Tag: covid

The Covid Sham Continues

jembendell

Establishment lies about Covid-19 continue. In the UK, currently there is an inquiry into the pandemic. It is as much of a sham as the mainstream media’s coverage of it. Due to a bereavement, I’m briefly back in the country, and watched the 6 o’clock ITV news for the first time in a long while. Their viewers were encouraged to assume that lockdowns were a good idea. That’s ignoring evidence from comparing the policies of various countries which has shown that lockdowns didn’t help curb the disease, while also generating widespread damage to both physical and mental health. That’s before we even consider the damage to small businesses and ordinary people’s incomes. The viewer was also encouraged to think the only alternative to lockdowns would be a callousness in letting the virus kill the elderly and vulnerable. There was nothing mentioned about other interventions that could have helped, such as air filtration systems or helping symptomatic workers to stay home. Learning meaningful lessons to curb Covid-19 transmission is incredibly important, as the virus remains an ongoing threat to long-term health due to recurring and persistent reinfections. If you are unsure what I’m talking about, or want to see official evidence and scientific papers for what I’ve just stated, then please review my essays on the topic, since October 2021.

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Alternative approaches to combat respiratory viruses – freedom from the failing corporate-induced orthodoxy of the early 2020s

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Faced with ongoing risks from Covid-19, as well as future pathogens, all responsible citizens have an interest in what actions might combat respiratory viruses in future. That is whether actions are in addition to, or instead of, the approaches that have largely failed since 2020, despite the hiding of that fact by government authorities and mass media. Low levels of awareness about complementary or alternative approaches to combatting respiratory viruses has meant that many people assume that anyone critiquing the orthodoxy on Covid-19 must have less concern for public health, rather than being more concerned about it. Such lack of awareness is due to the corporate takeover of medicine, government, media and the digital sphere, which is hiding relevant expertise while promoting false moral narratives to elicit disdain towards people with heterodox views. Despite the resultant vilification, some experts have been so concerned about public health that they have been assessing whether other approaches might work better, as well as having fewer negative impacts on health and wellbeing. As I am often asked what I suggest would be a smarter response to the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as future epidemics, I am summarising some of my understanding in this essay.  

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As Covid is here to stay – an excerpt from Breaking Together, forthcoming 2023

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Some of the research I have been doing over the past 3 years for my forthcoming book on societal disruption and collapse seems too urgent to sit on until June this year. The poor state of public discussion about the Covid pandemic is a reason why I am sharing a section from Chapter 5 of the book. I believe my approach reflects how research analysts like myself used to approach matters of public concern before discussions became polarized (and somewhat hysterical) during the pandemic. I hope more of us will take that approach in future and then be heard, rather than shadow banned and demonised by people who used to behave better.

“As Covid is here to stay, it is worthy of some closer consideration of its impacts on society.

With a relatively low infection fatality rate in the near term, the initial impacts of the disease itself do not constitute a threat of societal collapse. However, at the time of writing, pathways have been identified for how the pandemic could contribute to such a collapse. The first of these is the nature of the virus itself and how it could turn out to be causing long-term damage to health and vitality, as well as suppressing immunity in general and even being carcinogenic. The second of these pathways is the currently uncertain longer-term effects of some novel vaccines, which have already been associated with significant negative health effects. Then there are the wider effects of the policy responses including massive disruption to government finances and the authoritarian turn of mainstream media, big technology platforms, and sections of the general public, as well as the backlash against all of that – together creating a combustible mix. As this is such a polarized and polarizing topic it’s rare that the relevant information is brought together in one place, so I will briefly attempt that here so that the nature of the risk from Covid can be appreciated. 

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Rulers or Pets? Some history on their relative threat to your health

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When Covid broke out in China, one of the policies in some cities was to round up and kill people’s cats, due to a worry that they can carry coronaviruses. Subsequent protests have meant this policy has always been dropped, but only to reappear at various times. In early 2022, officials in the city of Langfangs ordered the killing of all pets of anyone infected with Covid. Again, the policy was dropped after protests (Daily Mail, 2022). Echoing some of that attitude towards pets, yesterday (November 22nd) the Daily Express newspaper ran a story about the UK, with the headline: “Covid horror as estimated over 350,000 cats infected with virus which ‘can be fatal’”. The story itself was about evidence of past non-fatal infections of cats with Covid in Britain. It also mentioned that other forms of coronavirus can be fatal to cats. The story provoked comments such as: “cull all cats” (Daily Express, 2022). The same story soon appeared in other UK newspapers and websites.

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It’s not too late to stop being a tool of oppression

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An audio version of this essay is available.

Death rates are still above normal in many countries of the world. The medical experts don’t know why. It could be from the long-term complications from past Covid infections, or it could be from the impacts of novel vaccines, or it could be from the delayed treatments due to lockdowns. Or perhaps it is from a mixture of these causes, or even from some other factor altogether. Even writing those two sentences induced in me a feeling of trepidation. I find myself readying for the annoyance or even aggression from some people. Which is odd: people did not behave so stridently on public health issues before 2020. I think the decay in normal scientific dialogue and policy scrutiny is a significant lasting damage from the last few years. It is why I am not going to let it lie. Instead, I hope we can all learn more about why people became so badly informed and aggressive towards others who reached conclusions different to their own. Only then might we avoid making matters worse when future public health crises occur. And if the excess mortality does not return to normal, then we are already within an ongoing health crisis right now.

It is why in this essay I am returning to the scientific facts which prove the medical authoritarian orthodoxy on Covid has been scientifically wrong. Not just wrong in hindsight, but now more widely recognised as wrong by experts and scientists who ignored some of the earlier concerns. This recent science can’t be ignored unless someone is no longer interested in the science on public health.

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They’ve gone too far with the children – so what do we do?

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Some countries recently stopped administering Covid vaccination to children. Sweden ceased recommending it for healthy children under the age of 18. Now Denmark won’t allow children to be jabbed for Covid, and they don’t recommend it either for anyone under 50, unless they are vulnerable.

These countries’ decisions make good sense, for several reasons. First, the disease is not dangerous to healthy children in the short term. For instance, the World Health Organisation (WHO) noted in August 2022 that only 0.5% of global deaths with a positive Covid test were under 25 years of age. Second, although long Covid is a significant and growing concern, a large study found that the vaccines were only about 15% effective at preventing that condition. It means we urgently need to explore other ways of combatting long Covid, whereas a simplistic focus on vaccines would undermine that.

A third reason for not vaccinating children for Covid is because that vaccination doesn’t significantly slow or stop infection and transmission. That matters if a vaccination programme is aimed at stopping children passing on a disease which does not harm themselves. A team from Imperial College London published their findings in The Lancet early in 2022, which showed that the impact of vaccination on community transmission of variants of SARS-CoV-2 appeared to be not significantly different from among unvaccinated people. Reviewing a range of studies, infectious disease specialist Dr. Franco-Paredes wrote in the same medical journal that because transmissibility is not reduced by vaccination a range of policy ideas should now be rethought.

A fourth reason for changing tack on child vaccination is the risk of significant side effects. That is why a team of top scientists recently wrote in the peer-reviewed journal European Society of Medicine that for “young healthy adults, some of the risks and disadvantages afforded by [Covid] vaccination prevail over the medical benefit..” They reached their conclusion even before new official data on adverse reactions. Alarmingly, a court case revealed in early October 2022 that the US government had kept private the data informing itself that about 800,000 citizens needed medical attention after their Covid jabs.

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A Positive Song in a World Gone Silly

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During the pandemic many people appear to have had their capabilities for logic and ethics vaporised in the heat of fear and the distortions of reality from elite interests.  Consequently, from a serious public health perspective, the conversations about the pandemic are mostly silly. That does not mean there are really serious and damaging outcomes for individuals and societies. Millions of lives were lost and many might have been saved with smarter actions and more free flowing information. Now millions more lives are being risked due to the impacts of policies on supply chains and the cascading impacts on the poor worldwide. But given how much misinformed piety and pseudo professionalism is on show, it can be helpful at times to simply laugh at the orthodoxy on the pandemic. Here are some examples. 

Medical officials ignoring early outpatient treatment from their frontline colleagues? Arrogantly silly. 

Bigtech firms suppressing such information that might save lives? Ruthlessly silly. 

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Thoughts On Pandemic Response

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Since April 2020 most media corporations have encouraged hostility towards open scientific dialogue and normal policy scrutiny. That has been accentuated by the way domestic partisan politics in North America has influenced media content globally and provoked censorship from Big Technology platforms. The sad result is that misinformed and emotionally activated people share misinformed and outrage-inviting commentary on the analysis of people who are demanding more open scientific dialogue and normal policy scrutiny. That creates a barrier to people discovering what is actually being said by people like me. Therefore I am listing my key writings on Covid in one place so it is easy to access them.  

It’s time for more of a citizen’s response to the pandemic – for a real #PlanB – where I explain how a different agenda to the current orthodoxy could be pursued that allies with our fellow citizens to remove barriers to us all making responsible decisions and how the Left has failed to articulate this agenda due to having lost close connection with the low paid workforce. 

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The Benefits of Africa Evading Western Panic

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Africa has fared far better than the West in the direct impacts of Covid-19. With 16% of the world’s population, Africa has had only around 5% of the world’s Covid cases, with only about 7% of the population double-jabbed against the virus. Half of African countries have Covid mortality rates lower than 1 in 10,000 people – less than one-twentieth the rate in the USA.

So what can people in the West, of any political leaning, learn from the pandemic response in Africa?

Tragically, the impacts of policies against Covid have put tens of millions of people into poverty through their disruption to economies and supply chains. That shows how ‘Western panic’ may be exerting severe collateral damage around the world. So what can people outside the West learn about the dangers of ‘Western panic’?

In an invited contribution to the ‘Existing Otherwise’ art exhibition in Ghana I share reflections during a 15 minute ‘walk and talk’ video.

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Decolonize the World Health Organisation (WHO)

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There is now much peer-reviewed science on the medicinal benefits of various natural foods. Which is obvious as humans have been healthy and recovering from disease since… um… well… prehistory. 

So science is playing catch up with traditional and community knowledge on how to help stay healthy and recover when we get sick. But that wisdom is studiously ignored by medical bureaucracies that have been trained to only accept large clinical trials of the type that (mostly Western) pharmaceutical companies can pay for. It means that esteemed institutions like the World Health Organisation (WHO) mostly ignore what is being done with healing plants in many countries. Worse, their staff devoutly and proudly ignore it as a matter of professional and personal identity as being strictly “scientific.” I know that because I worked as a consultant with them before. And there is evidence that millions are suffering as a result of their conceit. 

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