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COVID-19: Feckless Mask Studies, Censorship, Natural Immunity, Faithless Experts, Bulldoze the Injured
Related: COVID medications, ethics in medicine, gears of the machine, health, Medical Industrial Complex, natural immunity, particulate respirators and masks, risk assessment, SARS-CoV-2 aka COVID-19 aka Coronavirus, The Epoch Times, vaccination
re: COVID-19
re: Long-Haul COVID
re: natural immunity
Emphasis added.
Kevin Roche: How to Lie With Statistics and Bad Study Design, Mask Version
Sept 2, 2021, by Kevin Roche.
This new study supposedly showing benefits of community masking has been touted for showing mask efficacy and pilloried by true scientists for its abysmal design and statistical methods. To me, the level of garbage in the study is evident by two basic factors, which I will get to momentarily, but I will go through the whole thing rather than just dismissing it, which is all it deserves. I will do that to fully demonstrate the desperation of the mask religionists to find anything that supports mask effectiveness at stopping community spread of CV-19. That last part is the critical issue. In a world in which real science was respected, this preprint would get laughed out of peer review, but we will see what happens. (Mask Study)
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WIND: since it supports the mask narrative, at least one reputable journal might publish it? Peer review is a joke that only the naive believe in—it’s controlled by committees of conformists.
Meet The Censored: Ivermectin Critic David Fuller
Sept 2, 2021, by Matt Taibbi.
If Internet algorithms can't tell the difference between criticism and advocacy, what's safe to report? Why one filmmaker believes "YouTube is unfit for the purpose for hosting journalism."
They fixed the problem, twice. That’s the good news. The first time filmmaker, former BBC and Channel 4 journalist, and Rebel Wisdom co-founder David Fuller put together a video criticizing ivermectin advocates was on August 4th. Called “Ivermectin For and Against,” it was taken down by YouTube, on the grounds that it constituted medical misinformation.
Fuller appealed the decision for a variety of reasons – more on those later – and won. He continued investigating the subject, and taking on the claims of ivermectin advocates, hoping to conclude with a video called “Vaccines and DarkHorse: A Final Word.” This last piece included footage of well-known ivermectin advocates Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, whose DarkHorse podcast was previously featured on this site after YouTube banned some of their material.
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TK: What lessons do you take away from this experience?
Fuller: That YouTube is unfit for the purpose for hosting journalism, and that their moderation system is secretive, random and very disrespectful to creators who have made large amounts of money for the company. I still have no idea why any of these films was taken down or why.
WIND: COVID brought our governments the priceless opportunity to accelerate the death of scientific inquiry and free speech.
Kevin Roche: Coronamonomania Lives Forever, Part 15
Sept 1, 2021, by Kevin Roche.
I keep watching for signs that the world is leaving coronamonomania behind, but it isn’t clear that is happening. Here is an excellent overview article looking at the suppression efforts and lockdowns in particular. This truly was an unprecedented and unjustified approach. (Tablet Article)
Even the NYTimes is allowing op-eds wondering what the heck our goals really are. (NYTimes Article)
I am extremely concerned about the public communication, as usual, because in the next few weeks, breakthrough infections are going to become the majority of cases, and the proportion of hospitalizations and deaths will get higher as well. The public has not been properly prepared for this and it has not been put in context for the public, so there will be freaking out, which will likely be exacerbated by the media terror-lovers. There needs to be an exit plan and the biggest part of that plan needs to be stopping the endless reporting of meaningless data, like case numbers, and a far better education of the public on what to expect.
I am dubious about the entire booster idea, because it is not clear to me what the purpose is or that there is any data that a booster will have a longer impact than the original vaccination. Israel is the first country to really push the boosters, and this study looks at that effort. (Medrxiv Paper) The researchers created comparative cohorts of people with two doses but no booster and those who received the booster. The booster cohort had a much lower rate of infection, but this could be due to such a short follow-up period. And there may be some selection factor at work in who got the boosters that exaggerates effectiveness.
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WIND: follow the links.
TabletMag: The Masked Ball of Cowardice
August 29, 2021, by Michael P Senger.
Lockdowns,” the mass quarantine of both sick and healthy people, have never before been used for disease mitigation in the modern Western world. Previously, the strategy had been systematically ruled out by the pandemic plans of the World Health Organization (WHO) and by health experts of everydeveloped nation. So how did we get here?
Mass lockdowns of entire countries as a technique for fighting disease sprung into the world’s consciousness on the order of Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), who fomented a global propaganda offensive targeting Western governments and media. Within weeks, the WHO, an organization that once devoted itself to fighting disease and which has sadly become a tool of Chinese foreign policy, promulgated lockdowns into global policy through a series of pressconferences that showed a complete absence of analysis or logic.
...Likewise, in October 2020, the WHO’s peer-reviewed bulletin showed COVID-19’s overall IFR across all age groups to be about 0.23%. John Ioannidis, the world’s most-cited physician, believes the IFR to be lower and published his own peer-reviewed study showing the overall IFR to be about 0.15%. But in a poll conducted by the Menzies Research Centre, by June 2021 Australians on average estimated their chance of dying if they contracted the virus to be 38%, an overestimation of more than 160-fold.
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As the experiments of Stanley Milgram proved, people can be convinced to commit atrocities when ordered to do so by scientific authorities. From journalists and judges to politicians and common professionals, the public has granted health officials one exception after another to their most fundamental rights, and they’ve been misled every step of the way. Whether out of gullibility, face-saving incompetence, or something worse, they’ve brought the world to a frightening place.
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WIND: spot-on.
The Epoch Times: CDC Director Walensky Tells Unvaccinated People: Don’t Travel Over Labor Day Weekend
September 1, 2021, by Jack Philips.
“Given where we are with disease transmission right now, we would say that people need to take these risks into their own consideration as they think about traveling,” Dr. Rochelle Walensky said during a White House COVID-19 briefing Tuesday, adding that vaccinated people should wear masks. “If you are unvaccinated, we would recommend not traveling.”
As with other recommendations from the CDC, Walenksy’s remark has no legal authority.
...“No travel for you, bad little children,” wrote Dr. Robert Malone, who has self-identified as a key developer of mRNA vaccine technology, on Twitter after her announcement.
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WIND: who gave this anti-scientific lying “scientist” the right to tell people not to travel?
Even if we agree that there is some risk, the statement lacks any reference to natural immunity and that is outrageous, since natural immunity which is 27X BETTER than vaccination? Pure propaganda is what the twaddle is.
The Epoch Times: Pfizer-BioNTech Still Immune From Lawsuits Over COVID-19 Vaccine After Federal Approval: Lawyers
August 29, 2021, by Meiling Lee.
The Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) recent approval of the messenger RNA COVID-19 vaccine Comirnaty has prompted a wave of vaccine mandates across the country, yet individuals who happen to suffer serious side effects won’t be able to file a lawsuit against the producer of the vaccine, according to lawyers.
...Mark Sadaka, a medical litigations lawyer who has handled more than 175 vaccination cases, said full federal approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine doesn’t change the immunity status afforded to the vaccine manufacturer, so lawsuits can’t be filed if an individual has a severe reaction to the shot.
... Sadaka claimed that with the liability protection offered to vaccine companies, “there is no incentive to disclose safety risks of countermeasures outside of the simple goodwill of the large corporations that sell the product,” noting that “rare side effects are often swept under the rug in favor of profit.”
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WIND: totally safe— a drug company making $40B profit in one year on the vaccine needs to put its boot on the neck of people harmed by the vaccine by denying them justice? You’re SOL if the vaccine hurts you and there are a lot of fates nearly as bad as death, such as severe permanent neurological damage.
The Epoch Times: Pfizer Board Member: ‘Natural Immunity’ Against COVID-19 Needs to Be Included in Policy Discussions
August 30, 2021, by Jack Philips.
Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, who is also a Pfizer board member, noted that “natural immunity” gained from a prior COVID-19 infection needs to be included in discussions about virus-related policies and mandates.
“The balance of the evidence demonstrates that natural immunity confers a durable protection,” Gottlieb said during an Aug. 30 interview, referring to a landmark new preprint Israeli study that found that prior COVID-19 infection confers more protection against the virus than any of the vaccines. “It’s fair to conclude that.”
Although Gottlieb said he would “be careful” about concluding whether natural immunity provides better protection against transmitting the virus, officials “should start assimilating that into our policy discussions.”
“Natural infection confers robust and durable immunity,” he said, citing the Israeli study and others.
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WIND: great to see someone with at least some ethics speaking out on the Pfizer board. But he should be pushing a lot harder and making a huge stink about the gross ethical violations of continuing to use the term “unvaccinated” to refer to 120 million Americans already gotten-and-over COVID, those with natural immunity.
