Friday, August 26, 2022



I'm astounded

I have had a lot of good news lately but "wait, there is more". According to ResearchGate, a publication which tracks such matters, my academic publications are getting a lot of attention from other academics. They say that "Your Research Interest Score is higher than 95% of ResearchGate members". The score is mainly made up of citations.

Why is that surprising? Because I last published something in the academic journals back in the '90s. The general view of academic publications is that if it is more than 10 years old it no longer exists. But the advent of the internet means that someone researching a topic will usually do an internet search at some point and that will turn up something relevant regardless of date. So as long as your writings are online they are readily accessible. Most of my publications were written before the internet existed but I have made sure to put them online retrospectively. ResearchGate has them all. Being really old means that I can look a long way back.

And the fact that I have had so many papers published (250+) of course increases the likelihood that I will hit on something of interest to others.

But I mustn't get a big head about it all. I have kept some track of my citations and they mostly come from places like Pakistan and Poland -- not great sources of cutting edge academic endeavour

Another reason for humility is that my papers that other people cite are rarely the ones which I think are most significant or important. Instead people cite papers that are more technical or utilitarian. Still, it is nice to be still ahead of the pack even after 30 years. I did after all devote 20 years of my life -- from 1970 to 1990 -- to doing all that research and writing.

I have also now spent 20 years blogging -- from 2002 to 2022.

In all my writing I have aimed to say things that are informative or helpful to others and I think I have achieved that to a small degree. I do get "thank you" messages occasionally, which I appreciate.

JR

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Australia: Covid and miscarriage

‘No evidence Covid-19 vaccines cause miscarriage, despite Queensland doctor claim’, trumpeted the ABCFact Check and RMIT FactLab CheckMate. Unfortunately, that is not true.

The Queensland doctor is Luke McLindon, one of Australia’s leading fertility specialists. He has been collecting data on miscarriages in high-risk patients that he treats for infertility and recurrent miscarriage. Historically, the miscarriage rate has been 12 to 15 per cent. But comparing the period before and after the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists recommended Covid vaccinations for women at any stage during pregnancy, the miscarriage rate among his patients has more than doubled to almost 50 per cent. Disgracefully, Dr McLindon will not be able to continue his research because he declined a Covid vaccination and as a result his accreditation has been withdrawn, but he is not the only specialist who has identified a problem.

There is an ‘avalanche of data’ showing the Covid injections are not safe according to Dr James Thorp, an obstetrician gynaecologist and specialist in maternal foetal medicine in Florida. He wrote to the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynaecology about a study he completed documenting severe adverse outcomes in women of reproductive age and in pregnancy associated with the Covid injections including: an increase in menstrual irregularities, spontaneous abortion, and abnormalities in the foetus including malformations, cardiac arrest and death which he says occur in VAERS in statistically significant numbers and are corroborated by over 20 plus other independent sources.

Data is emerging elsewhere. The Lancet has just published a study of 5,936 pregnant Canadian women, which showed that only 7 out 339 (2.1 per cent) unvaccinated women had miscarriages compared with 258 out of 5,597 (4.6 per cent) vaccinated women. That’s an increase of 119 per cent in the rate of miscarriage in vaccinated women compared with unvaccinated women, just in the period up to 10 days after the second dose. Incredibly, this was obscured by the researchers who only statistically analysed the 83 miscarriages or stillbirths that occurred within seven days of the first jab. There were ‘an additional 175 individuals who reported experiencing miscarriage or stillbirth between the first Covid-19 vaccine dose and completion of the second survey (up to 10 days after dose two)’, more than twice as many as in the week after the first jab, but these miscarriages were left out of the statistical analysis, with no explanation as to why. In addition, only 3.2 per cent of unvaccinated women experienced a new or worsening health event, whereas 12.1 per cent experienced one after a second jab of Moderna. Why would the researchers fail to highlight the increased risk of vaccination during pregnancy, particularly with the Moderna vaccine? Perhaps because the lead author has been an investigator on projects funded by Pfizer, Moderna and other major pharmaceutical companies as have five of the other authors out of a total of 14.

A study of excess mortality in Germany by Christof Kubandner and Matthias Reitzner shows that in 2020, the observed number of deaths was close to the expected number but from April 2021, the observed number of deaths was two empirical standard deviations above the expected number in deaths in the age groups between 15 and 79 and a similar mortality pattern was observed for stillbirths, with an increase of about 11 per cent in the second quarter of the year 2021.

Lt. Col. Theresa Long, one of the US Army’s top flight surgeons and an expert on public health testified that in addition to strokes, clots, cancers and myocarditis, she has seen a number of adverse reactions related to reproductive health including testicular pain, menstrual irregularity, miscarriages and infertility.

What could be causing this? Dr Deirdre Little worked with the Brighton Collaboration on Vaccine Safety, a member of the WHO-led Vaccine Safety Net. She is concerned that rat studies published in May 2021 which supposedly demonstrate the safety of the Pfizer vaccine with regard to fertility did not include the histology reports of the rat gonads. Dr Little has been battling the Australian regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), for more than 12 months to see those reports but the TGA has repeatedly refused her request as has Pfizer. Both claim however that the reports show only that the vaccine is safe.

It’s hardly convincing. If the reports back up the claims of safety why not provide them? A report released by the TGA under Freedom of Information showed that the vaccine accumulated in rat ovaries at 48 hours post dose at more than ten times the concentration in other organs, with the exception of liver, spleen and adrenals. Does a similar phenomenon occur in the ovaries of females? Could it affect ovarian function? It is impossible to say without further research, starting with an examination of what happened in the ovaries of rats.

Dr Little highlights a disturbing report from 1993 which found that injected polysorbate 80, one of the mRNA vaccine excipients, has a proven association with ovarian toxicity in rats and its effects resemble those of diethylstilboestrol (DES), a drug used in pregnancy that was eventually linked to miscarriage, stillbirth, and breast, cervical and vaginal cancers.

Dr Little writes that what this means is that vaccines have been mandated which have been only provisionally approved, have been shown to concentrate in the mammalian ovary, have a statistically established safety signal for abnormal menses following vaccination, are also associated with post-menopausal bleeding, and contain a product similar to polysorbate 80, whose delayed effect resembles diethylstilboestrol toxicity to the ovaries and uterine lining when injected into rats, yet the TGA and Pfizer refuse to release the histology reports.

So is the ABC correct that there is no evidence that vaccines increase the risk of miscarriages? Certainly, if there is evidence, the regulator, the pharmaceutical company and the medical establishment is doing everything that it can to prevent it emerging. And yet in multiple places there are worrying signs for those willing to look.

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Conservatives Shouldn’t Apologize for Healthy Skepticism of Big Government

“Conservatives need to get over their allergy to government action.”

That was the headline on an opinion column by Henry Olsen last week in The Washington Post. Olsen is not alone among conservatives in thinking so.

Across much of the right today, there’s more openness to having government do more in the economy. Olsen observes that there are significant constituencies in America, especially blue-collar America, who appear supportive of a conservative agenda that would involve more state intervention, whether in the form of industrial policy, tariffs, or more expansive entitlement programs.

The right, Olsen wrote, cannot ignore those trends if it wants to stay electorally relevant. That necessitates moving away from what he labels “market fundamentalism.”

Winning elections is very important. But to embrace a bigger economic role for government amounts to conservatives endorsing policies that would push the United States even further in social democratic directions that would undermine America’s long-term economic and political well-being.

Here’s the fact often omitted by contemporary conservatives friendly to more government economic intervention: The American economy is already awash with interventionist policies—so much so that, according to The Heritage Foundation’s 2022 Index of Economic Freedom, overall economic liberty in America has been in decline since 2008. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

The index ranked America as the world’s 25th-freest economy. Many of the countries listed ahead of it are European nations with strong social democratic traditions. Moreover, the index adds:

Government spending [in America] has amounted to 38.9 percent of total output (GDP) over the past three years, and budget deficits have averaged 9.0 percent of GDP. Public debt is equivalent to 127.1 percent of GDP.

That doesn’t sound like small government to me.

In fact, even with the extra state spending induced by the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government has been spending like a drunken sailor for quite some time—and using debt to do so.

Leaving aside the ruinous expenditure levels and notorious inefficiencies associated with interventionist policies, there are serious political problems associated with conservatives adopting more economically interventionist stances.

“There’s a middle ground,” Olsen asserts, “between government directing everything or nothing.” Alas, if there’s anything that 20th-century economic history shows, it is that once the state’s economic role moves beyond securing certain public goods—the rule of law, property rights, national security, public works, etc. (none of which are small endeavors)—the genie is hard to put back in the bottle.

The middle ground thus ends up not being an essentially market economy operating within a framework of the rule of law and intertwined in a robust civil society. Instead, it becomes a type of social democracy in which excessive state power is omnipresent throughout the economy.

That doesn’t mean that you eventually get a Soviet-style command economy. But you do find yourself encumbered with the rampant cronyism that infects so much of D.C. politics, and, more insidiously, what the great political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville described in his classic “Democracy in America” as “soft despotism.”

Soft despotism is a Faustian bargain between the political class and the public. It involves “an immense protective power,” Tocqueville wrote, in assuming prime responsibility for everyone’s happiness—provided that power remains “sole agent and judge of it.”

That power would, Tocqueville added, “resemble parental authority” and attempt to keep people “in perpetual childhood” by relieving them “from all the trouble of thinking and all the cares of living.”

That’s the deal that progressives have proposed to Americans for more than a century. And it has saddled America with social and economic disasters like President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, which, as the economic historian Amity Shlaes illustrates in her book “Great Society,” wreaked havoc upon black America and the white working class.

In that light, there’s no reason to think that conservatives can devise an interventionist agenda that somehow avoids all of the problems—the one-size-fits-all mentality approach, the unintended consequences, the inability to address the non-material causes often central to social dysfunctionality, et al.— inseparable from such policies.

Faith in state intervention to effect positive economic and political change has also encumbered America with a vast administrative state. It’s no secret that these federal government departments, administrative bodies, and regulatory agencies are dominated by people ranging from indifferent to hostile to conservative ideas. Why would American conservatives want to affirm (let alone augment) the administrative state’s power by adopting economically interventionist programs?

Americans deserve better than having to choose between soft and hard versions of social democracy at election time. Nor should they have to put up with economic debates being reduced to who is willing to spend more.

If anything, American conservatives need to be more allergic to government economic intervention—not less.

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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