Our long time contributor TAE Summary has specialzed in summarizing two sides of the same coin when things are debated either in the media or, as in this case, in our Comments section. Question is/was: is there a God?
What I don’t see mentioned here is: can people(s) live without a religion to explain away what they do not understand in their lives? Or will they always create a story to ‘cover up’ their ignorance, and is that where religion comes from?
And in a logical next step, also in view of the recent Quran burnings in Scandinavia: No, we don’t burn each other’s Holy Books, or insult each other’s prophets or religious customs. We recognize that they all come from the same desire to explain what we don’t know. And we respect each other in that, and because of that. There have been too many Holy Wars already.
TAE Summary:
A Tale of Two Cosmologies
Theism
• Everything that exists has a cause and the obvious cause for the universe is God the creator
• The vastness of the universe with its well-ordered galaxies and solar systems is evidence of a divine creator and his purposes
• The intelligence and self-awareness of man is also evidence of a divine creator
• Science can explain physical cause and effect but can’t explain where the physical laws came from and is unable to give meaning to our lives
• There is no conflict between science and religion when properly understood
• Religion has been instrumental in human progress
• Religion has improved the lives of countless people; Atheistic societies like Soviet Russia and Maoist China are disasters
• Without God and an afterlife this life has no meaning; Atheists have no reason to be moral, ethical people; It’s anything goes and they end up committing atrocities
• Only with the ultimate punishment and rewards from God can men be responsible for their actions and have integrity
• You can only be free when you know that God exists and live the way he wants you to live
• Religions are benevolent organization that encourage people to be selfless givers
• Countless people have had direct experience with God and feel his love
• The holy scriptures show the historical workings of God among men and are a reliable guide on how to live a moral life
• Without religion there is no ultimate justice in the universe
• Atheists are illogical and suffer from cognitive dissonance; Only a major life upheaval like severe illness or death can help them realize the truth; Even then most won’t change
• Once they die atheists will realize how wrong they were
• Atheism is closely aligned with far-left liberalism and spoils everything it comes in contact with
Atheism
• The claim that all things have a cause and the cause of the universe must be God is logically inconsistent because it does not explain what caused God
• The creation and evolution of the cosmos is due to natural laws such as physics and natural selection; Given an infinity of universes one like ours had to exist and we are in it
• The universe has a trillion galaxies, each with 100 billion stars; The notion that one consciousness comprehends all of this and personally cares about the potentially trillion trillion souls in the galaxy is ridiculous
• The intelligence and self-awareness of man shows that belief in a divine creator is an unnecessary pablum
• There are things we still don’t understand about the cosmos but as science advance we understand more and more
• Theists start from an unscientific, non-falsifiable position and have been wrong about nearly everything; Only as they accept science do they become more correct
• Religion has always hampered human progress
• Religion has led and continues to lead to the repression and death of countless people; Religious societies are unerringly repressive and regressive; State sponsored religion is a disaster
• Theists believe that the next life is more important than this one and discount this life and don’t put in the work needed to make the world a better place; Without God man is forced to confront the issues of ethics and morality and make the hard choices; With God men outsource their morality which gives them license to commit atrocities
• Theists believe they are always being watched and ultimately rewarded or punished by God; It is impossible for theists to have integrity; They can never act from innate goodness
• You can only be truly free when you don’t believe in God and realize this is the only life you have
• Religions are by and large driven by control and making money
• People’s so called experiences with God are not reproducible; They are emotionally driven wishful thinking
• So-called religious scriptures are not historical, are full of contradictions and immoral stories and are not a good guide to a moral life
• Religion’s insistence on divine justice makes its adherents less likely to fight for justice here and now
• Theists are illogical and suffer from cognitive dissonance; Only a major life upheaval like severe illness or death can help them realize the truth; Even then most won’t change
• Since there is no consciousness after death theists will never know how wrong they were
• Religion is closely aligned with far-right conservatism and spoils everything it comes in contact with
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1/ If the US truckers manage to organize themselves anywhere close to the way their Canadian brethren have, in projects like Convoy To DC 2022 or American Freedom Convoy 2022, they will cause absolute mayhem stateside, and the Biden admin will very rapidly lift the -announced- vaccination mandates for truckers. This will force Canada to do the same. Of course the demands of the Canadian truckers are now much broader than their own vaccines, and US truckers may well go that way too.
Already, the Canadian ‘Freedom Convoy’ has forced the shutdown of General Motors and Ford automotive plants, among others. On both sides of the Ambassador Bridge, Detroit and Windsor carmakers have large plants, and the present standstill comes on top of global supply chain and local staffing issues.
Justin Trudeau won’t be able to tow the trucks on the bridge away. He also won’t be able to send in the military against his own people (neither will Joe Biden). If the truckers persist, they win. It really is that simple. They are serious, as the mayor of Windsor ON understands:
“You have a number of people who are … part of the protest group who have openly stated … they feel such a passion for this particular cause that they are willing to die for it,” Mayor Drew Dilkens told reporters on Wednesday. “If you have people who hold that sentiment, the situation can escalate and get very dangerous for police and those members of the public in very short order. It’s fair to say we don’t want to see anyone get hurt.”
2/ Scores of countries are now falling over themselves to lift Covid restrictions and measures. But there is one thing they will not do: lift these for unvaccinated people. Because that would make them lose face, despite the obvious fact that the vaccines either don’t work, or work for just a few months, and then require boosters that ever more people will refuse to get. The large amounts of people who did get tricked into being vaccinated will support the banning and cancelling of the “unpure”.
It will take a report like that of attorney Thomas Renz, based on the Pentagon’s DMED adverse event registration system, to bring this to light. And that may take a while yet. The Pentagon is altering the results as we speak.
“We saw—and this one’s amazing—neurological issues, which would affect our [military] pilots, [we saw] over a thousand percent increase—82,000 per year to 863,000 in one year. Our soldiers are being experimented on, injured, and sometimes possibly killed. They know this. And Senator, when these doctors are attacked, they call me. I’m the one dealing with the medical boards. I’m the one watching the witch hunts. I’m the one fighting them off, and I’m going to keep doing that. And let me give you one last thing, Senator—the Sept. 28, 2021, Project Salus weekly report.
Project Salus is a defense department initiative where they take all this data—that [they now say] doesn’t exist, supposedly—and they give it to the CDC. They’re watching these vaccines. On and around that date, I have numerous instances where Fauci and the entire crew were saying, “it’s a crisis of the unvaccinated. It’s 99% unvaxxed in the hospital.” In the project Salus weekly report, the DOD document says specifically 71% of new cases are in the fully vaccinated and 60% of hospitalizations are in the fully vaxxed. This is corruption at the highest level. We need investigations. The secretary of defense needs to be investigated. The CDC needs to be investigated.”
We are increasingly seeing politicians and “experts” walk back their words, but we will have to wait for the true adverse events to come to the surface, in order for the vaccine madness to stop. We have come too far for it to vanish overnight. And most vaccine effects will take years to come to light. So that provides a space/time that politicians and experts can and will use to walk back what they said and did. Renz says they all need to be investigated, and they know it. But how many will be, in the end?
For now, they can open their societies, and claim they are doing it because they follow the science. Which has changed, don’t you know. They will all hail the vaccines for saving the lives of their citizens, while the actual “saving” is done by Omicron. It’s spring in the Northern Hemisphere, and we can go back to normal! I achieved this for you! Vote for me!
All they -think they- need is for the truth to come out late enough, as in years from today. They think time is on their side. Let’s see. Are people more happy that the ordeal is over, or more angry that it was there in the first place? Many political -and scientific- careers will be ground to dust, but which?
And who will volunteer to get a vaccine for anything at all anymore 5 years from now? “The Science”, the real one, not the fake Fauci kind, has been thrown back many years. When you realize how many people have died or got maimed from a vaccine that your government forced upon you, and your doctor was only too happy too inject into you, what do you think the next time you need medical help? Or when your government wants you to do aything at all?
The outcome will be that nobody trusts their doctors, and nobody trusts their politicians. Except for the 50% that will believe anything you feed them, all the time. But you can’t build a healthy or prosperous society with those people. You can only do that if you have conversation, discussion, exchange of ideas and viewpoints. All of which are dead after 2 years.
It used to be that two know more than one, but now one knows more than 300 million. If they’re Tony Fauci or Klaus Schwab, that is. Well, bring it on.
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“Huskynut” in New Zealand sent me this, and introduced it by saying:
I was reality-checking with an old (used to be contrarian) friend a couple of days ago on Covid. He challenged me – “I don’t believe our politicians and medical community are evil people”, which is an excellent question. I find Mattias Desmet’s Mass Formation theory compelling, but it’s somehow not the full picture.
That thought train led me to the Lord of the Rings, which featured prominently in public consciousness until quite recently. Because of this place in public consciousness, I have a strong feeling (right or wrong), that the tale has a power to cut through in a way rational argument doesn’t.
I’ve drafted the piece below to outline the material, but because my thought process is heavily rational (rather than mythic), I suspect a writer with more affinity for that oeuvre could do it more justice. Would you give me your thoughts on how it might best be handled?
My answer to his question is publishing it. I think it’s an excellent metaphor, and he writes and explains it very well. From the actual story told in the books, and the movies, to the way they “lead” readers and viewers, he covers it all.
He perhaps says it best here: “..the epic battle scenes in Lord of the Rings contributed little to the wider plot. But they were EPIC!” And human love of epic stories is hardwired into us. Before we know it, we’re junked up on adrenaline, rooting for the hero, and hoping the movie never ends.”
And yes, The One Ring is the vaccine. If you ever want to return to the Shire, your normal life, you will have to throw it into Mount Doom. My Precious.
Huskynut: The three Lord of the Rings movies are usually recollected for their stunning NZ landscapes and epic battle scenes, but we could do well to reflect on the way aspects of the core plot mirror our current situation.
At the outset, an unexpected knock at the door draws Frodo to undertake an epic quest, for the good of Middle Earth. It takes little effort to imagine the way politicians, policy-wonks and health advisors and modellers all – consciously or unconsciously – answered the door to the Covid response and unexpectedly found themselves with oversized roles in the epic of a lifetime.
How intoxicating it must have felt to be cast as central figures in a complex plot line that has now dominated headlines for nearly two years! How noble and glorious to be on the front lines battling a constantly mutating Balrog or legions of Orcs. How majestic to dedicate one’s work life to completely vanquishing the enemy and pronouncing the joyous day of Zero Covid! All the intensity of a global war, but from the comfort of home, and with negligible personal risk.
The problem with this is twofold – firstly Covid isn’t at all like an epic army of well-armed marauding Orcs. It’s a virus. It isn’t “trying” to do anything.. not to get past our defences, let alone to attack and kill us, any more than the grass outside is trying to. On a scale of sentience, grass is vastly more complex and adaptive than Covid, though far less glamorous.
All of that excess emotion – that epic drama – led not a single step closer to understanding the nature of Covid or improving our response to it, in the same way the epic battle scenes in Lord of the Rings contributed little to the wider plot. But they were EPIC! And human love of epic stories is hardwired into us. Before we know it, we’re junked up on adrenaline, rooting for the hero, and hoping the movie never ends.
Secondly, when the mythological parts of story take hold of our psyche, any possibility of sound science disappears straight out the window. In science, there are no heroes, no villains. No-one swoops in at the last moment to save the day. No-one plots dastardly revenge. Perhaps those things take place on the periphery, amongst the humans engaged in a scientific pursuit, but not in science itself. Within science there is postulate, hypothesis, experiment, result.
Which is profoundly boring from an entertainment perspective, so the media never talk science. They talk instead of opinion, speculation, human interest or politics, and people mistake those for science. For those of us watching rather than creating the movie, there’s little input required beyond showing up and giving the screen our attention. That’s pretty much the opposite of how a participatory democracy is supposed to work, but a pretty accurate description of the way many have approached Covid. Tune into the daily podium soap-opera and FEEL.
Watching those plucky characters on the screen, entwined in the plot twists and turns, large numbers of us forgot that as citizens we ourselves are the fundamental characters in the plots of our own lives, not bit players in the primary drama or – worse – simply rubes to be milked for cash at the box office.
Back in the film, as they near Mount Doom, Frodo struggles against the spell of the One Ring, becoming increasingly distrustful and paranoid about the intentions of his loyal friend Sam. Again and again he feels compelled to wield the Ring. With every use of it he surrenders a little more of his integrity and sovereignty.
And as NZ draws closer to the end of the Covid pandemic, with the world opening up and the UK, Ireland and Czech Republic dropping most restrictions, the NZ government, their pet scientists and tame media seem increasingly paranoid about the intentions of loyal, taxpaying kiwis demanding the right to return to their lives unmolested by vaccine mandates and passes. Their finger twitches reflexively towards wielding The Ring – when Omicron hits, the Red “Traffic Light” will be invoked.
For anyone observing the character development over time, the trajectory is clear. What began as careful, nuanced and tentative statements from the NZ scientists, politicians and pundits moved to strident, dismissive and arrogant. Little of the science remains, only politics and drama. These characters move inexorably towards becoming Ring Wraiths … servants of the One Vaccine.
It’s abundantly clear that every time Jacinda and Ashley succumb to temptation and slip their finger back into the Ring – issuing a new compelling edict upon the public, they lose another sliver of humanity. Things that were once unthinkable – medical mandates throwing thousands out of work, say, or closing the borders to prevent our country’s own citizens from returning – are now routine. And there is no evidence these serious blows to NZ citizens trouble the Ring wielders for a second.
Our leaders appear to have convinced themselves of the essential need for their character’s places in the ongoing drama, because that’s precisely what power does, and particularly when the wielder is not held consistently to close account by a wise and honest friend like Sam, rather than the increasingly Gollum-like suck-ups populating the commercial media. The NZ government needs to take the One Ring of power – that body of Covid-19 legislation and operating practice they’ve been accumulating and casually toying with for two years – and fling it into a metaphorical Mount Doom before it consumes both them and us.
In watching the movie, we will Frodo to summon the strength to do what must be done in destroying the Ring. In our current political world there is no sign our politicians and bureaucrats possess the self-awareness, the wisdom or the will to do that themselves. There is even a substantial mass of people who would cry out against it.. either loath to have their passive movie-watching end and be confronted with the mundanity of their pre-Covid lives, or terrified that absent their heroic leaders the mythologised terror will rise and strike them down.
It’s time to put down the empty popcorn container and recall our place is on the relatively tepid yet real world outside the cinema. Yes, Covid is real, but the theatrical accoutrements that have come to surround it are not. We cannot afford to continue investing the colossal amounts of time and money that have been diverted to Covid at the expense of other priorities, including wider health and education.
Power corrupts. What started as naïve individuals embarking on an important quest has led to what it necessarily must – the time for those same people to reject the self-corrupting influence of power, and for both themselves and us to return to the Shire.
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Biden: “For the unvaccinated, you can expect a winter of death”
DeSantis: “You’re free to get vaccinated or not, but if you get sick either way, you can get monoclonal antibodies to survive. And if you can’t get vaccinated, you can always get Evusheld for protection.”
Omicron is not normal. No immediate progenitors are known; its closest relatives are viruses last seen in early- to mid-2020. The orthodox explanation for this awkward fact, is that it has spent the last 18 months lurking “in a geography with poor genomic surveillance … or … in a chronically infected individual.” The simpler explanation is that it leaked from a laboratory. As el gato malo and others have indicated, evidence is strong that Omicron circulates preferentially in the vaccinated. In all likelihood, it is the result of gain-of-function research, in which SARS-2 was passaged repeatedly through convalescent or vaccinated plasma, in the hopes of helping the virus evade acquired immunity. The purpose of this research would be to anticipate future immune-escape variants that vaccines might target.
Omicron carries a series of highly unlikely and suspicious mutations in its spike protein. It is hard to imagine that these mutations can have arisen via natural processes, because all but one of them are nonsynonymous – that is, they code for different amino acid sequences. Starkly mutated variants favoured by natural selection should have a great many meaningless synonymous mutations as well. Omicron’s ancestors may have spent a significant amount of time adapting to mouse cells, before re-entering human hosts. Omicron appears selected to replicate primarily in the bronchial tract. Deeper in the human lung, it functions far less efficiently than Delta or the first strains from Wuhan. This is probably why it causes mostly mild illness, and it is reminiscent of techniques used to make live attenuated influenza vaccines safer for use in humans.
Such vaccines are cold-adapted, that is, selected to circulate primarily in the cooler upper respiratory tract rather than in the warmer, more vulnerable lungs. The balance of the evidence is that Omicron leaked from a lab engaged in SARS-2 vaccine research. There are many possibilities: It might represent a live, attenuated virus vaccine used informally among researchers, that mutated back to virulence and escaped; it might have been released accidentally; it could even be an attempt to develop a self-spreading vaccine to immunise animals or third world populations.
Omicron is now the dominant version of the coronavirus in the US, federal health officials said on Monday, racing ahead of Delta and other variants and accounting for 73% of new infections last week. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention numbers showed nearly a six-fold increase in Omicron’s share of infections in only one week. In much of the country, omicron’s prevalence is even higher. It’s responsible for an estimated 90% of new infections in the New York area, the south-east, the industrial midwest and the Pacific north-west. Since the end of June, the Delta variant has been the main version causing US infections. As recently as the end of November, more than 99.5% of coronaviruses were Delta, according to CDC data.
Scientists in Africa first sounded the alarm about omicron less than a month ago and on 26 November the World Health Organization designated it as a “variant of concern”. The mutant has since shown up in about 90 countries. Much about the omicron variant remains unknown, including whether it causes more or less severe illness. Early studies suggest the vaccinated will need a booster shot for the best chance at preventing omicron infection but even without the extra dose, vaccination still should offer strong protection against severe illness and death. “All of us have a date with Omicron,” said Dr Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “If you’re going to interact with society, if you’re going to have any type of life, Omicron will be something you encounter, and the best way you can encounter this is to be fully vaccinated.”
“..No humans at the CDC stood up in front of a podium and announced the 73% number, or wrote a press release. It came from the CDC’s automated COVID data tracker website.”
Something extremely odd happened this afternoon. The press, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Axios, reported that the CDC had announced that 73% of US COVID-19 cases were now being caused by the Omicron variant, and major public health gurus like Ashish Jha, Eric Topol, Florian Krammer, Eric Feigl-Ding, and Scott Gottlieb circulated the reports at face value. But that’s not really what’s happening. There was some kind of bug in an automated statistical algorithm at the CDC, known as the variant proportions Nowcast. Omicron isn’t really dominant in most of the USA yet (although all evidence continues to indicate it will be soon). And the bug in Nowcast went from a quiet database update on a quiet CDC web page, to a national press sensation, in a matter of hours.
What actually happened? No humans at the CDC stood up in front of a podium and announced the 73% number, or wrote a press release. It came from the CDC’s automated COVID data tracker website. But it’s also not a statement of hard data, it’s the output of an algorithm called the Nowcast. The Nowcast algorithm is based on the CDC’s variant proportions data. Every week a small percentage of US COVID-19 cases are subjected to genome sequencing, which identifies them by strain. Right now it’s about 3.6%, but it varies by state. The CDC collates this data to produce weekly reports on the prevalence of each variant in each of ten regions of the continental USA. However, the genomic data takes time to generate and process, then get deposited into genomics databanks, then get analyzed by the CDC, so the newest data is about two weeks old at each weekly refresh (today, sixteen days old; the week ending December 4).
To display an estimate of current prevalence, the CDC uses an algorithm it calls a “Nowcast,” to project forward from two weeks ago and give an estimate of current prevalence for different strains. The Nowcast algorithm has been remarkably accurate and useful in the past; I followed it with great interest as Alpha, Gamma, Delta, Mu, and other strains washed across the USA from early 2021 until Delta attained total dominance in the summer. It’s a significant achievement for the CDC, and I celebrate them for it. But something is on the fritz now. In this week’s update, which dropped Monday afternoon, the Nowcast algorithm is presenting results that don’t make sense.
“..the “Joe Biden” regime’s main chance for retaining any power is to keep the Covid panic going long enough to re-run the mail-in voting scams of 2020..”
Omicron supposedly started in South Africa some weeks ago and Covid deaths there are at an 18-month low. The existing “vaccines” appear to be completely ineffective against omicron, so how is more of that stuff going to help? And then why all the hysteria about vaxxing up the vaxx-resistant? Insofar as the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines present not insignificant risks of harmful-to-fatal side effects, plus being ineffective, what is the prudent bet there? Speaking of which, will the public even be able to discern whether the alleged winter death surge is a result of Covid or of adverse reactions to the vaxxes? My money would be on adverse vaxx events. Why is there absolutely no talk — except in the state of Florida, run by Governor Ron DeSantis — about comprehensive early treatment of Covid?
Why is the CDC not setting up early treatment centers around the USA, where people with symptoms can receive monoclonal antibody infusions and kits of well-known, cheap, safe and effective oral medicines that can be used easily at home to defeat the virus? (Those medicines have been surreptitiously outlawed by our own CDC, you know.) Is it outlandish to suppose that the official “Joe Biden” government objective is to allow as many people to die as possible in order to keep the public terrorized? Meanwhile, they’ve provoked the public to line up for Covid tests using a PCR system so discredited for Covid detection that months ago the CDC scheduled it to go offline on December 31st, (And, uh, why the long time-lag between the decision and the action? Answer: it allows the CDC to falsely jack up case numbers until the year’s bitter end.)
With the apparent defeat of the Build Back Better boondoggle, following a long list of other failures, the “Joe Biden” regime’s main chance for retaining any power is to keep the Covid panic going long enough to re-run the mail-in voting scams of 2020 in the 2022 congressional elections. It’s a weak play, though, since the opposition is fully onto it. And if the Democratic Party loses as many seats in Congress and the Senate as it deserves to lose, not a single piece of their toxic legislation will see daylight until the mastodons come home in the next ice age. Also consider that Democratic Party operatives by the limousine-load will be hauled in to testify before opposition-controlled committees and many of these will be subject to criminal referrals.
Sunetra Gupta (Oxford), Martin Kulldorff (Harvard), and Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford) are top scientists. Fauci labeled them “fringe epidemiologists”. That’s how much respect he has for science and scientists.
Those weeks following the release of the Great Barrington Declaration did feel odd. On the good side, medical doctors, scientists, public health workers, and citizens all over the world were thrilled that three top scholars in fields of public health and epidemiology had spoken out against lockdowns and for a reasoned approach to Covid. They eagerly signed the document. Yes, there were some attempts to sabotage it too, with fake names and so on, which should have been a clue about what was coming. The fakes were deleted in days and new methods of confirming signatures were deployed. The document, on the one hand, said nothing controversial. The right way to deal with this pandemic, it said, was to focus on those who could face severe outcomes from disease – a very plain point and nothing new.
There was nothing to be gained by locking down the whole of society because of a pathogen with such a huge differential in its demographic impact. The virus would have to become endemic in any case (including the realization of “herd immunity,” which is not a “strategy” but a descriptive term widely accepted in epidemiology) and certainly would not be stopped by destroying peoples’ lives and liberties. The hope of the Declaration was simply that journalists would pay attention to a different point of view and a debate would begin on the unprecedented experiment in lockdowns. Perhaps science could prevail, even in this climate. On the bad side, and at the very same time, following the release, the attacks began pouring in, and they were brutal, structured to destroy.
The three main signers – Sunetra Gupta (Oxford), Martin Kulldorff (Harvard), and Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford) – made the statement as a matter of principle. It was also born of frustration with the prevailing narrative. Mostly this declaration was intended as an educational effort. But the authors were being called vicious names and treated like heretics that should be burned. There certainly was no civil debate; quite the contrary. It was all quite shocking given that the Declaration was a statement concerning what almost everyone in these professional circles believed earlier in the year. They were merely stating the consensus based on science and experience. Nothing more.
Even on March 2, 2020, 850 scientists signed a letter to the White House warning against lockdowns, closures, and travel restrictions. It was sponsored by Yale University. Today it reads nearly like a first draft of the Great Barrington Declaration. Indeed on that same day, Fauci wrote to a Washington Post reporter: “The epidemic will gradually decline and stop on its own without a vaccine.” But following the March 13-16, 2020 lockdowns, the orthodoxy had evidently changed. And suddenly. The signers of the GBD had declined to change with it. Thus did they endure astonishingly brutal smears. What felt odd at the time was the sheer intensity of the attacks, as well as their dogmatism and ferocity. These attacks also had a strong political flavor that had little regard for science.
” I’m calling for an immediate pause, a pause in the public program on Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson and Johnson, until we can do a deep dive on the safety review.”
1) COVID-19 is ONLY spread when symptoms are present. “The virus cannot be spread unless someone has symptoms, unless someone’s sick,” McCullough said in an address on December 12. “They cannot spread COVID-19 They’re not contagious. That’s been shown now.” He elaborated: “It’s only symptoms that are related to the spread of illness and there is no asymptomatic spread. So, if there’s no asymptomatic spread, as long as nobody in this arena has symptoms, there will not be a single case that comes out of this auditorium. That is an important principle. Now, that means if you’re sick, if you’re sick, and you’re susceptible to COVID-19, please stay home. If your children are sick and they’re susceptible to COVID-19, that could be the case, stay home.”
2) Asymptomatic testing is not FDA cleared or supported by any regulatory bodies. “Because there’s no asymptomatic spread … we never needed to close down the schools,” McCullough continued. “That means we never needed to wear masks, right, because you can’t spread it asymptomatically. That means that there should be no asymptomatic testing.” McCullough observed the World Health Organization (WHO) has agreed with this assessment since the end of June. “Widespread screening of asymptomatic individuals is not a currently recommended strategy due to the significant costs associated with it and the lack of data on its operational effectiveness,” WHO stated.
3) Natural immunity is robust, complete, and durable–it’s “one and done.” “Once somebody is recovered from COVID-19 It’s one and done,” McCullough emphasized. “It’s one and done. You’re done.”New York Attorney Elizabeth Brehm asked the CDC for “documents reflecting any documented case of an individual who: (1) never received a COVID-19 vaccine; (2) was infected with COVID-19 once, recovered, and then later became infected again; and (3) transmitted SARS-CoV-2 to another person when reinfected.” The response from Roger Andoh at CDC was: “A search of our records failed to reveal any documents pertaining to your request. The CDC Emergency Operations Center (EOC) conveyed that this information is not collected.” “Now the CDC has got 41,000 cases, sadly, of full-blown vaccine failures that resulted in hospitalization and death,” McCullough went on, adding, “41,000 vaccine failures, they don’t have a single failure of natural immunity.”
4) COVID-19 is a treatable illness in high-risk patients with early sequenced multidrug therapy. “The illness is imminently treatable … we can treat COVID-19, and we can actually markedly influence the natural history of the disease by intercepting it early, and those innovations were discovered early in 2020,” McCullough noted. “Everybody should have a COVID-19 survival kit at home,” he stressed. “We should really take charge of this. This viral pandemic is a war. It’s a war and it’s up to us to step up and start to fight this thing.”
5) The genetic COVID-19 vaccines are not sufficiently safe or effective for the public. Vaccine mandates should be dropped, and the vaccine program should be paused for safety review. “I don’t think anybody had a problem with vaccines a year ago. But we now know as they’re broadly used in the general population, like many new products, it has not worked out and we have seen unacceptably high rates of death that occurs after vaccination. About 50% of the deaths that are recorded happen within 48 hours, 80% within a week. “In the U.S. CDC VAERS [Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System] we have 19,000 deaths, about half of those are domestic,” he observed, adding: “We have 31,000 now that are permanently disabled. That is unacceptable for a medicinal product in the United States.
And it’s unacceptable for our agencies not to review safety for us. And it’s unacceptable for our FDA or CDC or NIH and our White House Task Force. It’s unacceptable for them not to provide a safeguard for our citizens. “Moving forward, the vaccines are not enough to bring us out of the pandemic. I am going to close by calling for, at this point in time, a complete and total ban on any vaccine mandates. I’m calling for an immediate pause, a pause in the public program on Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson and Johnson, until we can do a deep dive on the safety review.
Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are approved for use on children by the Vietnamese government. Children are divided into three age groups for vaccination: 3-11, 12-15, and 16-17 years old. The Ministry of Health predicted that by the fourth quarter of 2021, 95% of the 8.1 million youngsters aged 12 to 17 would have had two COVID-19 vaccine doses. A girl in Hanoi’s Thuong Tin District died only one day after vaccination in November. The cause of death was Grade IV anaphylaxis, according to the Post-Vaccination Events Expert Panel. Anaphylaxis is a set of symptoms caused by an allergic reaction to a foreign substance. The most severe form of anaphylaxis is Grade IV, which includes respiratory and cardiac collapse. However, it was concluded the case had nothing to do with the quality of the vaccine or vaccination methods.
The Hanoi Department of Health consequently spoke with the Ministry of Health regarding two batches of Pfizer vaccines, no. 124001 and 123002, which had been used to vaccinate students. These two batches were initially printed with an expiry date of November 30, 2021, but had their expiry extended to February 28, 2022. After receiving feedback from parents, Hanoi stopped injecting the two vaccines and consulted the Ministry of Health, the other batches were injected normally,” said Director of the Hanoi Department of Health, Tran Thi Nhi Ha. The Hanoi Department of Health published a press release on December 1 verifying that the Covid-19 vaccine is still being administered to students in Hanoi. TrialSite reports that news media in North America and Europe kept far away from this story.
Mobile injection sites are set up at schools in Thanh Hoa, south of Hanoi in the far northern reaches of this Southeast Asian nation. They primarily provide the COVID-19 vaccination to children in high schools, as well as students in vocational and continuing education institutes. However, more than 120 youngsters were hospitalised in the province for post-injection treatment. The provincial health department has taken steps to prevent injection of the suspect batches of vaccines, according to the international version of the VN Express, a popular online news media owned by FPT Group, the largest information technology service company in Vietnam.
Pfizer’s COVID vaccine “probably” caused the death of a healthy 26-year-old man, New Zealand health authorities said Monday. The health officials attributed Rory James Nairn’s death, 12 days after his first COVID shot, to myocarditis. “With the current available information, the board has considered that the myocarditis was probably due to vaccination in this individual,” a COVID-19 Vaccine Independent Safety Monitoring Board said in a statement. Myocarditis is inflammation of the heart muscle that can lead to cardiac arrhythmia and death. It can also result from infections, but more commonly myocarditis is a result of the body’s immune reaction to initial heart damage. Nairn’s death is New Zealand’s second reported death linked to myocarditis.
Health authorities in August reported a woman died from heart inflammation likely due to the vaccine.The board said: “The circumstances of these cases do not impact or change the known information on myocarditis, and the benefits of vaccination with the Pfizer vaccine for COVID-19 continue to greatly outweigh the risk of such rare side effects. “The Board has recommended actions to be taken by the COVID-19 Vaccine and Immunization Program to continue to highlight myocarditis as a very rare side effect of the Pfizer vaccine.” A Pfizer spokesperson said the company was aware of the reported death in New Zealand, and that it monitors all reports of possible adverse events and continues to believe the benefit-risk profile for its vaccine is positive.
Nairn’s fiancée, Ashleigh Wilson, is searching for answers after the “traumatic” ordeal. In a video interview with Chantelle Baker from B-2020, Wilson said her fiancé passed away from what paramedics believe was a heart attack. Wilson said Nairn began experiencing heart palpitations on Nov. 5, the same day he received his first shot but that didn’t recognize the severity of his symptoms. Wilson told the NZ Herald Nairn went into the bathroom as the two were preparing to leave for the hospital. That’s when she heard a thud. “He had fallen, his body was blocking the door, his full weight was against it and I couldn’t get it open,” Wilson said. “I could just see him through a crack in the door, I could see that he was gone.” “I watched him die and I could not get to him,” she said.
If he had wanted to, President Biden could have fulfilled the promises that he made during his campaign and set himself and his party up for a successful 2022. He could have ignored the hollow passions of Twitter and cable TV, lowered the temperatures that so mar our quotidian politics, and delivered the quiet, limited, competent leadership that he promised during his inconspicuous run for the office. Recognizing that his party enjoyed only the barest of congressional majorities, he could have scaled back his lofty ambitions and ensured that his own focus and the focus of the public at large were as tightly aligned as possible. He could have narrowed his initial COVID bill, eschewing the entreaties to go big and limiting the scope of its relief to the desperate alone.
He could have made the bipartisan infrastructure bill a centerpiece, rather than an afterthought, of his first year. He could have grasped that, because federal power is so limited, his role in fighting the pandemic would be exclusively oratorical. He could have understood that people care deeply about illegal immigration and gotten serious about limiting it, even as he struck a kinder tone. Having realized that inflation was clearly not set to be “transitory,” he could have directed the sum of his efforts toward alleviating it. And, while he was doing all that, he could have paid attention to the details that his job throws up in abundance — particularly in the foreign-policy realm — and thereby avoided the catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan that drove a stake through his presidency within six months of his taking his oath.
A little more humility, a greater willingness to say “no,” and a more acute understanding of why he won in the first instance would all have gone a long way. Instead? Well, instead he did precisely none of that. Instead, he ignored all evidence to the contrary and concluded that he was a world-historical figure. Instead, he began talking about “transforming” the country. Instead, he proposed the largest spending program in modern American history. Instead, he sent a welcome message to would-be border-hoppers. Instead, he embraced every ridiculous neologism that progressives saw fit to throw at him: “Latinx,” “BIPOC,” “birthing person,” the lot.
No sooner had Biden won the election, NPR reports, than a bunch of irresponsible voices had begun “flattering him with comparisons to two legendary Democratic presidents of the 20th century — Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson.” And Biden, fool that he is, believed them. In March, Axios confirmed to general derision that Biden was exhibiting a sincere “determination to be one of the most consequential presidents” in American history, and — euphemism alert! — to explore the “elasticity of presidential power.” The correct response to being told that he might be the next FDR would have been to laugh the speaker out of the Oval Office. Instead, flattered, Biden said, “Tell me more.”
Representative Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA), the powerful chair of an Appropriations subcommittee overseeing immigration issues, becomes the 23rd House Democrat to announce she will not seek reelection in 2022. Roybal-Allard was first elected to the House in 1993 and was going to have a redistricting battle. Additionally: “Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.), a leader of the moderate Blue Dog Democrats, announced earlier Monday that she was retiring in 2022 to spend more time with her young children.” Over the weekend, there were also reports Rep. Albio Sires (D-N.J.) plans to retire. The southern border is a mess, and border state Latino Democrats are switching to the Republican Party. Inflation is skyrocketing and will likely continue getting worse through 2022 due to fiscal and monetary policy.
Wage growth (3%) is nowhere near enough to keep up with food inflation (15%+). Making things worse, gas prices have doubled in most areas and will continue to increase into 2022 due to Biden energy policy. The Democrat regulatory environmental programs in coastal areas and ports are continuing to create massive supply chain issues. Home heating costs this winter will be 60 to 70 percent higher due to Biden energy policy. The Joe Biden vaccination mandate is creating a workforce crisis and escalating backlash created by toxic federal overreach. Several blue states (CA, NY, IL) are losing congressional seats due to population losses, while red states are gaining congressional districts due to population growth. Insane spending by Democrats continues without pause or consideration for the inflation they are creating.
The great ideological cleaving between Democrat communists and middle-class Americans continues. Polling indicates there is a major storm on the horizon for Democrats, as their ideological thirst for power is transparent and being rejected. Every single policy the Biden administration touches creates a crap storm of anxiety for the ‘Main Street’ American worker. The only group benefiting from JoeBama policies is the same group that funds them, Wall Street. Making matters worse, the political communists behind the policy execution are brazen in showcasing how the destruction of the American economy is their intent. Now the White House is promising “a winter of severe illness and death for yourselves, your families, and the hospitals you may soon overwhelm.” Not exactly an optimistic message.
Even the New York Times has gone from panic to ‘shock’: “The numbers are even worse for Democrats in the eight states expected to have the closest Senate elections, according to Langer — Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Not only is Biden’s overall job approval rating in those states 33 percent, 10 points lower than it is in the rest of the country, but registered voters in those eight states say they are more likely to vote for Republican House candidates than for Democrats by 23 points (at 58 percent to 35 percent).”
“Jones claimed that the committee is violating his 1st Amendment rights as a journalist, his 4th Amendment right of privacy in his papers, and his 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination.”
Shock jock Alex Jones has sued US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the congressional committee that’s investigating last January’s US Capitol riot to block the panel from accessing his phone records and forcing him to testify. The lawsuit, which was filed on Monday in US District Court in Washington, alleges that Pelosi and the investigative committee that she appointed are trying to suspend constitutional liberties “in coercive secret proceedings specifically designed to satiate a political witch hunt.” The committee subpoenaed Jones in November, demanding documents related to his role in organizing an election-fraud protest that escalated into the Capitol riot, according to the lawsuit. The panel also ignored the radio host’s constitutional objections, insisting that he testify in Washington on January 10, and it sought to obtain his phone records through AT&T.
“The select committee’s members have made it abundantly clear that they are only interested in prosecuting political adversaries,” the lawsuit said, adding that Jones was put in the “unconscionable position” of facing imprisonment if he exercises his constitutional rights. Jones claimed that the committee is violating his 1st Amendment rights as a journalist, his 4th Amendment right of privacy in his papers, and his 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination. The lawsuit noted that committee chairman US Representative Bennie Thompson (D-Mississippi) showed his disregard for those protections when he suggested in an MSNBC interview earlier this month that invoking the 5th Amendment may show that a witness is “part and parcel guilty to what occurred.”
“If the Clinton Campaign was being informed of the work by Fusion GPS, what of the likelihood that the Clinton Campaign was informing the work of Fusion GPS?”
Igor Danchenko, the primary subsource of Christopher Steele, was arrested on November 3, 2021 for giving multiple false statements to federal officials during his 2017 interviews with the FBI. These included lies about Danchenko’s sources, his travels to Russia, and his falsified contacts with Sergei Millian. We laid out Danchenko’s indictment here. Notably, Special Counsel John Durham alleges that one of Danchenko’s real “sources” was Charles Dolan, Jr. (perhaps first identified by Aaron Mate), who served in various leadership positions to elect Bill Clinton in the 1992 and 1996 campaigns and was an advisor to Hillary Clinton in her 2016 campaign for president. With Dolan’s involvement, the obvious question becomes whether he was the intermediary between the Clinton Campaign and Danchenko.
After all, we know that the Hillary Clinton Campaign paid for the Steele dossiers and the work by Fusion GPS. This was arranged through their attorneys (and the DNC attorneys) at Perkins Coie – notably Mark Elias and Michael Sussmann. Elias left the firm this summer. Sussmann was indicted in September 2021 by Special Counsel Durham for giving false statements relating to the Alfa Bank/Trump hoax. It is highly likely that the Clinton Campaign was receiving updates on the Fusion GPS/Christopher Steele work once they were hired by Perkins Coie in the spring of 2016. This is work the client – the Clinton Campaign – paid for. (The sharing of this info would be consistent with the Clinton Campaign – notably Jake Sullivan – receiving backchannel updates on the Alfa Bank hoax.)
If the Clinton Campaign was being informed of the work by Fusion GPS, what of the likelihood that the Clinton Campaign was informing the work of Fusion GPS? It was Clintons’ idea to link Trump and Russia in the first place. And associates of the Clinton Campaign (Sidney Blumenthal) were working to corroborate parts of the dossier. With that in mind, I leave you this bit of information provided by the New York Times in September (emphasis added) suggesting the complicity of the Clinton Campaign: “Some of the questions that Mr. Durham’s team has been asking in recent months — including of witnesses it subpoenaed before a grand jury, according to people familiar with some of the sessions — suggest he has been pursuing a theory that the Clinton campaign used Perkins Coie to submit dubious information to the F.B.I. about Russia and Mr. Trump in an effort to gin up investigative activity to hurt his 2016 campaign.”
Now let’s review what’s going on in Danchenko’s criminal case. He was originally represented by Chris Schafbuch and Mark Schamel. On December 6, 2021, Stuart Sears appeared on behalf of Danchenko. Schafbuch and Schamel dropped out of the case. According to Durham’s latest filing, Stuart Sears is a partner at the law firm Schertler Onorato Mead & Sears. Notably, the firm is currently representing the 2016 “Hillary for America” presidential campaign (the “Clinton Campaign”), as well as multiple former employees of that campaign, in matters before the Special Counsel.”
.@margbrennan: “Sen. Cruz told the Attorney General you should be prosecuted.”
Dr. Fauci: [Laughs] I should be prosecuted? What happened on January 6th, senator? … That’s okay, I’m just gonna do my job. I'm gonna be saving lives, and [Republican lawmakers] are gonna be lying." pic.twitter.com/8hbjgkhEeS
Dr. Anthony Fauci escalated his feud with Republicans on Sunday, declaring on national television that senators who are challenging his COVID policy decision are “anti-science.” ”They’re really criticizing science because I represent science. That’s dangerous,” Fauci told CBS Face the Nation. The top doctor’s comment drew immediate criticism, including from longtime critic Sen. Rand Paul, who called it “hubris.” “It’s astounding and alarming that a public health bureaucrat would even think to claim such a thing, especially one who has worked so hard to ignore the science of natural immunity,” Paul wrote. Wikipedia founder Larry Sanger added his own slam. “Fauci is a bureaucrat, not a scientist,” he tweeted.
Fauci and his boss, NIH Director Francis Collins, spent most of their time on television Sunday talking about the new coronavirus variant called Omicron. Fauci said the U.S. must do “anything and everything” to curb cases of the variant, although it’s “too early to say” whether a lockdown was needed. Collins said it will take weeks before scientists understand how effective current vaccines are at protecting against it. “We do know that this is a variant that has a lot of mutations—like 50 of them, and more than 30 of those in the spike protein, which is the part off the virus that attaches to your human cells if you get infected,” Collins told Fox News. Fauci added he believed Americans had to get ready to live with COVID.
“I don’t think we’re going to eradicate it,” he said. “We’ve only eradicated one infection of mankind, and that’s smallpox. I don’t think we’re even going to eliminate it.” But it was Fauci’s war of words with GOP senators that generated the most buzz.. “Anybody who’s looking at this carefully, realizes that there’s a distinct anti-science flavor to this, so if they get up and criticize science, nobody’s going to know what they’re talking about,” Fauci said. “But if they get up and really aim their bullets at Tony Fauci, well people can recognize that there’s a person there, so it’s easy to criticize, but they’re really criticizing science because I represent science.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) responded to an attack from Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Chief Medical Advisor to the president, on Sunday by doubling down on his call for the Department of Justice to investigate Fauci for alleged false statements that he made while testifying to Congress. “Anybody who spins lies and threatens and all that theater that goes on with some of the investigations and the congressional committees and the Rand Pauls and all that other nonsense, that’s noise, Margaret, that’s noise,” Fauci said during an interview with CBS News’ Margaret Brennan. Later, when asked about Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) saying that Fauci should be prosecuted by the Department of Justice, Fauci responded: “Yeah. I have to laugh at that. I should be prosecuted? What happened on Jan. 6, senator?”
Fauci claimed that Republicans were trying to scapegoat him to protect former President Donald Trump and that Republicans who are attacking him are “lying.” Cruz responded to Fauci’s remarks in a series of tweets late on Sunday afternoon, calling Fauci “an unelected technocrat who has distorted science and facts in order to exercise authoritarian control over millions of Americans.” “He lives in a liberal world where his smug ‘I REPRESENT science’ attitude is praised,” Cruz said.
Cruz then laid out four “facts” related to his call for the DOJ to investigate Fauci:
1/ On May 11, Fauci testified before a Senate Committee that “the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
2/ On October 20, NIH wrote they funded an experiment at the Wuhan lab testing if “spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model.” That is gain of function research.
3/ Fauci’s statement and the NIH’s October 20 letter cannot both be true. The statements are directly contradictory.
4/ 18 USC 1001 makes it [a] felony, punishable by up to 5 years in prison, to lie to Congress.
“No amount of ad hominem insults parroting Democrat talking points will get Fauci out of this contradiction,” Cruz concluded. “Fauci either needs to address the substance—in detail, with specific factual corroboration—or DOJ should consider prosecuting him for making false statements to Congress.”
The Omicron variant is likely to spread internationally, posing a “very high” global risk where Covid-19 surges could have “severe consequences” in some areas, the WHO said on Monday. The UN agency, in technical advice to its 194 member states, urged them to accelerate vaccination of high-priority groups and to “ensure mitigation plans are in place” to maintain essential health services. “Omicron has an unprecedented number of spike mutations, some of which are concerning for their potential impact on the trajectory of the pandemic,” the WHO said. “The overall global risk related to the new variant of concern Omicron is assessed as very high.” Further research is needed to better understand Omicron’s potential to escape protection against immunity induced by vaccines and previous infections, it said, adding that more data was expected in coming weeks. “Covid-19 cases and infections are expected in vaccinated persons, albeit in a small and predictable proportion”, it added.
“The preparation that we have ongoing … just needs to be revved up,” he continued, “by getting more people vaccinated and getting the fully vaccinated boosted.”
They have no clue if the vaccines will do anything vs Omicron.
White House coronavirus adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci has described the Omicron variant of Covid-19 as a “clarion call” to get people vaccinated. This is amid fears that the new variant may prove resistant to existing jabs. In the weeks since it was first discovered in Botswana, the Omicron variant of Covid-19 has rapidly become the dominant strain of the virus in South Africa, and cases have been discovered in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Although the US has shut down travel from a number of affected African countries, Fauci told ABC News on Sunday that “inevitably it will be here, and the question is, will we be prepared for it?” “The preparation that we have ongoing … just needs to be revved up,” he continued, “by getting more people vaccinated and getting the fully vaccinated boosted.”
Fauci also touted the wearing of face masks as key to preparing for Omicron. In a separate appearance on NBC News, he described the rise of the Omicron variant as a “clarion call” to get more people vaccinated. Little is known about Omicron, save for its high number of spike protein mutations, which Fauci said gave the variant “an advantage in transmissibility.” Preliminary information suggests the variant may evade the protection offered by the current crop of vaccines. The first recorded Omicron cases in Botswana occurred in fully vaccinated people, and the European Centre for Disease Control stated on Friday that the new variant might be associated with “a significant reduction in vaccine effectiveness and increased risk for reinfections.”
Fauci also touched on these worries on NBC News, telling host Chuck Todd that Omicron “might evade immune protection … possibly even against some of the vaccine-induced antibodies.” South African governmental adviser Professor Barry Schoub has described the Omicron symptoms as “mild” for “the great majority of the patients” infected with the new Covid-19 strain. “Their symptoms were so different and so mild from those I had treated before,” South African Medical Association chair Dr. Angelique Coetzee told The Telegraph on Saturday. In his push to get more Americans vaccinated, Fauci has previously described the Alpha, Beta, and Delta variants as “clarion calls” to boost vaccination. Some 59% of the US population is now fully vaccinated, and 21% of these people have received booster doses.
Critics took aim Saturday at White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci and President Biden for their “worse than useless” response to the highly contagious Omicron variant of COVID-19. “No worries, travel ban begins next week because you know, variants don’t spread on holiday weekends,” Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky scoffed on Twitter. “Who really believes this variant isn’t already here?” The Fauci-approved weekend-long delay in launching the ban on travel from Omicron-infected African countries angered City Councilman Joe Borelli (R-SI). “Why do people still take this man seriously?” Borelli, the chamber’s new minority leader, asked. “Either this is a life or death emergency, or it doesn’t need to happen. It seems like this is a lockdown for the sake of lockdowns.”
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) decried “the stunning hypocrisy of Democrats” regarding COVID travel bans during the last 20 months. “When President Trump took bold and decisive action in February 2020 to impose travel restrictions into the United States from coronavirus hot spots, Joe Biden attacked him, calling this decision a disgrace and xenophobic,” said Stefanik — who has called for Fauci to be fired over the gain-of-function funding controversy. And Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) condemned the Biden administration’s too-little, too-late travel measure as “worse than useless.” “Joe Biden and Tony Fauci push crushing restrictions on Americans—like masking two-year-olds—that are pointless,” Cotton tweeted Saturday. “But when it comes to targeted travel bans to protect American citizens, it’s nothing but incompetence and half measures from this White House.”
Medical company BioNTech said this week that it is testing its vaccine against the latest COVID-19 variant to determine whether or not the shot is effective against the latest mutation of the pandemic virus. World leaders and medical officials expressed alarm this week at a new “variant of concern” arising in Africa, one that is allegedly, like the Delta variant before it, highly transmissible. Officials from numerous countries including the U.S. put in place travel bans against countries reportedly experiencing spread of the variant. BioNTech said that it was exploring whether or not it would have to alter its vaccine in any way to account for the new strain.
“We expect more data from the laboratory tests in two weeks at the latest,” the company told told Reuters. “These data will provide more information about whether B.1.1.529 could be an escape variant that may require an adjustment of our vaccine if the variant spreads globally.” The company told media this week that earlier this year it had already planned for the potential need of a rapid alteration of the vaccine in case of the emergence of new variants.
One look at the ridiculous plunge across asset markets on Friday, which sent oil into one of its biggest tailspins in history (which as Goldman calculated would only make sense if the Omicron lockdowns are twice as bad as anything observed so far), and one would think that the Omicron variant – which as Edward Snowden so aptly put it “sounds like the name of an 80s movie’s evil Robot King” (of course, the WHO had no choice but to skip the Xi variant, located right before Omicron in the Greek alphabet for obvious propaganda reasons) – is several times more aggressive and far more deadly than the Delta or any other Covid variant to date. Neither is the case, and in fact, as even Tom Peacock, one of the original Imperial College narrative-setters admitted, “it may turn out to be an odd cluster that is not very transmissable.”
Alas, that would not help politicians who kill a lot of birds with just one brand new and “horrifying” variant, including getting a carte blanche for trillions in new vote-buying stimmies, enforcing even more ruthless and authoritarian government restrictions a dream come true for all liberal fans of big government, and most importantly forcing another round of mail-in ballot elections one year from today.
And yet, perhaps the pandemic apocalypse is not just around the corner. On one hand, Angelique Coetzee, the chairwoman of the South African Medical Association said today that “the new Omicron variant of the Coronavirus results in MILD disease, WITHOUT prominent symptoms.” On the other, none other than the most important bank on Wall Street – Goldman “Vampire Squid” Sachs – which sets the narrative that all other banks dutifully follow, has decided that it’s not worth starting a panic crash over this mutation and in a note published late on Friday writes that “this mutation is unlikely to be more malicious and that the existing vaccines will most likely continue to be effective in preventing hospitalizations and deaths” and as a result, while Goldman “would monitor the situation in Gauteng closely over the next month, we do not think that the new variant is sufficient reason to make major portfolio changes.”
[..] Conclusion: while we do not have sufficient information to forecast a global B.1.1.529 wave, a high rate of transmission almost inevitably leads to a variant dominance. Nevertheless, we can have reasonable degree of confidence that this mutation is unlikely to be more malicious and that the existing vaccines will most likely continue to be effective in preventing hospitalizations and deaths. As such, while we would monitor the situation in Gauteng closely over the next month, we do not think that the new variant is sufficient reason to make major portfolio changes.
Despite months of protests, Swiss citizens have overwhelmingly voted to keep the country’s system of Covid vaccination certificates in place. The deal was sweetened for voters by the promise of financial assistance. Some 62% of voters chose on Sunday to maintain the country’s coronavirus measures. These measures include a controversial system of Covid vaccination certificates, required since September to enter bars, restaurants, theaters and other public spaces. Majorities in 24 of Switzerland’s 26 cantons backed the law, with only the tiny cantons of Schwyz and Appenzell Innerrhoden rejecting the measures. All of Switzerland’s political parties with the exception of the right-wing Swiss People’s Party supported the law, which was brought to a vote after anti-lockdown groups gathered nearly 200,000 signatures to challenge it earlier this year.
Under Switzerland’s system of direct democracy, any initiative can be brought to a vote with 100,000 signatures. Voters in June backed the introduction of the measures by 60%, but recent months have seen protests break out in Swiss cities over the introduction of vaccine certificates. Police in October used rubber bullets, tear gas and water cannon to disperse crowds of people who broke through barriers outside the parliament building in Bern. “The democratic process has been respected but the law is still unconstitutional,” Michelle Cailler of the ‘Friends of the Constitution’ group said after the vote on Sunday. Cailler’s group was one of several who campaigned against the law.
Céline Amaudruz of the Swiss People’s Party, which is currently topping opinion polls in Switzerland, called on the government to take “coherent and measured” action, rather than treating the result as a “blank cheque” to impose whatever coronavirus-related policies it wishes. The law voted on provides for more than just vaccine passports. It also expands financial support for citizens and businesses affected by the pandemic, a provision that may have won over some reluctant voters.
A federal appeals court on Friday issued a temporary stay of a coronavirus vaccine mandate for prison workers. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued the stay, postponing the Jan. 12 deadline to get thousands of prison workers vaccinated until at least March, The Associated Press reported. The move by the appeals court came after a request for a stay of a September ruling by a lower court pending an appeal. The appeals court also moved up opening briefs to Dec. 13, according to AP. California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation statistics show that at least 240 prisoners have died from COVID-19 and more than half the state prison population has been infected, according to the AP.
The move from the appeals court blocked an earlier decision from U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar that required prison employees to get the vaccine. Tigar’s decision would also require prisoners to get either the vaccine or a medical or religious exemption in order to do work outside the prison or get in-prison visits from family. Both Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and the California Correctional Peace Officers Association opposed the prison worker mandate, the AP noted. Don Specter, director of the nonprofit Prison Law Office, said the court’s decision “puts both the prison staff and the incarcerated population at greater risk of infection,” according to AP.
Background : We aimed to establish an acute treatment protocol to increase serum vitamin D, evaluate the effectiveness of vitamin D3 supplementation, and reveal the potential mechanisms in COVID-19.
Methods : We retrospectively analyzed the data of 867 COVID-19 cases. Then, a prospective study was conducted, including 23 healthy individuals and 210 cases. A total of 163 cases had vitamin D supplementation, and 95 were followed for 14 days. Clinical outcomes, routine blood biomarkers, serum levels of vitamin D metabolism, and action mechanism-related parameters were evaluated.
Results : Our treatment protocol increased the serum 25OHD levels significantly to above 30 ng/mL within two weeks. COVID-19 cases (no comorbidities, no vitamin D treatment, 25OHD <30 ng/mL) had 1.9-fold increased risk of having hospitalization longer than 8 days compared with the cases with comorbidities and vitamin D treatment. Having vitamin D treatment decreased the mortality rate by 2.14 times. The correlation analysis of specific serum biomarkers with 25OHD indicated that the vitamin D action in COVID-19 might involve regulation of INOS1, IL1B, IFNg, cathelicidin-LL37, and ICAM1.
Conclusions : Vitamin D treatment shortened hospital stay and decreased mortality in COVID-19 cases, even in the existence of comorbidities. Vitamin D supplementation is effective on various target parameters; therefore, it is essential for COVID-19 treatment.
Thousands gathered outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology with faces of anxious anticipation over the weekend, as rumors had been circulating that a new COVID-19 variant would soon be named. The hopeful pilgrims’ hours of waiting were not in vain. Cheers erupted as white smoke began pouring out of the chimney early Sunday morning, signaling the creation and naming of a new COVID-19 variant. “It was a lively debate,” said one source from inside the Wuhan lab. “Yuhang suggested we just keep following the Greek alphabet and name it Xi. We haven’t heard from him in a few days, come to think of it.”
“Nu” was also floated as a possibility, but scientists wanted to avoid the stigma of being associated with nu-metal, generally acknowledged as the worst musical genre on the planet. One guy kept wanting to call it “The One-Der Variant” but this was confusing as everyone kept pronouncing it as Oh-NEE-der instead of Wonder. Finally, there was a last-ditch effort to name it the Trump variant, but this was finally defeated in favor of the safer “Omicron variant” according to sources within the lab. After the celebration died down, the pilgrims shuffled away, their faces full of cheer. But they’ll be back in a few weeks for the next one.
“Let your light shine so brightly that others can see their way out of the dark.”
~ Native American
France
Following Emanuel Macron’s announcement that a health pass would be required in all “bars, restaurants, amusement parks, shopping centers, trains, coaches and planes,” hundreds of thousands took to the streets across France for several months. 182/pic.twitter.com/SDXzIoWEMF
Thomas Cole The Course of Empire – The Arcadian or Pastoral State 1834
This essay is from longtime and very dear friend David Holmgren, guru/founder/apostle of permaculture, who says:
“Your constant work has help kept me informed through the roller coaster.
love
david”
David Holmgren:
As the pandemic rolled into its second year, I became concerned that the psychosocial fallout of the pandemic, and especially the response at the global and local levels, could represent an existential threat to permaculture and kindred movements. At one level, this threat is the same as that to families, workplaces, networks and organisations more generally, where a sense of urgency to implement the official response, especially lockdowns and mass vaccination, is producing a huge gulf between an ever more certain majority and a smaller minority questioning or challenging the official response.
My aim in this essay is to focus on the critical importance of using all our physical, emotional and intellectual resources towards maintaining connections across what could be a widening gulf of frustration and distrust within our movement, reflecting society at large. I want to explore how permaculture ethics and design principles can help us empathetically bridge that gulf without needing to censor our truth or simply avoid the issues.
While the pandemic and the responses to it will pass in time, I believe the future will be characterised by similar issues that test our ability to tolerate uncertainty and diversity and to thus exercise solidarity within kin, collegiate and network communities of practise.
International Permaculture Day May 2013 Daylesford Community Garden
Future Scenarios and the Brown Tech future
The positive grounded thinking that characterises permaculture has always been informed by a dark view of the state of the world and long-term emerging threats. Future Scenarios is my 2008 exploration of four near-future ‘energy descent’ scenarios driven by the variable rates of oil and resource depletion on the one hand and rate of onset of serious climate change on the other. Six years later, I wrote the essay ‘Crash on Demand: Welcome to the Brown Tech Future’ where I ‘called’ Brown Tech as being the already emergent scenario.
In the longer version of this ‘Pandemic brooding’ essay, I review and reinterpret this work in light of the pandemic and responses to it.
Permaculture pluralism
Anyone involved in permaculture knows that permies can come to quite different conclusions about what is the most ethical and practical solution to the same problem. For example faced with marauding wildlife, some will go to considerable expense (and resource consumption) building elaborate fences, anti-aviaries and other deterrents to separate wildlife from food. Others will treat the wildlife as another abundance of the system to be harvested. Various permaculture principles, as well as the fundamental ethic of Care of Earth, might be invoked to support both approaches.
Likewise, many permies believe taxation is essential to redistribute resources from places of abundance to those of scarcity and as an expression of solidarity essential to any functioning, let alone ethical, society. Others see almost all the expenditure by governments of tax revenues as representing rape of Mother Earth’s abundance and theft from Indigenous peoples, and further as either downright evil or at best a bandaid covering festering wounds. An ethical response is to minimise taxpaying (by reducing income and consumption). Again, design principles and ethics can be invoked to support either position.
From my perspective, grappling with the ethical and systemic issue is more important than the notion that there might be a correct answer, and therefore a wrong answer, to the challenge. In the past, there have been heated debates, and agreements to disagree, but rarely would participants in permaculture design courses, convergences or networks see the answers of others as reasons to reject permaculture. Many celebrate personal actions as small-scale experiments with their good, bad and interesting outcomes informing other experiments, especially the next generation’s, as we muddle through energy descent to hopefully more benign, or at least less-bad, futures.
Pandemic flavoured Brown Tech
I believe the pandemic and the responses to it represent a major turning point in crystalising the Brown Tech future. It ticks so many boxes:
a nature-driven crisis which has been long predicted, and to some extent, planned for
rolling uncertainty that progressively breaks down past expectations
a crisis which, like a war, requires the suspension of normal economic activity, personal rights and governance processes
a demand for strong action by government for the common good informed by science
a revival of Keynesian policies including a massive increase in government debt
an enemy (the virus) that can be easily demonised without there being too many defenders to ignore or silence
strong censorship of broadcast media and novel efforts to censor social media to sideline debate that could undermine the rapidly emergent and evolving program.
If the crisis is not solved, then demonisation progressively shifts to those resisting the plan.
This situation is creating the fork in the road where some permies will find themselves (perhaps surprisingly) following the program, while others will have become certain that they will at least quietly resist complying to some degree or other, right up to a radicalised public resistance, whether that be through resigning from work, street protest or satirical art.
We can learn and gain, individually and collectively, from these increasingly divergent paths – but the learnings could be painful. Let’s consider the benefits that might have led permies down one or another path, perhaps unwittingly, to increasingly polarised positions.
The mainstream plan
Although there are differences of emphasis and policies around the government responses to the pandemic, these debates are around the margins, even if they are at times heated. Most fundamentally, the mainstream plan, informed by the scientific and medical establishment, takes the following as self-evident:
The virus is an existential threat to society that must be contained and disarmed if not eliminated before an establishment of some hoped-for, tolerable new normal.
Social distancing, disinfectant cleaning, testing, contract tracing, masks and various levels of quarantine, border controls and lockdowns are the only mechanisms available to prevent collapse of the health system and deaths escalating to horrific levels in the short term.
Novel vaccine technology is the only real hope for a tolerable new normal.
To achieve effective herd immunity and minimise death, some great majority of the adult population and probably children need to get vaccinated as soon as possible.
The adverse effects of these provisionally approved vaccines are minor and/or rare and much less than the risk of the disease.
Preventative and early treatments are at best of marginal value, or more likely based on false hope and fraud.
The suspension of normal civil liberties is a necessary, albeit temporary, measure to achieve the plan in a timely fashion and reduce the suffering both from the virus and the plan itself.
People who actively resist the plan need stronger social, economic and, where necessary, legal sanctions to ensure their actions don’t prevent the plan from working for the common good.
Apart from debate around the margins about how best to respond to these givens, debate and questioning at the level of science, logistics, economics, law, politics, media and social media is not just unnecessary, but an existential threat to the plan and society at large, so must be prevented by unprecedented means.
It is the responsibility of every citizen to play a part in the plan, be bold in convincing those who are hesitant, and challenging those not following the plan, especially those actively resisting it.
Permies following the plan are likely to see themselves as being part of a society-wide collective effort to minimise pain and suffering in the aged, the disadvantaged and those in poor health; a choice in favour of collective and longer-term gain at the cost of individual and short-term sacrifice. For many of us, this is a perfect metaphor for what is needed to address the climate emergency. By accepting what appears to be a broad consensus of global, national and local medical and scientific experts, we avoid the protracted debate and lack of a technical consensus that has stymied governments in initiating strong action to address the climate emergency.
For permies in despair about the waste and dysfunction of the consumer economy, the closure, albeit temporary, of many discretionary services and businesses is a taste for how we might need to decide what is important; maximum consumer choice for the affluent versus the provision of basic needs for all. The personal sacrifice and adaptation to difficulties, including stay-at-home lockdown, have been opportunities to focus more on the important things in life and get a taste of what social solidarity feels like.
Reports of contrarian views seem to mostly come from sources contaminated by association with climate denial and other views we categorically reject. The resisters’ outrage looks to many like just more selfish, science denying and ignorant right-wing rednecks, trying to prevent collective wisdom and social solidarity from working. Familiar powerful bad players in global corporations or nation states have been replaced by much more immediate angry undesirables, who without much power or vision, could wreck the hard work of the collective to create a workable new normal.
The dissident view
It is more difficult to generalise about those who question or reject the program. A great diversity of views, explanations, feelings and actions flourish in an environment of unprecedented censorship. While there is great sensitivity about the term ‘censorship’, let alone ‘propaganda’ by those supporting the plan, for those on the other side, it is astonishing how rapidly the axe has fallen on enquiry, and debate, in the mainstream media, social media, workplaces and families, let alone in defence of what – until very recently – most of us took as our inalienable rights.
For many permies, the pandemic seems another example of hyped threat like the ‘war on weeds’, ‘war on drugs’, ‘war on terror’ used to manipulate the population to comply with some version of disaster capitalist1Disaster capitalism feeds off natural (climate change) and other disasters to provide recovery and reconstruction services funded by the public that typically benefit the corporate providers and contribute to ongoing dependencies. The term was used by Naomi Klein to describe the evolution of late stage capitalism over recent decades. solutions. Most sceptics acknowledge the virus as real, but not as dangerous as the cure in lockdowns and other draconian measures. The ‘war on the virus’ seems just as futile or misguided as all the other wars on nature, substances and concepts. So much for trying to have nuanced discussions about viruses as an essential and largely symbiotic mechanism for the exchange of genetic material and mediation of evolution!
While the closure and loss of cafés, gyms and hairdressers might not be a great loss, except to those directly affected, many of us have noticed that the official response to the pandemic tends to follow a pattern of support and strengthening of dominant corporations while leading to the weakening and likely collapse of small business and community self-organised activities.
During the first lockdown, ‘stay at home in your household’ was celebrated as a great plus for people getting the RetroSuburbia message. More recently, the messaging about the problem of shared and multi-generation households being suspect has been building, especially in the working-class western suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne where many of essential and less well paid workers live. We have shifted from a joke about ‘which permie created the pandemic?’ to a gritted teeth recognition that the response to the pandemic is working to vacuum people into another level of dependence on techno-industrial systems.
Many permies have taken advantage of the shift online to network more effectively around the country and the world, but we are deeply troubled by our increasing dependence on mediated experiences and what seems like draconian regulation of informal engagement with people and nature. The concerns for what this is doing to children are far more serious than the loss of the regulated version of social interaction that children get at school.
For many of us, it is completely natural to be sceptical about one big fast answer provided by the giants of the pharma industry, while they have been granted legal immunity for the consequences of their novel products.. Many have made the rational assessment that the very low risks of the virus (for most of us at least) seem better than the unknown of a novel technology approved and pushed on a frustrated and frightened population in record time. Some in this camp were sceptical about vaccines in general but most have been influenced by the largely censored views from some leading global experts, that these vaccines are in a totally different risk category to all previous vaccines.
While waiting and seeing what happens next may look selfish to the majority, the difficulty in getting access to data and unbiased interpretation drives many to rely on their gut feelings. One or more examples of spin and manipulation of data by officials, and especially the media, leads to a general collapse in trust about any, and even all, aspects of the official story. For instance:
Many of us have seen evidence that existing low cost and low risk treatments are available and used effectively in some countries resisting the ‘no available treatment’ orthodoxy.
Most understand that while the vaccines seemed to give some protection from more severe effects at least in the early stages, they do not appear to stop transmission, at least of the latest variant.
Many wonder why the build-up of natural immunity from prior exposure to the virus is not considered as part of the solution that should at least be discussed before vaccine passports are implemented.
Concerns about more serious adverse effects of the vaccines, as predicted by some experts, have developed into alarm, anger and resistance as both the evidence increases and efforts at cover up and spin become worse. Extreme consequences that many of us dismissed early on as highly unlikely are now showing up in hard-to-read scientific papers, clinical reports and official records and databases.
A similar process has happened with the official responses. For example vaccine passports are now widely discussed and debated as part of the attempt to get as many people vaccinated as possible, as the efficacy of vaccines falls and concerns about adverse effects lock in resistance by a minority. At the start of the pandemic this possibility was decried as paranoid conspiracy theory.
France has been leading the charge to impose vaccine passports for many public and work spaces including hospitals. It’s hard to assess how large the resistance will be in different countries and circumstances but there are already signs that whole industries will lose a significant part of their workforce as some substantial minority of the population withdraw their work, consumption and investment in the system rather than getting the vaccine. Whether by design, policy stupidity or the unexplained viral power of censored scientists and vaccine doubters to overcome the largest public health education/public relations/propaganda effort in history, it is conceivable that the result could be economic contraction on a much larger scale than has occurred as a result of lockdowns so far.2 I can’t help but see what is unfolding as a bizarre version of my ‘Crash on Demand’ scenario
Economic contraction could mostly be in the discretionary economy, but how would the health system cope with a loss of staff, especially if some combination of ineffective vaccines against new strains and antibody-enhanced disease lead to medically informed people losing faith before the general public? Part of the solution might be doctors and nurses from overseas,3In the week since I wrote this sentence, doctors from overseas are now part of the plan for Australia or the adoption of treatment options for Covid currently being used with success in countries like Mexico and India.
Australia and New Zealand seem to be something of a test bed for the most authoritarian regulations in an attempt to keep Covid as close to zero as possible (and failing). Large numbers of people in other countries see us as a police state and wonder why there hasn’t been more resistance Down Under.
Some of us have noted plans promoted by the World Economic Forum for a Global Reset that will require a command economy to respond to the climate emergency, and that the pandemic is an opportunity to implement some of the structures and processes needed to create what some fear is a global new world order.
For many people, the trajectory from trust to mistrust often leads to either deep depression or an energised anger, mostly focused on the authorities but often expressed to friends and family at great cost to all concerned.
Although I have some of those thoughts and feelings, I mostly feel a great tension between a deep and somewhat detached fascination with the big picture and the sense of urgency I habitually feel in spring to get fully cranking with the seasonal garden and generally keeping our home at Melliodora shipshape. I feel like I finally have a box seat to watch the train of techno-industrial civilization hitting the Limits to Growth stone wall and breaking apart, all in slow motion.
The rapidly evolving situation and all its psychological, sociological and economic dimensions suggest an expanding field of possibilities. These could include:
a cyber pandemic that crashes the global financial system,
rapid reduction in consumption of oil and other critical resources and consequently greenhouse gas emissions as a result of the virus,
plus of course accelerating climate disasters.
In different scenarios, concern about the virus and the ability to implement the plan could become ever more intense, or alternatively, be shunted offstage or metasatised into dealing with the next crisis. Consequently, the details of what worked, what didn’t, who takes the credit and who gets the blame, would probably all be lost in the swirling muddy waters of compounding crises.
A personal view of the pandemic
Up until this point, I have not indicated my personal interpretation of either the virus or the response because I wanted to focus on the bigger systemic drivers without getting muddied in the good/bad, right/wrong, us/them polarities. However we all have to face what life throws in our path with whatever internal and collective resources we have at hand. As is my lifelong habit, I have done my own ‘due diligence’ to understand and guide my personal decisions. In the past I have always been open about my conclusions and decisions, whether around the campfire or on the most public of forums. I have often joked about the comfort I feel in being a dissident about most things including being beaten up at primary school in the early days of the Vietnam war for being a ‘commie traitor’ to being ostracised in the 1990s for opposing the ‘war on weeds’ orthodoxy of the environmental mainstream. But today being a dissident is no joking matter. Unfortunately the psychosocial environment has now become so toxic that the pressures to self-censor have become much more complex and powerful. Much more is at stake than personal emotions, ego, reputation or opportunities and penalties.
Following my instinct for transparency, I will state my position, which has been evolving since I first started to consider whether the novel virus in Wuhan might lead to a repeat of the 1919 flu pandemic or even something on the scale of the Black Death. I can summarise my current position and beliefs as follows:
The virus is real, novel and kills mostly aged, ill and obese people with symptoms both similar to and different from related corona viruses.
It most likely is a result of ‘Gain of Function’ research at Wuhan Institute of Virology in China supported by funding from the US government.
Escape rather than release was the more likely start of the pandemic.
Vaccines in use in western world countries are based on novel technology developed over many years, but without resulting in effective or safe vaccines previously.
The fear about the virus generated by the official response and media propaganda is out of proportion to the impact of the disease.
Effective treatment protocols for Covid-19 exist and if those are implemented early in the disease, then hospitalisation and deaths can be greatly reduced, as achieved in some countries that faced severe impacts (especially Mexico and India).
The socioeconomic and psychosocial impacts of the response will cause more deaths than the virus has so far, especially in poor countries.
The efficacy of vaccines is falling while reported adverse effects are now much greater proportionally than for previous vaccines.
The under-reporting of adverse events is also much higher than for previous vaccines, although this is still an open question.
The possibility of antibody dependent enhancement (ADE) leading to higher morbidity and death in the future is a serious concern and could be unfolding already in countries such as Israel where early and high rates of vaccination have occurred.
Given the toxic nature of views already expressed about (and by) people I know and respect, I am not going to engage in an extensive collating of evidence, referencing who I think are reliable experts and intermediaries who can interpret the virus, the vaccine or any of the related parts of the puzzle. Outsourcing personal responsibility for due diligence to authorities is a risky strategy at the best of times; in times of challenge and rapid change the risks escalate. I do not want to convince anyone to not have the vaccine, but I do want to provide solidarity with those struggling (often alone and isolated) to find answers, so the following are two starting points that I think could be helpful:
For those focused on treatment options, the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCA) physicians are a good source on this rapidly emerging field of clinical practise.
As a healthy 66-year-old I am not personally afraid of the virus, but if greater virulence and death rate do emerge with new variants, I might consider the preventative regimen recommended by the FLCCA doctors. There is no way I will be getting any of the current vaccines in the foreseeable future, no matter what the sanctions and demonisation of my position on this matter.
At this point there may be readers who decide to ignore anything and everything I have written as obviously deluded. These are the costs of transparency.
Valuing the Marginal
Tolerance, let alone celebration of diversity, is not the easy permaculture principle many of us assume. Valuing the marginal can be even harder, especially if we study the darker periods of human history.
Over most of history, minority ethnicities and subcultures lived in ambiguous complementarity with dominant majorities. For hundreds, if not a thousand, years my Jewish ancestors made valuable contributions to European culture while managing to maintain their own culture to an extraordinary extent. They lived in ghettos not just for protection from the eruptions of intolerance in the dominant Christian communities but to ensure their language and culture wasn’t swamped by that of the majority. While the Jews carried the elitist belief that they were God’s Chosen People, they didn’t attempt to gain converts and were naturally respectful to the majority Christians. They survived through all but the worst of antisemitic pogroms by not antagonising the majority, largely accepting the restrictions placed on them by society. What else could they do?
Similar dynamics could emerge from the virus and the vaccine, where a subculture of home birth, home education, home food production and alternative health brings together people of previously diverse subcultures, including permies, who are excluded from society. That exclusion will seem self-inflicted to the majority, but for those excluded it will feel critical to both survival and identity.
Is it sensible to plead for tolerance in line with sensitivities to the rights of other minorities? Or is that just an invitation to be stoned to death, if not literally then virtually, on social media?
Unfortunately one of the weaknesses of western culture, which shows up in both Christian and Muslim traditions, is the idea that if a particular path is the correct one, then everyone should follow it. From the perspective of east Asian philosophy and many Indigenous traditions, harmonious balance is more important than the right way. The yin yang symbol showing each polarity containing the seed of its opposite encapsulates this critically important antidote to the recurring western theme about the triumph of good over evil. In The Patterning Instinct Jeremy Lent explores how these different world views have shaped history and that any emergent ecological world view will foreground the importance of harmonious balance.
The wisdom of the collective
I want to lead by example in trying to understand and articulate why it is good that the majority of the population appears to be strongly behind the official plan and that maybe it is even good that a majority of my permaculture colleagues might be lining up to get vaccinated, when I have no intention of doing so.
Firstly, I acknowledge the obvious reason that if the official story is right, the majority getting vaccinated will combine with naturally acquired immunity and control the worst effects of the virus without the need to get every last dissenter vaccinated.
Secondly, given the pressure to push the vaccination rate in every way possible, encouraging some extra hesitators to resist will only increase the pressure and possibly lead to harsher sanctions as well as more broken family relationships, reputations, pain and suffering, which could be worse than potential adverse effects of the virus, or the vaccine, on those people.
Thirdly, because so many people I respect as intelligent and ethical are following the plan, I won’t fall into the trap of losing respect for who they are, what they have done and what else they might do in the future. And if it turns out this is the start of a more permanent hard fascist command state, then we need people of good values on the inside to keep open whatever channels of communication remain possible.
As systems unravel, the stories that make sense of the world also fall apart and in the desperate search for mental lifeboats, different stories come to the fore. The mainstream story around the pandemic is one such mental lifeboat that allows people to maintain faith and function. Without the renewed source of faith and order from rational science guiding technological wizardry, the psychosocial shock from a pandemic could be enough to create social, economic and political chaos on a historically unprecedented scale, at least in long-affluent countries like Australia.
Whatever the nature of the next crisis, I think it will require citizens to by and large accept that the behaviours, rights and freedoms we took for granted are artifacts of a vanishing world. Further, it will provide a harsh reality check on how dependent most of us are on systems we have no control over, so most will find they have little choice but to accept the new state of affairs.
While I might resent what I see as unnecessary sanctions on those resisting, I accept than in the early stage of Brown Tech energy descent, harsh and by some perspectives, arbitrary, controls on behaviour will be part of our reality and are arguably necessary to maintain some sort of social order (even if short-sighted or not sustainable in the long run). My aim is to focus on how we ameliorate the adverse effects of a predicament that humanity cannot escape.
More philosophically, the virus and the response to it could be seen as a meditation practise showing us how no one is an island separated from the whole of life. To break down the toxic notion that we are free agents to do as we choose without consideration of consequences, especially for future generations and the wider community of life, is something permaculture teaching has tried to bring to daily life. How we do this in meaningful ways is a constant challenge.
Sympathy for the devil
Having at least had a go at seeing the good in the mainstream plan, I now want to articulate quite passionately why the majority should at least tolerate and not seek to further punish the minority for their resistance. To advocate for this within the permaculture movement, I appeal to our pluralism in celebrating the diversity of action. This is especially where permies take the risk of being the unvaccinated guinea pigs, who can at least be a control group in this grand experiment on the human family. Beyond that, I hope our colleagues inside the tent will see the need to express solidarity with our right to chart our own course and not feel they have to be silent for fear of being cast out of the tent.
While I respect the younger permaculture folk following the plan for the common good, I still believe the most creative deep adaptations to the Brown Tech world will be crafted at the geographic and conceptual fringes by younger risk takers coming together in new communities of hope. While the paths to the armoured centre and the feral fringes both have their risks, those on the inside, especially older people, should accept that the young risk takers on the fringes might create pathways though the evolutionary bottleneck of energy descent more effectively than the best resourced and rationally devised plans from within the system of thinking that has created the civilisation crises.
Whether or not the pandemic will lead to the flowering of creative light-footed models for adaptation, the larger energy descent crisis for which permaculture was originally designed (that most permies recognise as the ‘Climate Emergency’) needs these responses at the margins. If the permaculture movement cannot digest this basic truth and at least defend the right of people to craft their own pathways in response to collapse of all certainties, then our movement will have failed the first great test of its relevance in a world of energy descent.
Some permie dissidents will double down in their focus on preparation to survive and thrive in spite of the sanctions, while others will be energised by non-violent direct action to resist what they see as draconian and counterproductive collective punishment. In doing so they may draw on past experience, or inspiration, from the frontlines of anti-war, environmental defence and free communication resistance.
In the past, more apolitical permies trying to introduce permaculture to socially conservative punters could still acknowledge, at least privately, the element of truth in the quip ‘permaculture is revolution disguised as gardening’. In today’s climate, can permies inside the tent accept and appreciate their colleagues on the frontlines of a new resistance movement that might moderate the extremes of how society navigates the larger climate emergency? Or will they flip and decide permaculture was, after all, mostly hippy nonsense now further contaminated with toxic right wing conspiracy madness, so must be dumped as unfit for purpose in our new world?
In saying this, I’m not suggesting we should all follow suit, let alone belittle or demonise those who don’t take the walk on the wild side. That would also be a contradiction of permaculture ethics and design principles. As we have always taught, ethics and design principles are universal but rarely lead to clear and conclusive solutions. Strategies and techniques vary with the context; wonderful elegant design solutions for one context can be hopeless white elephants, or worse, in another. Context is everything and as colleague Dan Palmer has so effectively applied in his Living Design Process, the people context is as complex, subtle and diverse as that of the land and nature.
The sovereignty of persons to choose freely how they grapple with the tension between autonomy and the needs of the commonwealth is not just an ideal from western Enlightenment civilisation working out how to apply the gift of fossil fuel wealth. It is a fundamental expression of how the ecology of context is constantly shifting, and that all systems simultaneously express life through bottom-up autonomy of action and top-down guidance of collective wisdom.
In times of great stability, the distilled wisdom of the collective, embodied in institutions, carries human culture for the long run. Sometimes the sanctions on the individuals who rejected the rules of the collective were harsh and, according to modern thinking, arbitrary but over long periods of relative stability, those rules kept society working. In times of challenge and change it is, ironically, dissidents at the fringes who salvage and conserve some of the truths of the dying culture into the unknown future to craft new patterns of recombinant culture.
What we call ‘science’ had its origins in what Pythagoras salvaged, almost single handedly, from the decadent and corrupt theocracies of ancient Egypt of which he was an initiate, before he walked away from the centre to the margins of civilisation. Major failures in the application of so-called trusted science have been a feature of our lived experience. Tragically, science could be one of the casualties as humanity passes through the cultural evolution bottleneck of climate chaos and energy descent. Permaculture was one attempt to craft a holistic applied design science grounded in observation and interaction, taking personal responsibility and accepting (negative) feedback, designing from patterns to details, and creatively using and responding to change. I still believe that salvaged and retrofitted versions of practical science crafted at the margins will serve humanity better than rigid faith in the priests of arcane specialised knowledge maintained by an empire of extraction and exploitation. Can we be sure what the father of science and mathematics would do in this time of turmoil?
Whatever the historical significance of these times, maintaining connections across differences of understanding and action within permaculture and kindred networks will strengthen us all in dealing with the unfolding challenges and opportunities of the energy descent future.
David Holmgren
Melliodora
September 2021
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Ivan Illich (1926-2002) was a Austrian priest and philosopher who used the term “institutionalization” to describe what happens in several fields of knowledge, when these fields are monopolized by a subset of that knowledge. For instance, he saw schools and universities claim a monopoly on education, and doctors and hospitals (medicine) claim a monopoly on health care.
This is both utter nonsense and at the same time widely accepted. In reality, your education comes from everywhere around you, family, friends etc., and schools can merely add a layer to it. While medicine is sick care, not health care: it fails almost entirely in preventing your health from deteriorating (see the food most people eat) and focuses only on “curing” you once you’re already sick. Case in point: covid patients are left to their own “devices”, and no prophylactics are used until it’s time for a respirator. It’s a dangerous monopoly. But people accept it as some god-given truth.
Someone linked to a 2020 piece on Illich recently by David Cayley -see below-, and though it’s good -albeit very long- I think we can do better than that, in light of what Illich’s words mean in our current predicament. Illich said the monopoly claims in various fields would lead to “counterproductivity”, aka diminishing returns, indicating that at some point not only do additional steps no longer lead to progress, they cause regression.
This is very much what we see today when people like Anthony Fauci, politicians across the globe, Big Pharma, the MSM, talk about “The Science”, and don’t you dare question it, because they have the monopoly on it. There is one truth only, and it consists of facemasks, lockdowns and very poorly tested vaccines, and anyone questioning that is a danger to the entirety of mankind.
The reality is we can’t afford not to ask questions, and we can’t afford to stifle questions and dissent. We need every voice. The efficacy of masks and lockdowns is shaky at best, look around you, and so is the efficacy of the vaccines, while the latter raise many new questions about blood clots, heart inflammation, spike proteins accumulating in ovaries and testes etc etc. We’d be crazy not to ask questions.
In terms of Illich terminology, the concept of “The Science”, which cannot be questioned, means we have reached institutionalization on steroids, runaway institutionalization. And given the variety of severe adverse reactions to the vaccines, including 1000s of deaths, we also appear to have reached diminishing returns on steroids; in children, for instance, the vaccines appear much more dangerous than the virus they are supposed to fight.
While at the same time, “The Science” monopoly rejects any and all other approaches, vitamin D, ivermectin, HCQ etc. They do that because there are still laws and protocols in place that date from before “The Science”, and spell out procedures that have to be followed to get a novel approach, or drug, approved or even authorized. One of which is that if there is any other effective method for the purpose the vaccines are developed for, there can be no approval.
And that leads to regression in medicine. It also leads to media bans, scientists who are “cancelled”, the works. There is no logical reason to ban certain medicines, and use only certain -new- others. Well, other than money, that is. It would better for mankind to try everything we can, but not for The Science, which revels in its monopoly. And Ivan Illich saw all that coming.
Meanwhile, the list of very competent medical professionals who are getting banned, deleted, ostracized, keeps growing. There’s Kary Mullis, the inventor of the PCR test, who said before his death in 2019 that it was unfit for the purpose it’s presently used for. There’s Robert Malone, one of the inventors of mRNA vaccines, who’s very critical of how these are used today and recently said: “What happens to confidence in public health and USG if ivermectin turns out to be safe and effective for COVID, and the genetic vaccines turn out to have significant safety issues? This looks like a very plausible scenario from where I sit.”
Then we have former Pfizer Chief Scientific Officer Michael Yeadon, who said about mRNA vaccines: “There is something very, very bad happening and if you don’t pay attention, you will soon lose any chance to do anything about it. And don’t say you weren’t warned.” as well as “I’d pay a vaccinated person to shop for me before getting vaccinated myself.” We have Nobel Prize virologist Luc Montagnier, we have Roger Hodkinson, and of course FLCCC member Pierre Kory, a fierce advocate for ivermectin. And Peter McCullough:
https://twitter.com/i/status/1404716387247996928
Take all of them together, and I’m sure I forget a few, and you start to realize how insane it is that these people are banned from the discussions and policy decisions. All that expertise that is discarded in favor of a few opinions, it can not be a positive thing. And it’s not science, either: science requires constant questioning and discussion. Yeadon: “There is something very, very bad happening and if you don’t pay attention, you will soon lose any chance to do anything about it.”
Here’s from David Cayley’s April 2020 piece on Ivan Illich:
At the beginning of his 1973 book Tools of Conviviality, Illich described what he thought was the typical course of development followed by contemporary institutions, using medicine as his example. Medicine, he said, had gone through “two watersheds.” The first had been crossed in the early years of the 20th century when medical treatments became demonstrably effective and benefits generally began to exceed harms. For many medical historians this is the only relevant marker – from this point on progress will proceed indefinitely, and, though there may be diminishing returns, there will be no point, in principle, at which progress will stop. This was not the case for Illich. He hypothesized a second watershed, which he thought was already being crossed and even exceeded around the time he was writing.
Beyond this second watershed, he supposed, what he called counterproductivity would set in – medical intervention would begin to defeat its own objects, generating more harm than good. This, he argued, was characteristic of any institution, good or service – a point could be identified at which there was enough of it and, after which, there would be too much. Tools for Conviviality, was an attempt to identify these “natural scales” – the only such general and programmatic search for a philosophy of technology that Illich undertook.
Two years later in Medical Nemesis – later renamed, in its final and most comprehensive edition, Limits to Medicine – Illich tried to lay out in detail the goods and the harms that medicine does. He was generally favourable to the large-scale innovations in public health that have given us good food, safe water, clean air, sewage disposal etc. He also praised efforts then underway in China and Chile to establish a basic medical toolkit and pharmacopeia that would be available and affordable for all citizens, rather than allowing medicine to develop luxury goods that would remain forever out of reach of the majority.
But the main point of his book was to identify and describe the counterproductive effects that he felt were becoming evident as medicine crossed its second watershed. He spoke of these fall-outs from too much medicine as iatrogenesis, and addressed them under three headings: clinical, social and cultural. The first everyone, by now, understands – you get the wrong diagnosis, the wrong drug, the wrong operation, you get sick in hospital etc. This collateral damage is not trivial. An article in the Canadian magazine The Walrus – Rachel Giese, “The Errors of Their Ways, April 2012 – estimated 7.5% of the Canadians admitted to hospitals every year suffer at least one “adverse event” and 24,000 die as a result of medical mistakes. Around the same time, Ralph Nader, writing in Harper’s Magazine, suggested that the number of people in the United States who die annually as a result of preventable medical errors is around 400,000. This is an impressive number, even if exaggerated – Nader’s estimate is twice as high per capita as The Walrus’s – but this accidental harm was not, by any means, Illich’s focus.
What really concerned him was the way in which excessive medical treatment weakens basic social and cultural aptitudes. An instance of what he called social iatrogenesis is the way in which the art of medicine, in which the physician acts as healer, witness, and counsellor, tends to give way to the science of medicine, in which the doctor, as a scientist, must, by definition, treat his or her patient as an experimental subject and not as a unique case. And, finally, there was the ultimate injury that medicine inflicts: cultural iatrogenesis. This occurs, Illich said, when cultural abilities, built up and passed on over many generations, are first undermined and then, gradually, replaced altogether. These abilities include, above all, the willingness to suffer and bear one’s own reality, and the capacity to die one’s own death.
The art of suffering was being overshadowed, he argued, by the expectation that all suffering can and should be immediately relieved – an attitude which doesn’t, in fact, end suffering but rather renders it meaningless, making it merely an anomaly or technical miscarriage. And death, finally, was being transformed from an intimate, personal act – something each one can do – into a meaningless defeat – a mere cessation of treatment or “pulling the plug,” as is sometimes heartlessly said. Behind Illich’s arguments lay a traditional Christian attitude. He affirmed that suffering and death are inherent in the human condition – they are part of what defines this condition. And he argued that the loss of this condition would involve a catastrophic rupture both with our past and with our own creatureliness. To mitigate and ameliorate the human condition was good, he said. To lose it altogether was a catastrophe because we can only know God as creatures – i.e. created or given beings – not as gods who have taken charge of our own destiny.
Medical Nemesis is a book about professional power – a point on which it’s worth dwelling for a moment in view of the extraordinary powers that are currently being asserted in the name of public health. According to Illich, contemporary medicine, at all times, exercises political power, though this character may be hidden by the claim that all that is being asserted is care. In the province of Ontario where I live, “health care” currently gobbles up more than 40% of the government’s budget, which should make the point clearly enough. But this everyday power, great as it is, can be further expanded by what Illich calls “the ritualization of crisis.” This confers on medicine “a license that usually only the military can claim.” He continues:
Under the stress of crisis, the professional who is believed to be in command can easily presume immunity from the ordinary rules of justice and decency. He who is assigned control over death ceases to be an ordinary human…Because they form a charmed borderland not quite of this world, the time-span and the community space claimed by the medical enterprise are as sacred as their religious and military counterparts. In a footnote to this passage Illich adds that “he who successfully claims power in an emergency suspends and can destroy rational evaluation. The insistence of the physician on his exclusive capacity to evaluate and solve individual crises moves him symbolically into the neighborhood of the White House.” There is a striking parallel here with the German jurist Carl Schmitt’s claim in his Political Theology that the hallmark of true sovereignty is the power to “decide on the exception.”
Schmitt’s point is that sovereignty stands above law because in an emergency the sovereign can suspend the law – declare an exception – and rule in its place as the very source of law. This is precisely the power that Illich says the physician “claims…in an emergency.” Exceptional circumstances make him/her “immune” to the “ordinary rules” and able to make new ones as the case dictates. But there is an interesting and, to me, telling difference between Schmitt and Illich. Schmitt is transfixed by what he calls “the political.” Illich notices that much of what Schmitt calls sovereignty has escaped, or been usurped from the political realm and reinvested in various professional hegemonies.
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After Danish soccer player Christian Eriksen had a heart attack on the pitch last night at the Eurocup, the urgent issue should be: was he vaccinated? (he was), and if so, what is the link between the vaccine and the cardiac arrest?
I haven’t seen anyone make the connection thus far, and wonder if anyone will. But what if, g-f forbid, another vaccinated player goes down? With some 800 cases of myocarditis in young men in the US alone, this is a serious risk that requires a serious investigation.
Update: the president of his team, Inter Milan, says he was not vaccinated.
Update 2: a Twitter search for “Inter Milan doctor” appears to indicate Eriksen received his 2nd jab on May 31.
Confused? Did BBC just say that 50% of the people that died were vaccinated? But, but!???? ‘95% efficacy’, right!?
https://twitter.com/i/status/1403830591301242883
“The vaccines have been approved as experimental therapy, nothing more. How many times was it that Edison tested his light bulb before it was successful?”
Before medical technology caught up with our wildest dreams of living forever with no suffering, we had to make do. If a virus came along we were forced to let nature run its course. Before vaccines were discovered with the advent of Dr. Edward Jenner’s incredible work with cowpox, we didn’t have a choice but to grovel at the feet of Mother Nature and let her do her thing. Ultimately it all turned out pretty well; we are still here, aren’t we? — due to, among other things, the miracle of our immune systems. Things are different now, transhumanism is on the rise and is arriving hand in hand with the upcoming technocracy—we may one day actually be able to live forever! Yahoo! Certainly we can fight this war with Covid, with nature, and win the battle — one step closer to conquering nature entirely! We can cheat death, cheat illness, cheat suffering! Pass out the cigars!
What is the price? Humanity? That sounds too close to being ruled by nature — we certainly can give up these “human” things — smiles, touching, hugging, gathering — all things that engage our human bodies, and human hearts. These are things too close to what animals do, with animal bodies, animal instincts. That’s fine to give up, as Fauci says, we should probably never shake hands again — it’s too dangerous being human. Although I would surmise that people who are overly jubilant to get the vaccine do not necessarily believe they are transforming their body to superhuman status due to the gene therapy mechanism in the chemistry of the vaccination (I doubt if most even know what that is), but rather most of them are intrigued by the new technology they have heard it employs.
There is almost nothing in the modern medicine drug pantheon that is 100% effective, safe, or free of side effects, and even though it is clear the Covid vaccines also fall into this disappointment, the general public has indeed been told it is 95% effective and 100% safe (not bothering to be careful to ascertain what exactly it is effective in accomplishing). They are also nearly 100% synthetic, with a synthetic, high tech, mechanism. This view is a predominant one for vaccine lovers created primarily by the bottomless pockets of the manufacturers who spend countless millions in marketing and in successful attempts to show their customers how safe and effective their product is. “Look at how wonderful new technologies can be!” say their targets. “Those scientists are so very clever!”
Yes, technology can be wonderful, and yes, scientists can be very clever. Unfortunately, there have probably been more disasters in the experimental stages of products the big pharmaceutical companies want to market than successes—at least a fair share of them. The vaccines have been approved as experimental therapy, nothing more. How many times was it that Edison tested his light bulb before it was successful? How many times did he think it was going to work after “this one final experiment” — and it didn’t? There is no question that Edison was very clever, but this is the way of science and new discovery, and it always has been. And don’t tell me that mRNA technology has been studied for decades. That doesn’t cut it; Covid-19 had only been with us for about 9 months when the vaccines were rolled out.
Dr. Anthony Fauci’s recent suggestion that attacks on him are attacks on science itself is nonsensical. His attitude towards criticism is a prime example of scientism, which treats people in scientific fields with undue reverence. There has been an interesting cultural fight within the culture war over science itself. Many people on the political left have a tendency to place scientific method on a pedestal and not consider it for what it is – which is, purely and simply, scientific method. Rather, they treat science as a sort of dogma which cannot be challenged. In a sense, their attitude towards it is not that different from a Christian’s outlook on the Bible. A Christian believes that the Bible is God’s word, and is static and unchanging because of the nature of God himself.
However, the nature of science is not static because our understanding of the world is not static. As such, it’s appalling when someone who wields as much influence and political power as America’s chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci speaks in a manner that treats science as a dogma. In a recent interview with Chuck Todd on MSNBC, Fauci recently claimed people who are critical of him are “critical of science itself”, which is clearly preposterous. Science is meant to be questioned. If science was not questioned, scientific progress would be impossible because there would be no prevailing attitude that more must be learned. The attitude and belief that science is some sort of monolith is very disconcerting from a societal perspective.
I have great respect for those who spend their time trying to understand our universe one cell and one atom at a time, but Fauci’s stance seems to spit in the face of those people. Ultimately, every person who works in the sciences can only act on what they know, and whether they admit it or not they’ll never know enough. That, surely, is the name of the game. However, Dr. Fauci comes across as if he is the self-declared face of science and that he cannot be questioned for this very reason. Aside from this being wildly untrue, this is a prime example of scientism. It promotes the idea that his diplomas and governmental position make him someone who cannot be questioned, and that his knowledge has elevated him to a place above us mere mortals. As such if you don’t listen to what he says you’re nothing but a troglodyte. I don’t know how a man of such short stature carries such massive arrogance, but he certainly does not speak as if he is someone who has the proper attitude of a scientist.
When do we take out the trash? First the FDA “approves” an Alzheimer’s drug that, on the data, does not work — but it sure as Hell is expensive. At least one and perhaps two of their advisors quit over that one. Now the CDC is going to meet on the “extremely rare” myocarditis risk to kids getting tard shots. Extremely rare my ass; you never see if you don’t open your eyes, and given the reports in the news and social media there is no way this is “extremely rare.” How many people have heart attacks every day yet that doesn’t make the news unless they’re a celebrity or somesuch. So when nobodies start being reported on, well, folks, it’s not rare. To be “reported” at all you have to wind up in the hospital or similar, so the presumption that these are “mild” is horsecrap.
Nobody with a bit of discomfort goes to the ER; you go to the ER if you have chest pain, and that’s not minor. The big unknown is whether the damage done in these cases is permanent. Nobody knows. But, I remind you, a grand total of eighteen, more or less, kids have died with Covid all the way back to March of 2020. Now tell me exactly how many of the hundreds of those myocarditis events being reported, and that’s an undercount where Covid was an overcount, are acceptable if they produce permanent damage? If your answer is anything other than zero you’re a ghoul. If you gave these shots to kids, or advised kids to get them, well… you ought to have a problem. A big one. And so should Biden, Trump, all public health departments and every single corporation and social media firm that has been advocating these things for young people.
A freedom of information request (FOI) request was made by one of our members in February 2021 to the Australian drugs regulator, the TGA (Therapeutic Good Administration) to ask what should have been simple questions. The TGA is the Australian equivalent of the FDA (US), MHRA (UK) and EMA (Europe) and is held in high regard worldwide. Essentially the FOI questions were: • Did the TGA request the raw data from Pfizer • Did any of the committees approving the vaccine look at the raw data and/or discuss it • What were the “studies” referred to in the approval document relating to teratogenicity (risk of harm to a fetus)
The rationale of the request relates to concern over the validity and verifiability of Pfizer’s data given its legal history (and expressed by Peter Doshi in the BMJ in February) as well as the proven concerns over fraudulent data relating to Covid-19 as seen in the “Lancetgate” scandal of June 2020. The document below is a redacted version of the documents that were sent by the TGA in response to this request. What they show is that the TGA never saw or requested the patient data from Pfizer and simply accepted their reporting of their study as true. This means that when the head of the TGA John Skerritt said that “the safety evidence is pretty thorough” on the 6th February (here) his words would ring hollow to most Australians who have assumed, rightly or wrongly, that the TGA had actually looked at the patient data themselves.
A further concerning aspect of the FOI request is the efforts to which the TGA appeared to go to suppress the request – initially requesting a 6 months extension in view of a “voluminous request” which eventually yielded only one document of 14 pages, heavily redacted. This required an instruction from the Office of the Information Commissioner to the TGA to answer the request by the 26th May, a deadline that the TGA also failed to meet. Eventually the only document that was produced from the FOI request was a heavily redacted single study (not studies, as claimed in the TGA assessment document) showing that the only investigation into the effects on the fetus was performed on 44 rats with no long term data on the offspring. It is impossible to assess this study fully because 98% of the document was removed in order to protect Pfizer’s intellectual property (points 32-44 of the report).
Covid-19 has mutated significantly, and the virus is now much harder to treat than it used to be. That’s according to the head of Moscow’s Kommunarka Hospital, which last year became the city’s main coronavirus treatment facility. Speaking to Moscow radio station Ekho Moskvy on Thursday, the hospital’s chief physician, Denis Protsenko, who became a household name in 2020 due to his role at the forefront of the country’s battle against Covid-19, explained that it has become much harder to treat ill patients. “There is a feeling that the virus is changing,” Protsenko explained. “The proven methods of treatment for hyperinflammation or, as we call it, cytokine storms, are often failing.”
“This makes us think that the virus has also changed and has mutated in this year and a half,” he said, before encouraging people to get vaccinated against the disease. According to Protsenko, the Kommunarka hospital is now filled with a large number of elderly patients, as well as people who are overweight or diabetic. Furthermore, collective immunity in the capital is still under 50%, he said. On Wednesday, Deputy Moscow Mayor Anastasia Rakova revealed that the city would open up additional hospital beds in the upcoming days, boosting its capacity by 1,500. That announcement came after Mayor Sergey Sobyanin ordered local authorities to ramp up enforcement of sanitary measures, such as the wearing of masks on public transport. However, he also noted that he had no plans to introduce any new lockdowns.
According to the official numbers, Russia recorded 12,505 new cases nationwide on Friday – the highest figure since February 22. The capital is bearing the brunt of the latest wave, with 5,853 new infections detected in just 24 hours – 47% of all cases recorded. Moscow is home to just 10% of the country’s population. However, perhaps most worryingly, Moscow’s coronavirus spread, measured by the so-called R rate, soared to 1.6 in the past 24 hours – the highest seen since September 30 last year.
All vaccines, even if they have not been approved by the European Medicines Agency, will be accepted by Greece for entry into the country, according to the member of the health committee advising the government on the pandemic. More specifically, speaking during a regular briefing of reporters, Vana Papaevangelou said the decision was taken following a recommendation by the committee. The vaccines that will be accepted are Novavax, Sinovac Biotech, Sputnik V, Sinopharm and CanSino Biologics. Papaevangelou also stressed that tourists will be able to enter from the land border, and that specifications for hotels and ships will be updated, while stating that tourism workers will have to undergo a weekly self-diagnostic test and complete their vaccinations. She sounded the alarm for those people who haven t been vaccinated, noting that 98% of deaths in the last week were people who had not completed their vaccinations.
In the first federal ruling on vaccine mandates, a Houston judge Saturday dismissed a lawsuit by hospital employees who declined the COVID-19 shot – a decision that could have a ripple effect across the nation. The case involved Houston Methodist, which was the first hospital system in the country to require that all its employees get vaccinated. U.S. District Judge Lynn N. Hughes said federal law does not prevent employers from issuing that mandate. After months of warnings, Houston Methodist had put more than 170 of its 26,000 employees on unpaid suspension Monday. They were told they would be fired it they weren’t vaccinated by June 21.
The hospital already had made it clear it means what it says: It fired the director of corporate risk – Bob Nevens – and another manager in April when they did not meet the earlier deadline for bosses. In recent weeks, a few other major hospitals have followed Houston Methodist’s lead, including the University of Pennsylvania, University of Louisville, New York Presbyterian and several major hospitals in the Washington, D.C. area. Houston Methodist’s CEO Marc Boom predicts more hospitals soon will join the effort. Many hospitals and employers were waiting for legal clarification before acting. “We can now put this behind us and continue our focus on unparalleled safety, quality, service and innovation,” Boom said after the ruling. “Our employees and physicians made their decisions for our patients, who are always at the center of everything we do.”
“..the experts forecast dire impacts from the Federal Reserve’s new framework that supports tolerating higher inflation for the benefit of a full recovery ..”
Further disregarding inflation will push the global economy to a major crisis, according to the latest report issued by Deutsche Bank economists who point the finger at the US money-printing policies. Germany’s largest lender warned that the unprecedented levels of cash being injected into the economy while inflation fears are being dismissed will lead to excruciating economic pain if not in the near term then in 2023 and beyond. The report points to the US’ “breath-taking” monetary stimulus that is reportedly comparable with that seen around World War II. “Then, US deficits remained between 15-30% for four years. While there are many significant differences between the pandemic and WWII we would note that annual inflation was 8.4%, 14.6% and 7.7% in 1946, 1947 and 1948 after the economy normalized and pent-up demand was released,” Deutsche Bank notes.
Moreover, the experts forecast dire impacts from the Federal Reserve’s new framework that supports tolerating higher inflation for the benefit of a full recovery of the country’s economy after the slumber caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. “The consequence of delay will be greater disruption of economic and financial activity than would be otherwise be the case when the Fed does finally act,” Deutsche’s economists wrote in the first report of the new series, titled “Inflation: The defining macro story of this decade.” “In turn, this could create a significant recession and set off a chain of financial distress around the world, particularly in emerging markets,” the report added. According to the bank’s analysts, neglecting inflation leaves global economies “sitting on a time bomb.”
Lately I have been thinking a lot about the difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum while at the same time the world is witnessing the inexorable move to crypto in realtime. Some may question the latter half of that assertion, given that the latest FUD cycle against cryptos has been one of the most intense that I’ve witnessed since getting involved in the space in 2013. Behind the FUD we see actions. We see Russia dumping dollar assets (can you blame them?). We hear Munger making almost childishly uninformed remarks on crypto, yet BRK is investing in one of the world’s most crypto friendly banks. We see El Salvador as the first country in the world to make Bitcoin legal tender. In my mind this has not only sounded the starting gun on de-dollarization in earnest, it goes beyond that. Back in the late 90‘s people like me were about the age of many of the crypto kids today, and we were talking about the Internet Asteroid headed straight at the telecoms and traditional media.
Today, pretty well everybody is aware of Bitcoin. They may have positive or negative opinions on it, but most people are figuring out that it’s here to stay and there is a spectrum of sentiment around that ranging from enthusiasm to denial. But I don’t get the sense that traditional institutional finance sector sees the other asteroid coming, and it’s coming straight at them. Or maybe Ethereum/Bitcoin. Whatever your risk tolerance and investment objectives entail. I’ve been listening to the Bankless podcast lately and in more than one episode they’ve said something about Bitcoin as compared to Ethereum that I think is very helpful. It’s really helped me think about the two in terms of construction of a crypto portfolio. They’ve said, in essence, that Bitcoin is for when you’re bearish on society and Ethereum is for when you’re bullish.
It’s not that I agree with that literally (I don’t), but it really helped me refine the distinction I’ve always had around Bitcoin being the value and Ethereum being the execution in a coming tectonic shift into crypto. In the olden days, bonds and equities had an inverse correlation. Bonds kept your portfolio afloat when the economy hit a soft patch and stocks went down (yes, in the olden days, stocks could experience bear markets, sometimes for months or even years). Conventional wisdom was to have a portfolio mix between equities and bonds, along some rule of thumb like 60/40 adjusted for your age, risk tolerance, etc. We’re headed into a world where Bitcoin and Ethereum will fulfil the roles that bonds and equities did traditionally.
Russia has none of the “messianic fervor” of Western states such as the US, its foreign minister said this week, as the nations’ leaders prepare to meet. No longer the Third Rome, Moscow is seeking a more modest role in the world. The author Fyodor Dostoevsky had a grand vision for the country. Russia, he believed, would lead the West back to Christ and bring about “universal, spiritual reconciliation.” This it could do, he felt, because its people supposedly had a “capability for high synthesis, a gift for universal reconcilability.” The Russian, Dostoevsky wrote, “gets along with everyone and is accustomed to all. He sympathizes with all that is human, regardless of nationality, blood, and soil.” By contrast, those on the other side of the continent, the novelist added, “find a universal human ideal in themselves and by their own power, and therefore they altogether harm themselves and their cause.”
Russians, in other words, seek to reconcile all, while Westerners believe their own ideals are universal and seek to spread them everywhere. One may justifiably doubt such sweeping generalizations. But as Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, prepares to meet the leader of the Western world, Joe Biden, next week, these different approaches to the world were on display in Russian and American public rhetoric. First, on the eve of the G7 summit in London, which begins on Friday, the New York Times noted that Biden is casting his trip to Europe “as an effort to rally the United States and its allies in an existential battle between democracy and autocracy.” “We have to discredit those who believe that the age of democracy is over, as some of our fellow nations believe,” the president said. “I believe we’re at an inflection point in world history,” he added.
“A moment where it falls to us to prove that democracies don’t just endure, but will excel as we rise to seize enormous opportunities in the new age.” An altogether different view, however, came from Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov. In a riposte to Biden’s assertion that a struggle between Western liberalism and other systems was inevitable, Lavrov declared that Russia had no interest in a competition for ideological or geopolitical domination. Moscow, he said, “has no superpower ambitions, regardless of how much people try to convince themselves and everyone else otherwise.” The top diplomat claimed that the country simply doesn’t “have the messianic fervor with which our Western colleagues are trying to spread their ‘values-based democratic agenda’ throughout the planet. It has long been clear to us that the imposition of a certain development model from the outside does nothing good.”
The first Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, was surrounded by “hundreds” of CIA agents who told him what to do throughout his tenure as leader. That’s according to Ruslan Khasbulatov, the former chairman of Russia’s parliament. Speaking to radio station Govorit Moskva, Khasbulatov claimed Yeltsin’s entourage was full of Americans. In 1991, he was elected to his leadership post with Washington’s help, it has been alleged, and it is still not yet known to what extent the US remained the voice in his ear throughout his presidency. “There must have been a hundred [CIA employees],” Khasbulatov said. “They determined everything.” He also added that, after winning the presidential election, Yeltsin would send security officials and heads of departments to the US so the Americans could “examine them” and “give conclusions.”
Khasbulatov’s statement comes after former Russian vice president Alexander Rutskoy told online outlet Lenta that 12 full-time employees of the CIA helped carry out the landmark Yeltsin-Gaidar market reforms, systematically dismantling the centrally planned economic system and leading the country into shock capitalism. Rutskoy also claimed that, on one significant occasion, he overheard Yeltsin speaking to a stranger with a foreign accent. However, according to Khasbulatov, everyone knew about Rutskoy’s links to the US, and American officials even influenced the former president to replace a considerable number of his appointees.
“On the whole, Rutskoy is absolutely right – Yeltsin was advised by foreigners,” he continued. “There is no secret here, and a great number of people know about it. I don’t have any detective stories about eavesdropping, but, in general, it’s well known. Yeltsin used to confer very closely on all personnel matters with foreign representatives.” Yeltsin left office in 1999, but not before creating a hyper-presidential system, taking power away from a hostile parliament, and removing almost all checks and balances. This move was supported by Washington, which hoped to keep the Communist Party out of power in the newly formed Russian state.
In his book Value(s): Building a Better World for All, Mark Carney, former governor both of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, claims that western society is morally rotten, and that it has been corrupted by capitalism, which has brought about a “climate emergency” that threatens life on earth. This, he claims, requires rigid controls on personal freedom, industry and corporate funding. Carney’s views are important because he is UN Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance. He is also an adviser both to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on the next big climate conference in Glasgow, and to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Since the advent of the COVID pandemic, Carney has been front and centre in the promotion of a political agenda known as the “Great Reset,” or the “Green New Deal,” or “Building Back Better.” All are predicated on the claim that COVID, and its disruption of the global economy, provides a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity not just to regulate climate, but to frame a more fair, more diverse, more inclusive, more safe and more woke world. Carney draws inspiration from, among others, Marx, Engels and Lenin, but the agenda he promotes differs from Marxism in two key respects. First, the private sector is not to be expropriated but made a “partner” in reshaping the economy and society. Second, it does not make a promise to make the lives of ordinary people better, but worse.
Carney’s Brave New World will be one of severely constrained choice, less flying, less meat, more inconvenience and more poverty: “Assets will be stranded, used gasoline powered cars will be unsaleable, inefficient properties will be unrentable,” he promises. The agenda’s objectives are in fact already being enforced, not primarily by legislation but by the application of non-governmental — that is, non-democratic — pressure on the corporate sector via the ever-expanding dictates of ESG (environmental, social and corporate governance) and by “sustainable finance,” which is designed to starve non-compliant companies of funds, thus rendering them, as Carney puts it, “climate roadkill.” What ESG actually represents is corporate ideological compulsion. It is a key instrument of “stakeholder capitalism.”
Carney’s Agenda is promoted by the United Nations and other international bureaucracies and a vast and ever-growing array of non-governmental organizations and fora, especially the World Economic Forum (WEF), where Carney is a trustee. Also, perhaps most surprisingly, by its corporate victims. No one wants to become climate roadkill. Carney clearly feels himself to be a man of destiny. “When I worked at the Bank of England,” he writes in Value(s), “I would remind myself each morning of Marcus Aurelius’ phrase ‘arise to do the work of humankind’.” One is reminded of French aristocrat and social reformer Henri de Saint-Simon, the “grand seigneur sans-culotte,” who ordered his valet to wake him with similar words: “Remember, monsieur le comte, that you have great things to do.”
As COVID vaccine delivery continues to decline nationwide, Republican leaders have proposed a radical solution: a vaccination-by-mail program to cover all Americans. “Since voting by mail went so smoothly last year, we wanted to apply those same principles to our COVID vaccination program,” said Senator Mitch McConnell. “Mail-in vaccines will ensure that we have the most secure vaccination process in American history!” The Republican proposal is simple: every American will automatically receive a pre-loaded syringe in the mail, along with a COVID vaccine card. Individuals will then self-administer the vaccine and self-report their vaccination status, all from the comfort of their own homes.
“Everyone will be able to receive the vaccine without having to miss work to travel to a vaccination site where they will wait in line for hours,” McConnell noted. “Best of all, nobody will be subjected to any racist ID checks!” Democrats were quick to criticize the proposal, saying a self-reported mail-in vaccine program was ripe for fraud and dishonesty. McConnell quickly dispelled those notions, saying they were nothing more than a transparent attempt to disenfranchise Republicans from getting vaccinated.
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When the covid virustime started, we were told by everyone with a microphone to “follow the science”. But 16 months or so in, we’re not following the science, yet no-one calls us on it. What happened? Where did we lose the thread, where did we lose our heads, where did the science go?
Did we lose it because the vaccine makers got too greedy, or because politicians became too panicky, or because the media realized that scaring the living daylights out of people 24/7 is great for ratings? Or just because we ourselves lost track of what was really going on?
Injecting hundreds of millions of people with substances that have never been properly tested – for which long-established protocols have existed for a long time – is about as unscientific as it gets. Then when you realize there’s no evidence that they keep injectees from being infected or infecting others, but only makes them -hopefully- a little less sick, you might as well stop right there.
From a science point of view, you’re engaging in either a useless enterprise or a giant gamble with people’s health. Both utterly unscientific endeavors, any scientist can tell you that.
Shouldn’t you perhaps focus on the fact that over 4 out of 5 people have an immune system that provides them with “adaptive cross-immunity”, meaning they are not at risk of dying or even serious disease? Why would you instead turn to experimental substances that risk putting those immune systems themselves at risk?
Which part of this is us following the science? Why haven’t we seen huge campaigns aimed at making us healthier, and boosting our immune systems? What part of that would be “not following the science”? It’s not as if we don’t know how to boost our immune systems, or for that matter how to make us overall healthier then we are today.
Moreover, the effect of lockdowns is highly debatable -even if such debates are stifled-, as is the effect of facemasks always and everywhere. And, obviously, that of untested “vaccines”. We have the science, mankind has been through epidemics through its entire history, and it’s not as if scientists have never learned anything from that history.
It’s just that we seem to be changing the meaning of the word “science” to mean an industry, and corporations, that produce novel chemicals, as well as societies that do things, lockdowns, masks, that have never been used in the way they have been the past year.
And that is very risky. If people like Geert VanDenBossche are only half right when they say mass-vaccination during a pandemic will only -and inevitably- speed up the ability of an endemic virus to mutate into forms that evade the vaccines, it’s woman and children first. Well, either that or old and overweight men.
I’ve written a lot on the topic over the past year and a half, obviously, and it doesn’t feel all that great to repeat talking points, but I keep finding it difficult to understand why our 21st century world calls for us to follow the science, only to turn its back on that science the very next moment.
And for simply asking that, I risk being vilified. Like some kind of heretic. But as someone said, I think it was Roger Hodkinson, we cannot afford to stifle dissenting voices in this situation, because the discussion they start might be the very step we need to find a way out. We can’t afford to not ask questions.
To just say get your jab and don’t say or ask a word appears to be the most reckless thing we can do. Even if the alleged “vaccines” would do better at protecting us than the present science has evidence for, that would still be only in -the richer- part of the world, while the virus can run rampage in the rest.
As we can still, though you won’t hear anything about this from your media -local or global- or your politicians, strengthen immune systems sufficiently to make the worst threat of Covid go away.
The virus may kill the some of weakest amongst us, the obese, those with co-morbidities, and the elderly, but many other things, like the flu, can -and do- do that too, yet we have never paralyzed our societies and social lives because of those things. While we have zero evidence that the present vaccines, or whatever you call them, will solve these issues.
It doesn’t look to me like we are following the science at all. We’re following something alright, but not that. If and when the vaccine makers themselves state they have no proof their chemicals protect against infection, yet everyone starts opening up their stores and theaters and what have you, but only to the “vaccinated”, I’m at a loss for words.
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One might have expected that as the Covid drama unfolds, the world would return to its scientific senses. But the opposite appears to be happening, we’re moving away from our senses. Fear is a bad advisor. Earlier today, I wrote:
“I forget who drew my attention to this UK government report, Covid-19 Response Spring 2021, but it paints a very stark and completely ignored reality: only 66% of people can ever be successfully vaccinated and may be protected.
34% either can’t be jabbed for medical reasons, or the vaccines don’t catch on. And that’s assuming full uptake, which of course you’ll never ever get. So the number of not successfully vaccinated will be higher than 34%, perhaps quite a bit, no matter the PR campaigns and threats.
This should put the entire Covid response on its head, but for some reason it doesn’t. Those 34+% would appear to be ineligible for a “vaccine passport” as well, depriving them of basic human rights.”
Graph from the February 2021 report:
A few relevant quotes from the report (it’s over 60 pages):
Vaccine efficacy and effectiveness
[..] First, the vaccine is preventing people from catching COVID-19.
[..] The vaccines have transformed our efforts to tackle COVID-19 and will prevent many deaths. However, they will not guarantee protection to everyone. Vaccines will not be given to 100% of the population. This is because the vaccine is currently not authorised for some groups, such as children, and some people will not take up the offer of a vaccine.
[..] a significant proportion of the population could still be infected, either because they have not been vaccinated or because the vaccine is not effective for them.
Preparing for revaccination
[..] the Government is planning for a revaccination campaign, which is likely to run later this year in autumn or winter. Any revaccination is likely to consist of a single ‘booster’ dose of a COVID-19 vaccine: the ideal booster may be a new vaccine specifically designed against a variant form of the virus. Over the longer term, revaccination is likely to become a regular part of managing COVID-19.
Ergo: the UK government is preparing to declare over a third of its citizens 2nd rate. And not because they refuse to be part of a medical experiment and be injected with untested substances (which is a basic human right that no-one can be punished for), but because these substances are either prohibited for them, or simply have no -positive- effect. No matter, says Whitehall, you don’t count. So here come the corona passports.
Britons will find out which countries they will be able to enjoy quarantine-free travel to this summer “in the next couple of weeks” – as the transport secretary confirmed an NHS app will be used as a COVID passport for travel abroad. Under Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s roadmap for lifting lockdown restrictions, international travel without one of the current exemptions – which exclude holidays – will not be allowed any earlier than 17 May.
Ministers have set out plans for a “traffic light” system to be used this summer to categorise different destinations. And, speaking to Sky News on Wednesday, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps revealed “in the next couple of weeks” he will be able to give details on which countries have made it on to the “green list”. These will be destinations where Britons will be able to travel without having to quarantine on their return, although they will still need to undergo a COVID test before their departure, as well as on their return to the UK.
Mr Shapps also confirmed an NHS app will be used to allow Britons to demonstrate whether they have had a COVID jab, or tested negative for the virus, before travelling abroad. “It will be the NHS app that is used for people when they book appointments with the NHS and so on, to be able to show you’ve had a vaccine or that you’ve had testing,” he added. “I’m working internationally with partners across the world to make sure that system can be internationally recognised.”
Government sources clarified the app would not be the NHS COVID app – currently used to “check in” to venues such as pubs and restaurants for contact-tracing purposes – but would instead be the NHS app used to book general appointments.
Remember, there is no evidence that the “vaccines” protect anyone from getting infected or infecting those around them, but that little factoid has been swept under the carpet -along with the unfortunate third of Britons who can’t even pretend to be “protected”. The government simply claims without evidence that “the vaccine is preventing people from catching COVID-19“, and gets away with it. That’s our world today.
An instrument of unusual significance is quietly on its way to becoming law in Europe: the proposal for a ‘Digital Green Certificate’ (DGC). Up for a vote in the European Parliament’s plenary on Wednesday, it erects a “universal framework” for the control of disease within the Schengen area. The EU Commission has presented it as a return to freedom of movement, essentially suspended by member states since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a pandemic. However the DGC, which creates certificates for Europeans showing the bearer has been vaccinated, tested or achieved immunity, is already beginning to lose its sheen. Last week, the WHO asked that any plans for making proof of vaccination a condition of entry be abandoned, after the US ruled out enforcing vaccination cards on its territory.
So is it wise for Europe to continue with its own? Freedom of movement is perhaps the European Union’s most cherished achievement, certainly among northerners seeking a visa-free sun holiday. In my home of Northern Ireland, with our ever-fragile cross-border peace agreement, we have a special appreciation for the importance of keeping borders open. The recent EU threat to impose a ‘vaccine border’ between Northern Ireland and the Republic imperilled that peace. The EU can’t afford another blunder on borders, so it’s in its own interest that the DGC does what it says on the tin. However a cursory glance at the contents suggests a case of mislabeling or at least a lack of legal certainty. The commission assures us that the DGC will not restore (or entrench) border controls.
But “universal framework” can only be read as a euphemism for checks within the Schengen zone. It is article 3 of the DGC that creates certificates of vaccination, testing and immunity. Border guards will have to inspect these. As it’s put in Article 3(1), there will be “cross-border verification”, performed by the member state “authorities” mentioned in Article 9(2). In the absence of such checks, the certificates would be useless and the “universal framework” would not exist. With vaccinated Europeans travellers separated from non-vaccinated, infected from non-infected, and immune from non-immune—the DGC, if applied, would be a guarantee of discrimination within the EU.
This is simply not permissable under the Schengen Code. Chapter II of the Schengen Borders Code allows for the temporary reintroduction of internal borders in some circumstances, but that does not include a public health emergency. The whole endeavour is even more absurd if one acknowledges the scientific certainty that being vaccinated does not mean that one cannot be a carrier of the virus, nor infect others.
We already know from the European Medicines Agency and WHO, confirmed by a decision this month of the Conseil d’État (France’s Supreme Court), that no proof exists of vaccination halting the spread of Covid-19. Meanwhile, in the last months many courts including the Lisbon Court of Appeal and Administrative Court of Vienna have held that PCR testing is unreliable and cannot be relied on for determining infection; a physician must perform a proper medical diagnosis. Thus the DGC certificates are useless as proof of whether you are infected, or can or cannot spread the virus.
They’re going to do it anyway, ain’t they, laws or no laws, human rights or no human rights, science or no science. And 2/3 of Britons -and other countries’ citizens- are cheering them on, because they are promised they will regain their “freedom”. Some freedom, if you must first give up your rights. The virus is far from the biggest danger here. It’s the people. We could have known.
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@danielkotzin: “Children do not need protection from Covid. They need protection from government and health officials.”
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