Pfizer Identified ‘Most Likely’ Mechanism for Heart Inflammation After COVID-19 Vaccination

Pfizer examined possible ways its COVID-19 vaccine causes heart inflammation, a newly disclosed document shows.

The company, in a 2022 white paper, acknowledged that its vaccine, BNT162b2, may be causing myocarditis—which is heart inflammation—and a related condition called pericarditis. Pfizer scientists claimed that the inflammation likely wasn’t the result of direct cardiotoxicity but didn’t rule out several other possible mechanisms, including that it stemmed from immune activity.

The immune system may be triggered by lipid nanoparticles that, in the messenger RNA (mRNA) shot, deliver the spike protein, the document says.

“Although the BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine is optimized to reduce its detection by the innate immune system through the addition of nucleoside modifications and minimizing double-strand RNA impurity, it is possible, especially in certain individuals with genetic predisposition and underlying conditions that the immune responses to mRNA may not be sufficiently turned down and drive the activation of an innate and adaptive immune response,” the scientists wrote in the white paper.

“This may lead to the excessive activation of proinflammatory cascades which contribute to the development of myocarditis,” they wrote.

Myocarditis is a serious condition that can be deadly for some people. Many occurrences after COVID-19 vaccination have been in healthy, young people, with young males particularly at risk. The incidence is as high as 78.7 per million second doses in males aged 16 or 17, according to reports to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, with several dozen cases being reported after the second dose among 12- to 15-year-old and 18- to 24-year-old males.

Myocarditis also is an issue after booster vaccination, data from the United States and other countries show.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is among the entities that have said the evidence shows the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines cause myocarditis.

‘Has Not Been Made’

In the February 2022 paper, obtained and published by Project Veritas, Pfizer employees say that the company hadn’t defined myocarditis as an adverse reaction to its vaccine, meaning it hadn’t agreed that its vaccine causes myocarditis. It claimed that the benefits of the vaccine outweigh the risks, but a growing number of experts disagree, especially for young people.

Pfizer didn’t respond to requests for comment, including whether it has changed its stance on myocarditis in the intervening time.

Pfizer scientists used similar language to that used publicly by the company, acknowledging that there had been “increased cases of myocarditis and pericarditis” after mRNA COVID-19 vaccination. They claimed that most people recovered, but studies show myocarditis has long-term effects for some patients. Myocarditis has killed some people.

The scientists also noted that the true number of myocarditis cases after vaccination “is likely underestimated” because it can be difficult to assess milder cases.

Possible Mechanisms

Scientists are still trying to figure out how the mRNA shots cause heart inflammation.

In the paper, Pfizer scientists said the “most likely” mechanism was immune-mediated. The lipid nanoparticles, they said, may activate immune responses. The nanoparticles could also lead to the development of autoantibodies, or antibodies that attack a person’s immune system, they said, pointing to the case of a 52-year-old man who developed myocarditis that may have involved the generation of autoantibodies.

Cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough reviewed the paper. He told The Epoch Times via email that the lipid nanoparticles in the mRNA shot are “widely distributed in the body in the circulation for a month or more,” which “allows myocardial blood flow to repeatedly bathe the heart with vaccine products activating systemic and tissue immune response.”

Researchers have detected mRNA in the blood weeks after vaccination.

A third possible mechanism is molecular mimicry, or the introduction of antigen structures that appear similar to but aren’t, normal human structures, making it difficult for the immune system to properly classify them.

Pfizer scientists undertook a study to look at whether certain proteins that contain peptides, or a series of amino acids, could lead to immune responses triggered by the vaccine to “cross react with human proteins.” They identified several with 100 percent similarity to human proteins, but neither is “expressed predominantly in the heart.” Another six proteins were identified with algorithms, and one, nebulette, “has a heart-specific expression profile and may be involved in cardiac myofibril assembly.” Testing is needed to determine whether nebulette leads to cross-reactivity, the scientists said.

They ruled molecular mimicry an “unlikely mechanism.”

Malone’s View

Dr. Robert Malone, who helped develop the mRNA technology, said that lipid nanoparticles do activate the human immune system and that the RNA in the vaccine leads to inflammatory responses in the cells and tissues.

“This strong proinflammatory response of the mRNA/lipoplexes is the reason I (and others including [biotechnology company] Genzyme) abandoned further research into this technology in the late 1990s and turned to other delivery methods such as direct (‘naked’) injection and use of pulsed electrical fields,” Malone told The Epoch Times via email.

“It is reasonable to hypothesize that such proinflammatory processes might damage heart and other tissues. One key risk factor for COVID disease, and potentially for the post-vaccination syndrome, is a proinflammatory state such as is seen with both diabetes and pre-diabetes. That’s also consistent with this hypothesis,” he said.

Cardiotoxicity from the spike protein, which has been shown to linger in the body for weeks or even months after injection with the vaccine, is one possible mechanism for myocarditis.

“What we can conclude is that spike is a protein is a toxin. It acts through multiple mechanisms. One of those mechanisms appears to be eliciting a variety of autoimmune phenomena,” Malone said. “It’s known that viral myocarditis often acts through this autoimmune mechanism. And it’s reasonable to infer that the similar mechanism might be occurring in the case of these vaccines that are eliciting immune response against the virus proteins.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/pfizer-identified-most-likely-mechanism-for-heart-inflammation-after-covid-19-vaccination_5139370.html

*********************************************

Highly contagious killer fungus spreads in Covid aftershock

A highly-contagious killer fungus with no easy cure is rapidly spreading throughout the population after the widespread adoption of moist, fungus-friendly face masks during the Covid pandemic, health authorities warned.

The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention warned of the “alarming” rise in drug resistant Candid auris after cases more than quadrupled in three years and spread to more than half of America.

The fungus, which can kill up to 60 per cent of people infected within 90 days, was declared an “urgent threat” in 2019 when less than 500 cases were reported. The number of infected patients almost tripled by 2021 with 1,474 cases reported in more than 30 US states. In 2022, the number climbed again to 2,377 infections, according to the CDC.

The “dramatic increase”, reported in a research paper published in the Annals of Medicine, was likely worsened by Covid-19 pandemic measures, according to CDC officials.

The study’s lead author Dr Meghan Lyman, a medical officer in the mycotic diseases branch of the CDC, said in a series of interviews the agency was worried about what would happen during Covid lockdowns, as the agency screened less for the fungus, which thrives in the ideal conditions found in face masks, gloves, and nursing gowns reused during supply shortages of the pandemic.

It also grows in ventilators and other medical equipment found in hospitals and long-term care like nursing homes.

Almost all samples tested were resistant to at least one form of antiviral drug. The research found that 86 per cent of samples were resistant to a class of drugs called Azoles, a type of antifungal.

The number of cases resistant to the treatment of echinocandins – a last line of defence for the critically ill – tripled in 2021 compared to the previous two years with 1.2 per cent resistance, the study found.

“The rise in echinocandin-resistant cases and evidence of transmission is particularly concerning because echinocandins are first-line therapy for invasive Candida infections, including C auris,” Ms Lyman wrote.

When the fungus infects the blood, heart or brain, more than one in three people with the invasive C auris are killed.

Patients who survive remain “colonised” for years after successful treatment. If resistance to echinocandins continues to rapidly increase, treatment could become near impossible.

While the fungus has been found in more than 30 states in the US, the highest concentrations were detected in the warmer climates of California, Nevada, Texas and Florida.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/world/alarming-highly-contagious-killer-fungus-spreads-in-covid-aftershock/news-story/7b5dc3929a443af4c50df7304b0cfe4b

****************************************************

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

***********************************************

Were vaccines a political treatment for public fear?

Alexandra Marshall

‘All of the public health response [around Covid] appeared to be focused on ‘well’ people, and none of it was focused on sick people,’ said Dr Peter McCullough, during an interview with myself and Julie Sladden.

It was a critical observation made of a pandemic that, unlike most pandemics in history, had only a tiny fraction of the population presenting with serious health problems at any given point.

Normally this would mean that the health response had plenty of space to focus its attentions on those few individuals who were ill. Instead, the bulk of the money, pharmaceutical resources, and messaging was directed at the health response for those who were healthy – the people who were not sick and who had very little chance of ever becoming so. As McCullough added, ‘vaccines are not a treatment’.

‘I understand the enthusiasm for vaccines, but it doesn’t help a sick person. A sick person – whether they took a vaccine or not – they need treatment, and that’s it. People were in this mode of thinking where the only thing they could think of was a vaccine. As soon as the discussion shifted to treatment, people started to go blank.’

How often did we hear our Prime Minister, State Premiers, Health Officials, or medical bureaucrats talk about the great treatments on offer for Covid? About the only consistent messaging we had on that front was ‘take a Panadol’ even though it is not an anti-viral.

We had an entire Covid campaign saturating the airwaves with one word only: vaccines.

McCullough and his colleagues have been bizarrely hounded by the one-track-mind press for daring to ask questions about Covid treatments which, if you’re sick with the virus, are the most important thing. Why are treatments controversial? When, in history, has the medical community turned its back on helping sick people like it did during Covid? We ended up at a point where medical leaders were indicating that the unvaccinated should be left to their fates rather than helped.

It makes you wonder how much corporate power was involved in the lucrative sale of vaccines that saw them pitched as the one and only route to salvation. Objectively, it is a ridiculous way to approach a virus, and yet the aftereffects of this heavily politicised era of medicine persist.

In trying to work out why the focus was heavily shifted to vaccines by the political class, I asked McCullough, ‘Regardless of whether the vaccines work or not, were they in some way used to treat fear?’

Given that politicians had recklessly endorsed ‘fear’ as their primary tool to court public obedience during the opening months of Covid, I wanted to know if the vaccines were a way to treat public fear and bring it down to a manageable level. How else can you calm a terrified population except to offer them absolute safety with a single-shot wonder drug?

Indeed, that is how it was marketed. ‘Get the shot and you can go to work! Get vaccinated and you can go out to restaurants! Want your life back? Get vaccinated!’

McCullough replied:

‘I think that utilisation of fear – and we have outlined that in our book with John Leake and myself – is that a suppression of early treatment (those who are actively campaigning to suppress early treatment) are the same entities that were later going to massively promote the vaccines as safe and effective. The two are linked.

‘For instance, the American Medical Association, which took money from the federal government to promote vaccines, they launched a campaign in the United States. Their campaign was to abolish the use of ivermectin. To abolish its use.

‘Why would the American Medical Association, which is basically a political action committee for doctors, take an interest in this specific medicine? Why don’t they want to abolish fentanyl use or abolish a certain diabetes drug? Why have they only taken an interest in ivermectin?

‘Well, they were the ones who most vigorously supported (Covid) vaccines. And so we see these benefits over and over again. Suppression of early treatment linked to the promotion of the vaccines.’

I then pointed out to McCullough:

‘Our politicians had a big problem. Australia was a long way behind the rest of the world and everyone was terrified (of Covid). They didn’t want to go out and they didn’t leave their houses. The vaccines were sold to us as a way to safely go back out into the world. It was a way of undoing the political damage that had been done.

‘And politicians don’t seem to show a lot of interest in the clinical data. Do Covid vaccines work? Was it preventing transmission? They weren’t particularly interested. And this lack of data has been a serious problem.’

McCullough agreed, saying that the lack of transparency should be very concerning to the public.

‘John (Leake) and I just returned from India, and there is a complete lack of transparency on any clinical trial data of Indians and vaccines. It went all the way to the Supreme Court and at the Supreme Court, they still will not release any information to the public.’

Personally, I have always found the manipulation of public fear in historical political events fascinating if not disturbing. While we expect it, or at least understand it inside more primitive regimes – it was confronting to see the so-called ‘progressive’ political leaders of our Age claw hungrily at the chance to control the public with cheap headlines.

Victoria and Western Australia, in particular, appeared to revel in the power that fear-based politics granted them, with both state governments racing to expand and enshrine unlimited emergency powers that are still in existence. For what? A virus that, had the press said nothing, the population may not have noticed except to remark on a bad flu going around…

While I have no problem with private companies exploring the development of vaccines, or politicians informing us of public health concerns, what we witnessed on a global scale was nothing short of a power grab. Silencing criticism of vaccines makes sense when you realise that vaccines are a political tool. If their reputation is damaged, it also harms the validity of the political regimes that endorsed them.

Given that there were no consequences for political leaders, the slaughter of liberty is happening again through the existential fear of ‘Climate Change’ – which is an eco-fascist political movement, not an accurate representation of the cyclic behaviour of the planet’s climate.

John Leake, who was also present at the interview, added his thoughts to the debate.

‘I think that it’s illuminating for people to conceptualise this whole problem as a movement of the state to assume authoritarian control of a population or citizenry. The British Commonwealth parliamentary tradition is getting in the way of a centralised authoritarian approach to politics. So, it’s an authoritarian movement and it’s a militarisation of the practice of medicine.

‘Once people begin to conceptualise this emerging pandemic – it’s kind of like a foreign army. I mean, it’s like an invader. The state invokes emergency powers. It’s an emergency. By definition, an emergency requires extraordinary means to deal with this extraordinarily problem. And all of you smart-ass doctors better shut up because we have a plan in place etc…

‘That’s what happened. It’s that simple. And I tell people, if you want to understand this, it’s the War Powers Act of 1941, after the Japanese invaded Pearl Harbour. Congress passed the War Powers Act that authorised the US government to detain and intern Japanese-American citizens. So it’s a very, very similar authoritarian action that explains this militarisation of medical policy.’

When I asked my follow-up question to McCullough about why, realistically, would a medical authority or government withhold statistical data on Covid at a national level, he replied:

‘It is because, as John pointed out, countries had in place contingency plans for something like this to occur in the United States. It was memorialised in the 2005 PREP Act. And the PREP Act basically said that there’s a list of things we’re concerned about – Anthrax, Monkey pox, SARS, a nuclear holocaust, insecticide poisoning – and they said that if these things happen, we will put this plan into operation.

‘The plan is specifically a national security operation and the terms that are used are military terms like ‘countermeasures’ and ‘emergency countermeasures’. Countermeasures aren’t public health measures. They are saying, “We’re going to do this, whether it works or not.”

‘In war, they hand out machine guns. If they shoot straight or they don’t shoot straight, they’re going to say, “Listen, we’re giving you this machine gun and you’re going to use it.” World governments have shown no interest in re-evaluating the vaccines and safety of the vaccines. It’s just like handing out a machine gun. People’s minds are thinking that we’re in a war.’

Using vaccines as a military strategy after creating an environment of intense public fear might be one of the most irresponsible and disgusting chapters in modern history.

A consequence of this behaviour was the segregation, discrimination, and hate-fuelled environment that developed between friends, family, and our places of work in a previously harmonious country. Those cracks have not healed – they may never heal.

As I said on my Twitter: ‘Many ask why the unvaccinated can’t “move on” from the public abuse of the Covid years. I’ll tell you why. It’s like discovering your partner is secretly an axe-murderer with a narcotics hobby. It doesn’t matter how calm and charming they are now – you’ve seen what they can do.’

That is how I feel as I walk through the shopping centre, glancing at the shops and cafes whose owners viewed me as public enemy number one for months on end. As for the lifelong friends who hurled abuse, there is nothing that can ever be said to erase the knowledge that at the first whisper of ‘fear’, they were prepared to throw me to the government wolves.

This is how people behave when under the influence of authoritarian regimes. They betray those closest in order to maintain their image as ‘good citizens’ in a type of behaviour that goes so much deeper than simple fear of a virus. After all, if they were afraid of the virus, they would have paid more attention to genuine science – not idiocy such as ‘sitting rather than standing in pubs’ and believing that bottle shops are ‘safe’ but the local shoe shop is ‘dangerous’.

There is no excuse for what happened to our society during Covid. How many people stayed silent while others were persecuted and financially traumatised? How many said nothing as their co-workers were sacked? How many confronted business owners as people were left standing outside on the pavement? How many actually took a risk to uphold everything we thought we knew about civilisation?

As someone who stood on the outside, my friends were few and far between indeed.

Did we learn our lesson as a civilisation? Are we going to do it again? As I said to McCullough, our premiers are still passing legislation to increase their powers – not remove them.

‘I think the public is far down the path to a greater degree of lessons learned and not letting this happen again,’ he said. ‘But sadly, so many people in the public have arrived at that after losses.’

Covid was the first true pandemic to happen to Western Civilisation when almost the entire population is not used to death. We are ‘generation cotton wool’. We haven’t seen a ‘great war’. We haven’t had a period of starvation. There has not been a recession so severe we had to walk the streets barefoot and destitute. We don’t lose half our children to disease. We’re so safe and bored that the biggest problem facing our children is what gender they feel like presenting each day.

Fear in the crib is far easier to exploit. What happened during Covid would not have worked on a battle-hardened populace.

Society has to understand mortality and the reality of cyclic risk. Another pandemic will come along, but it is not an excuse to terrify the public or collapse our civil liberties. Wrecking the economy doesn’t save lives and emergency power in the hands of politicians is more dangerous than any flu.

Finally, as citizens, it is our responsibility to make sure we are never again so easily manipulated into committing abuses of human rights on our peers. If the state asks us to violate every pillar of civilisation – tell them ‘no’. How sad and pathetic it would be to discover that the most free and prosperous empire in human history ended because its people embraced entry-level propaganda.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/were-vaccines-a-political-treatment-for-public-fear/

****************************************************

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

***********************************************

Central Venous Thrombosis Of The Brain After Covid Infection And Vaccination

Peter McCullough is a fearless critic of conventional views about Covid and the response to it. So I read his article below with interest and attention. I was however rather confounded to see him claiming that a journal article showed the opposite of what the journal claimed.

The journal clearly claimed that the pathology they studied was vastly much less frequent among people vaccinated against Covid. McCullouch, in contrast, said that the pathology was just as likely to be found in unvaccinated people.

Looking at the raw numbers, however, I think I can follow McCulloch's reasoning. The actual numbers of people with the pathology were very small: 9 cases in the vaccinated group and 6 in the unvaccinated group. That might seem to show the vaccinated group being worse off but it overlooks the size of the populations those groups were drawn from (the denominator). As a PERCENTAGE of their respective populations, the vaccinated group was much better off.

What McCulloch does, however is to reject the denominators given. He thinks that the vaccinated group were much easier to access statistically so no comparable estimates of the denominators were possible. He just looks at the raw number of cases and says that is what matters. I think he has a point -- but the pathology is a very rare one anyway so may not be worth sustained attention

I reproduce the journal abstract below as well as McCulloch's commentary

Proponents of COVID-19 mass vaccination acknowledge that similar disastrous outcomes occur with both SARS-CoV-2 infection and the COVID-19 vaccines (myocarditis, blood clots, neurological problems)

They position a tradeoff and suggest you should risk it with the vaccine in hopes its lower than that of the infection.

Since 94 percent of Americans have had the COVID-19, its water under the bridge for the infection.

Early therapy reduces the invasive systemic manifestations of the illness and markedly reduces hospitalization and death including from complications.

With vaccination its a different story, the full force of engineered Spike protein is felt in the body with each shot and per case, the severity of the side effect is far worse than that with COVID-19.

Tu, et al illustrated this principle while analyzing central venous thrombosis which is a blood clot in the major vein of the brain which is a medical emergency requiring, hospitalization, intravenous or subcutaneous blood thinners, serial imaging, observation and in some cases surgery.

Tu attempted to divide cases by large denominators to minimize risk; that is invalid in safety research since not all cases can be found particularly fatal ones without an autopsy.

The important findings from Tu are in the tables.

Central venous thrombosis after vaccination was a catastrophe with more cases, greater need for therapy, more brain surgery, and higher degrees of neurologic impairment at discharge for those who took the mRNA vaccine.

Under no circumstances could someone accept a blood clot in the brain with the vaccine in the hopes of not getting COVID-19.

That tradeoff is untenable and yet another reason why vaccine promoters have lost trust from a discerning public.

https://principia-scientific.com/central-venous-thrombosis-of-the-brain-after-covid-infection-and-vaccination/

********************************************

Incidence of Cerebral Venous Thrombosis Following SARS-CoV-2 Infection vs mRNA SARS-CoV-2 Vaccination in Singapore

Tian Ming Tu et al.

Key Points

Question What is the risk of cerebral venous thrombosis (CVT) after diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 infection compared with after messenger RNA (mRNA)-based SARS-CoV-2 vaccination?

Findings In this observational cohort study of 62 447 individuals with SARS-CoV-2 infection and 3 006 662 individuals who received mRNA-based SARS-CoV-2 vaccine in Singapore from January 23, 2020, to August 3, 2021, the incidence rate ratio of CVT requiring hospitalization within 6 weeks of SARS-CoV-2 infection was 32 times higher compared with after mRNA-based SARS-CoV-2 vaccination.

Meaning These findings suggest that the risk of CVT after SARS-CoV-2 infection is higher than after mRNA-based SARS-CoV-2 vaccination.

Abstract

Importance Reports of cerebral venous thrombosis (CVT) after messenger RNA (mRNA)-based SARS-CoV-2 vaccination has caused safety concerns, but CVT is also known to occur after SARS-CoV-2 infection. Comparing the relative incidence of CVT after infection vs vaccination may provide a better perspective of this complication.

Objective To compare the incidence rates and clinical characteristics of CVT following either SARS-CoV-2 infection or mRNA-based SARS-CoV-2 vaccines.

Design, Setting, and Participants Between January 23, 2020, and August 3, 2021, this observational cohort study was conducted at all public acute hospitals in Singapore, where patients hospitalized with CVT within 6 weeks of SARS-CoV-2 infection or after mRNA-based SARS-CoV-2 vaccination (BNT162b2 [Pfizer-BioNTech] or mRNA-1273 [Moderna]) were identified. Diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 infection was based on quantitative reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction or positive serology. National SARS-CoV-2 infection data were obtained from the National Centre for Infectious Disease, Singapore, and vaccination data were obtained from the National Immunisation Registry, Singapore.

Exposures SARS-CoV-2 infection or mRNA-based SARS-CoV-2 vaccines.

Main Outcomes and Measures Clinical characteristics, crude incidence rate (IR), and incidence rate ratio (IRR) of CVT after SARS-CoV-2 infection and after mRNA SARS-CoV-2 vaccination.

Results Among 62 447 individuals diagnosed with SARS-CoV-2 infections included in this study, 58 989 (94.5%) were male; the median (range) age was 34 (0-102) years; 6 CVT cases were identified (all were male; median [range] age was 33.5 [27-40] years). Among 3 006 662 individuals who received at least 1 dose of mRNA-based SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, 1 626 623 (54.1%) were male; the median (range) age was 50 (12-121) years; 9 CVT cases were identified (7 male individuals [77.8%]; median [range] age: 60 [46-76] years). The crude IR of CVT after SARS-CoV-2 infections was 83.3 per 100 000 person-years (95% CI, 30.6-181.2 per 100 000 person-years) and 2.59 per 100 000 person-years (95% CI, 1.19-4.92 per 100 000 person-years) after mRNA-based SARS-CoV-2 vaccination. Six (66.7%) received BNT162b2 (Pfizer-BioNTech) vaccine and 3 (33.3%) received mRNA-1273 (Moderna) vaccine. The crude IRR of CVT hospitalizations with SARS-CoV-2 infection compared with those who received mRNA SARS-CoV-2 vaccination was 32.1 (95% CI, 9.40-101; P < .001).

Conclusions and Relevance The incidence rate of CVT after SARS-CoV-2 infection was significantly higher compared with after mRNA-based SARS-CoV-2 vaccination. CVT remained rare after mRNA-based SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, reinforcing its safety.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2790206

****************************************************

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

***********************************************

Physician Assistant Fired for Reporting COVID-19 Vaccine Adverse Events to VAERS

For her efforts to report injuries to the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) and to educate others in her hospital system on doing the same, Physician Assistant Deborah Conrad said she was labeled an anti-vaxxer and fired from her job.

Today, the New York-based Conrad tells her story at medical freedom conferences throughout the country, the most recent being one in Mississippi where physicians, scientists, and the vaccine injured warned state lawmakers to pull the COVID-19 vaccines from the market.

Conrad told The Epoch Times she began to see early danger signals in 2021 upon the vaccine rollout, and with that, resistance among her colleagues to report on them.

“After the vaccines came out, there was this uptick in unusual symptoms, some of which I had never seen in my 20-year career,” Conrad said. “In every case, it was in somebody who had received the COVID-19 vaccine.”

Conrad said she had never admitted an adult patient with RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) until the COVID-19 vaccines. “And every patient who came in with RSV was vaccinated for COVID,” Conrad said. “It wasn’t normal.”

Then, there were the adolescents with no previous medical conditions who had gotten the COVID-19 vaccine a week prior and, suddenly, they were struck with pneumonia and not able to function, she said. “They weren’t able to walk or eat, and they were completely and totally fatigued,” Conrad said.

This was in 2021 before myocarditis was being discussed, so many of those early cases that were probably myocarditis were diagnosed as pneumonia, she said.

“A lot of these myocarditis cases came in with fevers because of this massive inflammatory response that was taking place in the body, so they would be labeled as septic, treated as if we were treating pneumonia or fevers of unknown origin,” Conrad said. “We’d treat them with antibiotics and all sorts of other things, not realizing that they were having heart failure.”

Conrad began reporting to VAERS, which she said was an overwhelming task not made easy by its multiple user-interface complications. “My entire life had been taken over by doing these VAERS reports by myself,” she said.

In meetings with leadership, she would propose implementing a reporting system and hiring someone to manage the reports, she said.

‘A Hostile Environment’

“They kept telling me we’re looking into it and we’ll get back to you,” Conrad said. “Around April 2021, leadership came back and said no one else is reporting injuries—implying that I was crazy and there was nothing really going on with the vaccines.”

Leadership then audited her reports, she said and concluded that she was overreporting.

“I was then told that by doing VAERS reports and even discussing VAERS that it was an admission that the vaccines were unsafe, so it’s contributing to vaccine hesitancy,” Conrad said.

From there, it became a “very hostile environment” that compelled her to seek legal counsel, who wrote letters to the Department of Health, the CDC, and the FDA.

“No one cared,” Conrad said. “Finally, I had had it. It was so unethical; I couldn’t take it anymore. These VAERS reports are critical to assuring these vaccines are safe for us all. I could no longer be a part of a system that is lying to the American people.”

Conrad decided to become a whistleblower, telling her story on Del Bigtree’s The Highwire, knowing, she said, that it would cost her job.

“I couldn’t remain silent, even if it meant losing my career and everything I worked for,” she said. “I was fired a few weeks later and walked out like a criminal in front of all my peers.”

The initiative and education she had brought forth to report to VAERS were squashed that day, she said.

According to Barbara Loe Fisher, co-founder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), under the National Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, it’s a federal requirement for health care workers to report vaccine-related adverse events to VAERS.

Fisher, whose son was harmed by the DTP vaccine in 1980, worked with other parents of vaccine-injured children in establishing the NVIC in 1982.

“The 1986 Act was driven by parents of DPT vaccine injured children asking the government to pass legislation to secure vaccine safety informing, recording, reporting, and research provisions in the vaccination system to make it safer, and to create a federal compensation system alternative to a lawsuit against manufacturers of vaccines that injure or kill children,” Fisher told The Epoch Times.

In addition to NVIC arguing that physicians and vaccine manufacturers should be giving informed consent and report injuries, the organization maintained they should also continue to be held accountable in a civil court to serve as an incentive for physicians to administer vaccines responsibly, for manufacturers to produce safer vaccines, and for adequate federal compensation to vaccine-injured children.

“The vaccine manufacturers responded to our call for federal legislation reforming the vaccination system by threatening to leave the US without childhood vaccines unless the government gave them a blanket liability shield for harm caused by vaccines, arguing that if the FDA licensed a childhood vaccine as ‘safe,’ and the CDC recommended the vaccine for universal use by all children, and the states mandated the vaccine for daycare and school entry, then the vaccine manufacturer should not be held liable for harm caused by the product,” Fisher said.

When the Act passed, physicians were still liable for medical malpractice claims and pharmaceutical companies remained liable for product design defect claims in civil court, Fisher said.

“Unfortunately, the 1986 Act looks nothing today like when it was passed in 1986,” Fisher said. “In 1987, Congress passed an amendment to give a liability shield to doctors and vaccine providers. Over the next decades, amendments were added that weakened or eliminated safety provisions and the ability of children to receive federal compensation.”

In 1990, VAERS was launched; however, Fisher said, there are no legal consequences for a doctor’s failure to file a report.

“That’s because Congress made it a federal requirement in the 1986 Act to report but did not include legal penalties when vaccine companies or vaccine providers fail to report,” Fisher wrote.

‘A Prescription for Tyranny’

In 2011, amid hundreds of lawsuits linking autism to vaccine injuries, Fisher said the U.S. Supreme Court ignored the legislative language and reasons for the 1986 Act when it shielded vaccine manufacturers from all civil liability for vaccine injuries and deaths.

The federal government had sided with Big Pharma, Fisher said.

“At this point, those of us who worked on the 1986 Act with Congress know that our trust was betrayed by politicians who made backroom deals with drug companies, medical trade organizations, and federal agencies to gut the Act after it was passed and give the pharmaceutical industry what it wanted in 1986 and could not get: a complete liability shield for vaccine injuries and deaths,” Fisher said.

The 2011 case—Bruesewitz v. Wyeth—centered around the parents of Hanna Bruesewitz, who alleged their daughter’s neurological problems were caused by a vaccine made by Wyeth, which was a Pennsylvania pharmaceutical company before it consolidated with Pfizer.

The 1986 Act established a vaccine court to confirm vaccine injuries and award damages. After losing in the vaccine court, the Bruesewitz family brought the case to the highest court.

Marcia Coyle with The National Law Journal told PBS NewsHour in 2011 that there were only eight Justices presiding over the case because Justice Elena Kagan had recused herself due to her involvement as Solicitor General of the United States representing the federal government on the case.

“The Obama administration is supporting Wyeth laboratories saying that this lawsuit is barred,” Coyle said. “So, there are eight Justices. There could have been seven. The Chief Justice [John Roberts] had recused himself in the initial stages because he owns stock in Wyeth and he sold the stock in order to participate now.”

The pharmaceutical companies’ entanglement with federal officials wasn’t what Fisher said she would call an example of public health.

In a 2011 commentary on the ruling, she said, “This is exploitation of a captive people by a pharmaceutical industry seeking unlimited profits and by doctors and physicians of authority who have never seen a vaccine they did not want to mandate. It is a drug company stockholder’s dream, a health care consumer’s worst nightmare, and prescription for tyranny.”

In the wake of the decision, the 1986 Act seemed to lose its relevance, and the importance of reporting to VAERS became downplayed. Allegations that vaccines caused autism were ridiculed in pop culture’s media campaigns such as magicians Penn and Teller widely shared video promoting the vaccines and shutting down those who questioned their safety while ignoring what groups like NVIC were initially calling for: not the eradication of vaccines but safer vaccines with no mandates.

In retrospect, Fisher said, “Had the Supreme Court upheld the spirit and intent of the Act as originally passed in 1986, we may have been able to hold mRNA COVID vaccine manufacturers liable for design defect in a civil court of law today.”

The COVID-19 vaccines were issued under emergency use authorization, which grants the manufacturers immunity from liability.

‘The Whole System Is Corrupt’

Conrad herself said in her education as a physician’s assistant she never trained to even acknowledge VAERS or adverse events.

“When it came to learning about the vaccines, we learned the basic immunology associated with the vaccines and the adult and childhood schedule, but there’s no discussion on their side effects,” Conrad said. “We go into practice with the idea that vaccines are safe and effective. I never considered otherwise until COVID-19 happened.”

Among the insights the pandemic delivered has been that the unethical relationship between federal officials and the pharmaceutical-industrial complex has been going on much longer than many realize, Conrad said.

“This whole system is corrupt,” Conrad said. “The light in this whole experience for me is that now I’m aware of how deep the lies and corruption really are.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/physician-assistant-fired-for-reporting-covid-vaccine-adverse-events-to-vaers_5130783.html

********************************************

Biden Signs Bill to Declassify COVID Origins Intelligence on Wuhan Lab

President Joe Biden on March 20 signed into law a bill mandating declassification of COVID origin-related intelligence, saying that he shares “Congress’s goal of releasing as much information as possible” on the issue.

“We need to get to the bottom of COVID-19’s origins to help ensure we can better prevent future pandemics,” Biden said in a statement. “My Administration will continue to review all classified information relating to COVID19’s origins, including potential links to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

He added that, in implementing the legislation, the administration will “declassify and share as much of that information as possible, consistent with my constitutional authority to protect against the disclosure of information that would harm national security.”

This month, both the Senate and the House unanimously passed the bipartisan bill, dubbed “COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023,” before sending it to Biden’s desk. The bill directs the director of national intelligence to “declassify any and all information relating to potential links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the origin” of COVID-19.

Efforts to find out the origin of COVID-19 have consistently met with resistance from China, where the communist regime has covered up cases, silenced whistleblowers trying to sound warnings on the virus’s danger from the onset of the pandemic, and repeatedly refused outside investigators to probe the virus origins.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology has been the center of contention as a suspected source where the virus may have leaked.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/biden-signs-bill-to-declassify-covid-origin-intelligence-on-wuhan-lab_5137128.html

****************************************************

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

***********************************************

How the West Abetted Beijing’s Censorship of the Lab Leak Theory

“Debunked.” “Dangerous.” “Unhelpful.” These were some of the terms heaped on the theory that COVID-19 might have spilled from a lab in China, accidentally or not. Suggesting the virus may have been linked to a Chinese lab would swiftly earn one the label of “conspiracy theorist.”

That was the case for at least 18 months since the pandemic erupted from China, where the ruling communist regime has repeatedly thwarted efforts by citizen journalists and the outside world to probe the virus origins, and covered up the true death toll.

Three years on, the world is still in the dark about how the pandemic began. But mainstream discussion has gone through an about-face on the lab leak theory. The once-maligned hypothesis has gained significant traction—so much so that the FBI recently sided with the Energy Department in assessing that COVID-19 was “likely” the result of a lab leak.

But for many who have long sounded the alarm on the Wuhan lab, the U.S. government was too late to the game.

“My initial thoughts are where have they been for the last two-and-a-half years?” Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas), who sits on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, told The Epoch Times’ sister media NTD. “The entire world should have risen up and made China financially responsible for what had happened.”

Censorship

Concerns about the Wuhan lab came on early in the pandemic. At the time when Beijing was still blaming a wet market in the central Chinese city of Wuhan as the virus source, The Epoch Times released a documentary titled “Tracking Down the Origin of Wuhan Coronavirus” drawing attention to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which houses a biosafety level 4 facility that had been working on coronavirus research, and—as it was later revealed—highly-risky experiments that could make a virus more lethal.

Across different platforms, that video generated tens of millions of views shortly after its launch.

But rather than allowing further examination of these concerns, an all-out campaign was launched in the United States to shut down discussion of the Wuhan lab’s possible role in spawning the pandemic.

Facebook went on to mark the documentary as “false,” but a key source for the fact-checkers’ claim was not independent: a Singapore-based scientist who herself worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and praised the facility’s researchers as “incredibly competent, hardworking, and are excellent scientists with superb track records.”

These statements would later come under doubt as evidence of the lab’s risky experiments and lax biosafety standards came to light. But in 2020, they were enough to trigger a near-blanket media shutdown. Idaho state Rep. Heather Scott, a Republican and a biologist, was ridiculed by local media for sharing the video and getting a fact-check label.

Washington Post in a widely-cited article accused Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who called for questions to be asked about the lab, of “repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked.” It issued a correction in 2021 to remove the word “conspiracy theory,” which it acknowledged was an inaccurate characterization because there was no consensus about COVID origin.

‘Something Was Very Fishy’

As open discussion of the COVID origins was being muzzled in the West, China’s communist party was waging a full-fledged campaign to silence critics of its handling of the pandemic.

Law enforcement reprimanded doctors who sounded an early alarm on the virus, warning them not to “fear monger.” Citizen journalists were imprisoned. Chinese officials and state media, while hailing the communist leadership as exemplary in its global pandemic response, further exploited the rise of anti-Asian attacks in the United States by framing Western criticism of the regime’s handling of the outbreak as racist.

The result was that the world at large echoed narratives from China with little questioning.

But for Hans Mahncke, who has been documenting the U.S. suppression of the lab leak hypothesis for for The Epoch Times for the past two years, his suspicions were aroused as as soon as Chinese authorities took the unprecedented step on Jan. 23, 2020 to lock down the virus ground-zero Wuhan, a city of over 11 million.

“I knew something was very fishy,” he said in an interview, noting that Beijing hadn’t done so when severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) broke out from China in 2002, which by official accounts infected thousands worldwide.

“If you’re going to lock down the city, you’re not going to do it for a SARS virus,” Mahncke said, noting SARS’ relatively low transmissibility. This convinced him right then that the Chinese leader Xi Jinping “must have had some extra information, some data point that made him do something very out of the ordinary.”

More evidence soon emerged indicating something was off: the existence of a lab doing coronavirus research in the COVID-19 hotspot; a short Feb. 6 paper by two Wuhan university researchers—taken offline shortly after—pointed to WIV as a possible place where the “killer coronavirus” could have come from; the Wuhan facility’s senior virologist Shi Zhengli had for years been studying SARS-like coronaviruses, on which she published papers as early as 2015.

“I had to sort of bite my tongue a bit because I knew that if you said it publicly, or if you said it too stringently, you would get deleted off of social media,” he said, noting that he had seen friends censored from Twitter for lab leak comments.

“We could not just go into the public and say these things, because immediately you’d either have your Twitter account canceled, you would be shunned, you would get into trouble at work. You’d be called a ‘conspiracy theorist,’ you would have trolls and other people harass you.”

Something clicked for Mahncke as he followed the World Health Organization-backed (WHO) probe in Wuhan in early 2021. The mission, conducted with heavy involvement from the Chinese side, dismissed the lab incident hypothesis as “extremely unlikely.”

But after reading further into the investigators’ background, Mahncke realized that Peter Daszak, the U.S. expert on the WHO task force, had not only worked closely with researchers at the Wuhan lab but was instrumental in stymying discussion of the lab leak hypothethis during the pandemic’s early days.

Over the next months, internal documents released under Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) would show that Daszak had a more than passing friendship with the WIV staff. His New York-based nonprofit, EcoHealth Alliance, funneled hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to the Wuhan lab for virus research, including “gain of function” studies that could make existing pathogens more dangerous.

Anthony Fauci, who recently stepped down as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases that funded EcoHealth’s projects, initiated a call in early February 2020 after a team of scientists flagged concerns that the virus may have been engineered. Four participants of the teleconference, Daszak included, went on to draft “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” a paper that was widely circulated through media and used by many to assert the primacy of the natural origin theory.

Hitting a Brick Wall

When reports about a virus outbreak in China were first emerging in early January 2020, immunologist Nikolai Petrovsky was at his holiday house in Colorado to escape the blistering heat back at home in Australia.

About a week before Wuhan went into a full lockdown, the WHO was still repeating the Chinese claim that the virus was unlikely to be transmissible between humans. But on Petrovsky’s social media feeds, locals were posting images of dead bodies on stretchers and Chinese police welding apartment doors.

The official Chinese message, and the WHO’s amplification of it, was “outrageous,” Petrovsky, a Flinders University professor specializing in vaccine development, told The Epoch Times.

“I immediately recognized this was a serious virus that wasn’t being treated seriously. And when you don’t treat a serious virus seriously, you end up with a disaster.”

Shelving his vacation plans, Petrovsky began to run supercomputer modeling studies on the COVID viral sequence, hoping to find out which animal the virus came from.

By March, the analysis had yielded something no one in his team was looking for. The virus seemed better adapted to a human cell than any of the potential animal hosts identified.

“So then we said: ‘Well, how could that happen? Either the virus was spreading in humans for years with no one knowing it, which seems highly unlikely,’” he said. “Or, SARS-CoV-2 could have met a human cell in a laboratory dish.”

“It was like a light bulb moment,” Petrovsky said. “To us, it was just an obvious explanation for a finding that we had confirmed.”

As Petrovsky was pondering the lab hypothesis, Daszak was organizing a group of health experts to shut down challenges that the virus isn’t from nature. He was behind a statement co-signed by more than two dozen scientists, including four EcoHealth associates, that appeared in the medical journal Lancet in February 2020, which praised their Chinese counterparts for their “remarkable” efforts to fight the outbreak and sharing results “transparently” with the global health community, and derided alternative theories about the virus origin as “rumors” and “conspiracy.”

Petrovsky was shocked. “Politics should have no role in scientific investigation, and as far as I could see this article was purely about politics, containing no actual factual data,” he said. “Science should be neutral and just about finding the truth. It’s not about whether that truth is politically convenient or not.”

But this political ploy had real-world impacts on Petrovsky pursuing the science: getting his team’s findings published in scientific publications became next to impossible.

“We just hit brick walls,” said Petrovsky. “Several of the big publishers send it back to us in 48 hours without even reviewing.”

It took about a year of appeals and dealing with “very antagonistic reviewers” before prominent science journal Nature agreed to accept their paper. By then the landscape had changed: More scientists were coming forward urging a deeper look into the lab leak possibility, and President Joe Biden, acknowledging the scenario to be plausible, had ordered his intelligence agencies to produce a report on the virus origins within 90 days.

But the damage from the delay was hard to undo.

“By that time, the paper had much less impact,” said Petrovsky, because everyone had been convinced by the highly promoted Nature Medicine commentary that the virus must have had an animal source “and anyone suggesting otherwise, was a conspiracy theorist.”

“It appeared by then they were satisfied that their global disinformation campaign had been so successful at creating a smokescreen that it was now safe to let other data come out figuring everyone would ignore it or just attribute it to a conspiracy theory,” he added.

“And that is exactly how it played out.”

Inside the government, the atmosphere was no less intense. David Asher, who spearheaded a State Department task force probing the COVID origins in 2020, recalled being troubled by the military takeover of the WIV days after Wuhan lockdown. So he reached to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for expert opinion beginning in late Spring that year.

The NIH’s entanglement with the Wuhan lab wasn’t known at the time. But to his surprise, the institute provided “no investigative file” and pointed him to the Proximal Origin article.

The NIH head at the time, Francis Collins, “told us through their staff, not directly, that we should just trust the Chinese,” Asher, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, told The Epoch Times. “My answer was, ‘If that’s your basis for your analysis, then you have no basis for your analysis.’”

“So they were basically operating in a way that was totally inconsistent with transparency, the truth, and any sort of accountability.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/how-the-west-abetted-beijings-censorship-of-the-lab-leak-theory_5134112.html

****************************************************

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

***********************************************

Government censorship machine targeted TRUTH

The latest Twitter Files installment focuses on Stanford University’s Virality Project, which federal agencies bankrolled to engage in “detecting and mitigating the impact of false and misleading narratives related to COVID-19 vaccines.” The Virality Project, partnering with other federal contractors, sent weekly “anti-vax disinformation” reports to Twitter and other social media companies.

Mike Benz, president of the Foundation for Freedom Online, notes that the project was “deputized by [Homeland Security] to censor millions of . . . opinions . . . about COVID.”

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, whose lawsuit is shattering Biden administration coverups, described the program: Federal health officials in the Surgeon General’s Office, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Health and Human Services collaborated in a “censorship enterprise called the Virality Project, which procures the censorship of enormous quantities of First Amendment-protected speech.”

Disinformation warriors worked overtime to suppress “false” claims about the side effects of COVID vaccine, especially the true claims. Since the Food and Drug Administration officially (and speedily) approved COVID vaccines, any reports of side effects were automatically disinformation.

The Virality Project recommended that social-media companies suppress “stories of true vaccine side effects” and “true posts which could fuel [vaccine] hesitancy.” The project “routinely framed real testimonials about [vaccine] side effects as misinformation, from ‘true stories’ of blood clots from AstraZeneca vaccines to a New York Times story about vaccine recipients who contracted the blood disorder thrombocytopenia.”

The FDA now admits that the vaccines can cause strokes in senior citizens; many studies have linked the vaccines to myocarditis in young males.

The Virality Project derided as “misinformation” claims that the vaccines failed to prevent COVID transmission even after the CDC conceded the vaccine’s failure on that score.

Reverence for Washington poohbahs was the key. The Virality Project, Taibbi declares, “was specifically not based on ‘assertions of fact,’ but public submission to authority, acceptance of narrative, and pronouncements by figures like Anthony Fauci.”

In June 2021, a Freedom of Information Act request spurred disclosure of Fauci emails revealing his flip-flops on masks and his kowtowing to the Chinese Communist Party. The Virality Project warned Twitter that the emails were being exploited “to foment increased distrust in Fauci’s guidance and in American public health officials and institutions.”

But it wasn’t cynics’ fault that Fauci proffered disgracefully dishonest claims.

The Virality Project had several federally funded partners, including the Pentagon-funded Graphika. That company sent Twitter a report warning, “This continual process of seeding doubt and uncertainty in authoritative voices leads to a society that finds it too challenging to identify what’s true or false.”

One problem once the government starts censoring: It is never enough. On April 26, 2022, the Virality Project issued a report proposing a “rumor-control mechanism to address nationally trending narratives” and creating a “Misinformation and Disinformation Center of Excellence.” The following day, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told Congress he had already created a “Disinformation Governance Board,” headed by the singing censor, Nina Jankowitz. (The Post took the lead in demolishing that board.)

And that’s why we have federal agencies and federal contractors to tell us what to think.

Taibbi concludes, “America’s information mission went from counterterrorism abroad, to stopping ‘foreign interference’ from reaching domestic audiences, to 80% domestic content, much of it true. The ‘Disinformation Governance Board’ is out; but truth-policing is not.”

The fact that the media has largely ignored the Twitter Files revelations proves either that journalists don’t read so good or that they don’t give a damn about free speech. Or both. Is it “disinformation” to ask if anyone in Washington gives a damn about trampling the Constitution?

https://nypost.com/2023/03/17/private-federal-censorship-machine-targeted-true-misinformation/

*************************************************

Project Veritas Exposes What We've Suspected About the COVID Vaccine

Young Americans are dying all over from cardiac events; at least, that’s what it feels like, but the data support it. Cardiac episodes have spiked in the 18-34 demographic, which began two years ago. I wonder what mass epidemiological event occurred that would spur such a spike in cases of young people dying suddenly. It’s not like there was some vaccine that was rushed to market, protected by a legal shield, which government entities forced down our throats. Oh wait, that was COVID, and millions who refused to get the vaccine were threatened with termination of employment or social ostracization. Well, Project Veritas found documents from Pfizer showing that the vaccine did show that one of the side effects was increased risk of myocarditis (via Project Veritas):

“There is evidence that suggests patients who receive a COVID-19 vaccine are at an increased risk of myocarditis.”

* “Onset was typically within several days after mRNA COVID-19 vaccination (from Pfizer or Moderna), and cases have occurred more often after the second dose than the first dose.” [PAGE 19]

* “The reasons for male predominance in myocarditis and pericarditis incidence post COVID-19 vaccination remain unknown.” [PAGE 28]

* “The pattern of cases conform, as per the label, to a pattern of myocarditis cases occurring in majority of young males below 29 years of age within the first two weeks postvaccination...” [PAGE 19]

* “Since April 2021, increased cases of myocarditis and pericarditis have been reported in the United States after mRNA COVID-19 vaccination (Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna), particularly in adolescents and young adults (CDC 2021).” [PAGE 18]

* “Myocarditis events were defined as encounters with a billing or encounter diagnosis consistent with an ICD10-CM or SNOMED CT code for myocarditis which fell within two weeks of receiving dose 1, 2, or 3 of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine.”

* “Incidence rates of myocarditis were measured for each vaccine dose with denominator signifying the total number of patients receiving that dose and numerator signifying the total number of patients meeting the above criteria for an encounter for myocarditis following that dose.”

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2023/03/17/project-veritas-n2620814 ?

******************************************************

Don’t axe QoVax: A priceless biobank with the answers to long Covid is threatened with destruction

Rebecca Weisser

Why has the Queensland health department withdrawn funding for its award-winning QoVax research program studying the safety and efficacy of Covid-19 vaccines?

Only last August, Queensland’s Health Minister, Yvette D’Ath, and the chief operating officer of Queensland Health, Dr David Rosengren, celebrated the work of the QoVax team, led by Professor Janet Davies, which was a highly commended finalist in the Pursuing Innovation category at the 2022 Queensland Health Awards for Excellence.

The prize was no surprise. The program is the creation of 27 highly-skilled researchers, health professionals and administrative service staff with over fifty research, digital, scientific, and clinical skillsets such as laboratory scientists, nurses, solution and enterprise architects, pathologists, molecular and computational biologists, bioinformatician data scientists and infectious disease specialists. They were supported by multiple partners including twelve health service agencies, five universities, and two private pathology services

QoVax was also strongly supported by Queenslanders, rapidly enrolling more than 10,000 participants, both vaccinated and unvaccinated, from 85 per cent of postcodes across the state including communities in regional and Far North Queensland of whom more than 2 per cent identify as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander.

That level of support didn’t just happen. People from the QoVax team like Josh, an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health worker, and Janette, a registered nurse from Cairns, met with elders and First Nation communities in remote locations. They were accompanied by the Royal Flying Doctors Service who transported blood samples back to the laboratory in Cairns for testing.

Countries like Australia and New Zealand were uniquely placed to investigate vaccine efficacy because their diverse population was, until late in the pandemic, relatively free of the Covid-19 virus. Full marks to Queensland, and Professor Davies, for seizing the initiative. She was conscious from the outset that the Covid vaccine rollout was the largest coordinated vaccination program that had ever been undertaken and she wanted to record and evaluate the experience of Queenslanders.

The QoVax team didn’t just collect the standard data. Participants provided information on environmental and social determinants of health and biospecimens of blood and saliva that have been used to derive genomic, transcriptomic and proteomic datasets that will shed light on how the novel vaccines impact the immune system.

The secure digitally integrated biobank has 120,000 biospecimens: serum, saliva and peripheral blood mononuclear cells, in three -80 degrees Celsius freezers and three liquid nitrogen dewars. The linked data repository has four million linked data points and more than 500 whole genomes.

In addition, the biobank has access to real-time electronic medical records. With 70 per cent of hospitals in Queensland storing medical records electronically, the study was intended to allow long-term digital surveillance of health outcomes related to Covid-19 vaccinations, and intersections between vaccine responses and Sars-CoV-2 infection.

Studying immune responses is a vital part of assessing vaccines and Davies’ work is consistent with similar studies completed on other vaccines but her research is particularly important because two new vaccine delivery platforms were used – modified messenger RNA and viral vector DNA. The multiomic datasets that her team has collected will be critical to deciphering the impact of these platforms on the DNA, RNA and proteins synthesis of the human immune system. This is particularly important because the original trials of these vaccines were meant to last two years but the placebo group was vaccinated after only two months. As a result, there is a shortage of rigorous data adding even more importance to Davies’ research which includes an unvaccinated cohort. The information will allow researchers not just to better understand how the vaccines work but why vaccinated or unvaccinated people get repeat infections, long Covid, severe Covid or indeed die of Covid.

The study and the biobank have enormous international significance. The main comparable study is the UK Biobank but that country had very different early experience with high Covid caseloads prior to the rollout of vaccines.

Already the QoVax team has presented early findings at five conferences. The team was working on next steps to make the QoVax biobank and data repository accessible. The process had begun to scope and develop a user interface through collaborative workshops with researchers and health professionals across Australia.

Yet instead of answering vital questions about why Australia, one of the most highly vaccinated countries in the world, has such high excess mortality, and so many cases of long Covid in vaccinated people, Professor Davies is being forced to close down the QoVax program and sack her staff.

Worse still, the biobank, which should be a resource for the world, is threatened with destruction. Its precious resources will be destroyed in twelve months to save a trivial sum of money. The whole project has cost only $20 million.

Australia usually punches above its weight in medical research with eight Nobel prizes for physiology and medicine. Unfortunately, it also has a reputation for treating its scientists with contempt. Nobel laureates Barry Marshall and Robin Warren were ostracised in Australia for several decades after their amazing discovery of the bacterium Helicobacter pylori and its role in gastritis and peptic ulcer disease by a ‘gastric mafia’, an entrenched coterie of established scientists who refused to accept their findings because the therapeutic implications dented their vested interests.

The value of this data collected by QoVax is incalculable. It is a national scandal that it is not properly resourced. Every Queenslander involved in the project needs to speak up, as does every vaccinated person who has suffered from long Covid, or repeated Covid infections, or has been hospitalised with Covid, as well as every person that has suffered a vaccine injury or death and every person subjected to a vaccine mandate (when the vaccines did not stop transmission of the virus).

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/dont-axe-qovax/

****************************************************

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

**************************************************

Emails Reveal Journal’s Internal Discussions Before Rejecting Challenge to Pfizer’s Effectiveness Claim

Officials at a major journal discussed a professor’s alleged anti-vaccine Twitter activity when considering whether to publish his paper challenging the claim that Pfizer’s vaccine was 95 percent effective, newly disclosed emails show.

The Lancet journal ultimately rejected the rebuttal paper.

Professor Norman Fenton “retweeted anti-vaxx posts on Twitter,” one Lancet official wrote to colleagues.

They also discussed “vaccine misinformation” and Fenton’s background, the heavily redacted emails show.

“[redacted] have investigated him a little and he does seem to have a legitimate academic appointment,” one email, titled “Ongoing issues monitoring,” stated.

Fenton, emeritus professor of risk at Queen Mary University of London, obtained the emails from Elsevier, which publishes The Lancet.

“We knew that all the main academic journals were routinely rejecting any articles that were in any way questioning the accuracy of studies claiming vaccine effectiveness or safety. What surprised even us about this case was the sheer nastiness and lack of professionalism displayed by the journal’s editorial staff,” Fenton told The Epoch Times via email.

“The notion that authors’ academic credentials and Twitter activities had to be investigated as part of the reviewing process is shocking,” he added.

The Lancet did not respond to a request for comment.

Effectiveness Claim

The Lancet in May 2021 published a paper from Israeli officials and Pfizer employees that claimed the company’s vaccine was 95 percent effective against COVID-19 infection in Israel from Jan. 24, 2021, to April 3, 2021.

The study analyzed surveillance data drawn from government-funded insurance providers. Pfizer and Israel entered into multiple agreements early in the pandemic that saw the country primarily use the company’s vaccine and share data with the firm.

The study showed that two doses of Pfizer’s vaccine were “highly effective” across all age groups 16 and older in preventing symptomatic COVID-19, asymptomatic COVID-19, and COVID-19-related hospitalization, severe disease, and death, researchers said in the study, which was peer-reviewed before publication.

“These findings suggest that COVID-19 vaccination can help to control the pandemic,” they said.

The study was funded by the Israeli Ministry of Health and Pfizer.

Rebuttal

The effectiveness estimates were exaggerated, Fenton and Martin Neil, a professor of computer science and statistics at Queen Mary of London, wrote in a rapid response to the paper.

That stemmed in part from adjusting for how unvaccinated people were routinely tested for COVID-19 while vaccinated people were not, the professors said.

“There is also failure to properly adjust for the different testing protocols for vaccinated and unvaccinated people,” they wrote.

The Lancet told the professors that they were waiting to hear from the paper’s authors before publishing the rebuttal.

No further correspondence was sent until January 2023.

Apology

Josefine Gibson, a senior editor at The Lancet, wrote in a Jan. 8, 2023, email that she saw the submitted rebuttal had not been published.

“We had invited Dr. Sharon Alroy-Preis and co-authors of the published article to consider your letter, but I am sorry that we never received a formal reply from them and therefore have not been able to pursue an exchange,” Gibson wrote. Alroy-Preis is a top Isreali Ministry of Health official.

“But I am even more sorry that I didn’t communicate a decision with you in a timely manner. I will now close your submission, but I thank you for supporting post-publication debate in The Lancet,” Gibson added.

Fenton released the email online, triggering a flood of criticism of the decision not to publish the rebuttal. He and Neil also noted that Alroy-Preis had declared no conflicts of interest, despite Israeli health officials entering into the collaboration that outlined a close partnership.

“The world relied heavily on a major Israeli study in the Lancet which confirmed Pfizer vaccine efficiency, but the lead author failed to declare her conflict of interest in which she signed a contract not to release information detrimental to Pfizer’s product without their permission,” Fenton and Neil wrote in a blog post.

The criticism triggered another message from Gibson, who said The Lancet was “looking into next steps” regarding the rebuttal.

Offer of Publication
After Fenton highlighted what had happened to Richard Horton, The Lancet’s editor-in-chief, Gibson told him that she wanted to apologize “for the substandard experience you’ve had with the Lancet.”

“Having discussed this unfortunate situation with my Editor in Chief, Richard Horton, I would like to offer publication of your original letter. Alternatively, we could publish a new letter that reflects more a current experience with the Pfizer vaccine. We defer to your best judgement of what would best serve the medical community,” she said. “We very much hope you’ll accept this offer.”

Fenton and Neil penned an updated rebuttal, which concluded that the Pfizer–Israel study should be retracted due to reasons including the undeclared conflict from Alroy-Preis and the failure to adjust for different testing protocols. They also raised concerns about adverse reactions to the vaccine, which they said are now known to be “substantial.”

Gibson rejected the updated rebuttal.

“Given existing evidence about the effectiveness and safety of the Pfizer vaccine, it is factually incorrect–indeed, it is misinformation–to say that reported adverse reactions are ‘substantial,'” she wrote.

The Lancet also does not consider Alroy-Preis’s job at the Israeli Ministry of Health to be an undeclared conflict of interest, Gibson said.

New Emails

The situation prompted Fenton to seek internal correspondence regarding him.

The emails were prompted by Fenton’s publication of Gibson’s apology letter.

The tranche was heavily redacted, but did show how officials considered public statements about the vaccine.

“Both Fenton [redacted] have retweed anti-vaxx posts on Twitter, and their Substack articles are worth a scan,” one email stated, referring to Fenton and Neil. “[redacted] experts to determine if Fenton’s original letter and his criticisms of the article are valid and meet our publication standards.”

The email recommended holding off on further correspondence with Fenton until confirming redacted information, “especially given that anything you say directly to Fenton has the potential to be shared.”

In another missive, officials said there had been new developments on “the Fenton Twitter case,” including an additional post by Fenton and “helpful background on Fenton.” The rest of the email was redacted.

That’s when officials said that Fenton had been investigated and found to have “a legitimate academic appointment.” Officials also said that “[redacted] a source of vaccine misinformation is an academic prof based right around the corner from our Lancet offices.”

Officials then proposed what ended up being the final response that rejected the updated submission. They revised the response to change “associated adverse reactions” to “reported adverse reactions.”

Unhappy With Redactions

Fenton said that many of the redactions appeared unnecessary and that he has asked Elsevier to remove them.

“I am not happy about the scale of the redactions in the Elsevier response. If the Lancet editors were not making disparaging comments about me and colleagues, then there should be no reason to redact them. What do they have to hide?” he wrote on Substack.

“The Lancet are hiding their internal correspondence relating to the submission (and ultimate rejection) of our letter criticising Pfizer,” Neil wrote on Twitter. “They are however happy to let us know that they think of us as ‘anti-vaxxers’ and ‘misinformation spreaders’!”

Fenton said he’d informed Elsevier if it did not remove many of the redactions, he would report them to the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Elsevier did not respond to a request for comment.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/emails-show-journals-discussion-before-rejecting-paper-challenging-pfizers-claim-of-95-percent-vaccine-effectiveness_5124648.html

*****************************************************

Germany’s Health Minister changes tune on vaccine injuries -- Karl Lauterbach is having a dramatic fall from grace

Outside of Germany, few people have heard of Karl Lauterbach, Germany’s Minister for Health. But he’s one of the key figures in the Western Covid response. Once hailed as a hero, he’s now engulfed in the biggest vaccine-injury scandal to have emerged since the pandemic.

Lauterbach has served in the role since December 2021, under the traffic light coalition led by Olaf Scholz. Often described as “Germany’s Fauci”, Lauterbach — a professor of health economics and epidemiology and long-time member of the SPD — rose to national prominence early on into the pandemic as a Covid hardliner.

In his role as an advisor to Angela Merkel and prominent TV and Twitter commentator, and then as the country’s health minister, Lauterbach adopted an aggressively pro-lockdown and pro-vaccination stance, claiming that his aim was to vaccinate every single German — through the imposition of mandates, if necessary — in order to achieve so-called “herd immunity”.

Like most countries, Germany didn’t make vaccination legally mandatory for the general population, but rather made it de facto mandatory by making one’s Covid status a precondition for leading anything resembling a normal life — and making life impossible for the unvaccinated, including through targeted lockdowns.

A small but vocal minority of politicians — including the far-Left Sahra Wagenknecht and the far-Right AfD — opposed Lauterbach’s mass vaccination policies, warning about the side effects of these novel mRNA-based vaccines. Lauterbach responded by claiming — not only in a now-infamous tweet but also in several talk shows — that the Covid vaccines were “without side effects”. It was an astonishing claim, considering numbers from Germany’s own Ministry of Health showed (also repeated by Lauterbach himself) that reported serious adverse events occurred in one in 5,000 vaccinations. This increased up to 2 in 1,000 for all suspected adverse events.

Those words are now coming back to haunt Lauterbach. Over the past two years, more than 300,000 cases of vaccine side effects have accumulated in the Ministry’s own system, and more and more people are lodging compensation claims against the state — which, based on the contracts signed by the EU with vaccine manufacturers, is liable for any vaccine-related damage. Meanwhile, the subject of vaccine injuries has begun to be openly discussed in the German mainstream media.

All this has forced Lauterbach to make a spectacular U-turn. In a recent TV interview, he admitted that vaccine-induced injuries are a serious issue, and that his ministry was planning to launch a programme to investigate the negative consequences of Covid vaccination and improve care as soon as possible. Additionally, Lauterbach said that he hopes pharmaceutical companies will voluntarily help to compensate those harmed by the vaccines. “That’s because the profits have been exorbitant”, he said. Just a year ago he had said: “The pharmaceutical companies will not get rich with vaccines”.

Lauterbach’s words were welcomed by opposition parties, with the CDU now calling for an inquiry to investigate the government’s Covid response, but drew mixed reactions from his own coalition allies. “Such statements don’t contribute to strengthening Germany as a research and medicine location,” said the pharmaceuticals expert of the FDP coalition party — a reference to BioNTech’s recent decision to boost its investment in the country. This also explains Scholz’s silence.

It’s hard to imagine a more ruinous fall from grace for Lauterbach: in just over a year he’s gone from national hero to symbol of the pandemic failures. On this issue, we may only be beginning to scratch the surface.

https://unherd.com/thepost/germanys-health-minister-changes-tune-on-vaccine-injuries/

****************************************************

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

**************************************************

America’s COVID Response Was Based on Lies

By SCOTT W. ATLAS

Almost all of America’s leaders have gradually pulled back their COVID mandates, requirements, and closures—even in states like California, which had imposed the most stringent and longest-lasting restrictions on the public. At the same time, the media has been gradually acknowledging the ongoing release of studies that totally refute the purported reasons behind those restrictions. This overt reversal is falsely portrayed as “learned” or “new evidence.” Little acknowledgement of error is to be found. We have seen no public apology for promulgating false information, or for the vilification and delegitimization of policy experts and medical scientists like myself who spoke out correctly about data, standard knowledge about viral infections and pandemics, and fundamental biology.

The historical record is critical. We have seen a macabre Orwellian attempt to rewrite history and to blame the failure of widespread lockdowns on the lockdowns’ critics, alongside absurd denials of officials’ own incessant demands for them. In the Trump administration, Dr. Deborah Birx was formally in charge of the medical side of the White House’s coronavirus task force during the pandemic’s first year. In that capacity, she authored all written federal policy recommendations to governors and states and personally advised each state’s public health officials during official visits, often with Vice President Mike Pence, who oversaw the entire task force. Upon the inauguration of President Joe Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci became chief medical advisor and ran the Biden pandemic response.

We must acknowledge the abject failure of the Birx-Fauci policies. They were enacted, but they failed to stop the dying, failed to stop the infection from spreading, and inflicted massive damage and destruction particularly on lower-income families and on America’s children.

More than 1 million American deaths have been attributed to that virus. Even after draconian measures, including school closures, stoppage of non-COVID medical care, business shutdowns, personal restrictions, and then the continuation of many restrictions and mandates in the presence of a vaccine, there was an undeniable failure—over two presidential administrations—to stop cases from rapidly escalating.

Numerous experts—including John Ioannidis, David Katz, and myself—called for targeted protection, a safer alternative to widespread lockdowns, in national media beginning in March of 2020. That proposal was rejected. History’s biggest public health policy failure came at the hands of those who recommended the lockdowns and those who implemented them, not those who advised otherwise.

The tragic failure of reckless, unprecedented lockdowns that were contrary to established pandemic science, and the added massive harms of those policies on children, the elderly, and lower-income families, are indisputable and well-documented in numerous studies. This was the biggest, the most tragic, and the most unethical breakdown of public health leadership in modern history.

In a democracy, indeed in any ethical and free society, the truth is essential. The American people need to hear the truth—the facts, free from the political distortions, misrepresentations, and censorship. The first step is to clearly state the harsh truth in the starkest possible terms. Lies were told. Those lies harmed the public. Those lies were directly contrary to the evidence, to decades of knowledge on viral pandemics, and to long-established fundamental biology.

Here are the 10 biggest falsehoods—known for years to be false, not recently learned or proven to be so—promoted by America’s public health leaders, elected and unelected officials, and now-discredited academics:

SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus has a far higher fatality rate than the flu by several orders of magnitude.

Everyone is at significant risk to die from this virus.

No one has any immunological protection, because this virus is completely new.

Asymptomatic people are major drivers of the spread.

Locking down—closing schools and businesses, confining people to their homes, stopping non-COVID medical care, and eliminating travel—will stop or eliminate the virus.

Masks will protect everyone and stop the spread.

The virus is known to be naturally occurring, and claiming it originated in a lab is a conspiracy theory.

Teachers are at especially high risk.

COVID vaccines stop the spread of the infection.

Immune protection only comes from a vaccine.

None of us are so naïve as to expect a direct apology from critics at my employer, Stanford University, or in government, academic public health, and the media. But to ensure that this never happens again, government leaders, power-driven officials, and influential academics and advisors often harboring conflicts of interest must be held accountable. Personally, I remain highly skeptical that any government investigation or commission can avoid politicization.

Regardless of their intention, all such government-run inquiries will at least be perceived as politically motivated and their conclusions will be rejected outright by many. Those investigations must proceed, though, if only to seek the truth, to teach our children that truth matters, and to remember G.K. Chesterton’s critical lesson that “Right is right, even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong about it.”

https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14446&omhide=true&trk=title

****************************************************

Covid’s cockups and conspiracies: Australia wasn’t immune

Those debating whether the deadly schemozzle of pandemic mismanagement that has cast a pall over the last three years was due to a cockup or a conspiracy should abandon binary thinking. All the evidence, from both sides of the Atlantic, indicates that there were both cockups and conspiracies and they came not as single spies but in battalions.

In the UK, the ‘Lockdown files’, a trove of 100,000 WhatsApp messages released by the Telegraph over the last week, provide a portrait of former health minister Matt Hancock as a cruel careerist and a clown better suited to appearing on ‘I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here’, which he did for a fee of hundreds of thousands of pound, rather than running Britain’s pandemic policy.

The liberty of millions of Britons was curtailed based on the whims of decision-makers who, because they were not subject to parliamentary scrutiny, simply claimed they were following the best scientific advice.

Guilt and fear were shamelessly used to enforce the draconian dictates with Hancock writing that he would ‘frighten the pants off everyone’ with a new strain to get compliance.

A fan of Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum (WEF), Hancock wrote that he hoped Covid would propel his career into the next league. He discussed with his advisers how ‘pushing on vaccines’ would be ‘the most politically beneficial thing’ to do. When Dame Kate Bingham who led the UK vaccine taskforce suggested in October 2020 that only people who were ‘at risk’ should be vaccinated, Hancock branded her as ‘wacky’ and ‘totally unreliable’.

In the US, the Twitter files made public by Elon Musk exposed a conspiracy between key members of Team Biden, agencies such as the FBI and Big Tech to help Biden get elected and to censor and smear those who criticised the government orthodoxy.

Evidence of conspiracies continues to be uncovered by House Republicans. The latest emails show that Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022 and chief medical advisor to the president from 2021 to 2022 and Dr Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, the third largest charitable foundation in the world, hid their roles in February 2020 in the writing of a scientific paper whose purpose was to cast as much doubt as possible on the fact that the Covid virus originated in a lab in Wuhan. Both pretended they played no part in the paper’s genesis but both prompted the scientists to write it, Farrar edited it and Fauci hid the fact that his agency funded research in a Wuhan lab to make bat coronaviruses more dangerous.

In view of Farrar’s role in obfuscating the origins of Covid, leading scientists such as Dr Richard Ebright, a microbiologist at Rutgers University, has called for him not to take up an appointment announced last year to be the next chief scientist at the World Health Organisation.

Farrar also signed a notorious letter to the Lancet organised by Peter Daszak, the CEO of the EcoHealth Alliance who provided US tax dollars for research into bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The letter condemned as ‘conspiracy theories’ any suggestion that Covid-19 did not have a natural origin.

Conspiracies were not limited to promoting lies about the origins of Covid. As Dr Marty Makary, a professor of surgery and health policy at Johns Hopkins University said in sworn testimony before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic’s first hearing on Tuesday 28 February, ‘The greatest perpetrator of misinformation during the pandemic has been the United States government’.

Makary damned public health officials for lying to the American people that Covid was spread through surface transmission, that vaccinated immunity was greater than natural immunity, that masks were effective, that myocarditis was more common after infection than vaccination, that young people benefit from a booster and that vaccine mandates would increase vaccination rates. ‘We’ve seen something that is unforgivable,’ he said, ‘and that is the weaponisation of medical research itself’.

The common link between the UK cockups and the US conspiracies is the total disregard for scientific evidence, which either didn’t exist or contradicted what policy makers wanted to do and so was ignored or discredited.

There is no comfort for Australia in any of this. Like Little Sir Echo it copied all of its pandemic policies from the US and the UK. The question is what to do now?

It is impossible to prevent cockups or conspiracies, but it is possible to make them more difficult to engage in by subjecting governments and their agencies to greater scrutiny. We could start by requiring that they table all health advice.

Agencies such as the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) need to collect more data about adverse events, for example, by requiring the same information that is collected in the US. It needs to publicly state the background rates for adverse events, the rate of these events for comparable drugs, and provide a weekly update on the rate of these events in new products so that dangerous drugs can be withdrawn as soon as warning signs appear.

The meetings of committees that advise the TGA should be publicly televised as they are in the US and anybody who advises the TGA or any other part of government on health should be required to publicly disclose any funding they receive from pharmaceutical companies or other interested parties.

The power of the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency needs to be curbed. By issuing an edict telling healthcare workers that they must do nothing to undermine confidence in the government’s response to the pandemic, it pressured health practitioners not to report adverse events or tell their patients about the potential for adverse events.

The misinformation and disinformation laws tabled by the Morrison and now by the Albanese government are also a shameless attempt to curtail totally justified criticism of pandemic polices.

Too often over the last three years, Australians’ rights and freedoms have been violated in the interest of ‘public health measures’ that were harmful.

Only by making the work of the government and its agencies fully transparent can we start to restore confidence that we will be subjected to anymore conspiracies or cockups.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/covids-cockups-and-conspiracies/

****************************************************

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

**************************************************