This blog replaces the sort of posts about Covid that I used to put up on "Dissecting Leftism. Google started deleting a lot of my posts on that blog due to my political incorrectness and threatened to delete my whole "Dissecting Leftism blog permanently if I kept putting up "incorrect" posts.
So to escape their censorship it seemed best to revert my "Dissecting Leftism" blog to its original purpose and put up my posts about Covid, vaccines, lockdowns etc onto an entirely new and separate blog beyond their control, which is what you are reading now.
Email me at jonjayray@gmail.com. Links to all my blogs: here
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COVID WATCH
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31 July, 2024
Pfizer mRNA Vaccine Fails in Children’s Study, No Protection Against Symptomatic COVID-19, Grim Implications for Low-and Middle-income Countries
Cristina de Oliveira Rodrigues, Campus Toledo, Federal University of Paraná (UFPR), Brazil and a group of investigators from Hospital Moinhos de Vento, Inova Medical and Pfizer called the Toledo BNT162b2 Study Group Investigators designed and conducted a prospective test-negative, case-control study in the southern Brazilian city of Toledo occurring June 2022 to July 2023, involving young patients aged 5–11 years seeking care for acute respiratory symptoms in the public health system.
In addition to being tested for SARS-CoV-2 via reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), the investigators in their primary analysis primarily sought to better understand the actual effectiveness of the two dose (primary series) original wild-type BNT162b2, co-developed by Pfizer and BioNTech, against symptomatic COVID-19. The Toledo BNT162b2 Study Group Investigators, sponsored by Hospital Moinhos de Vento and others in southern Brazil, used an unvaccinated cohort as the reference exposure group in the study. This is an important question because effectiveness of this vaccine early on upon first roll out becomes important in guiding comparable vaccine policy moving forward.
Results of this study were published in Science Direct, Immunology Letters.
The Study
The study was a prospective test-negative case-control study (NCT05403307). The group used the same study method for both case and controls, while again deploying RT-PCR testing for COVID-19 prospectively to distinguish both cases and controls in addition to whole genome sequencing to identify variants of SARS-CoV-2. The authors designed in the protocol vaccination status before testing as well as possible confounding factors in both cases and controls as well.
As described in Clinicaltrials.gov, the study the test-negative design study was designed to estimate the real-world effectiveness of Pfizer-BioNTech BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine on symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection and its consequences among children aged 5 to 11 years in the city of Toledo in Southern Brazil.
The Toledo investigators enrolled persons aged 5 to 11 years accessing the public healthcare system with symptoms suggestive COVID-19. The cases were followed-up for a period of 3 months by means of structured telephone interview.
Findings
The Toledo study team was able to meet its study plan enrollment target of 757 children/patients and out of that total number, 461 (25 cases; 436 controls) were included in the primary analysis.
The average age of the study participant was 7.4 years with 49.7% female and 34.6% classified as obese and finally 14.1% of the participants identified with chronic pulmonary disease.
Not surprisingly, by the time of this study, Omicron made up 100% of all identified SARS-CoV-2 variants with BA.5, BQ.1, and XBB.1 accounting for 35.7%, 21.4% and 21.4%, respectively.
The adjusted estimate of two-dose vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic Omicron was 3.1% (95% CI, -133.7% to 61.8%) after a median time between the second dose and the beginning of COVID-19 symptoms of 192.5 days (interquartile range, 99 to 242 days).
Analysis
This is an important study given the dearth of data associated with COVID-19 vaccination and real-world effectiveness, especially against the mutating Omicron variant in young people across low-and middle-income countries (LMICs). Many LMICs do not have the financial wherewithal to continuously deliver expensive, cumbersome to deliver (refrigeration, etc.) expensive mRNA vaccines.
So, as will often be the case in the real world, the first delivered vaccine in LMICs (in this case Brazil) was put to the test via this study to determine effectiveness against symptomatic Omicron infection in the age 5–11-year cohort. We note that Omicron generally has been considerably milder in effect in both adults and children. With delta, while rare, multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS-C) in children emerged, yet studies reviewed by TrialSite during Omicron found this condition extremely rare.
The reality behind the vaccine effectiveness’s numbers from the Toledo study raises profound questions about vaccine policy during a pandemic, especially in LMICs which represent as high as 80-85% of the world’s population!
What defines an LMIC? The World Bank defines countries into income groups based on gross national income per capita in US dollars. In 2022, the World Bank categorized countries as low-income if their income was US\$1045 or less, and upper-middle-income if it was US\$4096–US\$12 695. This classification placed 137 countries in the LMIC category, which is 63% of the world's countries.
The two-dose primary series use of the first released Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine according to the authors “was not associated with a significant protection against symptomatic Omicron infection after a median time between the second dose and the beginning of COVID-19 symptoms of 192 days.”
Of course, limitations must be factored into this study, given the low number of cases, which by itself raises questions of why there was so much pressure put on by governments to vaccinate all children. Given the numbers the risk of an underpowered study is real.
The first pivotal Pfizer clinical trial testing BNT162b2 led to almost 95% relative risk reduction and under 1% absolute risk reduction as reported by TrialSite early on. See an opinion piece by TrialSite founder Daniel O’Connor on the topic for some perspective.
No doubt the vaccine became ineffective at delivering any protection due to the combination of virus mutation and vaccine duration. And regardless of other limitations the pragmatic policy implications scream for attention. Will anyone listen?
https://www.trialsitenews.com/a/pfizer-vaccine-fails-brazil-based-childrens-study-no-protection-against-symptomatic-covid-19-grim-implications-for-low-and-middle-income-countries-9f23b9d8
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Australian centrist politician Signs Letter Asking PM to Expand COVID-19 Vaccine Compensation Scheme
“Teal” MP Monique Ryan has signed a letter calling for an urgent review and extension of the COVID-19 Vaccine Compensation Claims Scheme.
The letter, addressed to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, raises concerns about the scheme’s proposed end date of Sept. 30, 2024.
“While the Australian government indemnifies vaccine manufacturers and continues to promote the take up of boosters, it makes no sense for the ’safety net' of the scheme to be removed,” the letter states.
The document was also signed by United Australia Party Senator Ralph Babet, Nationals Senator Matt Canavan, Liberal Senators Gerard Rennick and Alex Antic, One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts, and former Liberal turned independent MP Russell Broadbent.
The letter raises concerns the scheme’s “narrow scope of eligibility” means the majority of vaccine-injured Australians are unable to access support.
“It has been designed in a manner which makes it near impossible for applicants to access fair compensation for their injuries,” the letter states.
“The very system designed to support the vaccine injured is creating insurmountable barriers which are near impossible to overcome—further exacerbating their suffering and distress.”
Copies of the call to action were also sent to Health Minister Mark Butler and Government Services Minister Bill Shorten.
“We implore you to heed the advice of the Senate Finance and Public Administration Committee, which recommended that the government review the scheme and consider the merits of a national no-fault vaccine injury compensation scheme,” the letter states.
“As such, we urge you to extend the COVID-19 Vaccine Compensation Scheme, expand its eligibility criteria, and ensure that those Australians who have been injured can access the support they need.”
Compensation for Moderate to Severe Vaccine ‘Adverse Events’
The COVID-19 vaccine scheme enables individuals to claim compensation for moderate to severe vaccine-related adverse events.
The scheme covers vaccines approved by the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), including the AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Moderna, and Novavax jabs.
Australian government agency Services Australia administers the scheme on behalf of the Department of Health and Aged Care.
In December 2023, the Australian government extended the closing date of the scheme to Sept. 30, 2024.
To make a compensation claim, individuals need to meet the definition of harm, be admitted to the hospital as an inpatient, or have a waiver if seen in outpatient care.
Also, those who suffered harm need to have experienced losses or expenses of more than $1,000 due to the vaccine.
The conditions included range from anaphylactic reaction to erythema multiforme (major), myocarditis, pericarditis, and thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome.
Also included are shoulder injuries from the vaccine or other moderate to significant physical injuries that caused permanent impairment or need an extended period of medical treatment.
“In both cases, the injuries must have been sustained during the physical act of being given the vaccine. You must also have been admitted to hospital as an in-patient,” Services Australia explains.
“Presenting to an emergency department is not recognised as being admitted to hospital.”
Services Australia adds the following “harm” isn’t covered under the scheme—contracting COVID-19, psychological and psychiatric conditions and secondary injuries.
“For example, an injury suffered when fainting, or a haematoma where you were injected that becomes infected,” the government agency explains.
Other side effects not accepted include headache, nausea or vomiting, lethargy, hyperhidrosis, chills, decreased appetite, malaise, lymphadenopathy, urticaria or rash, pruritus, somnolence and abdominal pain,
Services Australia told The Epoch Times in May it had received 4,191 claims and paid 286 claims worth around $20.5 million.
The 2024-25 federal budget allocates $490 million over four years to continue the national COVID-19 vaccine program.
Within the budget (pdf), $6.9 million has been allocated to Services Australia to support “ongoing access to vaccines” in 2024-25, but this has been reduced to $3.3 million in 2025-26.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/world/teal-mp-signs-letter-asking-pm-to-expand-covid-19-vaccine-compensation-scheme-5695615?ea_src=au-frontpage&&ea_med=top-news-australia-top-news-5
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
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)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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30 July, 2024
Court Rules EU Commission Hid Vax Contract Details From Public
The EU’s top court today ruled that the European Commission’s decision to heavily redact key portions of COVID-19 vaccine contracts with pharmaceutical companies during the pandemic violated the commission’s transparency obligations
The European Court of Justice found that the commission failed to provide sufficient public access to COVID-19 vaccine purchase agreements, in a ruling that could deal a blow to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on the eve of her re-election bid, according to The Associated Press.
The ruling came in response to legal challenges brought by EU lawmakers and private citizens seeking fuller disclosure of the multibillion-euro vaccine deals.
It highlights ongoing concerns about the secrecy surrounding the EU’s vaccine procurement process, a contentious issue since the early days of the pandemic.
“The Commission did not give the public wide enough access to the contracts for the purchase of COVID-19 vaccines,” the court said in its judgment, pointing to several areas where the executive body fell short in being sufficiently transparent.
In response to the ruling, the commission wrote, “The Commission needed to strike a difficult balance between the right of the public, including MEPs [Members of the European Parliament], to information, and the legal requirements emanating from the COVID-19 contracts themselves, which could result in claims for damages at the cost of taxpayers’ money.”
‘Green’ MEP Tilly Metz, one of the deputies who submitted the original request, said, “This ruling is significant for the future, as the EU Commission is expected to undertake more joint procurements in areas like health and potentially defence,” Euractiv reported.
“The new European Commission will have to adapt their handling of access to documents requests to be in line with today’s ruling,” Metz said.
However, Dutch attorney Meike Terhorst told The Defender that the court ruling is not the victory it seems. She argued that the EU court has given the commission a “giant loophole” to keep parts of the contracts secret “to protect ‘business interests.’”
“It is not possible to both protect public health and full transparency and at the same time protect the business interests of the supplier,” Terhorst said. “We, the public, will not get the access to the information we need. The cat and mouse play continues.”
The commission, which has two months to appeal the decision, said it would “carefully study the Court’s judgments and their implications” and that it “reserves its legal options.”
Scale and speed of purchases unprecedented
In 2020 and 2021, von der Leyen negotiated purchase agreements for COVID-19 vaccines with several pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca, according to the AP.
EU member states mandated the European Commission organize the joint procurement of vaccines and lead negotiations with manufacturers.
The scale and speed of these purchases were unprecedented. According to the court, approximately 2.7 billion euros ($2.95 billion) was quickly mobilized to place firm orders for more than one billion doses of vaccines.
This joint procurement approach allowed for the rapid acquisition of vaccines for all 27 EU member states.
Initially, von der Leyen received praise for her leadership during the COVID-19 crisis, particularly for her role in securing collective vaccine access for EU citizens. However, the spotlight quickly shifted to concerns about the negotiations’ lack of transparency.
In 2021, several members of the European Parliament requested full details of the agreements. The commission, citing confidentiality reasons, agreed to provide only partial access to certain contracts and documents, which were placed online in redacted versions.
The commission also refused to disclose how much it paid for the billions of doses it secured.
Concerns over secret deals with Pfizer
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla twice in 2022 refused to testify before the European Parliament’s special committee on COVID-19. Bourla was expected to face tough questions about secretive vaccine deals and negotiations between Pfizer and the European Commission.
Of particular interest were text messages between Bourla and von der Leyen that preceded a multibillion-euro vaccine contract. In January 2023, The New York Times sued the European Commission over its failure to release the messages.
That suit followed a January 2022 inquiry by the EU ombudsman charging the commission with maladministration over its handling of a previous request for the messages.
In June, a Belgian court took up the issue of the secret negotiations between Bourla and von der Leyen, with a former lobbyist for the EU Parliament claiming “destruction of public documents” and alleging von der Leyen violated the commission’s code of conduct.
Commission officials argued the messages didn’t contain any important information and have thus far refused to provide them, according to the AP.
European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO) in 2022 opened an investigation into the acquisition of COVID-19 vaccines in the EU during the pandemic. This investigation stems from a criminal complaint filed by an individual, with the governments of Hungary and Poland later joining the lawsuit, euronews reported. EPPO adjourned the case until December.
Implications for the European Commission and von der Leyen
The court’s ruling comes at a critical time for von der Leyen, just one day before the European Parliament is set to vote on her reappointment as commission president.
Von der Leyen had previously won backing from a majority of EU leaders in June. To secure her position, she now needs to garner support from at least 361 MEPs in the 720-seat European Parliament, WIONews reported.
This ruling presents a dilemma for the ‘Greens’, who initiated the legal challenge against the commission’s redactions. In recent days, von der Leyen has been courting the ‘Greens’ to shore up support for her nomination ahead of the vote.
During a press conference in Strasbourg on Wednesday, Manon Aubry, a French MEP from the Left group, expressed strong concerns about the European Commission’s “lack of transparency.”
On the heels of the EU court ruling, German MEP Christine Anderson today said she would call for the removal of von der Leyen and the continuation of the criminal investigation of her actions.
https://principia-scientific.com/court-rules-eu-commission-hid-vax-contract-details-from-public/
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Large Korean Study Backs Monitoring mRNA Vax Patients for Auto-immunity
There is great concern that with continued dosing of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, the human body is forced to produce not only the foreign and potentially lethal Wuhan Spike protein, but probably about a dozen additional frameshifted proteins as shown by Boros and colleagues.
Invariably these peptides induce an immune attack against the human body as they are expressed on cell surfaces and in some cases like Spike protein, trimerize and are circulatory in blood for months after injection.
In clinical practice my screen for autoimmunity is through blood testing: ANA, rheumatoid factor, and anti-citrullinated peptide (anti-CCP) antibodies. If there are skin, kidney, or vasculitic features, I add the ANCA test.
Now a large study from Korea by Jung et al, suggests there are increased risks for some autoimmune illnesses after at least two mRNA shots, but not nearly as high as the established dangers of vaccine myo-pericarditis or Guillain-Barre Syndrome.
“In this nationwide, population-based cohort study involving 9,258,803 individuals, we aim to determine whether the incidence of AI-CTDs is associated with mRNA vaccination.
The study spans over 1 year of observation and further analyses the risk of AI-CTDs by stratifying demographics and vaccination profiles and treating booster vaccination as time-varying covariate. We report that the risk of developing most AI-CTDs did not increase following mRNA vaccination, except for systemic lupus erythematosus with a 1.16-fold risk in vaccinated individuals relative to controls.
Comparable results were reported in the stratified analyses for age, sex, mRNA vaccine type, and prior history of non-mRNA vaccination. However, a booster vaccination was associated with an increased risk of some AI-CTDs including alopecia areata, psoriasis, and rheumatoid arthritis.
Overall, we conclude that mRNA-based vaccinations are not associated with an increased risk of most AI-CTDs, although further research is needed regarding its potential association with certain conditions.”
Because these diagnoses are based on laboratory tests, Jung and coworkers may have underestimated incidence since not all vaccinated patients get laboratory monitoring in follow-up.
Jung concluded: “long-term monitoring is necessary after mRNA vaccination for the development of autoimmune connective tissue diseases.” These data suggest however, I could reduce the intensity of screening for auto-immunity and make it more clinically directed based upon symptoms.
When auto-immunity is found, the most common drug I use in my practice is hydroxychloroquine. However, I have had advanced cases that have required methotrexate, prednisone, and even rituximab. Media star Megyn Kelly serves as an example of this very real vaccine hazard.
https://principia-scientific.com/large-korean-study-recommends-monitoring-mrna-vaccinated-patients-for-auto-immunity/
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
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)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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29 July, 2024
COVID effect to cause 'excess' deaths for years to come
Death rates in Australia could be impacted for years by the lingering effects of COVID-19. (Steven Saphore/AAP PHOTOS)
Australia could continue to feel the tail effects of the COVID-19 pandemic for years as more people die because of the virus and its impacts.
Some 8400 more people died in 2023 than would have been expected under pre-pandemic conditions, an Actuaries Institute report, released on Monday, found.
The figure was down from the 20,000 "excess" deaths recorded in 2022.
Of the extra deaths logged in 2023, 4600 were directly because of COVID-19 while another 1500 were linked to the virus.
The institute's mortality working group said the substantial drop in excess deaths between the two years had not prevented the 2023 rate sitting higher than it had during bad flu years before the pandemic.
"We think COVID-19 is likely to cause some excess mortality for several years to come, either as a direct cause of death or a contributing factor to other causes such as heart disease," actuary Karen Cutter said.
"In our view, the 'new normal' level of mortality is likely to be higher than it would have been if we hadn't had the pandemic."
A higher death rate could remain as things such as vaccination rates and jabs' efficacy continued to be managed, Australian National University epidemiology lecturer Rezanur Rahaman said.
"It could be said that the excess deaths will continue for some time as it is a highly contagious respiratory pathogen that will not die out anytime soon," he told AAP.
But University of Technology Sydney bio-statistics professor Andrew Hayen noted the report found the age-standardised death rate in 2023 was almost the same as in 2019.
"We've already witnessed a considerable decline in excess deaths as measured by the Actuaries Institute (and) we are likely to see a continued decline in mortality, particularly due to COVID," he said.
It was difficult to attribute deaths specifically to post-COVID effects, rather than reduced health care during the pandemic, Professor Hayen said.
"Many of the deaths in 2022 were probably due to mortality displacement and there may also be issues relating to pressures on emergency services and delays in standard care, like elective surgery rates," he said.
"However, it's not possible to attribute exactly what proportion is attributable to putative causes."
Comparing Australia's experience with 40 other countries, the actuaries' report found the local excess death rate of five per cent between 2020 and 2023 was low by global standards, which averaged 11 per cent.
https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/8710518/covid-effect-to-cause-excess-deaths-for-years-to-come/
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Pentagon went all-out to discredit Chinese vaccine
Finally, a serious academic from globally known university has issued a statement on the what TrialSite has labeled the largest anti-vax operation worldwide during the COVID-19 pandemic: the U.S. Department of Defense, Pentagon operation to instill fear, uncertainty and doubt in the Philippines and other Middle Eastern countries to ensure COVID-19 Chinese vaccines were not embraced.
TrialSite also suggests the U.S. government used this elite psychological unit based in Tampa to clear the market space for American-based vaccine sales. Salvador Santino F. Regilme Jr, a tenured Associate Professor at Leiden University International Relations at the History and International Studies Section, Institute for History in the Netherlands was actually born in the Philippines and educated in Germany. Just published days ago in the Journal of Public Health is his “International Relations in public health: the Pentagon’s anti-vax campaign during COVID-19 pandemic.”
TrialSite has asked, “Where is the mainstream media” on this scandal dug up by Reuters? In fact, where is the so-called medical freedom movement who don’t seem to care about this news.
Professor Regilme points to growing dismay involving how “natural hazards and armed conflict intertwine” and along the way shape public health vulnerabilities. The Reuters piece most certainly raised attention, particularly from someone with roots in the Philippines.
Acknowledging that geostrategic interests insert with local health crisis in complex manners, Professor Regilme introduces the U.S. military’s “secret campaign to counter China’s influence in the Philippines” via the spreading of what is actually disinformation about Chinese vaccines plus other countermeasures (e.g. masks etc.).
Describing what TrialSite has already reported multiple times (probably more than any other media out there), Regilme summarizes the details of the operation, which don’t need to repeat.
With an aim of attacking China’s credibility and influence in the Southeast Asia region just as a deadly pandemic was spreading, he notes the U.S. diplomatic objections, undoubtedly futile attempts at common sense rationality.
The Leiden University professor also adds that the operation targeted Russian vaccines, which ironically TrialSite also raised concerns about via our reporting. The Philippine media was in touch with TrialSite and a government contact at one point which was covered in PhilStar, a Philippines media.
In the article titled “US Trials Watchdog: Philippines be Cautious trying out Sputnik V Vaccine” dated August 2020 the media cites TrialSite News specifically as a source of intelligence. But the concern was not statecraft—rather it was the shocking way the Russians cut corners to be the ‘First” to authorize a COVID-19 vaccine.
Of course, mounting tension between America’s interests and then-president strongman Rodrigo Duterte didn’t help matters. Under Duterte the foreign policy tone shifted away from America, a traditional ally since she seized the lands during the Spanish-American war in 1898. Russia and China were getting closer and units within the DoD sought to do something about it, pandemic or not. TrialSite has reported on a military-focused media that was able to elicit more information from a spokesperson who expressed no remorse about the operation--just business as usual in the information war against China.
But is this for public health branding:
“The Pentagon’s secret anti-vax campaign, which spreads false information about Chinese vaccines, reveals systemic hypocrisy in U.S. foreign policy.”
Contrary to the very public advocacy the U.S. government embraced and promoted under both Trump and Biden regimes, especially the latter’s importance placed on health and vaccine equity, the Pentagon effort further undermines any U.S. federal effort to “combat misinformation and support international health initiative.”
https://www.trialsitenews.com/a/leiden-university-professor-calls-out-u.s.-foreign-health-policy-hypocrisy-the-worlds-top-anti-vaxxer-was-the-pentagon-4778eea4
Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
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)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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28 July, 2024
Covid curbs such school closures and stay-at-home orders did more harm than good, major US study finds
Some restrictions designed to limit the spread of Covid caused more harm than good, a major study suggests.
The research found shutting schools down had little effect on virus death rates in the US but 'hurt' children's 'educational outcomes.'
Meanwhile, stay-at-home orders, restaurant, bar and gym closures and visitor restrictions in nursing homes did nothing to save lives and caused 'harmful social isolation.'
'The absence of evidence that these [curbs] ...reduced pandemic deaths suggests that they may have been too aggressively pursued in some states,' the study said.
The analysis did, however, find controversial measures like mask mandates and vaccine passports saved hundreds of thousands of lives across the US.
It comes weeks after Dr Anthony Fauci, who was instrumental in several of the anti-Covid measures, admitted many were not based on any firm science.
The new analysis, from researchers at the University of Virginia, looked at mortality and population data from the CDC in all 50 states for 2020 to 2022.
The results were compared to data for 2017 to 2019.
During those two years of the pandemic, there were 1.2million excess deaths, or fatalities of any cause that were above average.
Many of these excess would have been Covid itself.
But previous research has shown that harms associated with lockdowns also accounted for excess deaths, such as missed cancers, heart attacks, delayed hospital treatment and suicides.
The study found states that imposed the strictest and longest restrictions, such as New York and swathes of the North East, experienced lower death rates.
For example, the 10 states with the toughest curbs had an excess death rate of 282 per 100,000 over the 2-year period.
That was a third lower than the 417 per 100,000 estimated for the 10 states that imposed the 'weakest' restrictions, many of which were Republican-led and in the South.
The analysis estimated that if all 50 states had imposed the toughest level of restrictions then there would have been up to 250,000 fewer excess deaths.
Whereas there would have been up to 447,000 more deaths if all states had refused to implement vaccine passports and mask mandates.
However, the study highlights that many social factors were at play.
People in southern states that suffered large excess deaths were more likely to work labor jobs and other blue collar work, meaning they did not have the luxury of working from home and avoiding others.
These states are also more likely to have high levels of obesity and diabetes, which raise the risk of dying from Covid. They also have fewer hospitals and doctors.
The study estimated that behavioral changes, such as working from home, avoiding crowded places and getting vaccinated accounted for between 50 and 75 percent of the reduction in deaths.
The positive association between masks and lower death rates conflicts with other major studies that found they made little difference on Covid's spread.
The research around Covid vaccination is stronger. Those who were vaccinated were much less likely to die from the virus, especially among seniors.
The study conceded that some Covid restrictions caused long-term harm that we don't know the full extent of yet.
'Prior research indicates that school closings hurt educational outcomes,' wrote economics professor Christopher Ruhm, from the University of Virginia, the sole author of the paper.
'The absence of evidence that these also reduced pandemic deaths suggests that they may have been too aggressively pursued in some states.
'On the other hand, school mask mandates were probably more effective and imposed lower costs [to the government].
'Similarly, the social isolation experienced by nursing home residents was harmful, raising questions about activity limitations that restricted personal interactions for this group.'
The study was published Friday in JAMA Health Forum.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-13676727/covid-school-closures-isolation-harm-study.html
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COVID left Australians poorer, sicker and with a big financial headache, inquiry told
COVID-19 has left Australians with poorer physical and mental health, helped fuel inflation because of too many government handouts and encouraged people into the black economy, the first wide-ranging inquiry into the pandemic has heard.
Businesses, unions, health experts and the education sector have told the inquiry, due to report in weeks, that Australia needs to prepare for future pandemics to avoid repeating mistakes made across all levels of government that are still being felt in some parts of the nation.
The inquiry, promised by Anthony Albanese ahead of the 2022 federal election, is being headed by former senior public servant Robyn Kruk plus economist Angela Jackson and infectious diseases expert Professor Catherine Bennett.
Established last year, the 12-month inquiry is due to report by September. It has been given a wide remit to look at joint Commonwealth-state actions, although its terms of reference preclude examining unilateral actions taken by states and territories or international programs.
Across a series of roundtables, the inquiry has been told of major shortcomings with elements of the federal and state governments’ responses to COVID-19 and the long-term problems these have caused.
Health experts said border closures had a “significant” impact on healthcare provision, particularly in rural, remote and border communities, arguing health workers should be exempt from such restrictions.
Australia’s average age fell last year while the country experienced a record number of deaths in 2022.
Chronic disease monitoring and cancer screening were disrupted, the sector said, noting a nationally co-ordinated effort was now required to clear the backlog of tests.
“People are currently waiting longer for care than before the pandemic, are often sicker and [are] finding it less affordable,” the sector said.
Experts said the mental health system was in crisis before the pandemic, and COVID-19 had exacerbated problems that had only worsened since.
Anthony Albanese announces inquiry into COVID-19 pandemic
An inquiry into how Australia dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic has been announced by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
“Australian communities are experiencing a process of rolling recoveries from one emergency to the next (extreme weather events and the pandemic), with resulting cumulative trauma,” they told the inquiry.
“More emphasis is needed on community resilience and on strengthening the system ahead of the next emergency.”
Economists from academia and the private sector said original government spending was important in supporting households and businesses, but the speed at which it was rolled out meant “compromises” in policy design that should be avoided in future pandemics.
However, the ongoing financial support proved too much for the economy, they said.
“The scale of the initial fiscal and monetary support was likely warranted during a period of uncertainty. However, the winding back of these measures as the pandemic progressed was too slow,” they said.
The small business sector said differences in public health orders between the states and territories caused significant problems for many companies.
This, coupled with confusion over the definition of essential services and essential workers, encouraged some businesses to participate in the black economy.
“The lack of clarity and consistency around important definitions and public health orders resulted in an increase in the number of sole traders operating in the cash economy in some sectors, such as hairdressing,” it told the inquiry.
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/covid-left-us-poorer-sicker-and-with-a-big-financial-headache-inquiry-told-20240725-p5jwer.html
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
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)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Jul 25th 2024
Navy SEALs fired for refusing COVID vaccine for religious reasons score major win against Biden administration
Thousands of Navy SEALs and service members negatively impacted by President Joe Biden's COVID-19 vaccine mandate scored a major win in court after a years-long legal battle.
The mandate enacted in August 2021 led to the forced firing of over 8,000 service members who refused the shot on religious or medical grounds.
Navy SEALs and other special operators suffered professional setbacks for refusing the vaccine, despite having their religious accommodation requests denied multiple times.
They were fired, denied trainings to advance in rank and, in some cases, even forced by the military to repay their initial signing bonuses between $4,000 and $7,000.
SEALs and other special operations warfare troops were also told they would have to pay back the cost of their training by the federal government - hundreds of thousands of dollars - and hand over their hard-earned 'Trident' pin.
According to the settlement first obtained by DailyMail.com, service members who quit the Navy after being 'mistreated' will have their records corrected.
In addition, the Navy also 'agreed to post a statement affirming the Navy's respect for religious service members.'
The military will provide 'more training' for the actual commanders who review religious accommodation requests as well as change their policy.
Lastly, the government will pay $1.5 million in attorneys' fees that accumulated over nearly four years of litigation.
'This has been a long and difficult journey, but the Navy SEALs never gave up,' Danielle Runyan, senior counsel at First Liberty Institute told DailyMail.com.
'We are thrilled that those members of the Navy who were guided by their conscience and steadfast in their faith will not be penalized in their Navy careers.'
First Liberty and Hacker Stephens LLP secured the settlement on behalf of the troops that was accepted by the United States District Court Northern District of Texas Fort Worth Division on Wednesday.
Heather Gebelin Hacker added that it is a 'hard-fought but significant victory.'
A spokesperson for the Navy referred DailyMail.com to the Department of Justice for comment which did not immediately respond.
Earlier this year, over 200 active duty and retired service members vowed to hold the Biden administration accountable for 'trampling' on their rights by enforcing the COVID-19 vaccine mandate.
Over 200 service members declared that they will do 'everything' in their power to get accountability since not a single leader has resigned or been held to account despite the rollback of the vaccine mandate last year.
In a letter obtained by DailyMail.com, the current and former troops accuse Biden's military brass of 'continuing to ignore' their pleas to correct the 'injuries and laws that were broken.'
They are threatening to even force Biden's top leaders to be brought out of retirement so they can be court-martialed and held to account.
'While implementing the COVID-19 vaccine mandate, military leaders broke the law, trampled constitutional rights, denied informed consent, permitted unwilling medical experimentation, and suppressed the free exercise of religion,' the letter states.
It goes on to say both service members and their families were 'significantly harmed' and their 'suffering continues to be felt financially, emotionally, and physically.'
'Some service members became part of our ever-growing veteran homeless population, some developed debilitating vaccine injuries, and some even lost their lives,' the letter continues.
The mandate was eventually rescinded in the December 2022 defense authorization bill, but it did not reinstate service members who were fired for not receiving the shot nor provide any other compensation.
In the open letter, they explicitly name now-retired and still serving top commanders that they are demanding accountability from.
Those include the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley who exited the military in October and Gen. James McConville who served as the 40th chief of staff of the Army until 2023.
'These individuals enabled lawlessness and the unwilling experimentation on service members,' they state.
'The moral and physical injuries they helped inflict are significant. They betrayed the trust of service members and the American people. Their actions caused irreparable harm to the Armed Forces and the institutions for which we have fought and bled.'
They have 'refused to resign' or take any accountability for their actions, the service members state.
The letter goes on to mutually pledge to hold them to account through 'lawful word and action.'
The Army recently was under scrutiny for attempting to win back favor with soldiers who were fired after declining the COVID-19 vaccine for religious or medical reasons, offering a 'correction of military records.'
But the letter sparked an outcry of fury at the Defense Department by lawmakers and current and former service members who said there was always a process in place to do just that.
Since the mandate, Army has also faced a huge shortage of recruits in fiscal year 2022 at 55,000 - which was 10,000 short of its target for the year.
Congress is also working to further remedy the wrongs that these service members faced, but many soldiers have told DailyMail.com that it is just the start.
In the most recent National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which passed a year later in December 2023, there is a provision allowing former service members who were fired to change their discharge status.
But some current and former troops are saying that the amendments in the FY 2024 NDAA are not strong enough to undo the 'serious harassment' they endured over the last two years.
John Frankman, who was in the Special Forces as part of the Green Berets, said that the 'missed career opportunities' he endured over the last two years could never be undone by any action of Congress.
Another active-duty Army officer previously told DailyMail.com that the fired troops have had 'their lives turned upside down and were betrayed by those charged with protecting them.'
And a formal apology from their service branches would be key to be able to have trust restored, he added.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13668593/navy-seals-covid-vaccine-religious-biden-administration-settlement.html
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Large % of Brazilian Patients Struggle with Long COVID
This observational, prospective plus follow-up study was performed with a cohort of adults and older adults diagnosed with COVID-19 in 2020 in the State of Paraná, Brazil. Patients were included at twelve months after hospital discharge, plus answered a phone questionnaire about the persistence of symptoms after three levels of exposure to COVID-19’s acute phase (ambulatory, medical ward, and intensive care unit).
Findings
Collecting and analyzing participant characteristics, the researchers calculated the prevalence of Long COVID-19 with use of logistic regression analyses. The investigators were able to analyze data from 1822 participants (980 adults [?18–<60 years] and 842 older people [?60 years]) across three exposure levels.
In a surprising finding, incidence of Long COVID equaled 64.2%. Moreover, Salci and colleagues report, “Long COVID was observed in 646 adults (55%; of which 326 were women) and 523 older people (45%; of which 284 were women).”
Concurring with some other study findings, females experienced greater incidence of long-term symptoms (52%) compared with men.
Interestingly, when it comes to musculoskeletal symptoms, long COVID afflicts males more (aOR = 0.50). Other determinants were also considered risky, such as the presence of comorbidities (aOR = 1.41).
TrialSite can confirm multiple studies showing those individuals with more acute cases of COVID-19, that were hospitalized are associated with the development of Long COVID and this Brazilian study reaffirms this unfolding evidence.
Further heightening the risk at least for the Brazil cohort, the risk of developing Long COVID was twice as high for forward patients (aOR = 2.53) and three times as high for ICU patients (aOR = 3.56) when compared to non-hospitalized patients.
Those patients presenting digestive (aOR = 1.56), endocrine (aOR = 2.14), cutaneous (aOR = 2.51), musculoskeletal (aOR = 2.76) and psychological systems (aOR = 1.66) clinical manifestations have a greater chance of developing Long COVID.
Overall, as the outcomes show herein “Long COVID was present in a large proportion of people affected by the SARS-CoV-2 infection. Presence of Long COVID symptoms displayed a dose–response relationship with the level of disease exposure, with a greater prevalence of symptoms associated with the severe form in the acute period.”
https://www.trialsitenews.com/a/large-of-brazilian-patients-struggle-with-long-covid-cohort-study-d7118fc6
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
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)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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24 July, 2024
Newsom Continues Dreadful COVID-19 Crackdown: Reality dysphoria mounts across the Golden State
On March 3, 2020, California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency, “deploying every level of government to help identify cases and slow the spread of this coronavirus.” In April, the governor announced spending of $1 billion on masks from a Chinese company, but the state of emergency was more far reaching.
Newsom backed a ban on sport fishing and police arrested solitary paddle boarders. The governor shut down schools and his rules for private gatherings banned singing and the playing of musical instruments. And so on, by some accounts, the most rigid regime of any state.
Newsom officially ended the state of emergency on Feb. 23, 2023, but the people have grounds to wonder. Newsom now deploys a SMARTER Plan not just for COVID-19 but “strategies and systems for future emergencies.” SMARTER stands for Shots, Masks, Awareness, Readiness, Testing, Education and Rx. As Katy Grimes of the California Globe noticed, Newsom was simply extending his previous COVID protocols.
According to the SMARTER plan, “Vaccines are the most powerful weapon against hospitalization and serious illness.” This ignores the reality that the COVID-19 vaccines backed by the CDC and Dr. Anthony Fauci failed to prevent infection and transmission of COVID-19. Though fully vaccinated and boosted, both Dr. Fauci and Joe Biden tested positive.
“Properly worn masks with good filtration help slow the spread of COVID-19 or other respiratory viruses,” the SMARTER plan proclaims. As Californians may recall, Dr. Fauci said there was no need to wear a mask before claiming that masks were necessary, and that it was “common sense” to wear two masks. The guidelines ignore studies making a case that the masks don’t work.
“COVID-19 IS not going away,” the SMARTER plan proclaims, and “we will continue to stay aware of how COVID-19 is spreading, evolving variants.” According to the federal Centers for Disease Control, the variant JN.1 is “closely related to the variant BA.2.86” and JN.1 has “only a single change” in the spike protein with BA.2.86. That variant is a “grandchild of Omicron,” according to Dr. William Schaffner, professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and “about the same,” in infectiousness and transmissibility.
There is very little difference between the variants, but the CDC gives them menacing tags like “Pirola,” for JN.1. SMARTER takes no notice of these realities, and Californians have other reasons to ignore the governor’s plan.
In November of 2020, during the state of emergency, Newsom and a squad of lobbyists partied sans mask at the upscale French Laundry. He kept details of the $1 billion Chinese mask deal secret, even from fellow Democrats, and many Californians wonder where the money went. Newsom ordered many wineries to cease indoor operations but his own PlumpJack operation remained open.
Newsom claims that California’s COVID-19 death rate was the nation’s lowest, that the state GDP grew faster than U.S. GDP between 2019 and 2022, that California students experienced less learning loss than the rest of the nation, and so forth. As Grimes explains, this excludes the 50 percent of all California restaurants forced to close by the lockdown, the ongoing labor shortage, and the students who lost one year of learning due to Newsom’s school closures. For Grimes, the bogus statistics are intended to bolster Newsom’s “senseless three years of emergency powers,” and they should come as no surprise.
In his recent state of the state address, Newsom claimed “California is not a high-tax state.” As UCLA economics professor Lee Ohanian notes, the nonpartisan Tax Foundation “identifies California as a very high-tax state,” with the highest tax collections per person among all states.
California collects $7,200 per person per year in state tax revenue, some 65 percent more than the national average of $4,375. And as taxpayers might note, Newsom recently teamed with former Jerry Brown to have the Taxpayer Protection and Government Accountability Act taken off the November ballot, for which it had already qualified.
COVID-19 rules aside, Newsom seems to be suffering from reality dysphoria. A healthy intake of economic and medical reality will prevent this ailment from spreading to other states.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14997&omhide=true&trk=title
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The IRS and the Scale of Fraud during the Pandemic
The scale of fraud against U.S. taxpayers during the coronavirus pandemic amounts to billions, possibly even trillions of dollars. Count the Internal Revenue Service among the government agencies that enabled the frauds that were perpetrated. The numbers aren’t small, as Reason’s J.D. Tucille reports:
You can add the Internal Revenue Service to the ranks of federal agencies conceding that raining taxpayer money on all and sundry to offset the negative effects of pandemic-era closures didn’t go as well as intended. Not only was a program meant to offset the cost of paying workers during lockdowns and voluntary social-distancing prone to being gamed, but the “vast majority” of claims submitted to the program show evidence of being fraudulent.
In the course of a detailed review of the Employee Retention Credit, “the IRS identified between 10% and 20% of claims fall into what the agency has determined to be the highest-risk group, which show clear signs of being erroneous claims for the pandemic-era credit,” the IRS announced June 20. “In addition to this highest risk group, the IRS analysis also estimates between 60% and 70% of the claims show an unacceptable level of risk.”
The Employee Retention Credit was offered to businesses that were shut down by government COVID-19 orders in 2020 or the first three quarters of 2021, experienced a required decline in gross receipts during that period, or qualified as a recovery startup business at the end of 2021. But it was clear early on that scammers were taking advantage of giveaways of taxpayer money, either to claim it for themselves or to pose as middlemen helping unwitting business owners file claims.
In March of 2023, the tax agency warned of “blatant attempts by promoters to con ineligible people to claim the credit.” In September of that year, it stopped processing claims amidst growing evidence that vast numbers of applications were “improper,” as the IRS delicately puts it. In March 2024, the agency announced that its Voluntary Disclosure Program had recovered $1 billion (since raised to over $2 billion) in improper payouts from participants who got to keep 20 percent of the take.
As of September 23, 2023, the IRS had processed 3.5 million claims and paid $230 billion to those who filed for the benefit.
If only 60% of those claims were fraudulent, the lower end of the latest estimate, the fraud enabled by the IRS would have cost U.S. taxpayers $138 billion.
That’s more than the $127 billion the U.S. government spent on the Department of Transportation and all its infrastructure projects in 2023. However, the IRS can’t point to any highways, seaports, or airports to show for having sent out even more money without adequate oversight.
The IRS has recovered only about 1.5% of that loss.
Just imagine how much better the U.S. government’s fiscal situation would be if it were more serious about recovering the money it lost through the Employee Retention Credit to fraud.
https://blog.independent.org/2024/07/22/the-irs-and-the-scale-of-fraud-during-the-pandemic/
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
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)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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23 July, 2024
Breaking: Largest Study of Its Kind Finds Excess Deaths During Pandemic Caused by Public Health Response, Not Virus
A study released today of excess mortality in 125 countries during the COVID-19 pandemic found the major causes of death globally stemmed from public health establishment’s response, including mandates and lockdowns that caused severe stress, harmful medical interventions and the COVID-19 vaccines.
A study released today of excess mortality in 125 countries during the COVID-19 pandemic found the major causes of death globally stemmed from public health establishment’s response, including mandates and lockdowns that caused severe stress, harmful medical interventions and the COVID-19 vaccines.
“We conclude that nothing special would have occurred in terms of mortality had a pandemic not been declared and had the declaration not been acted upon,” the authors of the study wrote.
Researchers from the Canadian nonprofit Correlation Research in the Public Interest and the University of Quebec at Trois-Rivières analyzed excess all-cause mortality data prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic, beginning with the March 11, 2020, World Health Organization (WHO) pandemic declaration and ending on May 5, 2023, when the WHO declared the pandemic over.
The results, presented in a detailed 521-page analysis, establish baseline all-cause mortality rates across 125 countries and use those to determine the variations in excess deaths during the pandemic.
The researchers also used the baseline rates to investigate how the individual country variations in excess death rates correlated to different pandemic-related interventions, including vaccination and booster campaigns.
Not all of the results on a country-by-country basis were the same. For example, in some countries, mortality spikes occurred before the vaccines were rolled out, while in other places, the mortality spikes tracked closely with vaccine or booster campaigns.
In some places, excess mortality rates returned to baseline or close to baseline in 2022, while in others, the rates persisted well into 2023. Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., lead author of the study, told The Defender the disparities result from the complex nature of pandemic measures — and the data — in different areas.
Once Rancourt’s team was able to establish the baseline and excess mortality data for each place, they clustered and examined the data through different filters to interpret it, and drew several conclusions.
Data ‘incompatible with a pandemic viral respiratory disease as a primary cause of death’
The researchers established that there was significant excess mortality worldwide between March 11, 2020, and May 5, 2023.
Overall excess mortality during the three years in the 93 countries with sufficient data to make an estimate is approximately 0.392% of the 2021 population — or approximately 30.9 million excess deaths from all causes.
The conventional explanation for the excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic, Rancourt said, is that the SARS-CoV-2 virus caused virtually all deaths — and there would have been even more deaths if there hadn’t been a vaccine.
The variations in excess all-cause mortality rates across space and time, the authors wrote, “allow us to conclude that the Covid-period (2020-2023) excess all-cause mortality in the world is incompatible with a pandemic viral respiratory disease as a primary cause of death.”
They said the theory that the virus caused the deaths is propped up by mass virus-testing campaigns that should be abandoned.
‘Idea that vaccines saved lives is ridiculous’
Rancourt and his team cited several factors they believe disprove the theory that the virus caused a spike in all-cause mortality.
For example, they wrote that excess mortality surged almost simultaneously across several continents when a pandemic was declared, while there were no comparable surges in areas that had not yet declared a pandemic.
This suggests that pandemic interventions like lockdowns, which were implemented synchronously across many countries, likely caused the surges.
The researchers also pointed out the significant variation in mortality rates during the pandemic in all time periods, even across different political jurisdictions directly adjacent to each other. If the virus caused the deaths, it would follow that the infection fatality rate would be the same, or at least similar across political boundaries.
The researchers also found a lot of variability in death rates within countries over time, which also would not be an expected outcome if those deaths were caused by a pathogen.
Rancourt said they found “the idea that the vaccine saved lives is ridiculous,” and based on flawed modeling as he and colleagues also showed in a previous paper.
Here again, they found no systematic or statistically significant trends showing that vaccination campaigns in 2020 and 2021 reduced all-cause mortality.
Instead, they found that in many places, there was no excess mortality until the vaccines were rolled out, and most countries showed temporal associations between vaccine rollouts and increases in all-cause mortality.
Medical interventions — including denial of treatment — caused premature deaths
Rancourt said the excess deaths his team identified are strongly associated with the combination of two major factors — the proportion of elderly in a country’s population and the number of people living in poverty. Both factors increased peoples’ vulnerability to “sudden and profound structural societal changes” and “medical assaults.”
While the proximal cause of death may be classified on death certificates as a respiratory condition or infection, the researchers noted, they argue the true primary causes of death are actually biological stress, non-COVID-19-vaccine medical interventions and the COVID-19 vaccination rollouts.
The study provides an overview of plausible mechanisms for this hypothesis, including research showing that some people experienced severe biological stress from measures like mandates and lockdowns.
“If you structurally change the society by preventing people from moving, breathing, working, having their lives, having to stay at home, lock them in. If you do all these incredibly huge changes, structural changes in society, that is going to induce biological stress,” Rancourt told The Defender.
“There’s very compelling scientific evidence that biological stress is a massive killer,” he added.
Rancourt also pointed out that the stress of lockdowns affected poor people quite differently than it did people who could easily work from home, have food delivered and live relatively comfortably.
The authors also pointed to extensive evidence showing that medical interventions — including denial of treatment — caused premature deaths.
Such interventions included but were not limited to the denial of antibiotics and ivermectin against bacterial pneumonia, the systematic use of mechanical ventilators, experimental treatment protocols, new palliative medications and overdoses, isolation of vulnerable people and encouraged voluntary or involuntary suicide.
The March-April 2020 COVID-19 peak they identified in several countries is difficult to explain without such medical interventions, they wrote.
17 million excess deaths tied to COVID vaccines
Finally, the researchers projected that 17 million of the excess deaths they identified were associated with the COVID-19 vaccines, confirming the findings of their previous research on a smaller sample of countries.
Those vaccine-related estimations were based on analyses of places that had large spikes immediately following vaccination or booster campaigns and also by examining the numbers of vaccine doses and their relation to deaths over time.
Thirty percent of the countries they analyzed had no excess deaths until either the vaccine rollouts or the booster campaigns. And there were significant correlations between COVID-19 vaccine rollouts and peaks or increases in excess all-cause mortality. Ninety-seven percent of countries showed a late-2021 or early-2022 peak in excess all-cause mortality temporally associated with booster rollouts.
It is highly unlikely, the researchers wrote, that the vaccine-mortality associations are coincidental.
Rancourt noticed that people critical of this idea point to the fact that in some places, there are sometimes campaigns or booster campaigns that aren’t associated with spikes in excess mortality.
However, he said vaccination campaigns don’t always lead to such spikes because vaccination was not related to death in the same way in every situation. Vulnerability factors like the age of those vaccinated, the health of the population and other sociological factors related to stressors on the immune system change how they are affected by vaccine toxicity or the vaccines’ effects on the immune system.
Based on their analysis and interpretations, they concluded, “We are compelled to state that the public health establishment and its agents fundamentally caused all the excess mortality in the Covid period.”
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/excess-death-covid-public-health-measures/
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
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)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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22 July, 2024
Comparing the impact on pregnancy of Covid versus influenza using VAERS data
A Canadian Obstetrician and Gynaecologist for 43 years reports The Ghastly Impact of mRNA drugs in pregnancy.
Video here:
https://x.com/i/status/1811088901848846429
He says: “I don’t know if there is any other physician in the country that sees as many patients as I do by ultrasound, so I know what’s going on. I’ve seen death and destruction like I’ve never seen before."
“The vaccine causes a significant inflamatory effect. Anything that causes inflamation in my business, in my area of expertise, causes damage, injury, death and destruction in pregnancy. We’ve known that for half a century.”
Below is the abstract of the relevant article in The Journal of the American Physicians and Surgeons Volume 28 Number 1 Spring 2023. A Google search does now bring it up
COVID-19 Vaccines: The Impact on Pregnancy Outcomes and Menstrual Function
By: James A. Thorp, M.D. Claire Rogers, M.S.P.A.S., P.A.-C Michael P. Deskevich, Ph.D. Stewart Tankersley, M.D. Albert Benavides, B.S. Megan D. Redshaw, J.D. Peter A. McCullough, M.D., M.P.H.
ABSTRACT
This population-based retrospective cohort study assesses rates of adverse events (AE) after COVID-19 vaccines experienced by women of reproductive age, focusing on pregnancy and menstruation, using data collected by the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) database from Jan 1, 1998, to Jun 30, 2022.
The proportional reporting ratio comparing AEs reported after COVID-19 vaccines with those reported after influenza vaccines is significantly increased (? 2.0) for COVID-19 vaccine for menstrual abnormality, miscarriage, fetal chromosomal abnormalities, fetal malformation, fetal cystic hygroma, fetal cardiac disorders, fetal cardiac arrest, fetal arrhythmias, fetal vascular malperfusion, fetal growth abnormalities, fetal abnormal surveillance, placental thrombosis, fetal death/stillbirth, low amniotic fluid, preeclampsia, premature delivery, preterm premature rupture of membrane, and premature baby death. When normalized by time-available, doses-given, or number of persons vaccinated, all COVID-19 vaccine AEs far exceed the safety signal on all recognized thresholds.
These results necessitate a worldwide moratorium on the use of COVID-19 vaccines in pregnancy.
Link for journal article:
https://www.jpands.org/vol28no1/thorp.pdf?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
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)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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21 July, 2024
COVID Social Distancing Linked to Newborn Mortality and Preterm Births, Study Finds
The authors believe that disrupted prenatal care contributed to newborn mortality. The pernicious lockdown and isolation rules again
Pandemic social distancing is linked to higher rates of preterm births and newborn deaths within one to two months, according to a new study.
In a study published Thursday in JAMA Network Open, researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) evaluated over 18 million births in Alabama from 2016 to 2020, comparing prepandemic years to the period after officials enacted public health restrictions in March 2020.
The link was not immediately apparent. However, when researchers examined neonatal mortality and preterm rates two months after social distancing was implemented in the population, they found a link between the population’s social distancing behavior and neonatal mortality and preterm births. The neonatal period includes the first four weeks of a baby’s life.
The study evaluated the “unanticipated effects” of social distancing on infant health outcomes, senior study author Dr. Vivek Shukla, a neonatologist and assistant professor in the UAB Division of Neonatology, told The Epoch Times via email.
The clinician-researcher said that more research is needed to get a more nuanced understanding of these associations.
“This study shows that, on a population level, there might be delayed effects of health interventions,” he said. “Sometimes the effects of measures are not evident on the first day the measures are implemented.”
He added that the study only evaluated how social behavior might have related to health outcomes and did not examine how COVID-19 infections could affect a mother and her child.
Fewer Prenatal Visits
The authors said that their findings may be related to disrupted prenatal care and pregnancy complications.
They observed that during the pandemic, there were fewer prenatal visits and medical checkups during pregnancy, which may have been linked to social distancing behaviors in the population.
“These appointments are important to catch and address complications that could be life-threatening to both mom and baby,” co-author Dr. Rachel Sinkey, an associate professor in the UAB Division of Maternal–Fetal Medicine, said in a press release.
According to the American Medical Association, 81 percent of physicians surveyed in July and August 2020 reported providing fewer in-person visits than before the pandemic. The average number of in-person visits fell from 95 to 57 per week.
Additionally, disease rates, including gestational diabetes, gestational hypertension, and induction of labor, as well as neonatal intensive-care unit (ICU) admission, were higher during the pandemic.
The study found that neonatal mortality rates were generally lower throughout the 2020 pandemic period, but there were slight increases in neonatal mortality and preterm births after the population became more adherent to social distancing practices.
“COVID-19 affected the health care systems globally, and many lives were lost; it is important to learn from this experience to prepare better for possible future health crises,” said Dr. Shukla.
“We need to understand how changes in health behavior affected outcomes, whether people had limited access to care or healthy habits were altered.”
https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/covid-social-distancing-linked-to-newborn-mortality-and-preterm-births-study-finds-5689980
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COVID-19 mRNA Vaccination and Colon Cancer
Pfizer Vaccination Conferred Sixfold Increased Risk
By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH
I recently was asked about COVID-19 vaccination and colon cancer. Are they related? What is new in the literature?
Akkus et al studied the impact of COVID-19 vaccination more than 3 months before newly diagnosed with a special kind of colon cancer. Microsatellite instability-high (MSI-H) colon cancer is a type of colon cancer where tumor cells are highly unstable due to a high number of genetic mutations.
Instability occurs when mismatch repair (MMR) genes, which correct errors during cell division, stop functioning properly. As a result, errors accumulate and tumors become unstable. MSI-H colon cancer cells look and behave abnormally, making it easier for the immune system to recognize them as invaders and with proper immune surveillance, the tumor cells are effectively killed.
Exposure to the Pfizer mRNA COVID-19 vaccine was associated with a > 6-fold increased risk for this form of cancer. Because the Spike protein is believed to impair tumor surveillance systems, among several cancer-promoting mechanisms, it is plausible that these cancerous cells are allowed to proliferate among the vaccinated where the cancer was not yet detectable at the time of injection.
Akkus E, Karaoglan B, Akyol C, Ünal AE, Kuzu MA, Sava? B, Utkan G. Types and Rates of COVID-19 Vaccination in Patients With Newly Diagnosed Microsatellite Stable and Instable Non-Metastatic Colon Cancer. Cureus. 2024 Jun 6;16(6):e61780. doi: 10.7759/cureus.61780. PMID: 38975417; PMCID: PMC11227084.
https://www.trialsitenews.com/a/covid-19-mrna-vaccination-and-newly-diagnosed-microsatellite-stable-and-instable-non-metastatic-colon-cancer-7764a762
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
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)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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18 July, 2024
The coverup of vaccine side-effects takes a life
She and her family knew she had vulnerabilities from pre-existing conditions but were not told of the vaccine side effects that combined with those conditions to kill her
The death of a young woman in her 20s after she received a Covid-19 vaccine could progress to a full coronial inquest.
Coroner Catherine Fitzgerald told the involved parties that she would tighten the reins on expert reports being filed to the court, as mountains of medical information piled up.
Natalie Boyce, 21, died in March 2022 at The Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, five weeks after receiving a Moderna vaccine booster.
Lawyers for Ms Boyce's family opposed Moderna's request on the grounds the doctor saw the young woman for lupus four years before she died.
Natalie Boyce died from myocarditis. She spent the last three weeks of her life unconscious.
Ms Boyce was studying at Deakin University. She spent the last three weeks of her life unconscious. Her death certificate lists myocardial infarction with subacute myocarditis as the cause.
When she was 15, Ms Boyce was diagnosed with an uncommon blood clotting disorder that affects about one-in-2000 people.
Ms Boyce's mother, Deborah Hamilton, previously told a parliamentary inquiry that she believed her daughter would be alive if she had not received the Covid-19 vaccine booster.
'Had we known that there were risks there would have been no way that I would have allowed Natalie to receive another vaccine and I know that she would not have had it either,' Ms Hamilton told MPs in Canberra in 2023.
The day after getting the Moderna booster, Ms Boyce fainted, had a fever, stomach pain and vomiting. Her condition deteriorated over trips to doctors and several different hospitals.
Ms Hamilton has blamed both the vaccine mandates and 'medical negligence' from Victoria's health system.
Ms Boyce was encouraged by her part-time employer to get vaccinated and required a vaccination to go to the university campus.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13642351/Natalie-Boyce-died-Covid-vaccine.html
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Clinical Trial in Australia Reinforced problems with mRNA vaccines
10 to 11% of participants showed severe side-effects. Immunity conferred was weak
The PICOBOO clinical trial conducted in Australia involved immunocompetent adults <70 years old who had received two doses of BNT162b2 (Pfizer) followed by a single booster dose of any licensed COVID-19 vaccine at least three months prior. This study involved a random allocation of participants to BNT162b2 (Pfizer), mRNA-1273 (Moderna) or NVX-CoV2373 (Novavax) 1:1:1. The study was summarized as the geometric mean concentration (GMC log10 concentration of anti-spike Ig Total was). The team documented and analyzed reactogenicity and safety outcomes for this study registered in the Australia and New Zealand clinical trial registry as: ACTRN12622000238774.
Titled as “Platform Trial in COVID-19 Vaccine BOOsting (PICOBOO), the single blinded, phase 4, adaptive randomized trial to evaluate the immunogenicity of COVID-19 booster vaccines in adults and adolescents.”
The Study
The PICOBOO study platform is designed to be an adaptive randomised trial to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 booster vaccine strategies in the Australian context. This will enable regulators, researchers and policymakers to flexibly respond to new policy questions as they arise for example, as new vaccine formulations become available and new variants arise in Australia necessitating changes in strategy. This study aims to evaluate, pragmatically and efficiently, the immunogenicity and reactogenicity offered by alternative booster vaccination strategies against SARS-CoV-2. This adaptive trial is designed to allow for perpetual enrolment for as long as is needed to generate high-quality data to inform Australia's national COVID-19 booster vaccination practice and policy.
Findings
The study was conducted between 29 Mar 2022 and 2 Aug 2023, with 743 participants recruited to the trial with day 28 (D28) samples available.
Out of this total, 120 and 103 belonged to the 18-<50y and 50-<70y strata, respectively.
McCleod and colleagues report, “The mean adjusted geometric mean concentration (GMCs) (95% credible intervals) peaked at D28; these were 41 262 (31 611, 51 105), 45 585 (34 194, 57 441) and 25 281 (20 021, 31 234) U/mL in the 18-<50y stratum and 30 753 (25 071, 36 704), 35 132 (27 523, 42 239) and 17 322 (13 983, 20 641) U/mL in the 50-<70y stratum following boosting with BNT162b2, mRNA-1273 and NVX-CoV2373, respectively.”
At D28, mean adjusted neutralization against Ancestral virus was 389, 482 and 259 IU/mL in the 18-<50y stratum and 262, 288 and 130 IU/m in the 50-<70y stratum in each group, respectively.
The investigators report that when measuring concentration of antibodies against Omicron sub-variants they found limited neutralization, meaning the durability of these vaccines are generally weak, even after the fourth jab (second booster).
The Australian investigators report higher rates of severe reactogenicity events in both strata compared to other cohorts following second boosters, with 10% of cases from the 18-<50y-BNT162b2 stratum experiencing severe fatigue following mRNA-1273 and 11% of cases belonging to 50-><70y-BNT162b2 experiencing severe fatigue following BNT162b2 vaccination. This is consistent with data reported globally which has found higher rates of reactogenicity and adverse events following mRNA compared to protein subunit vaccines. Overall, reactogenicity events and ARs reported in this trial remain small and are within acceptable limits. >-<50 BNT162b2 stratum experiencing severe fatigue following mRNA -1273, and 11% of cases belonging to 50-<70 year-BNT162b2 experiencing severe fatigue following the Pfizer jab.
The authors report, “This is consistent with data reported globally which has found higher rates of reactogenicity and adverse events following mRNA compared to protein subunit vaccines. Overall, reactogenicity events and ARs reported in this trial remain small and are within acceptable limits.”
According to Peter McCullough, M.D., MPH:
“Four years into the mass vaccination campaign, there are no studies of pharmacokinetics or pharmacodynamics of the widely used Pfizer and Modernal mRNA vaccines. How long does mRNA and its Spike protein circulate in blood? Where does it go in the body? What are the consequences? Studies such as this one fail to procure enough samples over a long enough period of time and do the proper measurements. mRNA vaccines cannot be made safer unless the fundamentals of biotech clinical development are reproducible and reliable."
Limitations
The authors note that this study was not designed to evaluate vaccine effectiveness against clinical disease, rather they depend on correlates of protection. Moreover, variances in post-randomization SARS-COV-2 infection between sites should be interpreted in the context of differences in local transmission, non-pharmacological prevention measures (such as mask wearing and border closures) and testing approaches in different jurisdictions at different stages of the pandemic. Also, COVID-19 infections identified after randomization most likely represent an underestimate of the true number of infections, with a declining propensity for people with symptoms to test for COVID-19 as the pandemic evolved.
Finally, this study reports only on short-term humoral responses for immunocompetent older Australian adults receiving priming doses of BNT162b2. The Australian team plans on reporting on other data, such as cellular and longer term humoral immune responses to these vaccines as data become available
https://www.trialsitenews.com/a/picoboo-clinical-trial-in-australia-reinforces-mrna-durability-reactogenicity-issues-2af4ef41
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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)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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17 July, 2024
Moderna shaky?
Eleven of Moderna’s top institutional shareholders control 51% of the company as a highly concentrated capital ownership seeks to ensure their investment remains solid. As reported recently in Yahoo Finance, due to immense leverage these investment groups wield with this company’s stock, their investment decisions certain implicate direction and implication, especially with the individual investor. While generally, such concentration of large institutional players is covered a positive, as TrialSite has chronicled, it may very well be these investors while knowingly or not are propping up the company’s very survival, despite profoundly disturbing underlying trends.
The stock price has been on a downward trajectory currently priced at 121.43 as of this writing Sunday July 14, 2024. But year to date, the company remains north of its price at 112.50 on January 2, 2024.
For a list of their top institutional and mutual fund holders, see Yahoo Finance. Moderna, especially post the COVID-19 pandemic, benefitted from a massive multi-trillion-dollar federal countermeasure initiative.
Moderna’s intellectual property in part derives from the U.S. federal government via the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which of course is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the apex national research institution and part of the department of Health and Human Services.
Last year, TrialSite reported Moderna made a $400 million royalty payment to NIAID for the commercialization of the COVID-19 countermeasure. Countermeasures that in the bigger scheme increasingly have a questionable status in the market.
Why? Because the market for COVID-19 vaccines has collapsed, especially for the mRNA variety, and Moderna’s mRNA-1273/Spikevax has been shown to have more side effects than Pfizer-BioNTech (BNT162b2/Comirnaty), at least in some studies.
But TrialSite has raised other issues concerning Moderna and the mRNA platform. Including an accumulating scientific literature while ignored by mainstream media evidences a lack of stability and sufficient safety. This is why four ex-Moderna scientists have gone on the record in a scientific paper that the mRNA platform needs “derisking.”
Other concerns have been raised by TrialSite. For example, Moderna’s bet on vaccines will fall short. Although the company’s respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine was approved recently, we revealed how the Moderna product performed worse than both GSK and Pfizer’s vaccines. These latter pharmaceutical companies are far bigger and more pedigreed when it comes to open market commercialization. TrialSite’s founder Daniel O’Connor said, “We must remember Moderna came into commercial being via the unprecedented COVID-19 response, in the aggregate tens of billions, if not more, of public funds invested in research and development and commercialization via public procurement contracts of Operation Warp Speed and other efforts, and all of the funds used to promote COVID-19 vaccination which served like free advertising.”
O’Connor continued, “The externalities of this effort were incurred by the public. With the PREP Act there is no liability, no risks or downside from American legislation. But all of this protection was not appreciated by the American public and the pandemic ironically led to a viral understanding, and consternation, as to the protections these companies have amassed per statutory authority.”
The company will have far less support moving forward. Already, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have pared back their recommendation for RSV vaccination which automatically cuts back the market potential for the three vaccine makers, with Moderna paying the most.
Yes, true, the company is close with its influenza jab, and the company also is close with a combination flu and COVID-19 shot, but again myriad market forces will make highly successful commercialization of these mRNA products exceedingly difficult.
TrialSite has suggested in multiple articles that Moderna’s brightest prospects are the cancer vaccines they are developing. With promising data targeting both melanoma and lung cancer in partnership with Merck and the Keytruda product, a compelling set of outcomes in these late stage ongoing clinical trials could lead to robust commercialization potential.
In fact, TrialSite has predicted that it’s these cancer vaccines that represent breakout growth for the company, not its infectious disease vaccines.
But institutional investors, except for the ones subscribing to TrialSite, don’t necessarily see these highly bearish scenarios playing out, at least not in a way that is articulated publicly.
The stakes are big for the institutional investors as the Yahoo Finance piece makes clear. And this can represent a problem as the mainstream investment media website shares “However, it is best to be wary of relying on the supposed validation that comes with institutional investors. They, too, get it wrong sometimes. It is not uncommon to see a big share price drop if two large institutional investors try to sell out of a stock at the same time.”
Yes, that would be a big risk for Moderna should a couple institutions make substantial sales. The forthcoming earnings report will be of keen interest. But of course, there are other factors to consider, too.
What does ownership look like?
As mentioned above, institutional investors own more than half the company, meaning they can collectively wield significant power. But hedge funds don't have many shares in Moderna. Baillie Gifford & Co. is currently the company's largest shareholder with 12% of shares outstanding. Meanwhile, the second and third largest shareholders hold 10% and 6.6% of the shares outstanding, respectively. Furthermore, CEO Stephane Bancel is the owner of 5.5% of the company's shares.
Looking at the shareholder registry, we can see that 51% of the ownership is controlled by the top 11 shareholders, meaning that no single shareholder has a majority interest in the ownership.
What’s the direction of analysts?
As of July 12, 2024, the average 12-month price target for Moderna (MRNA) stock from 19 analysts was $141.04, with a range of $62–$310. This average represents a 14.83% increase from the last closing price of $122.82. Moderna also has an average brokerage recommendation (ABR) of 2.45 on a scale of 1–5, based on the recommendations of 22 brokerage firms.
TrialSite will monitor the company’s next earnings call August 1, 2024. Multiple analysts tracking Moderna, as well as employees at Moderna are TrialSite subscribers.
https://www.trialsitenews.com/a/moderna-share-ownership-dominated-by-just-a-handful-of-institutions-collective-moves-to-bolster-or-will-moves-be-made-cash-out-209d6490
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Suspended Australian doctor says he told truth about COVID
A doctor suspended over allegations he wrote fake COVID-19 exemptions and shared misleading information about the virus insists he told the truth about vaccines and their risks.
Disciplinary proceedings have begun between the Medical Board of Australia and Mark Hobart, with the Melbourne doctor maintaining he did nothing wrong.
In a brief hearing at the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal, Dr Hobart applied on Monday to have the matter dismissed or struck out on the grounds it was "frivolous, vexatious, misconceived".
He has filed a 27-page document setting out his submissions.
Despite this, his application to have the matter dismissed was denied.
A mention for those proceedings is expected to be held on August 16, with a three-day hearing expected to start early next year.
Dr Hobart has been suspended since November 2021 based on eight allegations of misconduct, including issuing almost 600 COVID-19 vaccination and mask exemptions.
Dr Hobart argues that the Board exceeded its jurisdictional powers in the matters, and says it cannot tell doctors what information they can or cannot provide to patients.
He also claims he told the "truth to patients about vaccines" and complied with his duty of care, including the obligation to do no harm.
Tribunal senior member Elisabeth Wentworth denied Dr Hobart's application to dismiss the matter, saying the allegations against him were serious.
"This is not a frivolous proceeding," Ms Wentworth said in her written findings.
She said the allegations raised important questions about a doctor's professional responsibility in relation to disease prevention and control.
Victorians were subject to strict vaccination mandates and mask rules throughout the pandemic.
Melbourne's metropolitan area was subject to six lockdowns of a cumulative 260-plus days in 2020 and 2021, giving the Victorian capital the dubious honour of being the most locked-down city in the world.
https://www.9news.com.au/national/suspended-doctor-says-he-told-truth-about-covid/d1f09909-54a1-41f9-9e1e-33a0aa102c5c
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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)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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16 July, 2024
Norwegian Professor's Analysis Reveals Disturbing Excess Death Data in England
TrialSite met with Jarle Aarstad, a full professor at HVL Business School, Western Norway University of Applied Science. The Ph.D. in Business Administration prides himself on being good with numbers, and he recently had a letter to the editor published in a German letter EXCLI Journal. Aarstad reported on his empirical analysis of cohorts of young people in England, aged 12-29 years, during 12 weeks after their first, second, and third jabs with the COVID-19 vaccine. The data reveals in this younger aged cohort that deaths increased significantly (95 % CIs) in the 10 or 11 weeks after COVID-19 vaccination compared to the first week.
Speaking with TrialSite’s founder Daniel O’Connor, Professor Aarstad said early on in the pandemic he started to significantly question some of the measures taken by his and other governments. He noted that in Norway by the first several months of the pandemic, the case fatality rate was not much higher than a bad flu, yet the response in that nation, including lockdowns and shutting schools down would have severe long-lasting impacts.
He would ask questions to himself like, “Why are we imposing such severe measures in Norway, such as keeping children from school, lockdowns and such given the actual threat faced?
During the pandemic, there were various points in time along the way that he felt something was just not right. One game changer from his standpoint, however, was alternative media. Early on, he started listening to various sources both in Norway and in broader Europe and England.
Professor Aarstad and his family decided that they would not be opting to receive COVID-19 vaccination. Using his own critical facility, intuition and education in economics and business Aarstad started crunching numbers, finding that in most advanced economies after the first waves of vaccination by 2022 a curious observation: heavily vaccinated nations had higher excess death patterns. A striking observation: the Norwegian professor submitted multiple papers based on data he accessed from Eurostat and other sources but all were rejected.
Eary on during the pandemic and after the first substantial waves of vaccination TrialSite reported from Australia and New Zealand to Singapore and Portugal, a disturbing trend of surges in COVID-19 deaths after the big waves of vaccination.
With Aarstad’s quantitative observations, it seemed like no journal wanted to discuss such a phenomenon. Then by late 2022, he noticed substantial excess death tolls in Norway. Aarstad found it curious that an academic speaking in affiliation with the Norwegian Institute of Public Health declared that the excess deaths had nothing to do with the COVID mRNA vaccines. Citing a Nature Medicine paper Nafilyan et al. Aarstad would go on to analyze that paper and found that if the authors had extended the time horizon to several weeks they would have come to the opposite conclusion.
The professor’s analysis of this British data was finally accepted by a German journal called EXCLI Journal a gold open access journal listed in DOAJ, Web of Science, EBSCO, Pubmed, and PubmedCentral; and a backup of the data is kept on the server ELDORADO at Technical University Dortmund.
What did he find?
The Analyses of young people in England aged 12-29 revealed that deaths increased significantly in 10 of 11 weeks after COVID-19 vaccination compared to the first week (blue color in the figure where 95% confidence intervals indicate the probability within the given range). In three of those weeks, the death rate was at least doubled. The tendency was the same for each dose. E.g., the probability of death was 1.95 and 2.67 times higher four weeks after vaccination with the first and second dose and 2.67 higher six weeks after the third dose.
Professor Aarstad shares with TrialSite:
“The findings deviate from a study by Nafilyan et al. claiming that COVID vaccination did not increase deaths among young people in England. By referring to it, Hanne Gulseth at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health has argued that, amid an above 50% excess mortality rate from diseases among young in Norway, “There is no evidence the covid vaccine has induced a generally increased mortality”. However, a limitation of Nafilyan et al.’s study is that they compared mortality in the first 12 weeks after vaccination with mortality after that. Not ruling out increased long-term mortality, i.e., after 12 weeks, it can have masked increased mortality also in the first 12 weeks, which I show.”
Covid vaccination can nonetheless, have induced increased mortality in the first week after vaccination, which implies that Aarstad’s estimates are conservative. I.e., using the first week after vaccination for comparison can have masked findings similar to those reported by Nafilyan et al.
Aarstad continued, “As I find increased mortality after the first week despite this, therefore, indicates that the substantial mortality due to the vaccination is even higher.
Lastly, it is worth mentioning that Nafilyan et al. also found increased mortality from the 25th week after vaccination and forward, compared to the 24 first weeks. This finding is particularly disturbing as it indicates that covid vaccination among young particularly appears to increase long-term mortality. Unfortunately, it may, along with my findings, explain increased mortality among young people in Norway.”
Now, Aarstad acknowledges that his analysis doesn’t conclusively prove that the excess deaths are caused by the COVID-19 countermeasures. Statistically other studies would need to be undertaken to arrive at such certainty. On the other hand, he also relies on his common sense and the deployment of the countermeasure response across nations clearly demonstrates a disturbing signal, one that should raise alarm.
Conclusion
Professor Arstad explained that alternative media such as TrialSite, credible authors on Substack, podcasts such as John Campbell and the like are absolutely vital for more veracity on life and death topics. With no political agenda, Aarstad doesn’t profoundly question vaccines generally and he remains cognizant of the importance of pharmaceutical breakthroughs in a modern society. Yet the pragmatic Norwegian academic researcher and professor nonetheless found himself questioning many aspects of government response worldwide to COVID-19, as did others in Norway, which typically remains a well-aligned and cooperative society when it comes to response to government.
The type of overreach and irrational decision-making Aarstad observed during the pandemic isn’t healthy for democracy. And he does report changes in the life in Norway that concern him, even before the pandemic. Of course, Norway emerged as a vastly wealthier society after the discovery of oil reserves. Aarstad suggested moves for a “vaccine passport” for example, which raised the alarm that politicians and the bureaucracy was headed in a dangerous direction.
Aarstad explains that when fundamental democratic principles, so cherished in Western societies such as Norway, are under fire, something has to be done in response, and he applied his education and training in the numbers to showcase to the world a real problem.
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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)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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15 July, 2024
Australian Territory drops more details from its COVID-19 death reports
The history of Covid is one coverup after another
ACT Health has decided to stop sharing the age ranges of COVID deaths in a move to match the reporting of other notifiable diseases.
The change comes after the Health Directorate's weekly report revealed a patient in his 40s had died, making him the youngest-COVID related death this year. ACT Health did not report whether the man was immunocompromised or had any comorbidities due to patient privacy.
Officials were notified of his death between June 21 and 27, but said he did not die during this period. They reported his age range and sex in the weekly respiratory surveillance report along with three other COVID-related deaths - a woman in her 80s and two women in their 90s. The deaths were reported last month, a period which recorded the highest monthly COVID activity this year with 844 PCR-confirmed infections.
In the following weekly report, from June 28 to July 4, ACT Health stated two people had died but did not include their age range like it had done in reports published since March 2023. ACT Health was contacted for comment as the report did not state a reason for the lack of age-related information.
A spokesperson told The Canberra Times the Health Directorate was following a new process and the change in reporting aligned "more closely" with the reporting of other notifiable diseases. Influenza and the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) are examples of other notifiable respiratory diseases.
"ACT Health regularly reviews and updates public reporting processes," they said. "[The change] is consistent with the approach taken nationally and in the majority of other jurisdictions. ACT Health does not publicly report death age range or sex information for any other notifiable conditions."
NSW Health stopped including ages and sexes of COVID-related deaths in May 2023 while Victoria's Department of Health still included age ranges in weekly reports.
Although the World Health Organization continues to classify COVID-19 as a global pandemic, Australia's chief medical officer Professor Paul Kelly declared it was no longer of national significance in October last year. He said it was still "a serious threat" but Australia would manage COVID like other common communicable diseases by focusing on prevention, reducing spread, serious cases, hospitalisations and deaths.
The ACT Health spokesperson said the age and sex of all COVID-19-related deaths were reported, especially during the declared public health emergency, on social media. They said social media updates stopped from March 23 last year because the structure and content of weekly COVID reports were updated as part of "transitional reporting changes".
"These changes reflected the ACT government's transition to managing COVID like other notifiable conditions, and a focus on carefully monitoring the severity of illness and the impact on the health system, rather than overall case numbers," the spokesperson said.
About 200 infections and an estimated eight deaths were reported this month, as of July 12. Before the death of the man in his 40s, the last COVID-related death of a patient under 50 years old reported to ACT Health was in January 2023, the spokesperson said in a statement.
Professor Peter Collignon at the ANU Medical School said not reporting age-related information about COVID deaths "distorted" people's view of the disease.
He said the majority of deaths from COVID and the flu were people over 80 years old with underlying conditions but said it was useful to know when younger people died. He said it would improve public awareness of the risk to age groups.
Professor Peter Collignon, professor of infectious diseases, at ANU and Canberra Hospital. Picture by Elesa Kurtz
The infectious diseases expert believed "balanced" public health reporting would share when young people were affected by these diseases, with context. He said governments should report death data annually at the least.
"When [someone young] dies you run the risk of overemphasising their youth, but by the same token, you've got to put a human face on this, and the rare exceptions ... make it real," Professor Collignon said. "I think it's a mistake not to report the ranges."
https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/8690718/act-health-stops-reporting-age-ranges-of-covid-deaths/
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
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)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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14 July, 2024
Mount Sinai Scientists Track SARS-CoV-2 Seropositivity Throughout Pandemic, Identify Trends, Racial & Class Disparity
A group of New York City-based scientists led by Florian Krammer, a microbiologist at Icahn School of Medicine, Mount Sinai, and colleagues describes results of a cross-sectional hospital-based study of anti-spike seroprevalence in New York City (NYC) from February 2020 to July 2022, and a follow-up period from August 2023 to October 2023. The team collected and analyzed samples from 55,092 individuals, spanning five epidemiological waves during the pandemic.
Why this activity? Because sero-monitoring provides context to the epidemiology of COVID-19, pervasiveness of infection, changes in population immunity ensuing after mass vaccination and the like. For the purpose of the aim of this study, the team used Poisson regression to obtain prevalence ratios (PR), a risk measurement used in cross-sectional studies to measure an association with exposure. The New York City-based team reports that the anti-spike antibody levels increased gradually over the first two waves, with a sharp increase during the 3rd wave coinciding with SARS-CoV-2 vaccination in NYC resulting in seroprevalence levels >90% by July 2022. The data generated by Krammer and colleagues offer insights into the dynamic changes in immunity occurring in a large and diverse metropolitan community faced with a novel virus and reflect the patterns of antibody responses as the pandemic transitions into an endemic stage.
Recently published in Nature Communications, the authors educate the reader about the importance of sero-surveillance systems and how they provide the means to describe population patterns in infection and vaccination over time.
Providing an overview of previous research, the group elaborates that antibody prevalence gradually increased over time, reaching levels above 90% by January 2022.
With the maintenance over time for seroprevalence and titers the team reported comparable trends during a follow-up period in August–October 2023, likely due to constant antigenic exposures by vaccine boosters and breakthrough infections.
An analysis of the geographical distribution of antibody prevalence and titers across all New York City’s boroughs, the team of researchers analyzed NP titers–indicative of immunity derived by infection–at discrete time points during the pandemic.
Does the Mount Sinai effort overlap with other estimates driven by New York City Health (DOHMH)?
According to Krammer and colleagues, the present seroprevalence estimates are overall overlapping with the City health agency’s estimates.
However, the analysis diverges in a couple of areas. For example, the authors point to the early phase of the pandemic plus later on, waves 4 and 5. In wave 1 for example, the City Health agency reports a large proportion (>50%) of seropositive individuals who were also tested for COVID-19 via PCR. The authors explain the commonsense explanation—individuals seeking testing at the time were likely infected and hence likely antibody positive.
The Mount Sinai led team reported:
“This is similar to what we observed in the urgent care group that was biased towards SARS-CoV-2 positives in the first wave.”
But a divergence ensues as later in the pandemic (more recent waves) NYC DOHMH tracking shows lower seropositivity as compared to the Mount Sinai tracking, which shows higher exposure. Krammer and colleagues also note, “This could reflect differences in the assays used or differences in the study populations.”
What about racial and class disparities?
Not surprisingly, as TrialSite reported throughout the pandemic, race and economic class mattered in terms of morbidity and mortality and apparently this also translates to seropositivity.
The Mount Sinai-led team reports that they collected early on in the pandemic suggest that seropositivity was relatively high in adults self-identifying as Black and Others. The authors of this paper point to “higher infection rates in essential workers lacking the possibility to socially distance or to socioeconomic constraints leading to more crowded living conditions.”
TrialSite reported in cities like Los Angeles Blacks in south central parts of the city were dying due to SARs-CoV-2 related infection at as high as five times those of wealthy whites in tony western reaches of that sprawling city (e.g. Bel Air, Beverly Hills, etc.).
What about age-based trends?
Krammer and colleagues report that early on, seropositivity tended to be higher among younger cohorts than the elderly, based on behavioral patterns, for example. But post the waves of vaccination, that balance shifted as elderly caught up with other younger age cohorts.
Was there a waning effectiveness of the vaccine?
Yes. Although with Omicron sub-lineage driven waves spike antibody responses were generally cross-reactive with ancestral strains, and the seroprevalence estimates were likely preserved in reaction to the spike of Omicron sub-variants, ultimately the neutralization sera from exposure to ancestral COVID-19 antigens (from infection or vaccination)waned against Omicron strains, yet some protection endured due to T-cell response mechanism.
An important question for research?
Dissecting the contribution of non-neutralizing cross-reactive antibodies upon exposure to emerging variants of the Omicron lineage will be important to have a broader picture of an individual’s immunity.
What limitations did the authors face with this endeavor?
What follows is a bulletized summary:
Mount Sinai Health System patient catchment area limits the study scope
The collection of residual de-identified samples impeding longitudinal tracking
Use of neighborhood tabulation areas (NTAs) for representation of samples limits the geographical distribution analysis
Summary
Given New York City represented an epicenter of the pandemic in America early on, Mount Sinai was able to capitalize on its hospital-based surveillance system to detect patterns comparable to the overall epidemiology of COVID-19, plus the countermeasure deployment.
For example, the authors write that “by early 2022, virtually the entire population had some evidence of COVID-19 seropositivity. Importantly, our data clearly show increasing overall seropositivity in the general population as SARS-CoV-2 vaccines became available.”
Plus, the persistently high “implied immunity” levels across the entire New York City population caught the authors’ attention. The Mount Sinai team offers other public health and epidemiological-focused researchers an important resource moving forward.
https://www.trialsitenews.com/a/mount-sinai-scientists-track-sars-cov-2-seropositivity-throughout-pandemic-identify-trends-racial-class-disparity-b95a8308
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All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
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)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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11 July, 2024
Why Did Cochrane Pull Their Ivermectin Evidence Article Down from the Internet?
Cochrane, generally believed to be the world’s most elite source of medical evidence covering all ranges of therapeutic areas, became front and center in the ivermectin debacle. While offering a new strategy moving forward, the organization’s review of the ivermectin evidence was damning for the available, economical anti-parasitic drug widely used during the pandemic against COVID-19, especially in low-and middle-income countries.
In the Cochrane ivermectin review in 2021 the group reviewed 14 studies and 2022 another 11 studies, stating they did not find any evidence of efficacy. Alexandros Marinos commented about the 2022 review. “5 of the 11 included studies, covering 2582 of the 3409 patients included in the systematic review did not qualify for inclusion, based on a novel criterion used to exclude many other studies.” In addition, the TOGETHER trial, 1358 patients(40% of the patients) did not meet their criteria.
I started emailing the organization on May 15, 2024. Not surprisingly I was sent a form to submit my data yet received no response. I was supposed to get a response in one business day. I think someone squelched my email. But I was able to publish my article on TrialSite News on May 30, 2024, 5/30/24 communicating that the Cochrane review did not include any trials with omicron patients and failed to review at least four large randomized ivermectin trials with 6000 patients. Those four trials all had terrible problems—and this author has done quite a bit of detective work to find out serious mistakes.
The Cochrane review of March 5, 2024 included studies of 2860 patients with mild to moderate COVID including 1358 patients in the TOGETHER trial and determined that those studies did not show evidence of benefit for ivermectin They found no problems in TOGETHER while others found plenty of problems, Ivermectin and the TOGETHER Trial,
Extreme COI, impossible data, blinding broken, randomization/blinding failure, uncorrected errors, protocol violations, no response from authors, refusal to release data--c19ivm.com
The TOGETHER Files 1: The Andrew Hill connection - How the principal investigator leaked interim results to a private ivermectin research group
Fraudulent Trial On Ivermectin Published By The World's Top Medical Journal
The False, Sinister, and Duplicitous Statements of the TOGETHER Ivermectin Trial Investigators
10 Questions for the TOGETHER Trial Investigators
The Potemkin Argument, Part VII: TOGETHER vs. Carvallo, A Tale of Two Studies
Did the Placebo Group in the TOGETHER Trial Take Ivermectin?
Demonstrating Randomization Failure in the TOGETHER Trial
FDA Reveals Concerns About the Conduct of the TOGETHER Trial, Joining Other Regulators
When Characteristics of Clinical Trials Require Per-Prot
This link lists the trials they reviewed which included the infamous Lopez-Medina trial published in JAMA Network..
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD015017.pub3/references#characteristicStudies .
The Publication of Fraudulent Ivermectin Trials by the High Impact Medical Journals
The Potemkin Argument, Part VI: The Ballad of Lopez-Medina
More Fraud Uncovered In The Lopez-Medina Ivermectin Trial Published In JAMA
I assume someone showed them the TrialSite News article and on June 3, 2024, I was requested to submit my complaints on a different form. I submitted my original complaint. I was told it would take 3 weeks for them to respond. I noticed that on June 11, 2024, the article disappeared from Google and on their website. Why would they take the article down? Should they not offer an explanation?
Below is their final reply to me. In that reply all Cochrane does is claim they did not do anything that was false even though they claimed ivermectin had no evidence of efficacy for prevention based on no studies and for mild to moderate COVID based on 2860 patients, 1358 of which came from TOGETHER which had all kinds of problems and 398 of which came from the infamous Lopez-Medina study.
Based on 11 studies, the Cochrane group published a report May 5, 2024, which determined that there was no evidence that ivermectin was effective for prevention based on no studies, ineffective for inpatients and ineffective for outpatients based on studies of 2860 patients which included 398 patients from the discredited Lopez-Medina trial and 1358 patients from the discredited TOGETHER trial.
They did not include any patients from trials with omicron patients and failed to include the last four large randomized ivermectin trials which were full of evidence of mistakes and bias.
No knowledge of different dosing, taking with food vs, an empty stomach, timing of receipt of the medication and biases in the data analyses all represented a problem this author identified. They were caught putting out a ridiculous report and pulled it off the internet with no comment after they were caught. One has to wonder about their “new strategy” and could that be related to this behavior?
Unfortunately, when people read that Cochrane group reported on something, they assume it to be of the highest quality and completely accurate. Their 2022 report included data from TOGETHER which had innumerable problems called out by others which the Cochrane group ignored. In the case of their 2024 ivermectin report it is obvious that they reported, at least according to this author’s detective work, deceptive data that had no clinical relevance and failed to evaluate the most recent data. Did this represent an intentional effort to falsely discredit ivermectin and keep the 8 billion people of our planet from potentially getting an effective drug for COVID?
https://www.trialsitenews.com/a/why-did-cochrane-pull-their-ivermectin-evidence-article-down-from-the-internet-34c68ae7
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10 July, 2024
How an Australian Doctor, My Le Trinh, by Saving Some COVID Patients and Getting Suspended, May Save Millions More.
By LtCol Kevin Loughrey(Ret’d) BE Mech(hons) psc, jssc
Dr My Le Trinh came to Australia as a refugee at the age of 12 and went on to become a doctor of medicine. That she could do that makes me very proud of my country. That pride, though, is now morphing into dismay as I watch how authorities, medical and Governmental, are intent on deregistering Dr Trinh because of her use of Ivermectin, Doxycycline, Zinc, Prednisone, and a number of other readily available, inexpensive medicines, to effectively treat COVID-19 sufferers and protect those who, because of their age and medical condition, would have suffered very badly had they contracted that disease.
Dr Trinh’s troubles started when a patient at her clinic was admitted to hospital and diagnosed with COVID-19. This patient discharged herself because she was concerned by the lack of effective treatment and she objected to having to wear a mask even though she was in a single room. Being an asthmatic, wearing the mask was uncomfortable and distressing.
Dr Trinh became involved in the case when the lady returned home and was entering the late stages of COVID-19 where her oxygen levels were dropping dangerously low. Because of lock-down restrictions, Dr Trinh couldn’t treat the patient face-to-face but instead had to work through her adult children. She decided to use the protocols favoured by the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) and other physicians successfully treating late stage COVID-19; this being the use of large, pulsed doses of Prednisone with other medicines specific to the patient’s circumstances. She also used Professor Tom Borody’s recommended medication of Ivermectin, Zinc and Doxycycline for the early treatment of COVID-19.
The high dose Prednisone protocol worked well and, in all probability, saved the patient’s life, but at the end of the treatment, the patient suffered steroid-induced psychosis. She was admitted to a different hospital from her first admission and came under the care of the neurology team which asked Dr. Narendra Gunja, the Toxicologist at the hospital, to provide an opinion on the patient's condition. The treating doctor wanted to rule out Ivermectin overdose, even though the patient was not taking Ivermectin at the time of admission. About two weeks before the patient's readmission, between 1 September and 3 September 2021, Dr. Gunja had appeared on radio and television to discuss the case of a man from Western Sydney who supposedly presented with an Ivermectin overdose. This purported incident sparked a media blitz, and a week later, on 10 September 2021, the Federal Therapeutic Goods Administration(TGA) banned the use of Ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19. It is of considerable interest that Gunja’s story bore a striking resemblance to a similar false narrative being promoted at around the same time in the US which, despite being untrue, had the same effect in that the FDA published it’s now famous and much discredited, “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Serious y'all. Stop It." (See false claim, by Dr Jason McElyea of largescale Ivermectin poisoning, rebutted by Northeastern Health System- Sequoyah 5 September 2021.)
Dr Gunja disapproved of the treatment Dr Trinh had provided and ordered a first year intern to report Dr Trinh to the Medical Council of New South Wales for malpractice. After the TGA had banned the use of Ivermectin, Dr Trinh’s chemist was ordered by AHPRA to surrender any such scripts issued after the ban. Dr. Trinh had provided a prescription for Ivermectin for a close relative before the ban but due to a lack of supply, she had left it at the chemist. The chemist later informed Dr. Trinh that the Ivermectin prescription had been handed over to an AHPRA agent as per their instructions.
Somewhere, during the course of this, a "Mr John Smith" was invented and a complaint was submitted under that name, with the Ivermectin script for her close relative, to the New South Wales Health Care Complaints Commission. The complaint, made by this fictional John Smith, was that Dr Trinh, by prescribing Ivermectin, and her apparent reluctance to unequivocally promote the use of mRNA injections, had not followed National Health Guidelines for the treatment of COVID-19. The complaint makes interesting reading:
“This physician is promoting and writing prescriptions for ivermectin for community groups online for inappropriate clinical use of ivermectin and doxycycline and azithromycin. We called the medical center to confirm and they confirmed the doctor is anti-vaccine and promotes other alternative unaccepted methods of treating/preventing covid. We have attached a friend's prescription for ivermectin, said friend does not suffer from worms, its principal use as prescribed by the doctor is for preventing covid. We know of at least 3 cases where the doctor has done that and we have evidence of such.”
Some of this was true but other “facts” in this complaint amount to lies and deception. The prescription was not for a “friend” of John Smith. It was for a close relative of Dr Trinh. Dr Trinh was not “anti-vaccine” but instead went to great lengths to fully inform her patients and to protect those that might be vulnerable from possible catastrophic adverse ill effects; all of which she obliged by law to do. I personally relate to this very much as both my son-in-law’s parents suddenly dropped dead a short time after they had received a booster. In both cases, thorough autopsies, according to Burkhardt’s protocol, were never conducted and no adverse reaction reports were ever submitted. This is a common tale in Australia.
In Australia, people suffering from COVID-19 were prescribed analgesics, sent home and told, should they have trouble breathing, to call an ambulance. Instead, Dr Trinh chose a different route, adopting instead treatment protocols based on her research of the FLCCC and Professor Tom Borody’s triple therapy of Ivermectin, Doxycycline and Zinc; all of which were reportedly delivering great success. This is best described by this graphic published by the FLCCC.
As a consequence of these complaints Dr Trinh had to appear before the Medical Council of New South Wales on 27 October 2021. Presiding at that hearing was:
Dr Candice Newbury
Dr Brian Morton and
Mrs Catherine Berglund
That hearing did not go well and much of that I believe could be attributed to poor legal representation. At the conclusion of that hearing Dr Trinh was suspended and her case was forwarded to the Health Care Complaints Commission(HCCC) for further investigation. Of interest this commission overseen by a Commissioner, Mrs Sue Dawson, and is composed entirely of Parliamentarians:
McGirr, Joe (IND, LA Member) - Chairman
Cohn, Amanda (GRNS, LC Member)
Crakanthorp, Tim (ALP, LA Member)
Donnelly, Greg (ALP, LC Member)
Kemp, Michael (NAT, LA Member)
MacDonald, Aileen (LIB, LC Member)
Saliba, David (ALP, LA Member)
(Note: LA= Legislative Assembly, LC=Legislative Council. IND=Independent, GRNS = Greens, ALP= Australian Labor Party, NAT = National Party, LIB= Liberal Party)
Being Parliamentarians, without being otherwise briefed, they took the word of the Medical Council without question and so the matter has been forwarded to the New South Wales Administrative and Civil Tribunal(NCAT). A hearing has been set down for 15 July and has been scheduled to run until 17 July 2024. Dr Trinh wrote to HCCC Commissioner, Mrs Dawson, multiple times but did not receive any response from her. Dr Trinh, on numerous occasions, requested AHPRA conduct an investigation into how the prescription, confiscated by AHPRA from her chemist, ended up as part of the complaint made by the fictitious “John Smith”. AHPRA has been unable to explain this and claims it does not have the prescription. As the Commissioner, Mrs Dawson is responsible for overseeing the operations of the HCCC. It is important to note that politicians are not directly involved in its day-to-day functions. It would, however, be within their ambit, in this instance, to require Mrs Dawson to step down.
The members of the NCAT can be found on https://ncat.nsw.gov.au/about-ncat/tribunal-members.html . They are too numerous to mention here.
At the heart of this complaint lies the suppression of early treatment by Government authorities and ignorant doctors who have blithely gone along with this abominable policy. The motivation behind the policy was always to force people to submit to an experimental series of injections based on mRNA technology which is really a gene therapy. Dr Trinh was one of a number of exceptional doctors who would not comply and they have all been suspended or deregistered.
The mRNA Anti-COVID Injections have now been shown to not only be ineffective in preventing people from contracting COVID-19 but evidence suggests people are more likely, over a period of time, with more doses, to become more susceptible to COVID-19 and die from the disease. This gene therapy also has numerous other issues deleterious to the health of the recipient. At the moment, Australia has an excess mortality rate running between 10 and 18%. There is no doubt in the minds of most sensible people that the mRNA Anti-COVID injections are responsible for this carnage; the untimely deaths of around 20,000 Australians annually.
When Dr Trinh faces the NCAT I have arranged that she will have some of the most distinguished doctors and pharmacologists supporting her. This could be a seismic moment in the history of medicine in Australia and one that is long overdue. Its resolution could even affect the world and save many lives far in excess of what Dr Trinh, through her brave actions doing what she felt was best for her patients, could ever have contemplated.
https://www.trialsitenews.com/a/dr.-my-le-trinh-attacked-by-australian-health-authorities-for-following-the-kory-and-mccullough-protocols-for-the-successful-treatment-of-covid-19-b4fb5f40
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9 July, 2024
Hundreds Of Doctors And Scientists Sign Accord Calling For Suspension And Investigation Of MRNA Vaccines
Written by Will Jones
Hundreds of doctors and scientists from around the world have signed an accord calling for the suspension and investigation of mRNA Covid vaccines due to serious concerns about their safety and efficacy.
The statement, called the Hope Accord, was released this week and swiftly gained nearly 3,000 signatures. These included endorsements from over 200 doctors, 300 other healthcare professionals and over 100 scientists and academics, with all signatures being verified to ensure they are from real and qualified people.
The statement, which also calls for recognition and support for the vaccine injured, addresses five key priorities:
Immediate suspension of COVID-19 mRNA vaccine products: It says mRNA vaccine products should be suspended immediately due to a growing body of evidence suggesting a link between the vaccine rollout and alarming trends in disability and excess deaths.
Comprehensive re-evaluation of COVID-19 vaccine safety and efficacy: It demands independent investigations to thoroughly reassess the safety and efficacy of all COVID-19 vaccine products, ensuring transparency and full disclosure of data.
Recognition and support for the vaccine injured: The accord stresses the need to acknowledge and support individuals who have suffered vaccine-related injuries, providing them with the necessary medical care and compensation.
Restoration of ethical principles abandoned during the COVID-19 era: It calls for a return to core medical ethics, including informed consent, bodily autonomy and the protection of children, all of which were compromised in the last few years.
Addressing the root causes of the current predicament: The accord advocates an honest investigation into the factors that led to the current ethical and medical issues, including institutional groupthink, conflicts of interest and the suppression of scientific debate.
The initiative grew out of the U.K. People’s Vaccine Inquiry, beginning life as a statement by members of Doctors for Patients U.K., including GP Dr. Ayiesha Malik, Surgeon Dr. James Royle and Cardiologist Dr. Dean Patterson. Emergency physician Dr. Tim Kelly saw the need for a broader international ethical statement and drew in supportive clinicians from the U.S., Canada, South Africa and Australia.
In a press release, the organisers said the accord “calls on the medical community and policymakers to reassess the ethical breaches of recent years and ensure future health crises are managed with greater adherence to ethical principles and scientific integrity”.
Healthcare professionals, scientists and concerned members of the public are invited to join the movement by adding their signature and support.
Top heart doctor Aseem Malhotra has endorsed the statement in a video on X.
Jordan Peterson has also backed the initiative, saying that while he doubts ethics can really be brought back to medicine, “these people are worth supporting”.
Dr. John Campbell has done a video looking at the Hope Accord that is worth a watch.
https://principia-scientific.com/hundreds-of-doctors-and-scientists-sign-accord-calling-for-suspension-and-investigation-of-mrna-vaccines/
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Scientists Who Were Instrumental to COVID-19 ‘Natural Origin’ Narrative Received Over $50 Million in NIAID Funding in 2020–21
Four prominent scientists who played key roles in shaping the public narrative about the origins of COVID-19 received substantial increases in grant money from the institute headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci in the subsequent two years, a review of funding data by The Epoch Times has found.
Three of these scientists—Kristian Andersen, Robert Garry, and Michael Farzan—were advisers to a teleconference organized by Fauci held on Feb. 1, 2020, in response to increasing public questions about the origins of the virus.
The scientists also were instrumental in the publication of “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” a highly influential paper that promoted a natural origin theory for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, and has been frequently cited by the government and media.
Emails released under Freedom of Information Act requests show that the scientists told the senior members of Fauci’s teleconference that they were 60 to 80 percent sure that COVID-19 had come out of a lab.
Notably, despite their private concerns about the origins of the virus, the first draft of “Proximal Origin” was completed on the same day as the teleconference. Andersen and Garry were co-authors of the paper, and Farzan was acknowledged in the version published by the journal Nature for his participatory discussions in the article’s creation.
Additionally, Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) provided a substantial increase in funding to EcoHealth’s Peter Daszak, through whom NIAID had funded controversial gain-of-function coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
Some of this funding has continued through 2021—and one of the newest grants will continue through at least 2025.
A significant portion of the funding increase for Daszak, as well as for Andersen and Garry, was provided through NIAID’s creation of the Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases (CREID).
The program, which was originally referred to as Emerging Infectious Diseases Research Centers (EIDRCs) during the early planning stages in 2019, was formally announced under a new name on Aug. 27, 2020. It isn’t known why the program was initially delayed or why it was renamed.
The new initiative, described as a global network that involves “multidisciplinary investigations into how and where viruses and other pathogens emerge from wildlife and spillover to cause disease in people,” provided 11 new grants totaling $17 million of new funding in the first year and $82 million in total funding across five years.
Andersen and Garry were the co-recipients of a new $8.9 million, five-year grant made under the CREID initiative that established the West African Research Network for Infectious Diseases (WARN-ID). Daszak was the recipient of a new $7.5 million, five-year CREID grant that established the Emerging Infectious Diseases: South East Asia Research Collaboration Hub (EID-SEARCH). The other participants of the NIAID CREID program can be found here.
Notably, although the creation of CREID wasn’t publicly announced until Aug. 27, 2020, the award notice date for the grants to Andersen and Garry is listed as May 21, 2020. The CREID grant to Daszak lists a date of June 17, 2020. The timing of Daszak’s grant is particularly noteworthy, as it came shortly after President Donald Trump had revoked Daszak’s previous grant from Fauci’s NIAID in April 2020 because of Daszak’s entanglements with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Andersen, who had privately told Fauci on Jan. 31, 2020, that the virus “looked engineered,” but later helped spearhead Fauci’s efforts to promote a natural origin narrative, received a total of $7.4 million in funding in 2020 as compared to $4.5 million in grant proceeds in 2019. Andersen’s total grant funding increased to nearly $9 million in 2021. The new CREID grants (co-awarded with Garry) accounted for approximately $1.9 million of his 2020 grant proceeds and $2 million of his grant proceeds in 2021. Included in Andersen’s 2021 figure is a $266,250 CREID grant that was made to Andersen but didn’t include Garry as a co-recipient.
While it isn’t known currently whether there was a connection between the increased funding and the scientists’ involvement in shaping the public natural origin narrative, these revelations raise an obvious question: How is it that among the thousands of scientists eligible to participate in the much-desired funding from the 11 grants provided by Fauci’s new $82 million CREID initiative, three of those chosen happened to be the same individuals who had led the way in promoting Fauci’s natural origin narrative—despite their private concerns that the virus had been created in a lab.
During the Feb. 1, 2020, teleconference, Andersen claimed to be “60 to 70 percent sure the virus came from a laboratory,” while one of Andersen’s “Proximal Origin” co-authors, Edward Holmes, put that figure even higher, at “80 percent.”
Garry, who told the senior members of Fauci’s teleconference group that he “really can’t think of a plausible natural scenario where you get from the bat virus” to SARS-CoV-2, received $7 million in NIAID grants in 2020, compared to $5.7 million in 2019. Garry also received $6.6 million in grants in 2021. The new CREID grant (co-awarded with Andersen) accounted for about $1.9 million of his 2020 grant proceeds and $1.8 million of his grant proceeds in 2021.
During the Feb. 1, 2020, teleconference, Garry cited the remarkable sequences of mutations that would have to occur for SARS-CoV-2 to arise naturally, telling the group, “I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature.” However, Garry noted that a lab-created virus would easily explain the virus data he was seeing, telling Fauci’s group that “in the lab, it would be easy to generate the perfect 12 base insert that you wanted.”
Notably, Garry recently admitted in written correspondence with The Intercept that he had been advised not to discuss a lab leak in the “Proximal Origin” paper, stating, “The major feedback we got from the Feb 1 teleconference was: 1. Don’t try to write a paper at all—it’s unnecessary or 2. If you do write it, don’t mention a lab origin as that will just add fuel to the conspiracists.”
Garry—along with Andersen—must have heeded that directive, because on Feb. 1, 2020, the same day as Fauci’s teleconference, both men helped to complete the first draft of “Proximal Origin.” The paper, which sought to exclude the possibility of a laboratory leak, became the media’s and the public health establishment’s go-to evidence of a natural origin for the virus.
The choice of Andersen as a lead author for the paper is particularly curious, since Andersen had no material experience in researching coronaviruses. His stated focus was related to the Zika virus, Ebola virus, West Nile virus, and Lassa virus. It wasn’t until sometime after the Feb. 1 teleconference that he changed his biography to incorporate SARS-CoV-2.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/scientists-who-were-instrumental-to-covid-19-natural-origins-narrative-received-over-50-million-in-niaid-funding-in-2020-2021-post-4220769?ea_src=ai_recommender&ea_med=a_bot_2_ads
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8 July, 2024
It’s Time to Tell The Scientific Truth About the COVID-19 Vaccines
daniel_oconnor
Remember during the pandemic when the clinical trials concluded, and TrialSite advisor committee member Ron Brown, Ph.D. educated readers about the difference between relative risk reduction (RRR) and absolute risk reduction (ARR)? While the Pfizer mRNA COVID-19 vaccine efficacy was about 95% as measured in RRR, as for ARR, that number came in just under 1%. But neither the pharmaceutical sponsor nor government health-related agencies bothered to discuss that latter number.
Dr. Brown wasn’t the only one to mention these divergent numbers. In a piece in the Lancet Microbe titled “COVID-19 Vaccine efficacy and effectiveness—the elephant (not) in the room” University of Oxford infectious disease and poverty researcher Piero Olliaro and colleagues also reiterated these figures. See graph below for the divergent spread between RRR and ARR for all the COVID-19 vaccines at the time.
It turns out that ARR and RRR are both ways to measure risk reduction, and they can be used in medical interventions and they should both be used. More on that topic below.
And this is an important point about say the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 mRNA vaccine. To speak of this reality in social media would lead to censorship, even accusations of being a conspiracy nut, a loon or even—an anti-vaxxer.
Yet so many ethical scientists, front line doctors and health-related researchers or for that matter, journalists seeking to democratize scientific communications such as at TrialSite that took on and challenged the government’s narrative during the pandemic were wronged in so many ways,
To promote a big, lie a government-industry-academic medical system tripartite needs to be able to censor or gaslight anyone who has opposing views and the mainstream media machine along with big tech emerged as the vehicle for suppression during the COVID-19 crisis--with military precision--smearing anyone that questions the top-down, rigid, draconian policies and strategy.
But at TrialSite, a biomedical and health research media platform democratizing scientific communications in the biomedical and health research space, we encouraged pursuit of truth in this critically important field. In fact, we were the only media in the English speaking world that I know of that consistently reported on studies showing both the benefits of the vaccine—and there were many mostly observational studies with lots of limitations, yet showing benefit, but also the problems with the mRNA vaccines.
The mainstream media and trade press only reported on good news associated with the COVID-19 countermeasures, while groups considering themselves part of the medical freedom movement only published bad news. Today, there are numerous Substackers that literally hang out at the obituary page to connect any cardiovascular death to the vaccines. They have absolutely lost their minds in some cases. Yes, TrialSite continues to get an earful, and more from both sides.
But it turned out that when it came to Pfizer and the mainstream media, science is immutable. Yes, Pfizer claimed a 95% efficacy rate but we knew that based on the ARR the effectiveness in the real world could be far less.
Importantly, we should use both ARR and RRR when interpreting clinical trials results. Both ARR and RRR should be used when presenting the results of a clinical trial. Each measure provides different information and can be useful for different audiences:
Absolute Risk Reduction (ARR):
Definition: ARR is the difference in the event rates between two groups (e.g., treatment group and control group).
Importance: It gives a direct measure of the reduction in risk attributable to the treatment. This can be more intuitive for clinicians and patients to understand the actual benefit of a treatment.
Example: If a drug reduces the incidence of a disease from 10% in the control group to 5% in the treatment group, the ARR is 5%.
Relative Risk Reduction (RRR):
Definition: RRR is the proportionate reduction in risk between the treatment group and the control group. It is calculated by dividing the ARR by the event rate in the control group.
Importance: It expresses the reduction in risk relative to the baseline risk, often making the treatment effect appear more impressive. This can be useful for comparing the effectiveness of different interventions. It’s used frequently in marketing communications.
Example: Using the same numbers, if the drug reduces the incidence from 10% to 5%, the RRR is 50% (since 5% is half of 10%).
Why Use Both Measures?
Comprehensive Understanding: Using both ARR and RRR provides a more complete picture of the treatment’s effectiveness.
Communication: Different stakeholders (e.g., clinicians, patients, policymakers) may find one measure more intuitive or useful than the other.
Contextual Clarity: ARR helps understand the real-world impact, while RRR can highlight the effectiveness in relative terms, especially when the baseline risk is low.
Additional Considerations:
Number Needed to Treat (NNT): This is another useful measure derived from ARR, indicating how many patients need to be treated to prevent one additional adverse event.
Context of the Study: The baseline risk and the clinical context should be considered when interpreting and communicating these measures.
Overall, presenting both ARR and RRR helps ensure that the information is clear, transparent, and useful for making informed decisions in clinical practice.
Now, if we look at some recent data, or for that matter dozens of real-world studies reviewed at TrialSite over the past couple years, that 95% effectiveness rate has gone way, way down. In fact, so far down after a few months its performance starts to look like that initial ARR.
One recent The Lancet Regional Health paper states: ‘Compared to a waned third dose, fourth dose vaccine effectiveness was 24.0% in the first two months post-vaccination, reducing to 10.3% and 1.7% at two to four and four to six months, respectively’.
If we take wide confidence intervals, the waning numbers could easily wane to below zero.
And remember those Cleveland Clinic studies authored by Shrestha et al.? They found each vaccine dose was associated with a higher number of infections, with those on zero doses doing better than the others.
Study after study covered by TrialSite, published in the New England Journal of Medicine to the MMWR reports from the Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention we see in real time how effectiveness has dramatically dropped, including for severe COVID, with in some cases the previously infected and unvaccinated having lower infection rates than those double doses and never infected.
One British study according to social and medical entrepreneur Sir Ray Avery revealed the effectiveness of one to two doses of AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines dropping to zero, and turning negative, after only two to three months.
Then just days ago, TrialSite covered the latest piece from Australian academic researcher Raphael Lataster BPharm, Ph.D., Associate Lecturer, FASS, University of Sydney. Published in the Australian Journal of General Practice (AJGP) Lataster addresses COVID-19 vaccine negative effectiveness (where the vaccine according to this assessment boosts one’s probability of not only COVID-19 infection, but also hospitalization and yes in some cases even death.
As New Zealand based Sir Ray, an important figure few know about here in America recently inserted in a LinkedIn post, “There comes a point where labelling these respected authors as conspiracy theorists just doesn’t wash.”
His point, and this author in this opinion piece at this moment in history has to concur, that at best case, this is not a vaccine that provides long term immunity against Covid-19 and there is a decent probability now that for many cohorts the vaccine could be doing more harm than benefit. And that’s based on the unfolding science. Meaning any government discussion to the contrary is propaganda, a spin to try to keep a story going as long as possible to figure a way out.
Did the COVID-19 vaccines help, especially early on in the pandemic? Yes, they did especially elderly people at higher risk of acute COVID-19 infection. And hundreds of studies we have reviewed suggest a benefit. But has their performance waned materially? Absolutely. Is that conspiratorial to admit? Absolutely not.
https://www.trialsitenews.com/a/its-time-to-tell-the-scientific-truth-about-the-covid-19-vaccines-7c2e9515
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7 July, 2024
European Medicines Agency Top Scientists Acknowledge mRNA-Based Spike Protein a Potential Threat with Myocarditis
TrialSite has chronicled many dozens to nearly a hundred studies involving myocarditis and COVID-19 vaccines. Chronicling a growing body of quality evidence that a circulating spike protein likely represents a problem, at least in some relatively rare number of cases. Yet mainstream science in North America as represented by academic medical centers, apex federal health institutions and physician societies have avoided the free spike protein question despite growing evidence. It is for this reason that even though TrialSite questions many of the assumptions underlying the conclusions in a recent paper authored by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) top scientists, it’s nonetheless a breakthrough that the esteemed group of authors has opened up the discussion, acknowledging a potential problem with COVID-19 mRNA vaccines and free spike induced cardiovascular injury.
Alessandra Buoninfante, Ph.D., Scientific Officer, and colleagues at the European Medicines Agency (EMA) first and foremost, wield quite a bit of influence in the European continent when it comes to regulation of drugs and vaccines.
In this latest review article in NPJ Vaccines, the four authors acknowledge that the available evidence reveals that COVID-19 mRNA vaccination is associated with a greater risk of myocarditis, but emphasize the risk remains far greater with COVID-19 infection.
While the high-level EMA operatives emphasize a benefit/risk ratio overwhelmingly favoring use of the vaccine versus the risk of COVID-19, they nonetheless open up the door to take on the mRNA vaccines.
In this latest paper, the scientific leadership from this powerful regulatory body declares that to date, no definite mechanism for vaccine-associated myocarditis has yet to be identified, necessitating ongoing epidemiological, clinical and non-clinical research. And they introduce select examples of the mRNA vaccine-triggered free spike protein as a possible culprit.
According to Buoninfante and colleagues prior to the availability of COVID-19 vaccination, COVID-19 patients faced approximately 16 times the risk for myocarditis relative to patients without COVID-19. What is the basis for this claim? Boehmer, T. K. et al. Association between COVID-19 and Myocarditis using hospital-based administrative data — United States, March 2020–January 2021. That observational; study was limited however and was not designed to establish any causation.
One glaring issue with this underlying study the European regulators use for their evidence is that the risk estimates from the study reflect the risk for myocarditis among persons who received a diagnosis of COVID-19 during an outpatient or inpatient health care encounter and do not reflect the risk among all persons who had COVID-19. This point cannot be glossed over.
The vast majority of COVID-19 infections (90-95%) were mild to moderate with no clinic encounter. In fact, many cases were asymptomatic. So TrialSite must challenge the underlying premise based on this point alone, not to mention other risks for misclassification as well as other biases.
Buoninfante et al, also point to matched analyses from medical records (Dec 2020 to May 2021) from the largest healthcare organization in Israel. Cited as Barda et al. study according to the authors revealed that “COVID-19 vaccination was associated with an elevated risk of myocarditis (risk ratio, 3.24) compared to unvaccinated and SARS-CoV-2 infection was associated with a substantially increased risk of myocarditis (risk ratio, 18.28) compared to uninfected.”
The Israeli reports the mortality rate involving myocarditis to be less for those vaccinated compared to persons with viral infection-related myocarditis.
Plus they refer to a more contemporary study result in Husby et al. suggesting that the relative risk of heart failure within 90 days was 0.56 and 1.48 for myocarditis associated with vaccination and COVID-19 disease, respectively. Again, multiple limitations and the observational nature of the study raises the specter of association but not causation.
The authors use these selected studies to conclude that “myocarditis associated with COVID-19 disease, myocarditis after vaccination with SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines occurs less frequently and in addition is associated with a better clinical outcome.”
Real World Recognition
The authors which include pharmacovigilance experts from EMA also point to the likely uncertainty in all the numbers. Among other reasons in trying to identify an accurate background incidence rate in healthy people and the actual number of vaccine-associated cases. Cases are likely underestimated in pharmacovigilance systems.
Estimating the extent of potential under-reporting in the pharmacovigilance systems is influenced by public awareness, the disease severity spectrum, demographics, and/or local practices and other factors beyond the regulator's control.
A Breakthrough Spike Protein Discussion
Interestingly the European Medicines Agency scientists raise the specter of implication of free spike protein as a potential culprit, and this is a big deal given a growing body of literature and mostly silence from mainstream science in North America.
For example, Buoninfante and colleagues point out that “despite not being systematically screened and checked for in myocarditis samples, the spike protein could be a key player in the etiology and/or progression of the disease.”
The speculation suggests, according to the European regulators, that “the spike protein (expression) could directly contribute to inflammation of the endothelium and cardiac tissue. Detailed antibody- and T-cell multiplex cytokine response profiles of 16 subjects who developed post-vaccine myocarditis within the first week after vaccination appeared to be indistinguishable from those generated from vaccinated control subjects and only a modest increase in cytokine production linked to innate cell response was observed.”
Yet they point to “elevated levels of full-length spike protein unbound by antibodies were detected in the plasma of these myocarditis subjects, whereas no free spike was detected in asymptomatic vaccinated control subjects citing Yonker et al. Correlating with cardiac troponin T levels as well as innate immune activation with cytokine release was the unbound spike.
The authors cite Avolio et al noting that the spike protein may interact with and trigger “dysfunction of cardiac pericytes” not to mention contribute to endothelial inflammation in mice as reported in Robles et al.
Moreover, EMA’s authors cite Roltogen et al and Ogata et al “demonstrating the presence of spike antigen post second COVID-19 mRNA dose in circulation longer than originally anticipated.”
Going back to Yonker et al., the European regulatory establishment in the form of this paper acknowledges vaccine-induced myocarditis may be directly explained by an “unbound circulating spike protein, not in inducing immune hyperactivation, but in contributing directly to the effects recorded in myocarditis subjects.”
Summary
While EMA”s Scientific Officer along with Marco Calaveri Head of Anti-infectives and Vaccine and other high ranking colleagues continue to suggest the risk of myocarditis in association with COVID-19 infection remains far higher than via mRNA vaccination, the evidence they depend upon isn’t designed to make such claims while the influential, we would argue powerful group offers the scientific world an important opening in this recent review—they embrace the unfolding scientific evidence that a mRNA COVID vaccine-induced spike protein may be doing damage. Calaveri as with many making this claim do not consider time ordered exposures: SARS-CoV-2 infection followed by vaccination, vaccination followed by infection, and repeated sequences.
This makes it impossible to claim infection alone causes myocarditis. With infection alone, there have been no published clinically adjudicated cases of myocarditis. There have been no fatal cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection before vaccination where myocarditis was identified on autopsy. This is a breakthrough given that for at least a couple years now in reviews of substantial amounts of literature industry, government and academia continue to lag behind more independent scientists critically scrutinize the mRNA-induced spike protein in the context of vaccine injury, including myocarditis.
https://www.trialsitenews.com/a/breaking-european-medicines-agency-top-scientists-acknowledge-mrna-based-spike-protein-a-potential-threat-with-myocarditis-337834f0
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4 July, 2024
Major Medical Journal Publishes Article Showing Negative Effectiveness of COVID-19 Vaccines
BY DR RAPHAEL LATASTER
I don’t like to say things are huge, but this is huge. As promised, my own little article on COVID-19 vaccine negative effectiveness (where the jab increases one’s chance of Covid infection, hospitalisation and even death) has been published in a major medical journal, the Australian Journal of General Practice. Published by the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, AJGP is literally the medical journal for general practitioners (family doctors) in Australia. Also discussed in what became an epic and frank discussion amongst several Australian health professionals are vaccine injuries and ‘Long Covid’ potentially being ‘long jab’.
This all started with Tindle’s article in AJGP earlier this year, which contained scarcely believable quotable quotes like: “Because COVID-19 vaccines were approved without long-term safety data and might cause immune dysfunction, it is perhaps premature to assume that past SARS-CoV-2 infection is the sole common factor in long Covid.” He declared that “COVID-19 vaccination per se might contribute to Long Covid, giving rise to the colloquial term ‘Long Vax(x)’”, since the “spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 exhibits pathogenic characteristics and is a possible cause of post-acute sequelae after SARS-CoV-2 infection or COVID-19 vaccination”. Not to mention the “class switch to IgG4 antibodies”, which Tindle thinks could lead to autoimmunity and cancer.
With the editorial team apparently happy to publish on the jab potentially causing immune dysfunction, I thought this could be my chance to once again bring up negative effectiveness in a major medical journal. Indeed, it accepted, and here is what I spoke about:
I cite several articles apparently displaying some sort of COVID-19 vaccine negative effectiveness, including one published by NEJM, another published in a Lancet journal and the little discussion involving myself in the BMJ. In the worst cases, the vaccines’ effectiveness drops to zero, and even turns negative, within mere months.
I cited the JECP4 articles, which show “that issues with counting windows have likely led to exaggerations of COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness and safety estimates, for both the clinical trials and later observational studies”.
I also pointed to Fürst et al., a recent study revealing “strong evidence for the healthy vaccinee effect”, countering any excuse involving the idea that sicker people are the ones getting vaccinated. A pretty silly excuse anyway, since most adults took the jab.
I conclude: “All this makes it plausible that the COVID-19 vaccines have always had an effectiveness that was very low, zero, or even negative, with inadequate methods allowing for a highly exaggerated effectiveness initially – an exaggeration that is lessened with time. It is, as Professor Tindle noted, possible that the vaccines could be causing immunosuppression. With the ubiquitousness of the vaccines, and the fact that some vaccine mandates are still in place, to say nothing of the upcoming Senate inquiry into excess mortality, I suggest we investigate this further.”
Awesome, huh? But wait, there’s more. A few more follow-up articles were published by AJGP, one involving Liu and Macartney (from the influential pro-jab Liu et al. study I’ve ‘refuted’, publishing forthcoming), with the usual attempts to “counter the unsubstantiated assertions that COVID-19 vaccination is causally associated with Long Covid”, customary claims that the jab “saved millions of lives” included.
Okay, so that bit of propaganda wasn’t so exciting, but another follow-up was also published, by Murnane. They were also concerned about “spikeopathy” and declared:
Professor Tindle’s concerns about ‘Long Vax(x)’ very much echo conditions I have observed working as a general practitioner. I have seen patients present with Long Covid symptoms post COVID-19 vaccine without prior COVID-19 infection. I have also observed patients with Long Covid that has been acquired post COVID-19 infection, who have experienced a worsening of their symptoms post COVID-19 vaccination. This is consistent with studies that have shown a worsening of symptoms in 21% to 31% of Long Covid sufferers post COVID-19 vaccination.
They also shared that they “personally suffered from a COVID-19 vaccine injury leading to dysautonomia, small fibre neuropathy, thyroiditis and mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS)”.
Finally, Tindle was granted the opportunity to wrap things up. He apparently agreed with my “case counting window concerns”, observations of negative effectiveness and the healthy vaccinee effect, countering Liu et al. Tindle is all of us when he opines that the “amount of spike protein from the vaccine is likely many fold greater than that from infection with virus because of stability mutations introduced into the vaccine mRNA, and the tissue penetrance of spike protein mRNA into a far more diverse set of tissues than infection”. In response to Murnane, Tindle claims that other GPs echoed similar concerns, about ‘Long Covid’ being “a side effect of the Covid vaccination”, and mentions the persecution of doctors who dared to speak out. Ending by questioning if the jabs are truly beneficial for all, Tindle even boldly noted that earlier “posts implicating COVID-19 vaccines were removed by the site moderators”. Things are changing. We’re winning.
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/07/01/major-medical-journal-publishes-study-showing-negative-effectiveness-of-covid-19-vaccines/
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From Solzhenitsyn to US Governors: No Lessons Learned
This year marks half a century since Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation appeared in English. Northwestern University professor Gary Saul Morson calls this work “the masterpiece of our time,” and there’s a backstory here.
After visiting the Soviet Union in 1919, California journalist Lincoln Steffens proclaimed, “I have seen the future and it works,” a claim repeated by many Western luminaries during the 1930s, as Malcolm Muggeridge recalled in Chronicles of Wasted Time. Solzhenitsyn showed how the USSR didn’t work, except as a vast prison camp, and confirmed that the first Communist state was much worse than anybody imagined. In some quarters, the revelations did not receive a warm welcome.
While the courageous Solzhenitsyn was being hailed around the world, U.S. President Gerald Ford declined to meet with the author. During an October 1976 debate, Ford proclaimed “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.” As this confirmed, ignorance and reality dysphoria are not new problems in America. Had other politicians given Solzhenitsyn’s work the attention it deserved they might have gone easier on the people during difficult times.
Independent peasants known as “kulaks” resisted the collectivization of agriculture. During Stalin’s campaign to eliminate the kulaks as a class, as Solzhenitsyn noted, food was confiscated and even fishing in the rivers was prohibited. Jump ahead to January, 2020.
The CDC’s Dr. Nancy Messonnier announces that a “novel coronavirus” has arrived stateside from China and will spread across the country. Quick to proclaim a state of emergency was California governor Gavin Newsom, who considered a statewide ban on freshwater sportfishing.
Newsom told the anglers “we are not cancelling the fishing season. We just want to delay, not deny, that season.” But he presented no scientific evidence that anglers on the state’s remote rivers and lakes posed a danger to public health.
The governor also closed nearly all beaches in southern California, including beach bathrooms, piers, promenades, and beach bike paths. In early April, 2020, police arrested a solitary paddleboarder near the Malibu pier. Gov. Newsom and his aides failed to show how a single person on the water posed a threat to public health. The governor also ordered many businesses, including wineries, to shut down their indoor operations, but he exempted Napa County from the state’s monitoring list.
That’s why the governor’s own PlumpJack Winery, purchased with Gordon Getty, remained open. Napa County is also home to the upscale French Laundry restaurant, where Newsom and lobbyist colleagues partied sans masks, which the governor demanded for ordinary people. None of the highly restrictive rules for private gatherings were in force for the governor and his friends. In similar style, while many of the state’s government schools were shut, Gov. Newsom’s four children received in-person instruction at an exclusive private school in Sacramento County.
Across the country in New York State, elderly patients, the group most vulnerable to Covid, were forced into nursing homes where thousands perished. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) boss Dr. Anthony Fauci, who claimed to represent science, didn’t want to talk about it.
From the nursing home victims on down through school shutdowns and the ban on paddleboarding and fishing, the government pandemic regime reflected an authoritarian mindset more than any quest to keep the people safe. As Solzhenitsyn noted, the Soviet Communist Party elite enjoyed special powers and privileges, so it’s more a matter of degree than kind.
Stalin set out to eliminate the kulaks as a class and murdered millions. American President Gerald Ford tried to free Eastern Europe with his mouth. American politicians such as Gavin Newsom and Andrew Cuomo, in alliance with government bureaucrats such as Dr. Fauci, caused vast damage to the people while claiming to keep them safe. From the Red Terror to white coat supremacy, it’s all about memory against forgetting.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14969&omhide=true&trk=rm
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3 July, 2024
Large Korean Study Finds Neuropsychiatric Symptoms Linked to Long COVID
Researchers from Kyung Hee University College of Medicine in Seoul, South Korea investigate any evidence that SARS-CoV-2 infection is linked to short-and long-term neuropsychiatric symptoms.
The Korean-led team capitalized on the Korea nationwide cohort involving 10,027,506 (discovery) individuals plus the Japanese claims-based cohort involving 12,218, 680 (validation) to estimate the short-term (<30 days) and long-term (?30 days) risks of neuropsychiatric outcomes after SARS-CoV-2 infection compared with general population groups or external comparators (people with another respiratory infection).
This propensity score matching study led to the conclusion that in both the short and longer term, COVID-19 is elevated with risk of neuropsychiatric symptoms as compared to persons in Korea and Japan infected with another respiratory condition.
What symptoms and conditions emerge in this long COVID population as measured by propensity score matched outcomes in the 30-plus day cohort? Myriad neurological-based conditions:
Guillain-Barré syndrome
Cognitive deficit
Insomnia
Anxiety disorder
Encephalitis
Ischemic stroke
Mood disorder
Are there any mitigating factors, interventions reducing risk of these neuropsychiatric symptoms linked with long COVID?
According to the study which has its limitations and is not designed to prove causation factors ranging from mild severity of COVID-19, increased vaccination against COVID-19 and heterologous vaccination could be associated with lower long-term risk of adverse neuropsychiatric outcomes in the targeted populations.
The time attenuation effect was the strongest during the first six months after SARS-CoV-2 infection, and this risk remained statistically significant for up to one year in Korea but beyond one year in Japan, according to the authors’ entry in the peer-reviewed journal nature human behavior.
Thanks to the validation cohort with Japanese data, the authors were able to replicate the findings. The authors point out that their “findings contribute to the growing evidence base on long COVID by considering ethnic diversity.”
https://www.trialsitenews.com/a/large-korean-study-finds-neuropsychiatric-symptoms-linked-to-long-covid-9f7e13c4
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A top Republican is demanding the Pentagon explain why it tried to hide taxpayer dollars sent to China for risky virus research
A new Defense Department report shockingly revealed the agency lost track of millions of taxpayer dollars sent to the adversary of the US.
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., is now demanding Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin explain what exactly happened, according to correspondence exclusively obtained by DailyMail.com.
Paul says he's 'deeply concerned' over the Pentagon report finding the department couldn't determine whether it sent money to China for pathogen research.
'It is unacceptable that DoD cannot account for the full extent of taxpayer funding it has spent on pandemic pathogen research at Chinese research laboratories,' Paul wrote to Austin.
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has requested files from the Pentagon regarding their use of taxpayer dollars to fund pathogen research in China. Paul has been investigating the origins of COVID for years and was shocked over the Pentagon's neglect in tracking funding to foreign countries
The Republican requested Sec. Austin turn over files relating to the Pentagon's Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs (CDMRP) that funded Chinese pathogen research, similar to the research done on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology before the COVID pandemic.
The senator has been vigorously investigating the origins of COVID and former White House Chief Medical Advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci for his role in the pandemic and its policies.
Now he is examining the Pentagon's role in using 'American taxpayer dollars for risky virus research in China and other foreign countries.'
'This lack of oversight represents a significant gap in our national security and undermines public trust in the DoD,' Paul said.
Previously, the senator disclosed to DailyMail.com how Fauci still receives a taxpayer-funded 24/7 US Marshal security detail despite not being a government employee.
'The only other person probably getting his level of security would be the president, vice president, maybe cabinet members, and a few members in leadership in the House and Senate,' Paul told DailyMail.com.
Paul has also been outspoken in accusing Fauci of obfuscating the origins of the virus.
The Republican has twice sent referrals to the Justice Department for Fauci's prosecution, telling DailyMail.com 'he committed a felony by lying to Congress saying he didn't fund gain and function research. He's still saying that.'
'It is annoying that he's still out there crowing how great he is, when really his philosophic opinion that gain-of-function research is worth the risk is something that I think history should remember, and I'm going to do every bit of making sure that history remembers that he was philosophically in favor of the research that I believe allowed millions of people to die from this lab leak,' Paul told DailyMail.com.
Last month, the Kentuckian grilled several eminent doctors during a Senate hearing on the origins of COVID and definition of gain-of-function research.
The hearing became heated as lawmakers and witnesses sparred over the good that could come from the research that enhances viruses to make them more effective.
And Paul said if Republicans gain control of the Senate in November and he gets committee power, his first action will be to subpoena those files.
'The most important information is the NIH deliberation over what is, what is not gain-of-function,' he told DailyMail.com. 'They won't give us the information.'
Those documents will truly reveal whether Fauci lied to Congress about whether he was overseeing the dangerous research method, which he previously denied doing before the Senate, Paul said.
Still, the reputation damage to US public health officials is done, he added.
'We have public health officials that appear to be more salesmen for Big Pharma, than they do objective scientists, and that still is a problem,' Paul told DailyMail.com.
'It's led to a great deal of distrust, much more distrust over what the government tells us, than ever before,' he said.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13593491/pentagon-hid-taxpayer-funding-chinese-labs-rand-paul.html
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Jury Awards $687,000 to BlueCross BlueShield Scientist Fired for Refusing COVID-19 Vaccine
A federal jury has awarded $687,000 to a research scientist who was fired from BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee for refusing to comply with the company’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate.
Tanja Benton, who had worked at the firm for 16 years when she was fired, was awarded $177,240 in back pay, $10,000 in compensation, and $500,000 in punitive damages, according to a document made public by the federal court in eastern Tennessee on June 30.
Company officials told Ms. Benton in August of 2021 that she would need to be “fully vaccinated” to keep her position, according to her lawsuit. Ms. Benton refused, saying aborted fetal cell lines were involved in the development of the COVID-19 vaccines and she couldn’t “in good conscience consume the vaccine, which would not only defile her body but also anger and dishonor God.”
BlueCross BlueShield said her position involved “regular external public-facing interactions” so she couldn’t keep it. While Ms. Benton said her position became fully remote in 2020, BlueCross BlueShield said it would have involved some in-person interaction with clients.
Ms. Benton was told to pursue other positions within the company and applied for two. But she was fired on Nov. 4, 2021, and was told five days later that, “Unfortunately, all positions require the vax now,” according to an email entered in the case.
Her lawsuit charged that BlueCross BlueShield violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which says an employer may not “discharge any individual, or otherwise discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment” because of that person’s religion. Employers can disregard religious exemption requests if they can prove accommodating them would create an undue hardship.
BlueCross BlueShield “cannot prove that allowing Plaintiff to continue her employment as a Bio Statistical Research Scientist without being vaccinated for COVID-19 constitutes an undue hardship,” the suit stated. The company “also cannot show that it made any good-faith efforts to accommodate plaintiff’s sincerely held religious beliefs.”
BlueCross BlueShield also was accused of violating the Tennessee Human Rights Act, which bars discrimination by employers at the state level.
“We’re disappointed by the decision,” Dalya Qualls White, chief communications officer for BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee, told The Epoch Times in an email. “We believe our vaccine requirement was the best decision for our employees and members, and we believe our accommodation to the requirement complied with the law. We appreciate our former employees’ service to our members and communities throughout their time with our company.”
A lawyer representing Ms. Benton didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, presented with the case, cleared Ms. Benton to sue her former employer.
Company lawyers had argued the firm would be unduly burdened by providing Ms. Benton an indefinite exception despite her role as a “public-facing employee.” The lawyers said she couldn’t have continued to work remotely indefinitely.
The company also asserted that Ms. Benton didn’t hold a sincerely held religious belief and “denies that the COVID-19 vaccine was derived from aborted fetus cell lines, which is verifiably false,” according to the company’s filing.
Johnson & Johnson used cells derived from an aborted fetus in the design, production, and testing of its COVID-19 vaccine. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines also utilized the cells in early testing. The companies have said the final products don’t contain aborted fetal cells.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/jury-awards-687000-to-bluecross-blueshield-scientist-fired-for-refusing-covid-19-vaccine-5678321
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2 July, 2024
Pfizer About To Find Itself In Court Again
Pfizer Inc. previously admitted it behaved improperly in not reporting major clinical trial safety issues during the original COVID-19 “vaccine” trials because they claimed the US FDA were aware of what they were doing, therefore, it was OK. That is a very creative defence
But momentum is building to bring Pfizer, Moderna and “health experts” like Fauci to justice.
Grilling of Dr. Fauci goes on before US Senators and admissions of misinformation (read “lies”) are now flowing…..there was no science to support lockdowns, masking or social distancing.
The “experts” didn’t even bother to look at the science according to Dr. Scott Atlas who was part of the Trump Covid task force team.
We know better now and nobody should be so easily fooled again (think Bird Flu).
Now details are emerging of the specifics of the Kansas State lawsuit against Pfizer Inc. over the COVID-19 “vaccines”.
A Substack by Carl Heneghan of June 27th details the main alleged points which may be summarised as follows:
· Pfizer misled the public in relation to its claim of “safety and efficacy”
· Pfizer used confidentiality agreements to conceal critical data relating to the safety and effectiveness of its COVID-19 vaccine
· Pfizer used its confidentiality agreements with the US government and others to conceal, suppress, and omit material facts relating to Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, including the safety and efficacy of the vaccine
· Pfizer used an extended study timeline to conceal critical data – the study was repeatedly delayed
· Pfizer has not honoured its promise to release safety data
· Pfizer destroyed the vaccine control group
· In its press release announcing emergency use authorization of its COVID-19 vaccine, Pfizer did not disclose that it had excluded immunocompromised individuals from its COVID-19 vaccine trials
· Pfizer knew its COVID-19 vaccine was connected to serious adverse events, including myocarditis and pericarditis and did not properly report these in a timely manner
· Pfizer’s February 18, 2021, press release also did not disclose other adverse effects on the reproductive systems of women who received Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine
· Pfizer’s study on pregnant women failed and the results are secret
· Pfizer misrepresented and concealed material facts relating to the durability of protection provided by its COVID-19 vaccine
· Pfizer said its COVID-19 vaccine would prevent transmission even though it knew it had never studied the effect of its vaccine on transmission
· Pfizer worked to censor speech on social media that questioned it’s claims.
These alleged crimes have been well known for some time but now they will be tested in a court of law.
https://principia-scientific.com/pfizer-about-to-find-itself-in-court-again/
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Unvaccinated Police In Australia Fired Two Years After Covid Mandates Dropped
Two years after the Covid mandates ended, the West Australian Police Force has fired nearly 20 unvaccinated police officers and public servants for refusing to get the jabs.
A legal challenge against the mandates, brought by WA Police officer Ben Falconer and staff member Les Finlay, had previously secured an injunction preventing the force from firing unvaccinated staff until the matter had been settled in the courts.
However, a Supreme Court ruling that then-WA Police Commissioner Chris Dawson’s Covid vaccination directive was “valid and lawful” brought an end to the injunction in April. WA Police announced the resumption of disciplinary action against 17 affected employees immediately after the hearing, with all 12 police officers and five staff having now been sacked.
Falconer was the last to be formally notified of his dismissal on Friday, for disobeying the Commissioner’s vaccination directive. Despite no prior history of disobedience, Falconer refused the jabs due to his concerns over the safety and efficacy of the Covid vaccines and the way in which mandates violated the bodily integrity of officers and staff.
While Deputy Commissioner Allan Adams said that Falconer’s dismissal was “regretful”, Falconer maintains that refusing Covid vaccination is the “best decision I’ve ever made”. Falconer, a Senior Constable who served in the force for 15 years, says that the sacked police officers had over 150 years of policing experience combined.
The firings come amid staffing shortages and low morale, with WA Police turning to overseas recruitment to prop up its frontline forces.
In April this year it was reported that WA Police was well short of its target of recruiting 950 new frontline officers by mid-year, with only 450-500 having signed on.
Opposition leader Libby Mettam (Liberal) said that in the past four years, there has been a “mass exodus of police with nearly 1,000 officers resigning” from the roughly 7,000 strong force.
Police Commissioner Col Blanch admitted that the force saw a “significant” reduction in police numbers after the Covid pandemic, with 570 officers leaving the force in 2022, of which 473 were resignations and 97 retirements.
WA Police was asked to provide comment along with up-to-date recruitment, resignation and retirement figures, but did not respond prior to publication deadline.
The Labour Government has blamed market forces for WA Police’s struggles with retention and recruitment. However survey data collected by the WA Police Union in 2022 showed that 77% of staff exiting the force claim poor work culture and dissatisfaction with management as their reasons for quitting.
Another union survey of members conducted in 2022 found that morale in the force is at an “all-time-low”, with almost two thirds (64.6%) of respondents describing morale as “poor”. This is more than double 28.2% who said the same in the last poll in 2017. None of the 1,966 respondents described morale as “excellent”.
A majority of respondents complained that their workload had increased, and half or more complained of fatigue, management problems, unpaid overtime and rostering issues.
Nearly three quarters (71.4%) of respondents said they’d used the WA Police mental health services, with 36.6% of service users reporting their experience was “very negative” or “negative”.
Public sector census data obtained under Freedom of Information by the Liberal opposition showed that in 2023, less than half (47.1%) would recommend their agency as a workplace, compared to almost 70% for the public sector overall.
Some of this discontent appears to be driven by the force’s Covid response. In an unauthorised survey of WA Police staff initiated by former officer Jordan McDonald, who resigned over vaccine mandates, employees said they felt “bullied” into getting vaccinated and complained about resources being diverted away from traditional policing towards the state’s Covid response.
In 2022, WA Police began an international recruitment drive to fill vacant frontline positions, with the aim of recruiting 750 officers from the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland and New Zealand over a five-year period. WA Police has also been creative with its recruitment campaign at home, appealing to lonely hearts on hookup app Tinder.
The WA Police Union said it supports the overseas recruitment drive but characterised it as a “band-aid solution”.
“It’s only a matter of time before these new recruits obtain permanent residency and become familiar with the many cultural and organisational issues in WA Police,” the union said in a media statement.
The WA Police Union was approached by unvaccinated members for assistance with their industrial action resisting the mandates, but Falconer, who was a member, says the union’s response was “hostile”. The union also declined to provide information and comment for this article.
Unvaccinated WA Police staff had been on paid leave since the Covid vaccine mandate came into effect in December 2021 until their recent dismissals, an arrangement that Falconer has called “fiscally irresponsible”.
In an essay posted to social media platform X, Falconer said that the South Australian Police Force responded to the situation better. Unvaccinated SA Police officers were allowed to use accrued leave until the mandates dropped, after which they were allowed back to work “without ever being stood down and no disciplinary action taken whatsoever”, he said.
“I could have been back at work from June 2022 [when the mandates were dropped] and there were plenty of administrative tasks that could have been done with remote access to police systems if allowed to work from home,” said Falconer, who said he informed WA Police more than 30 times of his willingness to return to work.
Former police officer of 27 years Lance French, who was also fired this month for not complying with the Police Commissioner’s 2021 Covid vaccination directive, said that he too had informed WA Police numerous times that he wanted to return to work since the mandates were dropped.
Now that his two-and-a-half year legal fight has come to an end, Falconer said that he will take some time out to consider his next career move.
French expressed gratitude for the support of his wife, family and colleagues, opining on social media that while “the trajectory we are heading (as a society) is not good,” he was appreciative for “the legislative and judicial structures enabling our lawful challenge of Commissioner Dawson’s… draconian order to undergo a medical procedure”.
WA Police officers and staff are not the only Australian workers still experiencing repercussions from the Covid mandates, even after most of the public have well and truly moved on.
In January of this year, Queensland Health was criticised for continuing to discipline and fire healthcare workers for failing to comply with vaccination directives issued in late 2021.
More than 50 unvaccinated firefighters remain banned from returning to work in Victoria despite critical staffing shortages, and mandates remain in place for some nurses, midwives and doctors around the country.
The Australian state and territory governments’ coercive Covid vaccination mandates have come under fire recently with AstraZeneca’s admission that its vaccine can cause deadly blood clots, and with mounting vaccine injury claims.
https://principia-scientific.com/unvaccinated-police-in-australia-fired-two-years-after-covid-mandates-dropped/
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1 July, 2024
The Great Lockdown Swindle
Written by Alex Kriel
Many people will remember the Covid policy response as a nightmare involving: reduced access to medical treatment, businesses closures, disrupted schooling and fear generated by Government brainwashing.
After the event, it is always worth doing a ‘cui bono‘ (who benefits) exercise to identify who benefited, especially since the hopeless mainstream media have largely failed to do this.
Counterintuitively, the über-wealthy owners of 0.1% of wealth in the United States, increased their net worth by a staggering $6.4 trillion over the 2022-2023 pandemic period.
With their net worth growing from $12.1 trillion to $18.5 trillion, a pretty cool $20 million per head for approximately 300,000 people.
This outcome is counterintuitive since the lockdowns temporarily wrecked the economy and had a significant negative impact on Government debt, which ballooned due to staggering budget deficits. All things being equal, you would expect stock markets to move lower under these circumstances.
In the Alice-in-Wonderland world of extreme money printing though the stock market exploded and the benefit from this explosion accrued primarily to the über-wealthy, who hold most of the financial assets.
Regular folk without significant financial assets tended to get left with the rough end of the stick in the form of elevated inflation.
We covered the link between money printing and financial asset values in a previous note (‘Where did the money go?‘), the chart below shows that money printing (red), moves in almost exactly the same way as the size of the wealth owned by the wealthiest 0.1% (blue). Both axes are in trillion (millions of millions).
You could credibly argue that the aim of monetary policy seems to be to prop up the value of the financial assets held by the über-wealthy. Within the group of über-wealthy, gains were not evenly distributed.
The world’s second richest man, Jeff Bezos, made over $90 billion in paper gains over the first nine months of 2020 due to an increase in Amazon’s share price. A large part of this was thanks to lockdowns, which closed down the bricks and mortar competitors and diverted tens of billions of dollars to Amazon, whose sales growth doubled from around 20% to 40% towards the end of 2020.
Another group which seemed pleased with the lockdowns was that of the social engineers who had since the 1970s wanted to redesign society, including to reduce or even eliminate growth.
The Chairman of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab co-authored a book, COVID-19:The Great Reset.
The book calls for significant parts of the lockdown response to be made permanent; the book’s cover makes clear that he wanted to leverage Covid for the purposes of introducing massive societal change.
They say that you should never let a good crisis go to waste, but what if rather than waiting for a good crisis, some interest groups created or simply exaggerated a crisis?
One thing that has become clear over the recent past is that the über-wealthy have access to enormous lobbying power via their foundations.
A large foundation can comfortably spend around $400 million a year on lobbying (philanthropy). As we discussed in our note on green money, the resources of the oligarch foundations dwarf the funding available to regular political parties.
In addition to having access to foundations, the über-wealthy have significant media reach in their own right. This is what several high profile business leaders said in 2020 about the coronavirus:
As we now know, the global infection fatality rate (IFR) was 0.03% for the under-60s: this was not the existential threat that it was made out to be. The fact that Covid was not an existential threat and that the infamous Imperial model was significantly overstated was clear from March 2020, as soon as the Diamond Princess figures came in. Professor Levitt identified that the Imperial model was massively overstated (I was able to help him correct some small errors in the calculations).
We can identify a small group of über– wealthy who on an ex-post basis enjoyed rapid and large increases in wealth as lockdowns favoured their businesses whilst disadvantaging competitors.
Furthermore, the eye watering money printing significantly raised the value of pretty well all financial assets. Finally, a group of social engineers who wished to see a “Great Reset” involving reduced consumption also seemed well pleased with lockdowns, the WEF website carried gushing articles about the benefits of lockdowns.
It could be that the quotes above from Schwab, Soros and Gates were alarmist as they were made in the heat of the moment. I was always dubious about this explanation: Bill Gates’s quote was the earliest from February, but the others were later and after actual data were available.
These individuals are very wealthy and must presumably be highly numerate and able to accurately assess risks. They would also have access to the best available researchers and sophisticated databases. It feels unlikely that they would get simple ratios significantly wrong, in my opinion.
In any event, a credible case could be made to say that some vested interest groups wanted to see a terrible overreaction to Covid, provided that this was accompanied by enough money printing.
It is worth remembering that the pre-existing pandemic response plans explicitly excluded lockdowns as a policy option:
In other policy areas, I have noticed a pattern whereby high profile oligarchs float a policy idea, which subsequently becomes Government policy years later (more about this later).
I am not making accusations, but identifying interest groups that either benefited financially or achieved the policy response that they wanted.
Worryingly, the issue of lockdown effectiveness is being largely ignored, even though Professor Ioannidis et al. have convincingly shown that lockdowns achieved next to nothing.
There is a danger that various interest groups are ensuring that this topic is not addressed so that they can repeat lockdowns in the future.
Crime requires three elements and we have all three in lockdowns: motivation ($6.4 trillion increase in net worth), method (enormous lobbying resources) and opportunity (venal politicians). Is this too conspiratorial?
https://principia-scientific.com/the-great-lockdown-swindle/
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University of Hong Kong Pediatric Specialists Identify Mechanisms Driving Vaccine Induced Myocarditis
Aggregated data recently suggests that Natural Killer (NK) cell activation by mRNA COVID-19 vaccine contributes to the pathogenesis of acute myocarditis in genetically and epidemiologically vulnerable subjects.
This is the conclusion of a study funded by the Hong Kong Collaborative Research Fund (CRF) 2020/21 and the CRF Coronavirus and Novel Infectious Diseases Research Exercises
Patrick Ip, a specialist pediatrician at University of Hong Kong and colleagues collected and analyzed samples from 60 adolescents with vaccine-related myocarditis: these including pro-inflammatory cytokines, cardiac troponin T, genotyping, and immunophenotyping of the corresponding activation subsets of NK cells, monocytes, and T cells.
The findings, compared with samples from 10 vaccinated individuals without myocarditis and 10 healthy controls, the study team in investigating the rare, but real vaccine-related acute myocarditis they pursue a clearer understanding of precise mechanisms based on their hypothesis that natural killer (NK) cells play a central role in its pathogenesis.
In a previous epidemiology study, the authors found a significant increase in the risk of acute myocarditis with rapid onset (median only 2 days) following vaccination with Pfizer’s mRNA-based vaccine (BNT162b2), particularly among male adolescents, especially after the second dose. But what are the underlying immune mechanisms involved? What follows is a summarized breakdown.
What’s the observation in this study?
The Hong Kong-based physician specialists and scientists observed very high levels of serum cytokines pivotal for NK cells in post-vaccination patients with myocarditis.
What was particularly noticeable in male patients and those individuals receiving their second jab?
Other than KIR polymorphism, the NK cell-specific eQTLs DNAM-1 (CD226) and FuT11 were also known to be key determinants of NK cell activities.”
What about after a third dose—why a lower incidence of myocarditis?
The authors of this study cannot be certain about why the cases of myocarditis are lower after a third jab.
They propose one possible answer: that this dose’s administration occurs during the longer time gap between the second and third doses of the vaccine. Could it be that genetically vulnerable subjects would have already developed the complication after the second dose. If not, the likelihood of developing myocarditis after the third dose would be low. More research would be needed to elucidate these and other possibilities.
Core hypothesis
The authors of this study find evidence backing their core hypothesis: NK cells serve a key role in the cause of rapid-onset of mRNA COVID-19 vaccine-induced acute myocarditis.
The Hong Kong-based research team now offers world-novel insights into the fundamental immune mechanisms associated with rare, but very real, and potentially deadly, side effects.
The authors assume the growth in adoption of the use of mRNA vaccines meaning these findings raise implications for “designing improved mRNA vaccines that would have minimal NK activation effects.”
Physicians must be aware of patients who not only have a history of post-vaccination myocarditis but who are also genetically susceptible. Thus, clinicians can be more proactive, acting earlier with sound medical advice, and based on these insights close monitoring could very well be warranted before and after receiving a similar mRNA vaccine.
https://www.trialsitenews.com/a/university-of-hong-kong-pediatric-specialists-identify-mechanisms-driving-mrna-covid-19-vaccine-induced-myocarditis-75c50d7c
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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