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Rhonda Patrick vs Byram Bridle — Coronavirus Vaccination

dryburgh-com — Wed, 14 Jul 2021 22:01:41 +0000

Background

Last Saturday, Rhonda Patrick held her monthly members-only Q&A. The email invitation said that “misinformation on COVID-19 and mRNA vaccines” would be the prioritized theme, and that she’d specifically seek to address the following three questions:

“Ivermectin has been getting more press lately and seems like a hugely compelling Covid prophylaxis and treatment. Can you comment on this at all?
Can you address why people are saying the spike protein from mRNA vaccines are cytotoxic?
Does the spike protein made by the mRNA in the covid vaccine stay in the shoulder (or the deltoid)?”

I appreciate Rhonda and what she’s contributed to public awareness over many years around aging and nutrition. A favorite of mine was her coverage of “triage theory” with her former professor, the brilliant biochemist Dr. Bruce Ames.

I attended the members Q&A. It sounded like she lacked a more full complete and accurate picture, simply owing to lack of specialization. To seek further education I pinged viral immunologist Bryam Bridle. I relayed main points of the Q&A. He kindly responded in detail.

He finished with:

“Feel free to invite Rhonda to an open scientific discussion on the topic of the safety of COVID-19 vaccines. I would be happy to do this with a mutually agreed upon moderator on any forum that would be widely accessible to the public. If she is so certain she is right and I am wrong, this would be an ideal opportunity to quench my ‘misinformation’. I recommend forwarding this to her directly.

I have summarized all my current thinking about the vaccines in the attached guide that I wrote. I will work on turning it into a formal scientific paper.”

I’ll forward this post to Rhonda and report back on this blog if she’d like to take up Bryam’s offer. It’s all in positive spirit, healthy scientific discussion and debate.

Bryam said in his response “I have summarized all my current thinking about the vaccines in the attached guide that I wrote. I will work on turning it into a formal scientific paper.”, download here.

I’ve witnessed respected world-renowned scientists and physicians making mis-statements with regards to coronavirus, owing to their lack of specialization. If Rhonda is wrong, I applaud her for her courage in stepping forward with her thoughts.

Dr Rhonda Patrick

BIOGRAPHY

Dr. Rhonda Patrick has a Ph.D. in biomedical science from the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, Memphis TN and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Memphis TN. She also has a Bachelor’s of Science degree in biochemistry/chemistry from the University of California, San Diego. She has done extensive research on aging, cancer, and nutrition.

Dr Byram Bridle

BIOGRAPHY

Dr. Byram Bridle is a viral immunologist who is passionate about improving life through two avenues of research. One arm of his research program is dedicated to designing and optimizing novel biotherapies for the treatment of cancers. The goal of his research team is to harness the natural power of a patient’s immune system to eliminate their own cancer cells. This represents the ultimate personalized therapy and holds the potential to treat cancers more effectively, safely, and at lower cost than current options. The second arm of his research program focuses on studying host responses to viruses and other inflammatory stimuli. This has implications for the treatment of infectious diseases and inflammation-mediated disorders. These two programs have been unified in a unique way. The Bridle lab is harnessing their expertise in making potent cancer vaccines and combining this with their interest in anti-viral immunity to develop vaccines to protect against infectious diseases such as those caused by highly pathogenic coronaviruses. Mentoring the next generation of Canadian scientists is a responsibility that Dr. Bridle takes very seriously.

Email Exchange with Dr Bryam Bridle

I said, “She said she got vaccinated. She said the spike protein used in the vaccine was not cytotoxic as it did not have ACE2 receptor binding, i.e. was not the same spike protein”.

He replied:

“The mRNA vaccines encode what is called the ‘prefusion-stabilized spike protein’. The S1 sub-unit has the ACE2 receptor binding domain. In was shown in this study that 11 out of 13 vaccinated people had the S1 subunit is circulation: Ogata, A.F. et al. Circulating SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine Antigen Detected in the Plasma of mRNA-1273 Vaccine Recipients. Clinical Infectious Diseases (2021).

It provides proof-of-principle that not all the spike stays intact in the prefusion-stabilized form. This might be due to partial degradation of the some of the mRNAs at the transmembrane domain end, due to partial degradation in cells that undergo apoptosis, etc. Some have claimed that the concentration of the S1 subunit was too low to be of concern. However, in the study, the authors did not determine if any of the S1 was already bound to ACE2 on cells.

Also, in Canada, we defined the AstraZeneca vaccine as being too dangerous for adults at a reported rate of 1 potentially fatal blood clot per 55,000 people vaccinated. If systemic spike were the culprit, one would only expect to see high concentrations in 1 out of ~55,000 people evaluated (so what are the chances of finding this in 13 people).

Of much greater concern to me is not the free spike, but the biodistribution data that suggest the mRNA vaccines are getting delivered to a wide variety of tissues. If there is localized expression of spike on these cells (since the spike is supposed to stay on the surface of cells), these would become targets once antibodies are induced.”

I said, “She further said that the Japanese info that was widely disseminated saying the vaccine spike protein was found in ovaries etc was nonsense because the dosage used on mice was 300 to 1000x that used in humans. She said she was far more worried about the spike protein in the real virus”.

He replied:

“They key to this study is that it demonstrates that only ~25-50% of the dose stays at the injection site. Would this change with the dose? I don’t think it would change this fact much. However, we won’t know unless a study is done. This is where it is frustrating. Never before has the onus been placed on scientists outside the vaccine companies to prove danger. It has always been the responsibility of the companies to prove safety. …and a lack of data regarding harm does not equal confirmation of safety.

Second, the study was done in rats, not mice. Both are a terrible model of COVID-19 since the binding affinity of the spike for mouse/rat ACE2 is at least an order of magnitude lower than for human ACE2. I believe that ACE2 in rats is of even lower affinity than mice. Neither develop COVID-19. Mice and rats are not appropriate models for studying either COVID-19 nor the safety of COVID-19 vaccines. Note that the pre-clinical fertility studies were also done in these rodent models, which would be expected to overestimate safety.

Also, the biodistribution study did not look at spike. It assessed the distribution of the lipid nanoparticles. Further, rats are not humans. One cannot say with absolute certainty that a high dose in rats rules out the possibility of safety issues with a lower dose in humans (see the comments about the affinity of binding of spike to ACE2 from different species as one example).

Finally, the point is that the biodistribution study was never done with the actual vaccine formulation, nor in appropriate animal models. Nor was any effort made to assess this in the first phase 1 trial, which is where it should have been evaluated in people. This, and the story Re: PEG (see below) suggest corners were cut to rush the vaccine into people. This may have been deemed acceptable to help the at-risk. However, it is no longer acceptable in the context of people at low risk of COVID-19, especially in the absence of pre-screening for naturally acquired immunity (which is likely the case for many people by now) that would preclude the need for vaccination, and especially for young people.

The wide distribution of mRNA vaccines throughout the body has a historical precedent, such as for immunizing against influenza for example. However, many people do not realize that lipid nanoparticles were not designed to function as vaccines. They were designed to serve as gene therapies or carry drug cargo throughout the body, including into the brain where attempts could be made to treat diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and brain cancers.

Of substantial concern is the use of PEG, which has been associated with anaphylactic shock in some people after receiving a mRNA vaccine. PEG was added to lipid nanoparticles in the early days of drug development to promote much wider distribution throughout the body. Specifically, when PEG is added to lipid nanoparticles, it helps the particles avoid being consumed by cells throughout the body, especially cells of the immune system, that would limit the distribution of the mRNA cargo.

Indeed, addition of PEG to lipid nanoparticles was hailed as a breakthrough because ‘This effect is substantially greater than that observed previously with conventional liposomes and is associated with a more than 5-fold prolongation of liposome circulation time in blood’.

In retrospect, it seems that another mistake may have been made in the rush to get these vaccines into people: Arguably, the PEG component should have been removed from the lipid nanoparticle formulation. This likely would have resulted in lipid nanoparticles with a greater tendency to remain at the injection site and be picked up by the very cells of the immune system that we want to induce an immune response.

References:
Bahl, K. et al. Preclinical and Clinical Demonstration of Immunogenicity by mRNA Vaccines
against H10N8 and H7N9 Influenza Viruses. Molecular therapy : the journal of the American
Society of Gene Therapy 25, 1316-1327 (2017).

Puri, A. et al. Lipid-based nanoparticles as pharmaceutical drug carriers: from concepts to clinic.
Critical reviews in therapeutic drug carrier systems 26, 523-580 (2009).

Papahadjopoulos, D. et al. Sterically stabilized liposomes: improvements in pharmacokinetics
and antitumor therapeutic efficacy. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 88, 11460-11464 (1991).

Gabizon, A. & Martin, F. Polyethylene glycol-coated (pegylated) liposomal doxorubicin. Rationale
for use in solid tumours. Drugs 54 Suppl 4, 15-21 (1997).”

I said “She also said that coronavirus was associated with brain shrinkage similar to dementia, in many.”

He replied:

“I am very worried that the vaccines may cause dementia in some people and the symptoms may not become apparent for years (i.e. a potentially unappreciated long-term effect).”

More Resources:

The post Rhonda Patrick vs Byram Bridle — Coronavirus Vaccination appeared first on Darachi.com.

Exclusive Vaccine Focus at Expense of Therapeutics Killed Up To 85% — Peter McCullough MD Testifies to HHS Committee

Eva Medved — Wed, 14 Apr 2021 20:37:08 +0000

Dr McCullough MD

Peter McCullough, MD, MPH is board certified by the American Board of Internal Medicine in internal medicine and cardiovascular disease. He has extensive training and expertise in lipidology and echocardiography. He holds additional certifications from the American Board of Clinical Lipidology and the National Board of Echocardiography.

Dr. McCullough specializes in treating patients with complicated internal medicine problems that have affected important organs including the heart and kidneys. After receiving a bachelor’s degree from Baylor University, Dr. McCullough completed his medical degree as an Alpha Omega Alpha graduate from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas.

He went on to complete his internal medicine residency at the University of Washington in Seattle, a cardiology fellowship including service as Chief Fellow at William Beaumont Hospital, and a master’s degree in public health at the University of Michigan. Dr. McCullough oversees cardiology training, education, and research for Baylor Health Care System and is Vice Chief of Medicine at Baylor University Medical Center at Dallas. He is an internationally recognized authority in his field and frequently lectures on internal medicine, nephrology, and cardiology.

In addition, he has published over a thousand related scientific communications. He is currently serving as the chair of the National Kidney Foundation’s Kidney Early Evaluation Program, the largest community screening effort for chronic diseases in America. As both a primary care physician and specialist, Dr. McCullough welcomes patients with complicated internal medicine problems that have affected important organs including the heart and kidneys.

He is knowledgeable about the roles of diet and exercise in health and disease and commonly provide guidance concerning dietary supplements and treatments for obesity. He has an intimate practice style with frequent patient contact and 24 X 7 access for questions and help with medical problems. His practice involves both teaching and research, therefore, his patients are among the first to have new tests and treatments for high cholesterol, high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart and kidney disease.

Dr. McCullough is on the medical staff at Baylor University Medical Center, Baylor Jack and Jane Hamilton Heart and Vascular Hospital, and The Heart Hospital Baylor Plano. He is also on staff at Baylor Heart and Vascular Institute which promotes cardiovascular research and education.

Notes

Peter McCullough has been censored by YouTube. The following four items will help the reader/listener broaden their understanding of the topics conveyed in this testimony by him.

COVID Treatment: Step-By-Step Doctor’s Plan That Could Save Your Life, (Updated 1st Feb, 2021), Read PDF
Dr Peter McCullough MD Explains COVID19 Treatment Protocol (5th Nov, 2020), Watch Odysee
Treating Covid-19 @ Home with Elizabeth Lee Vliet, MD on The Dr. Peter Breggin Hour (18th Nov, 2020), Watch Odysee
Ambulatory Treatment of COVID-19. Peter McCullough, MD (12th Oct, 2020), Watch Odysee, Slides PDF

Transcript

Peter McCullough ➝ 00:00

Good afternoon. I’m Dr. Peter McCullough and I’m an internist and cardiologist and professor of medicine at Texas A&M University School of Medicine. I’m on the Baylor Dallas campus, and I’ve been integrally involved in the response to COVID-19.

Now, the opinions expressed are those of my own, and not necessarily those of my institution. I can tell you that in my field, I’m an academic doctor, I see patients, but I’m very involved in research.

I’m the editor of two major journals. In my field, I’m the most published person – in my field, which deals with the heart and the kidneys – in the world in history. And when COVID-19 hit, I saw it as our medical Superbowl, and they were going to be doctors like Dr. Urso coming out of wherever they worked to face the virus. And there were doctors in the hospital that just had to receive the virus.

Peter McCullough ➝ 00:56

And then there were those who headed for the sidelines. And then there were those that were detractors against the pandemic. And so as I started to survey the literature, I had patients with heart and lung disease who needed urgent treatment. And I refused to let an illness which lasted for two weeks at home before they got sick enough, to be hospitalized.

I refused to let a patient languish at home with no treatment and then be hospitalized when it was too late. It was obvious. That was obvious in April, that that was the case.

So I used the best tools or drugs available at the time. And these are appropriately prescribed off label. Remember, a label is an advertising label, a label isn’t a scientific document. There is an appropriately prescribed off-label use of conventional medicine to treat an illness.

And I, in May, I put together a team of doctors because the group that was facing the pandemic to the greatest degree was in Milan, Italy.

Peter McCullough ➝ 02:00

So most of them were in the Italian research network.

We summarized all we knew about the available drugs, and we published our findings in the August 8th issue of the American Journal of Medicine. And the title of that paper was the Pathophysiologic Basis And Rationale For Early Ambulatory Treatment. And it had a premise there’s two bad outcomes to COVID-19, hospitalization and death.

The second premise, if we don’t do something before the hospitalization, we can never stop it. We can never stop it. And I have to tell you when I, and was the lead author in that paper, but we had dozens of authors from Italy, India, UCLA, Emory. We had the best institutions in the United States.

I can tell you the interesting thing was there was 50,000 papers in the peer-reviewed literature on COVID. Not a single one told a doctor how to treat it. Not a single one.

Peter McCullough ➝ 02:51

When does that happen? I was absolutely stunned. And when this paper was published in American Journal of Medicine, it became a lightning ride. Oh my gosh, it became the most cited paper in basically all of medicine at that time.

The world started knocking on my door and I said, Oh my Lord. I just can’t believe what became untapped. And I had never been on social media before. And my daughter who was home from law school, I was talking to her about it. She said, well, why don’t make a YouTube video?

So I made a YouTube video with four slides from the paper. This is a peer-reviewed paper published in one of the best medical journals in the world, four slides. I even wore a tie and a suit, and she showed me how to record it in PowerPoint.

Peter McCullough ➝ 03:30

And I posted it on YouTube. It went absolutely viral. And within about a week, YouTube said you violated the terms of the community.

And that’s when Senator Johnson’s office got involved in Washington and said, Oh my gosh, this is important scientific information to help patients in the middle of this crisis. And social media is striking it down. Based on what authority?

Well, one thing led to another and I became the lead witness for the US Senate testimony on November 19th, 2020. And the reason why there was Senate testimony is because there was a near total block on any information of treatment to patients, a near total block.

And so what had happened over time is that we had gotten into a cycle in America of no information on treatment. Patients actually think that the virus is untreatable. And so what happens is they go out to get a diagnosis.

Now I’m a COVID survivor, my wife in the galley is a COVID survivor, my father in a nursing home is a COVID survivor.

You get handed a diagnostic test. It says, here, you’re COVID positive, go home. Is there any treatment? No. Is there any resources I can call? No. Any referral lines, hotlines? No. Any research hotlines? No. That’s the standard of care in the United States. And if we go to any one of our testing centers today in Texas, I bet that’s the standard of care. I bet that’s the standard of care. No wonder we have had 45,000 deaths in Texas. The average person in Texas thinks there’s no treatment. They honestly think there’s no treatment.

They don’t even know about these EUA antibodies. You heard from a 90 year old gentleman who got bamlanivimab. Terrific.

Where’s the focus? There’s such a focus on the vaccine. Where’s the focus on people sick right now? This committee ought to know where all these monoclonal antibodies are. They ought to know where all the treatment protocols are. They ought to have a list of the treatment centers in Texas that actually treat patients with COVID-19. So I led the initiative.

The second paper was published in a dedicated issue of Reviews in Cardiovascular Medicine. Now I had 57 authors, including Dr. Urso, Dr. Immanuel, lead doctors in Houston, San Antonio, all over. And it was another world by paper. And now we have it updated, integrated. So yes, we used drugs to affect viable replication.

Peter McCullough ➝ 05:50

The antibodies are terrific. We can use intercellular anti-infectives in that box. We use corticosteroids in inflammatory drugs. The best anti-inflammatory drug is colchicine. You’ve probably never heard about it. In the largest, highest quality randomized trial, over 4,000 patients, double blind randomized placebo controlled trial. There’s a 50% reduction in mortality. No word of it, none, complete block to anybody, colchicine.

How can that be? How can that be? And then the most deadly part of the viral infection is thrombosis. So I have always treated my patients with something to treat the virus, something to treat the inflammation and something to treat thrombosis.

Just as Dr. Urso had. And I had very, very sick patients and I’ve lost two. But I have to tell you, what has gone on has been beyond belief.

How many of you have turned on a local news station or a national cable news station and ever gotten an update on treatment at home?

Peter McCullough ➝ 06:52

How many of you have ever gotten a single word about what to do when you get handed the diagnosis of COVID-19? No wonder that is a complete and total failure at every level.

Okay. Let’s take the White House. How come we didn’t have a panel of doctors assigned to put all their efforts and stop these hospitalizations? Why don’t we have doctors who actually treated patients get together in a group and every week, give us an update. Why didn’t we have that? Why didn’t we have that at the state level? Zero? Why don’t we have any reports about how many patients were treated and spared hospitalizations from all the – I listened to six hours of testimony today? Zero. Zero.

We have a complete and total blank spot on treatment. It is a blanking phenomenon. At least in the United States, there are some heroes. Now, the American Society of Physician and Surgeons took the lead. They’re the group. They have identified 35 treatment centers in Texas.

Peter McCullough ➝ 07:49

They knew who they are. They have emergency hotlines. They helped Dr. Hall put together this very brief pamphlet, but there’s more of an extensive one. We can pass it around to everyone that at least gives people half a chance to find out about information. Okay.

This is a complete and total travesty to have a fatal disease and not treat it. Now, the National Institutes of Health and the Infectious Diseases Society of America started putting out guidelines of the treatment of COVID-19. And to this date, they nearly exclusively deal with the hospitalized patient.

The two papers that I have published as the lead author, and supported by wonderful people, by Dr. Urso, are the only publications in the peer-reviewed literature that tell doctors how to treat COVID-19 as an outpatient, based on the supportive scientific information. The only two.

The home treatment guide by the American Physicians and Surgeons is the only source of information available to patients on how to treat COVID-19 at home. The only source.

Peter McCullough ➝ 08:50

So what can be done right here, right now? There’s going to be more people that die in Texas. And it’s an absolute tragedy. How about tomorrow? Let’s have a law that says there’s not a single result given out without a treatment guide and without a hotline of how to get into research. Let’s put a staff around this and find out all the research available in Texas. And let’s not have a single person go home with a test result with their fatal diagnosis, sitting at home, going into two weeks of despair before they succumb to hospitalization and death.

It is unimaginable in America that we can have such a complete and total blind spot. I blame the doctors for not stepping up. Where was the medical society stepping up and putting effort on this? How about from the federal and state agencies? There never was a single bit of group collaborative effort to stop the hospitalizations.

Peter McCullough ➝ 09:39

Nobody even kind of thought about it. Bob Hall had me on a teleconference in April or May. And we’re like, wait a minute. How come, where’s UT Southwestern? I’m a graduate of UT Southwestern. Where’s A&M? Where’s the rest of the universities? How come we’re not stopping this? How come we are not stopping this?

But it gets worse because in the paper I published in December of 2020, you know what I did. I had a terrific doctor from Brazil, we went through country by country, by country. And just asked the question, what are the countries doing? What was the last time you turned on the news and ever got a window to the outside world? When did you ever get an update about how the rest of the world is handling COVID? Never.

What’s happened in this pandemic is the world has closed in on us.

Peter McCullough ➝ 10:23

There’s only one doctor whose face is on TV now. One, not a panel. Doctors, we always work in groups. We always have different opinions.

There’s not a single media doctor on TV who’s ever treated a COVID patient. Not a single one. There’s not a single person in the White House task force who has ever treated a patient. Why don’t we do something bold? Why don’t we put together a panel of doctors that have actually treated outpatients with COVID-19 and get them together for a meeting.

And why don’t we exchange ideas? And why don’t we say how we can finish the pandemic strongly? Isn’t it amazing? Think about this. Think about the complete and total blind spot. So what happened? I can tell you what happened.

What happened in around May, it became known that the virus was going to be amenable to a vaccine.

All efforts on treatment were dropped. The National Institutes of Health actually had a multi-drug program. They dropped it after 20 patients, said, we can’t find the patients. The most disingenuous announcement of all time.

And then Warp Speed went full tilt for vaccine development. And there was a silencing of any information on treatment. Any. Silencing. Scrubbed from Twitter, YouTube. Can’t get papers published on this. You can’t, we can’t even get information out in our own medical literature on this. There’s been a complete scrubbing.

So this program has been one of, try to reduce the spread of the virus and wait for a vaccine. And when we vaccinate, all efforts have to be on vaccination. And probably if I had four hours of vaccination on here. Think about it. As we sit here today, the calculations in Texas on herd immunity, the calculations are we’re at 80% herd immunity right now with no vaccine effect. 80%. And more people are developing COVID today.

They’re going to become immune. People who develop COVID have complete and durable immunity – a very important principle – complete and durable. You can’t beat natural immunity. You can’t vaccinate on top of it and make it better. There’s no scientific, clinical or safety rationale for ever vaccinating a COVID recovered patient.

There’s no rationale for ever testing a COVID recovered patient. My wife and I are COVID recovered. Why did we go through the testing outside? There’s absolutely no rationale.

I’d encourage this committee to actually look at what’s being done and ask, is there any rationale, is there any rationale for anything? Listen, there’s plenty of COVID recovered patients. Let them forgo the vaccine and let people who are clamoring for it get it. But at 80% herd immunity in the vaccine trials, fewer than 1% in the vaccine and the placebo actually get COVID. Fewer than 1%. The vaccine is going to have a 1% public health impact. That’s what the data says. It’s not going to save us. We’re already 80% herd immune. If we’re strategically targeted, we can actually close out the pandemic very well with the vaccine, but strategically targeted.

People under 50, who fundamentally have no health risks. There’s no scientific rationale for them to ever become vaccinated.

Peter McCullough ➝ 13:28

There’s no scientific rationale. One of the mistakes I heard today as a rationale for vaccination is asymptomatic spread. And I want you to be very clear about this. My opinion is there is a low degree, if any, of asymptomatic spread. Sick person gives it to sick person.

The Chinese have published a study in British Medical Journal, 11 million people, they tried to find asymptomatic spread. You can’t find it. And that’s been one of important pieces of misinformation. When Senator Hall called a conference call of what should we do in the Capitol when we reopened, I said, you know what? You know what we do at Baylor? You walk in and they zap your temperature.

“One of the mistakes I heard today as a rationale for vaccination is asymptomatic spread. And I want you to be very clear about this. My opinion is there is a low degree, if any, of asymptomatic spread.”

Peter McCullough, MD

Professor of Medicine

You get a temperature check and go in. Do we test everybody who walks into the Baylor hospital? No. Are they a lot sicker than everybody in this room? You better believe it. So why would we do something here at the Capitol that has absolutely positively no scientific rationale and then do it in this context?

Peter McCullough ➝ 14:22

So my testimony as I sit here today is COVID-19 has always been a treatable illness. A very large study from McKinney, Texas, another one from New York City show that when doctors treat patients early, who are over age 50 with medical problems, with a sequence multi-drug approach with the available drugs, four to six drugs that are available to them now, the monoclonal antibodies are better. There’s an 85% reduction in hospitalizations and death. 85%. 85%. I want you to remember that number. 85%.

“You can’t beat natural immunity. You can’t vaccinate on top of it and make it better. There’s no scientific, clinical or safety rationale for ever vaccinating a COVID recovered patient.”

Peter McCullough, MD

Professor of Medicine

We have over 500,000 deaths in the United States. The preventable fraction could have been as high as 85%. If our pandemic response would have been laser focused on the problem, the sick patient right in front of us. We’re focused over here and focused over there and focused on masks and what have you. Laser-focused. Sick patient, treat them. We lost focus on the most fundamental thing. That’s my testimony.

Chair ➝ 15:24

Thank you. I can tell how passionate you are and certainly have been a leader in talking about preventive protocols and also the ambulatory stage. And I do think that that has been missing and it’s been a concern because COVID-19 is going to be with us, right? I mean, it’s, you know, I hope we’re at 80% herd immunity. I don’t know yet. I’ll read your papers, but I appreciate that. And the message is is that there are drugs out there that work. There are therapies out there that work.

Peter McCullough ➝ 15:54

But no single one works alone. And so the dismissive mistake was to do a very small study. Oh, we studied 200 patients and we used ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, and it didn’t work. That’s like cancer and picking one drug and saying, Oh, it doesn’t reduce cancer mortality. We never do that in cancer. We never did that in AIDS. We don’t do it in hepatitis C.

What we look for is signals of benefit and acceptable safety. And then we combine them and that’s all we’ve done. But this independent declaration drug by drug that the drugs don’t work has been, and that’s on us, that’s been our medical house. That’s been a giant error that we’ve made on our side. We never should have expected single drugs to reduce mortality, but drugs in combination against a fatal viral infection, we should have.

Chair ➝ 16:39

This entire session is learned from lessons. I know we’re running short on time. Senator Hall, you have one question or?

Senator Hall ➝ 16:48

Real, real quick. I’d ask the question earlier when Dr. Hellerstedt was here about the idea that fits in with what you’ve talked about is that when we test someone, rather than just say, give them, yep. You’re positive. You’re negative. Be on your way. That we at least provide them information of what we know out there can be used.

Not trying to play the role of doctor out there. Would you, do you agree with Dr. Hellerstedt’s interpretation that that should not be done because it’s setting up a doctor-patient relationship and simply informing people or providing with over the counter drugs so that we could possibly have the early treatment for these folks rather than wait till they show up in the hospital?

Peter McCullough ➝ 17:40

We could at least have a physician group approved guide. The AAPS guide has been used in over 500,000 cases in the United States. In fact, the early treatment is probably what prevented us from overflowing the hospitals in the last quarter of the year.

“… when doctors treat patients early, who are over age 50 with medical problems, with a sequence multi-drug approach… There’s an 85% reduction in hospitalizations and death.”

Peter McCullough, MD

Professor of Medicine

When I testified, I said, listen, we’re on track. And I was very commenced to this. We’re on track of overflowing our hospitals. Our break point was 135,000 in the hospitals in the United States, we hit 128. Now the curve started going down long before the vaccine.

So I can tell you herd immunity long before the vaccine showed up, started to go down. But the early treatment kicked up, ivermectin news skyrocketed, hydroxychloroquine, monoclonal antibodies, as much as we could push them. Sadly, the monoclonal antibodies are still sitting on the shelf in a lot of places, but committees like this ought to be saying, listen, where are those monoclonal antibodies?

Peter McCullough ➝ 18:28

Do we stock them at the nursing home? What are the big nursing home chains? What are the big urgent care chains in Texas? And what are they doing? What are their early treatment protocols?

You know, these are blank spots. I bet nobody here has even thought about this. This is really low hanging fruit that we can tackle. The bottom line is a lot of doctors have checked out. And when patients call them, they say, I don’t treat COVID.

“People under 50, who fundamentally have no health risks. There’s no scientific rationale for them to ever become vaccinated.”

Peter McCullough, MD

Professor of Medicine

And when I asked those doctors, I said, you don’t treat COVID, how come? They go, well, there’s no treatment. I said, but do you call them two days later to see how they’re doing? No. So what’s that? That’s not, I don’t treat COVID. That’s, I don’t care anymore. That’s a loss of compassion.

So we have a crisis of compassion in our country, in the medical field. That’s in our house right now. But for every doctor that’s ever told a patient that they don’t treat COVID. Okay. But do they call them two days later and help them get oxygen or see how they’re doing?

If the answer’s no, that’s the Hippocratic oath going out. And that’s on us. And I’m telling you, we have a real self-check to do in the house of medicine.

More Resources:

Video Testimony Given March 10, 2021, Texas Senate HHS Committee

The post Exclusive Vaccine Focus at Expense of Therapeutics Killed Up To 85% — Peter McCullough MD Testifies to HHS Committee appeared first on Darachi.com.

The UGLY Truth About The COVID-19 Lockdowns (Video Plus Transcript & Slides) — Nick Hudson

dryburgh-com — Sat, 03 Apr 2021 09:04:06 +0000

Nick Hudson

Nick Hudson, a South African actuary who has settled into a career as a private equity investor, co-founded PANDA with four friends, professionals, who all shared an observation that data and facts about coronavirus weren’t at all as the media was portraying them. Besides taking interest in statistics and investment, Nick Hudson is also a speaker on the topics of epistemology, corporate governance, investment management, and, as of late, the pandemic.

PANDA

PANDA (Pandemics ~ Data & Analytics) is a multidisciplinary group seeking to inform policy. It is a collective of leading scientists, actuaries, economists, data scientists, statisticians, medical professionals, lawyers, engineers, and businesspeople working as a collective to replace bad science with good science.

Their key principles are that lockdowns run contrary to pre-COVID science (endorsed by the WHO and other medical bodies), that imposing restrictions on healthy people runs contrary to pre-COVID science, that poor countries and poor people within society are the worst affected by lockdowns, that it is questionable whether virus can be controlled at all (without having to completely isolate a nation for a very long time), and that implementing focused protection would provide the best natural outcome.

PANDA’s scientific advisory board includes some of the most renowned names in infectious diseases and epidemiology, such as Scott W. Atlas, Sucharit Bhakdi, Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta, Scott Jensen, Martin Kulldorff, Michael Levitt, Paul E Peterson, Ellen Townsend, Michael Yeadon, and many others, some of whom have to be members in a “cryptic way” due to the controversially.

Notes

Nick gave this talk on Thursday 18th March 2021 at the inaugural BizNews Investment Conference. I immediately thought that YouTube will censor it within hours, certainly within three days. To my astonishment, it was still there one week later. I checked back on morning 1st April and it was still there, and with 350K views! I could not believe that YouTube was allowing non-WHO sanctioned material on their platform. I don’t think I’ve saw a good honest coronavirus related video last that long on YouTube.

However when I checked again later in the day, it was removed – “This video has been removed for violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines”.

Although my interest is only to uncensor voices that should be heard as part of a sufficiently broad public discourse (i.e. a fundamental underpinning of a modern democracy, something now very much out of favor with big tech), I would be willing to undersign everything Nick said. There was not a single thing I understand at this point to be inaccurate.

The second BizNews Investment conference will start 31 Aug (Central Drakensberg, South Africa). Nick will be speaking again.

Transcript

Host ➝ 00:00

Nick first came to our attention when PANDA began making some insights into the whole lockdown. He, in many ways, typifies what BizNews is about. We do not believe that our audience is stupid.

We believe our audience doesn’t have to be told what the truth is. We rather prefer providing a platform where alternate views can be presented and that our community can make up their own minds. So the intelligent lay-person approach.

Never underestimate the intelligence of your community. Never overestimate their knowledge. That’s what we work on. And that’s what we will continue doing in the future.

Everyone that we admire is an independent and free thinker. When you start with him and Michelle there, Paula Sullivan, and Nick and Charles Savage, and they’re all changing the world in their own way by thinking independently.

And if you recall what Steve Jobs, the late Steve Jobs, said, it was the pirates and the misfits and the oddballs who actually change the world, not the people who are made from the cookie cutters.

We believe that our community loves BizNews because of that. That all of our, what our community members are looking for is something different, something alternative, something, not just run to the mall. And that is personified in our opening address this morning by Nick, the co-founder of PANDA, an investor, private equity specialist, Nick Hudson,

Nick Hudson ➝ 01:56

Thank you, Alec. And I really applaud you for taking that approach to journalism. It’s uncomfortably rare in the whole world at the moment. And that is just a terrible state of affairs.

PANDA started off as a conversation, really. A group of four friends, professionals, economist, a doctor, a lawyer, and a little actuary. What we shared was an observation that the data and the facts, the reality of coronavirus was far, far away from what the media and public health institutions were presenting to the world.

And we saw in that problem, the seeds of a great tragedy. After some months, we realized that our South African efforts needed to internationalize. This was not a local story, and it was not only about the science.

Our advisory board now includes some of the leading lights in infectious diseases and epidemiology, Nobel Laureate. And the working team of PANDA now spans the globe and includes a great many scientists, most of whom have to be members of Panda in a cryptic fashion. That’s how bad the censorship in this world has become.

We have believed from the get go that it was wrong on a number of levels to close society down, and that it has always been time to reopen society. And we also believe that the truth only prevails if plans are taken to bring it to light.

Nick Hudson ➝ 03:46

Our world is gripped by fear. And that fear is very much the product of a false narrative. When I say it’s a false narrative, I’m telling you that every single element, every single element of this narrative is false.

The narrative says that there’s a deadly virus spreading across the planet that nobody’s immune to it, and there’s no cure.

Even asymptomatic people can spread it and are major drivers of the epidemic of disease. And unless we lockdown and wear our masks until vaccines arrive and everybody gets vaccinated, we’re all going to die.

And anybody who challenges this narrative is a lunatic, a menace, a danger to society. Hence the suppression that Alec was talking about. But it is and always has been absolutely clear to us that no element of this narrative is justified in the face of reality. The reality is that there is a virus.

It is having a meaningful impact in some regions of the world. Very few people are susceptible to generating severe disease. There are several available treatments. Asymptomatic people, in a more sensible era known otherwise as healthy people, are not drivers of the epidemic.

Lockdowns and mask mandates have been ruled out by pre-COVID science for good reasons, never recommended. They’ve been tried. They have not worked, and they have caused great harm instead of protecting the vulnerable minority. We have hurt them.

This is ground zero for the malarkey of COVID. The statement, the greatest misrepresentation of all time, two sentences, which by themselves are true.

It’s true that the case fatality rate for COVID at this time was about 3.4%. And it’s also true that the flu generally kills far fewer than 1%. In fact, most people would say 0.1% of those infected, not of the cases, the sick people who arrive at hospital. But by conflating these two separate points, CFR and IFR, Tedros was effectively lying.

And this man [John Ioannidis], the greatest, one of the greatest infectious diseases specialists in the world, picked it up a few days later, he said that the statistic causes horror and it is meaningless. And he’s right.

Five months later, the World Health Organization had no option but to publish his paper, which demonstrated the extent to which he was right, showing that the infection fatality rate for coronavirus was not 3.4%, but 0.23%. And more impressively that for people under the age of 70, it was a mere 0.05%, which is to say negligible.

Nick Hudson ➝ 07:02

People are also astonished because the media has suppressed this fact that in March, the first quarter of last year, none other than Anthony Fauci said that the consequences of COVID may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza.

He was right at the time and has been right ever since, but for reasons that are something of a mystery, he’s been wrong in terms of what he’s said ever since. The other effect that flat mortality rate hides is this very impressive statistic. That there’s a three order of magnitude difference between the infection fatality rate for young people and that for the elderly.

Further inflaming the fear is this false idea of a novel virus. The reality is that coronavirus is a very close relative, not even a separate subspecies, a very close relative of the 2003 SARS virus.

There are seven related coronaviruses known to cause disease in humans, probably many others. And for the general circulation, annual, pretty much annual global circulation. So the naming of this disease is terribly inconsistent.

This has really a rose by the name, SARS, a variant of SARS. It’s not novel, but it enabled a further porky pie.

I could talk for a whole day on the things that are going wrong in this paragraph here, Maria Van Kerhkove of the World Health Organization, a majority of the world’s population is susceptible to infection.

And that is the first of two key elements that lead to this idea that everyone is dangerous until proven healthy.

But we could see as early as February, March, that this was not the case. There was the dramatic tale of the cruise ship, deadly virus on board. The captain having to attempt a lockdown under conditions where lockdown was pretty much impossible.

And what that ship showed us, that petridish experiment that should have been seen as a godsend is that a minority of people got infected. A minority of those developed the disease and a very small minority of those, confined to the over 65, died. Only 12 people out of several thousand on board of the ship died.

Nick Hudson ➝ 09:55

So that told you very clearly that this universal susceptibility was nonsense. Another thing that makes it very clear is the startling map showing the population fatality rates around the world.

And while you can see that in Europe and the Americas, there has been an issue. In a vast region covering Africa, Southeast Asia and Oceania, the population fatality rate has been a hundred in a million, which is to say there almost isn’t an epidemic.

To put it in context in a typical year, these countries would expect to see about 10,000 deaths per million from all causes. So the hundred per million represents just 1% of annual deaths and probably be less than the number of people who annually die from influenza or pneumonia, respiratory diseases.

Nick Hudson ➝ 10:49

The wheel of published science turns very slowly and it’s caught up. There are now dozens of papers demonstrating the mechanisms and the detail and the extent of this fact that there is significant preexisting immunity from exposure to past viruses.

And that brings me to the second element that enables this doctrine of everybody being a danger. And that is the asymptomatic driver thesis. It rests on very shaky grounds.

I was absolutely aghast to find out the poor quality of the science underpinning this idea. One of the seminal papers involved one woman who reputedly infected 16 of her colleagues while asymptomatic. But a tiny little bit of investigation pulled out the reality that she was being treated for flu-like symptoms. And with that evaporates a substantial underpinning of the whole asymptomatic transmission story.

We were quite pleased on the 8th of June when the World Health Organization acknowledged this. Maria Van Kerhkove again, gets up on stage and says, the data show that asymptomatic transmission of coronavirus is very rare.

Only to be deflated the next day when she was forced back onto stage to walk back to the statement saying that there’s still much we don’t know, and our models show us that. And so on. And so on. It’s utter, utter nonsense.

Again, Fauci knew this in the first quarter, he told the world that in the history of respiratory borne viruses of any type, asymptomatic transmission has never been the driver of outbreaks.

And again, the literature catches up and we see that in the real world data asymptomatic transmission is not a driver.

Nick Hudson ➝ 12:55

Moving onto lockdowns. Where on earth does this story come from? This man, Bruce Aylward, will go down in history as a criminal of immense stature. He takes a delegation to China, spends a few days there and returns and says to the world that everybody should copy China’s response. There was no substantive reason for him to say that.

The entire basis for saying this was the doctrine of universal susceptibility. It was clear that in China, not everybody had died. Therefore lockdowns work [sarcasm]. It is so silly.

Talk about quarantining of the healthy, the measures that are reported to be ineffective. And that should never be attempted include large-scale quarantines, border closures, school closures, mask mandates, social distancing, all of the stuff that we’ve being forced to do.

And the effect of measures are pretty much limited to isolation of the sick. And hand washing, the stuff we’ve always done. Again, the literature catches up slowly and this finding is coming thick and fast.

Non-pharmaceutical interventions, in general, especially the draconian ones, do not have a statistical impact on epidemic trajectories, whether cases or deaths, and you can even make the discernment that the most draconian interventions are pro contagion. They actually inflame the spread.

Nick Hudson ➝ 14:50

Now we saw in the data months and months ago. In May last year, it was clear what this chart shows you is that there is no relationship between the stringency of a country’s lockdown and the number of deaths per million in that country.

That statistically is called a paint splat. And it means there’s no relationship.

A relationship would look like that:

It wasn’t only in that data that we could see this fact, we could also see it in the individual curves of countries. So on the left, the UK. On the right, Sweden. UK, having locked down in a draconian fashion, Sweden having famously never locked down.

If you’ve heard otherwise, you’ve been misinformed. They have never locked down in Sweden. And a trained statistician would look at those bottom two charts and tell you straight away that there was no regime change. It’s not possible to detect the initiation or the suspension of the lockdown in the UK. The statistical pattern is identical to that of Sweden. The disease follows a trajectory of linear decline in the rate of spread as the number of infectable or susceptible individuals gets consumed by the virus. Lockdown has no effect.

Nick Hudson ➝ 16:10

I don’t really like pairwise comparisons. They’re not scientifically sound, but when they show no difference, they have some validity. Here, you have North Dakota, South Dakota pairing.

North Dakota, lockdown, business restrictions, mask mandates. South Dakota, none of the above. And the most that you can say about that curve is that South Dakota, the open society, had a flatter curve.

No country has been lied about more than Sweden. There were daily articles in The Guardian and The New York Times and The Washington Post, and even The Financial Times, warning that if Sweden did not lock down, there would be a wall of death, murder, mayhem, and the same models who put us into lockdown with their absolutely overblown forecasts predicted that if Sweden did not lock down, it would suffer a hundred thousand excess deaths by May of last year, nearly double the normally as death toll in the country, in the event, Sweden did not lock down.

That orange bar is what they predicted. That blue bar is what actually happened. Sweden had a normal year of deaths, bang in line with the 10 year average, depending on how you do the calculation, how many years you average over, somewhere between zero excess deaths and seven or 8,000, not the hundred thousand that they were warned against. What they warned against, what they got. A massive departure.

And every, I bet you, every single person sitting here walked into this room with the belief that there was something that had gone terribly wrong in Sweden because of its refusal to lock down. It’s a lie.

Nick Hudson ➝ 17:57

What isn’t a lie, and what is very clear in the data, is that lockdowns cause a great deal of harm. We have infant mortality. We have creeping poverty. We have starvation, joblessness.

There have been gut-wrenching denials of service, failures to diagnose or even treat diseases, which are far more impactful than coronavirus. And we are now dealing with a horrible specter, especially amongst the youth, of psychological disorders, with the incidents of self-harm and suicide, suicidal ideation, expanding to levels that have never been seen before. One and a half billion children had their educations effectively terminated, or at least severely disrupted. And that is even true for the few children of the wealthy who were able to attend classes online.

Nick Hudson ➝ 19:01

And perhaps the hardest thing for me to swallow about all of this is in undergraduate epidemiology. It is a well-known finding that when you are confronted with a disease with sharp age graduation, as you are with coronavirus, measures to generally suppress the spread of the disease have the effect, reliably, of shifting the disease burden onto the vulnerable who we should be protecting. They worsen, are expected to worsen and do worsen coronavirus mortality

Nick Hudson ➝ 19:44

Closing up now with some stories on masks, because if you think the story around lockdowns is a lunatic story, this one is extreme. Here in March, we have the World Health Organization correctly telling everybody that there was no reason for the general public to be wearing surgical masks, let alone cloth ones.

Three months later, an inexplicable about turn, again at the hands of Dr. Tedros. And I want you to note the date of that announcement. It is the 5th of June. It’s astonishing because on the same day, the World Health Organization published this announcement that there is no direct evidence for the effectiveness of universal masking.

The CDC did a similar about turn just a couple of weeks before. Its guidance had ruled out mask mandates, and it suddenly produced some extremely flaky science, including my favorite yet, a study of two hairdressers in Missouri who were reputedly symptomatic, wore masks, and didn’t infect their young and probably not susceptible customers. Absolute nonsense.

And it contradicted the CDC’s simultaneous publication of a study of many years of the effectiveness of masking in the case of influenza, in which there was no evidence to suggest that even surgical masks were effective with that virus.

And again, when you look at the data, we can compare the mask mandate states in orange with the non-mask mandate states in blue, in America.

And there’s no difference. Nothing. The story that this is protective of you or somebody else is probably a harmful story. What does Fauci do in response to this evidence? That the things don’t work? Let’s wear two. What a joke. Tom Jefferson, the famous epidemiologist, is correct.

Sometimes you get the feeling that a whole industry is waiting for a pandemic to occur. The reason you get that feeling is because there is one. Big pharma.

Nick Hudson ➝ 22:03

I love this woke Pope meme. It’s made up, okay. This is not fact, but it does communicate an important point that vaccines are being sold as a ticket to freedom by people who stand to make countless billions out of them.

And we get to the extreme very quickly with GAVI, the conflicted vaccine alliance telling us that nobody is safe unless everybody’s safe.

How convenient that we now have a logic that tells us that we need to vaccinate 7.8 billion people for a disease that has a mean survival rate of 99.95% for people under the age of 70. The profiteering here is naked. It is transparent.

Nick Hudson ➝ 22:59

And so we have these sad situations of teenagers who are really not susceptible, lining up to get vaccinated in their desperation to get their

freedoms back. They’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. And we have this very dystopian, not a new normal but a new abnormal, a PCR test that is not capable of diagnosing infectiousness or infectedness.

It is wrong to call it a COVID test. COVID is the disease, not the presence of a virus. Inflated death numbers, media propaganda emerging from rampant disinformation by governments, not by PANDA. We have restrictions on movement and travel.

We have these ridiculous arbitrary rules. Two days ago, three days ago, Fauci’s out. Yet the evidence now shows that six feet can be reduced to three. Yeah. I mean, can you, can you even begin to take a person like this seriously? We have the looming vaccine passport, loss of personal liberties on an unprecedented level and so on.

And fear, fear, fear, fear, fear, fear of reinfection, fear of long COVID, fear of resurgences and waves and mutations and variants.

And it just is continuous and unnecessary. And it’s putting us into a very Orwellian dystopia with pictures that have never been seen in living memory in liberal democracies.

Nick Hudson ➝ 24:43

Pictures of violence, desperation, and absurdity, absolute absurdity.

If you are not seeing at the moment that the very underpinnings of our civilization are under threat here, then I beg you to consider. We have a choice. We’re up, we’ve been pushed up against the precipice. Are we going to be pushed off or are we going to push back?

Nick Hudson ➝ 25:23

I’d like you to go and read the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocates pretty much for what the guidelines said. What we knew before the world went mad. That we should pursue a doctrine or focus protection and get on with our lives.

We have expanded that in a plain English document called the Protocol for Reopening Society, which you can download from our website. Mandela was right. Courage is not the absence of fear. It’s okay to have been scared by this virus. Courage is the triumph over fear, and we all need to strive to accomplish it.

It’s a hell of a task because this is true that men think in herds and go mad in herds, but they only recover their senses one by one. It’s a tough task ahead. In order to go back to normal, we need to mount an unprecedented awareness campaign to kill this harmful narrative, this deadly narrative of fear and malarkey. And then after that, we have to do some more work. It’s not simply get rid of this fear.

We need to look very carefully at what failed, what safeguards do we need to prevent this kind of situation from ever happening again?

Thank you.

More Resources:

Video Copyright BizNews, March, 2021

The post The UGLY Truth About The COVID-19 Lockdowns (Video Plus Transcript & Slides) — Nick Hudson appeared first on Darachi.com.

Should Everyone Get Vaccinated? — Yeadon, Wittkowski & Bridle Comment. Twitter Censors Kulldorff.

dryburgh-com — Tue, 30 Mar 2021 23:46:04 +0000

The above video, ‘Twitter censoring Harvard Medical school Professor Martin Kulldorf’ is trending today. I took a look to see what had been censored and it was the following simple Q & A exchange.

Since the start of the pandemic big tech has been aggressively censoring medical information, with a complete bias for Non-Pharmacological Interventions (masks, social distancing, lockdowns) also dubbed Non-Scientific Interventions. Draconian interventions exported from China last year that are not evidence-based and from which big tech derives benefit. Big tech censorship of therapeutics is costing lives.

As we’ve come to expect when big tech censors, it does not cite anyone. Nor does it offer any form of transparency into the decision making process. For anyone who has looked into it, it’s an American political censorship by proxy game. A grave danger not just to America, but to the world.

The other day Martin threw down the gauntlet.

It caught my attention in particular because I’ve been absolutely perplexed by mainstream media endlessly advocating to vaccinate everybody. It made absolutely no sense.

I even caught Fauci recently on television talking about a road map to vaccinate babies! I was literally stunned.

Fauci had claimed that the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) of influenza is ~0.1%. And the other day also, John P. A. Ioannidis, C.F. Rehnborg Chair in Disease Prevention, Professor of Medicine, of Epidemiology and Population Health, and (by courtesy) of Biomedical Data Science, and of Statistics; co-Director, Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS), published peer-reviewed ‘Reconciling estimates of global spread and infection fatality rates of COVID-19: an overview of systematic evaluations, that stated “… the available evidence suggests average global IFR of ~0.15% and ~1.5-2.0 billion infections by February 2021 with substantial differences in IFR and in infection spread across continents, countries, and locations”. In other words it’s flu-like risk for the great majority of people.

Or put it another way, if you are worrying about it, stop, and if you must worry about something that could threaten your life, worry about forgetting to look bothways before crossing the street.

It’s even more odd because the age graduated risk is extreme, with the very elderly being at several thousand times more risk than young children. It just didn’t make sense to be introducing medical risk to children, let alone babies. Their risk of COVID-19 is negligible, less than that of influenza.

And why would healthy, non-elderly adults want experimental treatments for a flu-level risk? And if they were not already immune (e.g. existing cross-immunity), why would they not want to acquire “full spectrum” natural immunity instead? Most certainly for the young.

Plus, as with the flu vaccine, it’s not ‘sterilizing’. Immunity is not long lasting, mandating a yearly jab. The UK has already planned such a booster jab for those already vaccinated!

It doesn’t protect against infection. It doesn’t protect against transmission (although it’s likely to dampen it). It’s primarily intended to blunt disease progression. But healthy non-elderly adults (let alone children) rarely progress to a disease state from a SARS-CoV-2 infection.

I was so perplexed that I asked around for a week, “why vaccinate everybody”? No one provided a credible response to substantiate vaccinating everyone as per the transnationally orchestrated mainstream media campaign.

I received a few, credible sounding responses that not everyone should be vaccinated from Dr Knut Wittkowski (Epidemiologist), Dr Byram Bridle (Viral Immunologist), and Dr Mike Yeadon (Former Vice President and Chief Science Officer for Pfizer) replied. You can read their professional biographies.

The first to reply was Dr Knut Wittkowski. Hyperlinks are mine:

The risks vaccines confer depend on the type of vaccine

Most vaccinations cause some discomfort from local reactions.

There is always a risk of severe immune reaction (anaphylactic shock), which can be handled with epinephrine if the vaccine remains under observation for 15-30 minutes.

Some cases of Bell’s palsy have been reported with COVID vaccines.

An attenuated virus vaccine can mutate back and cause the disease it is supposed to prevent.

An adenovirus (or other vector) vaccine carries the risk that infection with the adenovirus might cause in immune-compromised people.

An mRNA vaccine may carry some risk from the artificial hull (eg, if it is made of long PGA, which can be immunogenic).

If the vaccine creates neutralizing Abs and they don’t always neutralize the virus, there may be a risk of Ab-dependent enhancement when the Ab-virus complex replicates in the macrophages that are supposed to eliminated it (I’m not entirely sure if this is all and/or correct).

Of course, only Ab-neg. people should be vaccinated. With respiratory virus diseases such as COVIDs, less than 50% of them need to be vaccinated to reach HI.

While these AEs are rare, they exist and if the expected AEs are more severe than the expected illness from disease vaccination should be avoided.

Hence the following people should not be vaccinated:

Those who are Ab-positive.

Children, because their expected illness would be very mild.

Some older or vulnerable people, because they may experience more severe AEs. (An older person in my family couldn’t speak for a whole day after the 2nd vaccination and needed 36 h of sleep to recover.)

Dr Byram Bridle replied with:

Here’s my quick ‘two cents-worth’… One of the arguments for vaccinating everyone is to protect each individual from the potential of acquiring severe disease and possibly dying. This has been largely supported by selective emphasis of data that has scared many people. This includes things like failing to define the nature of ‘cases’ (i.e. asymptomatic, mild, moderate, severe, lethal); this would paint a different picture. An accurate presentation of the full spectrum of data set alongside the context of something like influenza viruses that everyone has a lot of experience with would help bring balance to discussions. A second argument for vaccinating those who are not at high risk is that it will prevent the least vulnerable from passing the virus to the most vulnerable. I.e. to use the least vulnerable as shields. However, for that to work properly, the vaccines would have to confer sterilizing immunity, for which there is no evidence that they can achieve this (most of the data shows that they are excellent at blunting the severity of disease). As a global community, I think we have ‘missed the boat’ on this one. Acquisition of herd immunity among low-risk people (the majority) while focusing temporary protective measures on the most vulnerable likely could have got us out of the ongoing cycle of lockdowns quite some time ago, and with fewer overall deaths.

and quickly followed up to my response to that with:

That’s the crazy part of this. If the vaccines don’t confer sterilizing immunity (and there is no evidence they do; in fact, quite the opposite), then the argument of risk of transmission to the vulnerable remains. In Canada, vaccinated individuals have to remain under lockdown, wear masks and maintain 2 meters of distancing just they had to prior to vaccination.

Dr Mike Yeadon gave the final response and shared his views in a broader context:

I second everything in Knut’s summary & of course the implication NOT to continue with the ill-advised plan to vaccinate everyone.

On ADE, I don’t think it’s understood exactly how it occurs, only that it has in the past and more than once.

I will now outline a strong reason not to vaccinate everyone, even supposing there was a perfect vaccine that harmed no one.

For the first time in human history, the “vaccinate the world plan” will, as a by-product, give rise to a unified database of every person on the planet.

For each person, at minimum, there will be a common standard digital ID associated with their vaccination status.

That database will be used to grant certain privileges such as the right to cross an international border.

Those not on the system will be denied access.

Initially, the idea is made to sound reasonable: “it’s not us, we aren’t setting this requirement, it’s clearly up to other, sovereign nations to set conditions for entry to their country, and we must accommodate this, so that our citizens can once again travel”.

Once on this common ID system, permissions & privileges will steadily be made more stringent until you will legally be unable to leave your dwelling.

Israel is leading by example. Absent a strong & widely heard and understood reason, the U.K. will be next.

Furthermore, you’ll turn up when ordered to do so for your next “top up vaccine”.

Therefore I concluded that at least for now:

Twitter censorship is grossly wrong, not just the practice of censoring lawful content but their censorship is factually incorrect.
Mainstream media is wrong, then again, owing to the vast sums spent by governments on advertising vaccines and paying top dollar, it’s unlikely that mainstream media would be incentivized to do anything else.

I still very much welcome input, either way. If you have credible reason/s to vaccinate everyone, please do reach out.

More Resources:

The post Should Everyone Get Vaccinated? — Yeadon, Wittkowski & Bridle Comment. Twitter Censors Kulldorff. appeared first on Darachi.com.

Israel is Under a Medical Apartheid — Illana Rachel Daniel

dryburgh-com — Sun, 28 Mar 2021 21:45:43 +0000

Background

Illana Rachel Daniel is a Rapeh party candidate.

Rapeh was founded by Arieh Avni, a medical doctor who is deeply concerned that Israel has spent more time in lockdown than any other country, has decimated its economy, and yet continues to have a high COVID-19 infection rate. Israel has seen 6,100 covid-related deaths in a population of 9.7 million people.

According to his party literature, Avni’s aim is “to cure the Ministry of Health’s years of injustices that have reached their peak during 2020-2021 and are manifested by unbearable medical coercion and the violation of human rights: lockdown, social distancing, cellular location tracking, the green passport, the wearing of masks, the destruction of the economy and public deception.”

Avni wants to overhaul the health system to focus on preventative treatments, improving the health of the overall population, and strengthening their immune systems. As a medical doctor, Avni believes this would significantly reduce the impact of the pandemic.

Illana Rachel Daniel has made numerous factual errors with regards to mRNA based vaccines. For example she has claimed elsewhere that they are not a vaccine but are instead “medical devices” – untrue. She has also claimed that they represent “genetic engineering” – untrue, and anyone interested should listen to the interview I did with Liz Parrish. Liz was the first human to genetically modify themselves.

However Illana is correct that the vaccines are experimental, confer risk, and that there is no scientific reason to vaccinate everyone. If you think otherwise, please feel free to contact me with justification.

Only the vulnerable should be offered vaccination. The vaccines do not confer ‘sterilizing immunity’ – you can still transmit the virus once vaccinated.

I’ve included Illana as she illuminates the present situation that Israel has descended into a medical tyranny, and that it represents a model to be rolled out across the globe. It is highly likely that other nations will now force/coerce annual experimental medical treatments upon their populations, in exchange for temporal restoration of some civil liberties.

It is likely that under the guise of “coronavirus” the population of Earth will be assigned a “global ID” and will have a “health status” attached to it.

It’s very very odd, particularly since the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) is around that of influenza (~0.15%, whereas influenza according to Fauci is ~0.1%).

Video source is James Delingpole podcast March 5th, 20221. I trimmed it to 34 mins from 51 mins (without losing anything meaningful). I also added two graphics to accentuate the points being made.

Transcript

Host ➝ 00:00 (Clip 1)

I have been really shocked with what is going on in Israel, which seems to be pushing these so-called vaccines more aggressively than any country on earth. So tell me about what’s going on, Illana.

Illana Rachel Daniel ➝ 00:13

Yeah. So I agree with everything you’re saying, the thing I think it’s so important to understand is that what’s happening here is… it is very specifically happening in Israel because we’re kind of the heart of what’s – so I’ll get to that in a minute, but it is not specific to Israeli politics or Israel… as the richness of the land and the things that you’re talking about that can’t be sullied by what’s happening.

But what is happening is since December, they have implemented, and again, there’s no choice. They just decided unilaterally. They signed, our government under Benjamin Netanyahu, signed a contract, and we’ve only seen a redacted version of, with Pfizer that literally sold his people to be the guinea pigs of the world. And everyone in the world knows that except for us.

So it’s been a program that has done so crudely, I mean, just there’s, it’s kind of impossible to draw the picture of literally just like you take a big fat crayon and just say… they just decided from one day to next that everybody would be vaccinated.

There’s no informed consent. There is no risk benefit analysis. There is absolutely zero understanding of the undertaking and it’s very deliberate because were there any, then you wouldn’t be able to get out these mass numbers.

And we know there’s a quota, there was a penalty clause and they have numbers that they need to see filled and they’re going to make darn sure that that happens at the end. Again, when I say crude, I mean, they’re offering people pizza. Come and get a free slice of pizza if you get your shot. It’s madness.

And when I say that, and I have relatives in the States who have taken this injection with some more thought, and they were given a stack of papers, you know. Here’s side effects to look out for. Here’s the number to call. Here, you get your injection. You wait 15 minutes. Science is done. It’s proven. Go on your way. And there is no data being collected. So that’s the shortest version [laughter].

Host ➝ 02:23

Oh no, Illana, you’ve spelled it out very clearly there. And look, I mean, let’s cut to the chase here. The Jewish people are kind of the last people on earth you would imagine that it’s right for this kind of experimentation to be forced on. It’s, I mean, have we forgotten what happened in 1944, 45?

Illana Rachel Daniel ➝ 02:55

Yeah, the thing is it’s like, you know, when I start off with this, do I think that specifically Pfizer picked this? I mean, there’s reasons, there’s logical reasons that Israel was chosen for this experimentation because we’re this little hermetically sealed environment.

“they just decided from one day to next that everybody would be vaccinated.”

Illana Rachel Daniel

Rapeh party candidate

We have decades of perfectly meticulously recorded medical history that they can blame any side effects on. And you have our very ambitious prime minister who wants to be with the big boys. So there’s a lot of reasons, but the personalness, again, it’s so personal on levels, spiritual and historical that the Jewish people are chosen in their homeland. You can’t, it cannot be a more personal – looking for the word in English – betrayal, you know, and you have literally, you actually have people who survived the Holocaust only to be injected experimentally in their homeland.

This place was, it’s supposed to be our refuge. And we’re being attacked by our own people. If you drew a picture, you couldn’t have made it more meticulously painful.

Host ➝ 04:13 (Clip 2)

One of the knowledge things about the vaccine, which is why I think – not just the Pfizer one, but I think the AstraZeneca one, as well – is that they are not recommended for pregnant women. And there have been miscarriages. Not just pregnant women, but women considering getting pregnant. And yet here you are. Can they really be wanting to inject this stuff into the entire Israeli population, children as well, women of childbearing age, and…

Illana Rachel Daniel ➝ 04:47

Yeah, everyone has gotten it. Everyone. They have told children in schools down the road from me in Jerusalem, 16 year old kids who have no ability to make a decision, 16 year old kids, you can’t take your matriculation exams if you don’t come with this injection in your body. It’s absolute madness.

What grandparent would want to risk their grandchildren’s lives. It’s just, the whole thing is so obvious. All of this getting to the answers is really quite linear. If you ask one question, it takes you on a very straight line to where we are today. Seeing that this, the corruption that’s much bigger than specifically Israel. That’s very clearly by all of our leaders. Most of the leaders worldwide have very clearly an agenda. And we know that what’s happening here is the model.

We know that again, I want it to be clear that that Israel and the Jewish people, I know that there’s so much misunderstanding about what happens here in Israel, and historically, but to understand that what’s happening, regardless of people’s political understandings, that we have, we’ve always been the canary in the coal mine. That’s just the job that the Jewish people have always, we have this job to reflect to the world.

And when there’s rot with us, there’s rot in the world. That’s just how it goes. That’s just how it goes historically. Like it’s just what it is.

So we know that the model, we will be used as the model very specifically, again, whether it just happened because we had these great medical records. It’s very specific that we are happening here.

And we know, and my call to the world to saying, this is our chance to be human in a way that we have never had, where they’re pushing past all our divisions, where we don’t have to be left, or right, or religious or Muslim, we get to be humans. We get to really connect and say, we are stronger than the few. You know, these few up top have had their agendas.

And if we can do that, it’s tremendous. And understanding that fighting for Israel, standing up, it is a fight for yourself. We know that here, we know that this battle that they must see through, they want, they have to see this program succeed here, because we’re going to be the model for the rest of the world. And so the pressure for it to come in is greater than it’s ever been. You know, these entities that we’re up against. Pharmaceutical, the government, the Great Reset type things. It’s got to work here, you know? So that’s why we need this global recruit.

Host ➝ 07:46

You mean, in a way that you have to crush the Jews first because the sort of symbolic purposes. And because yeah, I sort of see that, but I mean, it does sound like a Nazi experiment. I, there’s no way of getting round it. It’s like, I mean, the future of Jewish survival, reproduction and stuff, if you’re injecting these, they’re not vaccines, they’re this experimental therapy, into young Jewish. It horrifies me. I can’t believe I’m living in a time where such things could be possible.

Illana Rachel Daniel ➝ 08:30

It’s mind blowing, you know, cause we all say never again. We all read 1984, you know, we all were so sure we’d be diligent. You know, we’re looking over here to be diligent, should these things happen? And in the meantime, it’s happening over here and we’re seeing. But no, we’ve got to, because there’s this virus, you know.

And what’s even more painful is that people who we respect, you know, we love, our relatives, our neighbours, are validating these horrific things. We’re this frog in the pot being boiled up and pretending it’s not that hot yet. It’s not that hot.

“Seeing that this, the corruption that’s much bigger than specifically Israel… Most of the leaders worldwide have very clearly an agenda. And we know that what’s happening here is the model.”

Illana Rachel Daniel

Rapeh party candidate

They’ve got a reason, you know, like trying to breathe above the water. It’s madness. And the thing is, what woke me up at the very beginning was kind of like a shot up in bed type of thing that I realized at the beginning of this.

I mean, for me, I’ve been in the vaccine safety world for a while. So it wasn’t a surprise that this agenda was happening, but when it came on and the way they just, there’s no choice here. Other places in Europe and in America, it’s kind of like, Oh, would you please come and take this vaccine you really have to take. But here they’re just like smack, choke, you know?

And if you don’t, you don’t get to work. You don’t get to be… Healthy, law-abiding, tax-paying citizens are not allowed into the museums that we support because we didn’t take an experimental injection that has no existing safety studies. We’ve lost our collective minds. We can’t go to our choir groups we’ve been with for years.

I just want to say that for me, the wake up call was that this is what a Holocaust looks like in 2021. We don’t do bang, bang, shoot it out anymore. This is it. This is for real, this is what war looks like today. It’s the war of your mind and of your body. This is the last, last, last terrain. And they know that.

Illana Rachel Daniel ➝ 10:27 (Clip 3)

And this switching over of science as an absolute, you must pledge your allegiance. You know, it’s an ideology as opposed to a dynamic learning process that you must necessarily unroot yourself, according to the data and the evidence in front of you. But we’ve lost that entirely. You’re not allowed to question the vaccines, even though there’s a lot of reasons to look for improvements in them.

Host ➝ 10:56

Tell me about your specific concerns with this new generation of – I’m not going to call them vaccines, cause they’re not, they’re jabs, aren’t they. Tell me what your research is.

Illana Rachel Daniel ➝ 10:27

I mean, and again, and I want to say that that’s not… The whole argument that I make personally even before this is not about being a pro or anti. Everybody wants to make it this… We don’t live, we talk in black and white, but we live in shades of gray.

“the wake up call was that this is what a Holocaust looks like in 2021… It’s the war of your mind and of your body. This is the last, last, last terrain.”

Illana Rachel Daniel

Rapeh party candidate

This is talking about improving on a product that we’re mandating for every newborn child up until today. This is the discussion we must have. So if everybody wants to stick you in a box, but that’s not the box that I’m talking from.

I’m talking about getting against coercion, I’m talking about making the best use of science and technology that’s available to us. So mRNA, and I’m not a scientist and I am not a doctor, but mRNA has a history of, they’ve never made it out of the stage three animal trials because all the animals, rabbits, cats, monkeys, ferrets, all drop dead of ADE.

A cytokine storm, this pathogenic priming, which basically means it sort of, they take the vaccine, everything seems okay. And then when they’re introduced to the wild virus, the virus in the wild, then the body has an extreme inflammatory process. And generally they died. They’d never been able to, they’ve never tested this out on the public exactly for that reason. They know exactly what’s going to happen.

You know, there’s a great fear, like you’ve said already, of fertility, the sensitin one and the similarities between the antibodies. We know that we’re concerned about, I mean, auto immune is literally the body not recognizing its own proteins. And we’re literally making, adding the synthetic pathogenic part of the spike protein into the cellular system. We have no idea.

“Healthy, law-abiding, tax-paying citizens are not allowed into the museums that we support because we didn’t take an experimental injection”

Illana Rachel Daniel

Rapeh party candidate

And the fact that we’re making a second class citizen, I mean, literally in medical apartheid, literally based on wishful thinking at best. We don’t think. They’re telling me that our point is anti-science when you literally have doctors saying, we don’t, it doesn’t look like, we don’t think it will happen. Well, that’s lovely [laughter], but you can’t tell me there’s enough science to base something on when we know that corona only came into our lives a year ago, but yet this vaccine that was stuck in a vial within eight weeks time is enough to decide that we are anti-scientific and we can’t associate with our communities anymore. It’s a complete madness that’s happened.

Host ➝ 13:44

Yes. I understand that it’s an experimental substance until 2023. So anyone who takes it now is in the experimental phase. And as you say, there is that massive worry about ADE. I just wanted to reference, I’m just going to look it up now, that this piece that was in new analysis, Pfizer vaccine killed about 40 times more elderly than the disease itself would have killed.

It says a reanalysis of data from the Israeli health ministry concluded Pfizer’s COVID vaccine killed about 40 times more elderly people than the disease itself would’ve killed during the recent five week vaccination period. And 260 times more younger people than would have died from the virus. Now, that is just terrifying.

I mean, it’s at a website called Children’s Health Defense. And these guys who’ve done this report are kosher. It’s by a guy called Hervé Seligmann, a member of the faculty of medicine, emerging infectious and tropical diseases at Aix-Marseille University and engineer Haim Yativ. These are not fools. They’ve done their research, and this is just the beginning [note: The data showed that the majority of COVID-19 deaths in vaccinated people occurred in those who had received only one dose. The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine requires two doses to achieve its full efficacy].

“And the fact that we’re making a second class citizen, I mean, literally in medical apartheid”

Illana Rachel Daniel

Rapeh party candidate

I mean, we haven’t even had the ADE effect yet. So we’ve already got excess mortality just from reactions to these jabs. And if these people encounter the wild virus, we know that there could be this weird antibody reaction where instead of protecting you from the virus, it actually exaggerates its effects. So I can see why you’re reluctant to take it. Tell me, have you found kind of solidarity, are there other people like you in Israel?

Illana Rachel Daniel ➝ 15:56

So there are. Well, there are people speaking out more and more. How do I say this? There are, but Israel seems to have a unique situation where we don’t see the sort of power of the people on the streets because of the nature of Israel, which I, myself, am trying to understand where you have a population that’s really been very uniquely dependent on the government being this little island on itself.

So the trust that’s with the government is sort of stronger in a way than you have in some bigger countries. You have a profound dependency on the government, as well as everybody goes to the army. This is not an army where you have these kinds of stereotype of people. This is everybody’s kids. They go, they come home with piles of laundry and they eat a ton of food and they sleep for the weekend. They go back. You know, we’re all the same. It’s all the same population. So having people speak out has been different. We’ve seen it very differently than what we’ve seen in Europe. You know. We’ve seen a couple of thousands of people, as opposed to the 10 thousands you want to see riding in the streets, you know?

Host ➝ 17:23

Yes, you’re sort of like a giant kibbutz, aren’t you? Yeah. Everyone’s sort of pulling together and everyone does the military service and probably are used to taking orders, are used to obey orders ultimately for the greater good of the state.

Illana Rachel Daniel ➝ 17:39

Well, so I mean, our lives have depended on it. You know, if somebody’s attacking, it’s not such an unusual thing. I mean, you have to be able to depend on your government who says, go into your basement or whatever it is, you know, I mean, there’s, there’s there’s been a very necessary, like in, we literally like existing in an Island here with a whole lot of, there’s just been a very necessary necessity for survival.

But the data that you were talking about is, is it, I mean, it will still be coming up because like I said, you have no real collection of the data. I wonder myself what Pfizer is getting out of it. I mean, obviously there, the real data that I imagined that Pfizer wants to see, they’re not even getting, because like I said, there’s nothing being collected.

At least to my knowledge, you have, I have a contact with people inside medical centers here and they see what they see. 40 year olds, a lot of heart issues happening, even in the vaers. They saw that 40 something year old people dropping dead of attack a day or two later, but there’s no connection. There’s no connection. God, for anybody who gets a shot to the head, you know, and dies, he dies of corona, but anybody who was taking the vaccine and, and clearly has a, you know, a catastrophic reaction, it’s just absolutely coincidence every time.

So, and I see, I hear some really gut gut wrenching things that are happening inside our hospitals. You know, these things can only happen if you have an army to soldiers to carry out your, your orders.

Host ➝ 19:17

Oh my goodness. Tell me, tell me first of all, has there been any resistance from within parliament at all? Any of your MPS or anyone?

Illana Rachel Daniel ➝ 19:28

Nothing. I mean, no. Well, it’s not fair to say there’s been, you know, there’s been a few lone voices of sanity and they quickly… there was one woman Sasha, she, and they immediately took her out of the corona committee. You know, we also have a 30 year, they put in a 30 year confidentiality act [between government and Pfizer]. We can’t know anything. Not only are they doing the most extreme policy implementation anywhere on the planet, we don’t even have a clue what they’re saying in it, 30 years.

And that’s literally, you know, talking about politics, which is a dirty word. It’s a dirty word in my mouth. I personally have done a fantastic job of avoiding politics my whole life, because it’s, it’s the house of lies. It’s, it’s temporary based on, you know? And so the fact that I have joined this party literally only because it is solely a human rights movement is it’s not right or left.

Everybody keeps saying, well, what do you think about this? I was just like, this is not the, this is a, the house is on fire. We’ll talk about rearranging the furniture some other time. We only want to get into the health ministry. We only talk about transparent science. We only talk about no more lockdowns, no insane green passport, no forced, anything. Even vitamin D, vitamin D can be mean the meaning of life or death, your vitamin D levels. But I am not going to force my Israeli beloved citizens to take vitamin D because I’m just going to give them the information.

They could have some responsibility for their own health, you know, to make these kinds of information ubiquitous the way every little sign on the door is put your mask on. You know, how about some actual information of how to prepare your body.

Host ➝ 21:28

All the know, any kind of sort of cantankerous contrarian old-school is rainy gem less so righteous when he bought, he liked all sorts of media figures who are, who are, who are pointing this out? Are you all alone?

Illana Rachel Daniel ➝ 19:28

Well, there are like when I’m starting to connect, I think the biggest challenges, especially in Israel that’s why also, so what, like, we’re starting to make the connections because you have little groups, two and four and eight and 10, you know, so I think finally now it’s, it’s the, as far as the journalists, I, that I haven’t seen, although in all honesty I don’t get my news from the mainstream media, you know, so, but but people are starting more and more to talk the, that the, the protests are finally gaining some, some strength and and that’s why it’s, it really is crucial. But they are cut off. You can’t say a word about it in the media.

You cannot suggest that this is not the most fantastic thing, but it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s complete, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s people who were beloved in the media before saying, Hey guys, can you, can you mandate something that has death as a side effect? And they’re, you know, off with his head completely.

“for anybody who gets a shot to the head, you know, and dies, he dies of corona, but anybody who was taking the vaccine and, and clearly has a, you know, a catastrophic reaction, it’s just absolutely coincidence every time.”

Illana Rachel Daniel

Rapeh party candidate

So, yeah, but it’s happening. I had a call this morning, so it’s happening. I think that, I think that it’s very powerful for the first time reaching out to the international community for me, feels, I feel hope in a way that I haven’t, because this is, this is how we win.

I, I, you know, Peter, some people will say, Oh, the sheep. And I don’t, I can’t think like that because I, the only way so far that I’ve come up with to overcome these incredibly powerful forces is if all the people stand up, that’s what they want. That’s why they’re separating us. We are the many, and they are the few, but if we get together really from the inside and out, they can’t stop us. We’re in charge.

Host ➝ 23:37

Totally agree. I totally agree. And what the situation you described about the media is exactly the same in the UK. And I think in the U S probably too. But there is not a single newspaper that is arguing against this, this, this craziness, and even w one of our, one of our bleeding, tabloid newspapers at the weekend, the mail on Sunday had a full page spread telling its readers. So include people like my mother, telling them that these vaccines vaccines, as they call them were absolutely safe. And just, just ramming home the message and also ramming home the propaganda line that people who didn’t like the vaccine work, anti-vaxxers conspiracy, theorists, this kind of thing. So they, they both picked up the vaccine while simultaneously vilifying anyone who opposed it and making them pariahs. Now you tell me a bit more about, about the pariah status of people who won’t take the vaccine. So you can’t go into museums. I’ve seen the photographs of deck chairs on the beach, where it said, you can only sit here if you’ve had a vaccine. So give me a few other examples.

Illana Rachel Daniel ➝ 24:45

That’s it, we have, I get calls from people. I can’t go to the choir, my choir, that I’ve been a part of for six years. I can’t do my, you can’t go to the choir. I can’t join my pool. They won’t even give me my money back from my membership to the pool that they won’t let me in anymore.

Host ➝ 25:05

With, with loads of chlorine in the water when you couldn’t possibly catch this, this

Illana Rachel Daniel ➝ 25:11

Exactly, exactly [laughter]. You can’t get into your pools in the gyms, you know, they’ve kind of made it. So I think so they were put malls on the table to, to keep us out of an, Oh maybe only some are adhering and some aren’t you have some businesses it’s still playing out because again, it’s all, well, there’s no, there’s no science here that this is based on. So it’s all Willy Nilly, but you know, it changes every day.

This morning, they’re going to not let you in here, but what’s happening actually is on a terrifying level at the airports. Just this morning, there was a man who wrote up his personal experience coming into the airport and his mother having been a survivor from Auschwitz. And he literally felt like he was in a selection. It was literally, did you have the vaccine or have you recovered from the virus, go to the right?

And if you haven’t, you go to the left, you get this thing jammed up your nose and they ship you off to these filthy corona hotels. You’re like a prisoner in your own state.

I saw even it’s it’s and they’ve, or you can use, or I think in some cases, again, I can’t be completely specific because it changes from minute to minute, or they give you this security ankle bracelet, which you get to pay the privilege of having a, being a prisoner in your own home, 2000 shekels, her leg, you know to, to, to be monitored in your own home. And if you don’t and it’s, and it’s quite, it’s quite a physical, there’s been some pestles at the airport, you know, women in children and it’s, it’s insane. It’s insane.

It, you know, the truth is, and I, I heard even from Canada, that Trudeau also was said some pretty crazy, crazy, crazy things as well about, about anybody coming in internationally, what they’ll do. So whether that may not be unique, it’s absolutely being implemented as we speak. Yes, yes. Yeah. And also as well. So in that, in the schools, they are rolling out this program where if you want to participate in your schools, you have to get this swab.

And if one kid tests positive, the whole class is out. So it’s mad. It’s people who are not, you have, they’re pushing you to the extreme. So people who even wouldn’t question vaccines before are saying, this is so you know, it’s such a, it’s so extreme, it’s suspicious, suspicious. Yeah.

Host ➝ 27:39

If, if the, if COVID was such a problem, people would be, you know, if you were in serious risk of dying from COVID, which, which most of us really aren’t, they wouldn’t need to empower the state to do all this stuff to you that you’d be, you be queuing up anyway. So how did the people in your choir group react? I mean, do they miss you too? Have you had conversations with them?

Illana Rachel Daniel ➝ 28:10

This was a friend of mine. I’m not in the choir group, but it was a friend of mine who literally was crying to me. They think this one bit of joy that she had, they just simply, I help people are justifying this. I, I it’s still the whole thing. It’s still, the people are still sending me the same kind of pictures is, you know people crowding together.

Do you think this is right? It’s still this blindness as if corona is the reason behind it is. And, but those kinds of people, I there’s, there’s not enough. If you’re still in that shroud, I think that this is not sort of that energy, that I’ve got the time, right. This minute to focus on. It’s sort of the people who are sitting at home going something doesn’t feel right, and let’s argue, let’s bring articulation to that, to what you’re seeing, what you’re feeling.

Those are the people that right now need to join joined this, this movement people who still imagine that this is all about a virus that we could have solved in March with with ubiquitous treatments that have been in use since the 1970s.

It’s, it’s again, it’s this whole idea, which, which I think that if you asking people, it’s a very linear sort of answer to get to the point where our governments know that there’s treatments, that we have, there’s treatments that we know that work, that have been denied us, you know, in order to be able to, you can’t have experimental treatment, if you have treatments that work. So this emergency authorized treatment is, is absolutely.

“… his mother having been a survivor from Auschwitz. And he literally felt like he was in a selection. It was literally, did you have the vaccine or have you recovered from the virus, go to the right?”

Illana Rachel Daniel

Rapeh party candidate

We have been denied the things that could have saved thousands upon thousands of lives, vitamin D, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, we’ve been drastically broken. We’ve been denied those points quite deliberately. And if you ask those questions and it, it tears the whole structure down, and I think it’s, it’s too painful. People have lost so much this year.

It’s like, it’s some people just, they can’t go any further and asking those questions, it’s just taking too much. You know, we’ve all been good. We, we invested decades into this whole structure of society. It’s just asking too much of some people to, to go there. That’s.

Host ➝ 30:30

Now, before I forget, I mentioned this earlier, have you seen the, the charts of the deaths in the Palestinian Territories competitive with the Israel? Yeah. Much because you know, the Palestinians have not been given these, these so-called vaccines. And if you believe the narrative you’d think, well, this is Israel being denying the poor Palestinians that the lifesaver, but actually those Palestinians are very, very lucky because they’re not, they’re not dying on anything like the same scale that the spike for the, for deaths in Israel to do with the, the vaccine is, is shocking.

And there’s not, I mean, if ever you wanted an experiment where you’ve got these contiguous territories contiguous populations, very, very similar in many ways you know, climate and so on. And yet they’re not dying. The Palestinians are not dying. The Israelis are that’s, that’s, that’s shocking. I, I imagine that this is not something you’re going to, you’re going to see in the, in what, what are your papers, haircuts or, or whatever.

Illana Rachel Daniel ➝ 31:40

Right? Exactly. Also as well, countries who never walked down countries that have never locked down, not one day – Japan, nobody even talks about Japan right next to China. Yeah. Right, right. Over there. Never a day. Shut down. Never forced anything. You know, we in Israel have sat in accumulative, five months of lockdown, five months.

Host ➝ 32:10

Are you allowed out to take exercise? How does it work?

Illana Rachel Daniel ➝ 32:12

So the it’s changed because of course everything changes. So the first one, we weren’t the very first one, you remember the good days back in the first lockdown, that was only a hundred or the a hundred meters.

We were allowed from our house, a hundred meters and a hundred meters, a thousand meters. It was, we had to be tethered to the house. And it was very, very extreme. We could only go to the grocery store, what it was, it was something. And then, and then the previous ones, then they kind of come up and down and they messed around with it. They have jerked everybody around to the point that they’ve lost their minds. You go to school, you tell children, they can go to school. And by the next morning, no, we’ve changed our minds. You can’t green zones, red zones. It’s so we say, Israel-Bella gun.

It’s, it’s a mess. It’s a massive mess. So the last one, the third one, which we’re still in, I don’t even know we’re still in it. We’re not in it. And again, you could only go a thousand meters from your house. And then they finally loosened it. So you could do exercise. You can only take your mask off. Now you can take it off. If you’re doing exercise, I’m always doing exercise. Yeah. I’ve always got my sneakers on wherever I’m going now [laughter].

But but yeah, it’s, it’s insane. You can’t do anything. Who’s essential. Who’s not essential. You have people that I, since October, I know, I know a guy who says I’m still in second lockdown. He has a, a coffee house in Tel Aviv. And they’ve never opened since October. Anyway,

Host ➝ 32:35

It’s extraordinary. I just want to kill your whole society and your whole culture. So what are you going to do? I mean, are you going to, can you escape? I mean, do you want to escape? Was it, what, what, what future do you see in, in, in this tyranny? Cause that’s what it is.

Illana Rachel Daniel ➝ 33:53

That’s a really hard question because I’ve never in the nearly 24 years that I’ve lived here, never considered leaving.

“And then they finally loosened it. So you could do exercise. You can only take your mask off. Now you can take it off. If you’re doing exercise, I’m always doing exercise. Yeah. I’ve always got my sneakers on wherever I’m going now [laughter].”

Illana Rachel Daniel

Rapeh party candidate

Listen to this. This is my, this is I can’t go anywhere else because this is, this is my home in a way, that’s it. I can’t express it on a personal, my life experience level. And also as a Jew, you’re plugged in here. This is where this is where I’m meant to be. This is where I can best do whatever work in the world. I, there is nowhere else to go. And if there was, I mean, porta, apparently Florida is the only place left in the world to go.

They’re living lives normally there, but I CA I can’t leave. This is, this is our fight. I can’t think ahead. It’s like, everything is completely opaque. You know, I have no idea. I think all of us in the world, we don’t have any idea what the future’s going to hold. So it’s like, you have this little candle and you’re just like one step forward. One step forward. All I know is I can just, all I can do is fight with everything I can and I’ll see what happens,

Host ➝ 34:55

Ilana. I totally respect your, your spirit.

More Resources:

Video Source is James Delingpole podcast (Copyright James Delingpole, March 5th, 20221)

The post Israel is Under a Medical Apartheid — Illana Rachel Daniel appeared first on Darachi.com.

“I Don’t Think We Should Be Vaccinating Everybody” — Theoretical Epidemiologist Prof. Sunetra Gupta

dryburgh-com — Tue, 23 Mar 2021 20:41:40 +0000

Professor Sunetra Gupta

Sunetra Gupta is Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology in the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford, and a Royal Society Wolfson Research Fellow. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and a Ph.D. from the University of London. She has been awarded the Scientific Medal of the Zoological Society of London, the Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Award, and currently holds a Royal Society Wolfson Research Fellowship and an ERC Senior Investigator Award.

In addition to epidemiology she has expertise in immunology, vaccine development, and mathematical modeling of infectious diseases. Her area of specialization is evolutionary ecology of infectious disease systems.

Sunetra gave this talk to the COVID Plan B group which opposes the official narrative of the deadliness of Covid-19 and its continuous new strains, the necessity of the lockdowns and the theory of elimination, and instead proposes treating the coronavirus like the seasonal flu (using vaccines).

Transcript

Host ➝ 00:00

I’d like to introduce Senetra Gupta. She’s a theoretical epidemiologist from Oxford University. She spoke at our first symposium back in August last year which turned out to be the most popular clip on our YouTube channel. Tens of thousands of people have watched that clip and from there on Sunetra has kept speaking, and talking about what she sees and keep doing her analysis. Very grateful that she can join us again today. Sunetra, are you there with us?

Sunetra Gupta ➝ 00:36

I am, indeed. Yes. Pleasure to be here. Thank you for asking me back.

Host ➝ 00:48

I’m very glad we’re honored. We’re very glad to have you back with us despite everything that’s happened. But we can talk a little bit more about that afterwards. So I’d like to invite you to shoot away with your presentation if you’d like.

Sunetra Gupta ➝ 01:05

Okay, can I, I can share my screen. Yes, that’s possible. There we go.

And I’ve got to try and find it, oops. Get the slideshow. Oh, there we go. Right. Okay. Right.

Sunetra Gupta ➝ 01:35

So you know, I’m going to try and keep this short. I used to have this as my final slide, but now I’ve started to give talks with this as my first slide, which is just to say the starting point, really, for all of us in thinking about how to cope with this situation is that we cannot afford lockdowns.

So that’s true in many parts of the world, and I believe is also true in the UK. Lockdowns are a luxury that only the affluent within an affluent country can actually afford.

As my colleague Martin Kulldorff recently put it, lockdowns are like focus protection for the liberal elite essentially. And they protect those of us who can conduct our business through laptops and Zoom and whatnot, and have some gardens that allow us to accommodate our children and others we care about.

Sunetra Gupta ➝ 02:42

But they are absolutely disastrous at every level for the poor and the young, both in the global North and the global South. And actually one of the projects I’ve been involved with in initiating since I last spoke is called Collateral Global, where we seek to, we’re trying to develop a global repository for research into the collateral effects of COVID-19 lockdown measures.

And when we say effects, we do, we are going to actually look at both positive and negative effects, but we do think it’s very important to have these in focus before you can develop any kind of rational policy.

So also what’s happened, although I may have actually shown you this slide in August is, is that some of us have got together and various groups have got together to look at other solutions.

And the one that I’ve been advocating is one of focus protection whereby we shelter the vulnerable specifically, which is something that is afforded to us by the nature of COVID-19, in that it is, there is a clearly identifiable group of people who are vulnerable to severe disease and death.

Sunetra Gupta ➝ 04:07

And in October Jay Bhattacharya, who’ll be speaking as well, and Martin Kulldorff and I got together and produced something we call the Great Barrington Declaration, which has put forward this idea and try to flesh it out as as a sort of policy document and has attracted attention, both negative and positive, since then.

So the idea is to take advantage of two things. One that the pathogen acts in such a ways we can identify who is vulnerable and who’s likely to die, which is mainly the elderly and the frail, but also those with certain comorbidities.

“Lockdowns are, like focus protection for the liberal elite essentially… they are absolutely disastrous at every level for the poor and the young”

Sunetra Gupta

Theoretical Epidemiologist, Oxford University

What this allows us to do is to protect the rest of the population from the harms of lockdown, and which also allows immunity to accumulate in the population, what we used to call – hopefully we’ll continue to call – herd immunity, despite it suddenly having become this rather dirty word.

So this is possible if you shelter the vulnerable and allow the the rest of the population to function. Normally we recommended that we invest on, of course, in therapy and vaccination, particularly since vaccination is a means of protecting the vulnerable. And that’s indeed what we now have with the array of vaccines at our disposal.

And one of the other things that I thought was missing from the debate and continues to be missing from the debate is that we need to think outside national boundaries and consider our responsibilities as international citizens in dealing with this solution.

So of course, this was met with a barrage of criticisms and the of these is what if there is, which was put forward by people who thought we were somehow advocating something that would kill a lot of people. And the first objection was what if there is no naturally acquired immunity to this SARS-CoV-2 which is a virus that causes COVID-19 and that we know is simply not true.

Sunetra Gupta ➝ 06:19

There was no reason for us to think there’ll be no naturally acquired immunity to this virus. It belongs to family of other coronaviruses for which we have ample evidence that there is naturally acquired immunity.

And now we know, now that so much time has elapsed, we have been able to do studies, which confirmed that COVID-19 elicits a long-term immunity.

This is not always evident in whether people have antibodies in their blood at the time they’re sampled, those could disappear, but the immune memory, the ability to fight the virus, particularly at the level of whether or not you come down with severe disease and die, is definitely retained.

What that means is that we can continue to use this model, which is what is the basis of what most people use whether it’s in a very simple form or complicated computer simulation form, a fundamental framework known as the SIR framework is what people use to study the dynamics of COVID.

Sunetra Gupta ➝ 07:33

And in this framework, people go from being susceptible to being infected and then recover, write down a set of equations or a computer simulation, and you get an epidemic where the accumulation of people in the recovered class who are immune, at least for the time being, causes the epidemic to turn over and start to die away.

This is something obviously that’s hard to, I mean, it’s hard to determine what the extent to which herd immunity has contributed to the decline in cases that we see worldwide, we’re seeing worldwide at the moment. Because of the interventions that we’ve also been putting in place.

“There was no reason for us to think there’ll be no naturally acquired immunity to this virus. It belongs to family of other coronaviruses for which we have ample evidence that there is naturally acquired immunity.”

Sunetra Gupta

Theoretical Epidemiologist, Oxford University

But there are regions where it’s incontrovertibly been herd immunity that has resulted in the resolution of at least what people would call the first wave of the epidemic such as in Manaus in Brazil, and several papers have been published, showing both that the shape of the epidemic, the increase in deaths, hospitalizations and its subsequent resolution was accompanied by an increase in the prevalence of antibodies, an indication that a large number of people had been exposed to the virus.

Sunetra Gupta ➝ 09:09

So this implies that herd immunity plays an important role in the control of this virus and that we can use it as a tool in trying and keeping the risk of infection low to those who are vulnerable. Since then, however, in Manaus, we have seen a resurgence of COVID-19 and the people, some of the authors of one of the papers that I just showed have within two weeks of publishing, the paper came, produced a commentary in which they suggested a number of reasons why this might be happening.

And one of these is that immunity against infection might already have begun to wane by December following the first wave in April. And this is also, it aligns with a concern that people have had in our focus protection hypothesis, in which herd immunity plays a role.

Sunetra Gupta ➝ 10:15

What if herd immunity doesn’t last forever? Or what if it doesn’t last forever? Does that mean as some people have suggested that we can’t get to herd immunity. There are very good reasons to believe that it might not last forever because seasonal coronaviruses, other circulating coronaviruses, do not give you lifelong immunity in the way, for example, measles does.

The pattern there is that these current viruses existed a sort of endemic equilibrium where people keep getting reinfected, but reinfections carry with them very little risk of severe disease and death, which is why we don’t normally worry about coronaviruses.

So if that’s true of this coronavirus, how then can we think about herd immunity? Well, the truth is that whether immunity lasts forever or not, does not actually impact upon the buildup of maintenance of herd immunity.

Sunetra Gupta ➝ 11:21

So you could have an SIR model in which people remain immune forever, or you can have what we call an SIRS model, which is probably the better metaphor for coronaviruses. And then where people go from being recovered, they lose their immunity and become susceptible again.

And in both cases, if you do the the mathematics, you’ll find that herd immunity is reached at a point where the proportion of immune in the population is at a particular threshold that’s determined by the fundamental transmission characteristics of the virus itself, which is reflected in this quantity R0.

And this is the same, that level at which everything settles, that what we would call an endemic equilibrium, the level of immunity in the population is the same for both the SIR and the SIRS.

“Circulating coronaviruses, do not give you lifelong immunity in the way, for example, measles does…”

Sunetra Gupta

Theoretical Epidemiologist, Oxford University

In other words, the rate of loss of immunity does not influence the establishment or maintenance of herd immunity in contrast to many statements that were made.

Sunetra Gupta ➝ 12:33

And the one that I’m showing you here is from an article in Nature, which is entitled the false promise of herd immunity which suggests that you’d never reach herd immunity through natural transmission if there is a rate of loss of immunity.

I often use this water cistern analogy to explain what’s going on here. Within a system a level of water is maintained at a constant.

It’s a constant level maintained, and this is independent of the rate at which water flows in and out. So measles would be a cistern in which water is flowing out very slowly, trickling out slowly as people die, and then you get new infections, newborns or people born into the population, filling up the system.

Coronavirus, little different, you get water flowing out quickly. People being reinfected and coming in. The system maintains the level through a more dynamic loss of water, loss of immune people, reinfections, but importantly, those reinfections do not carry with them a high risk of disease or death.

And therefore we still maintain the endemic equilibrium we want where the deaths are kept low.

The other thing that we know now is that previous exposure to other coronaviruses does give you some level of protection against, particularly against disease from the new virus. And so, in fact, the cistern, going by the system analogy, we didn’t actually start with an empty system with coronavirus.

“the truth is that whether immunity lasts forever or not, does not actually impact upon the buildup of maintenance of herd immunity”

Sunetra Gupta

Theoretical Epidemiologist, Oxford University

And some work that my group, Jose Lourenco and Francesco Pinotti, have done shows that under those circumstances, the level of exposure required in a population to reach endemic equilibrium is much lower.

So we mustn’t confuse low observations of low prevalence of antibodies with – that does not mean that we haven’t reached a level where things have been kept in control by herd immunity.

Furthermore, once you factor in the effects of seasonality, you can start to find patterns that correspond entirely to what we’ve observed in many parts of the world in terms of an initial early peak and a seasonal increase at a later point in time.

Sunetra Gupta ➝ 15:12

And these are just some simulations showing how the duration of immunity in combination with seasonality can give you those patterns. A paper published in Science a few months ago also reveals the same sort of dynamic occurring.

This is from Bryan Grenfell‘s group, again an SIRS model, but here they make the distinction again between being reinfected and infected for the first time, which allows you to see that you can easily replicate and understand what’s going on and where we’re headed in terms of a new virus coming in to which there was some immunity to a lot of immunity already to disease, some immunity to infection and how obviously that would cause an initial large peak, but then settled into this pattern whereby you get the infection levels sort of oscillate around an equilibrium due to seasonality and other considerations.

Sunetra Gupta ➝ 16:18

So that could certainly be what underlies this recent increase in Manaus, but other explanations that the authors offered, which are pertinent to the current sort of discussion around what’s happening with SARS-CoV-2, is that there are new lineages emerging, and these may have properties that allow them to cause a second epidemic.

For example, there may have been a new lineage that occurred, and we know there are new lineages emerging in Manaus and in Brazil, which have a higher inherent transmissibility than pre-existing lineages. So this P.1 lineage is one of the variants of concern that’s emerged in Brazil that people are worried about now.

And there are several others that, you know, that’s why we’ve, UK has closed its borders and is obliging people to stay in quarantine. And apparently you can go to prison there for 10 years for lying about having gone to Portugal en route.

Sunetra Gupta ➝ 17:24

And these are all predicated on this idea that some of these new variants that are arising are more transmissible. Are they?

Well, in order to understand this, we have to, again, we can employ the SIR framework, but this time we have to think about variation in the possible strains and variants of the virus.

And the simple answer is that indeed, it may well be that some of these variants are more transmissible, but the truth is that within a system where you have a lot of immunity shared amongst the variants, as you will have, because we know there’s strong cross responses, not just amongst variants of coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, but also amongst, within the whole coronavirus family.

What you tend to get under these circumstances is competitive exclusion. So the strain with the higher R0 wins, and then what that means is that even with the marginal increase in transmissibility, that could see a new variant sweep through, but that does not really have much of a material effect or difference in how we deal with the virus.

Sunetra Gupta ➝ 18:38

In other words, the surge and the virus cannot be ascribed to a new variant, or it’s very improbable that the reason why we’re seeing surges is because the new variants are more transmissible.

On the contrary. What’s much more likely is the new variants are slightly more transmissible. And because they’re in a very competitive environment due to all the herd immunity that’s built up and because some of these mitigation methods, lockdowns also intensify the scramble for susceptible individuals, because of these circumstances, we are favoring variants that have only a marginal advantage in terms of transmissibility.

The other big question is are these variants more virulent? And the truth is that we don’t know, but it’s unlikely so far. The data don’t seem to say so despite these scary headlines.

And generally within these systems, what you have is a sort of trade off between virulence and transmission.

Sunetra Gupta ➝ 19:43

So pathogens tend to evolve, but not always towards low virulence because that maximizes their transmissibility.

But generally what we’d expect a small variations in virulence and transmissibility, and one strain will probably emerge as the victor, but it’s very, it’s improbable. It’s not impossible, but it is much more probable that these trends will not be materially so different than we’d have to alter our policies.

In any case, the focus protection strategy kind of circumvents all these uncertainties by putting forward a proposal, which allows us to protect people and save them from severe disease or give them protection from severe disease and death, even if there were to be such a unusual, unlikely changes in the pathogen. The other final option that was considered by Sabino and colleagues is that which we’re all thinking about, is will these lineages, and are these new lineages able to evade immunity generated in response to previous infection?

Sunetra Gupta ➝ 21:01

Is this an immune escape? Now that is worrying, of course, because at the moment, what we have, the best way of delivering focus protection is through vaccines. And so this is a question that we, that needs to be answered and people are answering, trying to answer it. And it’s clear and not surprising at all that some of these mutations, because they do happen to be in the very targets of immunity that actually are important for the virus to gain entry into cells, that some of these mutations are stopping or preventing the neutralization of the virus.

But there are a wealth of other targets on the virus, on the surface of the spike protein, and certainly natural infection gives you a whole array of other responses. So it’s unlikely to alter protection, at least against severe disease and death. It may compromise a protection against infection, but it’s not likely to alter protection against severe disease and death.

Sunetra Gupta ➝ 22:09

So now we are back to this solution, we can refine it. We now have a good means, a very reliable way of sheltering the vulnerable by using all these vaccines that have been developed so quickly. So remarkably well. Because these vaccines, one thing we know, we can be sure of, is no matter how much mutation there is, and whatever else happens, that they’re very likely to protect, continue to protect against severe disease and death. And that’s what we want.

We have no idea even without mutation, how well they work against infection. And so it’s not a good, it’s not sensible to think of these vaccines as giving us herd immunity against transmission in the way that measles vaccines can do. So I think we’re going to have to rely on naturally acquired herd immunity in combination with vaccine induced protection, focus protection of the vulnerable in order to provide a global solution to the problem.

Sunetra Gupta ➝ 23:17

And once again, in doing that, we need to, instead of closing borders, try and think outside national boundaries. In the end, I hope we will achieve a solution which combines our considerations of not just an understanding the logos, if you like, of this pathogen, how the science, as people like to call it, how it spreads and how immunity accumulates, how to make vaccines, but also to integrate into that what we do as human beings, considerations of pathos, in other words, socioeconomic environment considerations as well as ethos, how do we want to live our lives?

Thank you very much.

Host ➝ 24:02

Thanks, Sunetra. So you’ve got some time for some questions.

Sunetra Gupta ➝ 24:08

Yes. I do.

Host ➝ 24:09

Yep. Okay. Thank you. I think, probably just, I’m going to pick up on the last point you made, and it was the one that right at the start, and it is one that you mentioned in the first presentation and that’s about the national boundaries because it’s something that wasn’t being touched on at the time and really still hasn’t.

One of the effects of COVID-19 and government responses has been nationalization with the latest of which we’ve seen as in the fight over vaccines. How might things have been different? One of the things that struck us has been every country seems to talk about its own battle with COVID and focus on their own responses and whether or not they’re being successful. It doesn’t appear as if we are learning well enough from each other. Comment on that.

Sunetra Gupta ➝ 25:12

Yeah. I think it’s astonishing. I mean, I’ve been astonished right from the start at the lack of international perspective here, and a dereliction as I feel of our duties as international citizens, which I believe we have a, you know, we signed up to all of this, partly, you know, some of us due to our principals, some of us, because we thought it was how the global market appealed to them, I should say.

“It’s not sensible to think of these vaccines as giving us herd immunity against transmission in the way that measles vaccines can do. So I think we’re going to have to rely on naturally acquired herd immunity in combination with vaccine induced protection”

Sunetra Gupta

Theoretical Epidemiologist, Oxford University

And so there were all these sort of, you know, their various from various perspectives, the idea that we were a global economy and, you know, all sorts of issues of internationalism, I thought had moved to very advanced stage where we couldn’t just go back to the sort of tribal kind of situation where we were only going to look after our national interests and gloat over, you know, having achieved something when it’s clearly at the expense of other countries who simply can’t afford it and are damaged by the policies that we’re adopting to protect foreign citizens.

Even if it is seen as the only way forward, I don’t think it should be something you should be proud of. You should be apologetic about having to protect you own citizens at the expense of the wellbeing of global citizens.

Host ➝ 26:38

Is that something that your Collateral Global effort is, counting the effects on say poor nations of withdrawals? Yeah. Okay.

Sunetra Gupta ➝ 26:49

Yeah, no, that’s sort of the big focus of that project.

Host ➝ 26:54

I’m going to ask you just a couple of questions about trying to understand what I think you’ve been taking us through. It appears that what you’re saying, what you’ve summarized is this endemic equal equilibrium that SARS-CoV-2 is nothing out of the ordinary, that all of what we know is herd immunity and the fluctuations of the virus and the new strains, all of that is what we would expect to see under any coronavirus and that none of these new developments, if we call it that, are in themselves unusual or scary.

Sunetra Gupta ➝ 27:31

Yes. I mean, I think it is a new phenomenon in that it has entered a population that has not, you know, what we’ve experienced is its epidemic phase.

And so one of the problems that I’ve encountered, one of the major sources of confusion is when people say, well, it’s not like flu, flu only kills, you know, 650,000 people a year, and that’s flu in its endemic state.

And COVID of course has gone through an epidemic phase in which it is likely to have a much higher death toll. Flu in an epidemic phase would kill very many more people. But what we can expect COVID to do is settle to an endemic state and what the focus protection plan offers is a way of getting to that endemic state without sacrificing, or sacrificing isn’t even the right word.

Sunetra Gupta ➝ 28:30

We want to reach that state without allowing people to die. So if possible. And so what it does is offers a way of doing that. So if you protect the vulnerable, you shield them over that particular epidemic period.

And then when the epidemic period is over, they are no more vulnerable to corona, this particular virus than they are to other coronaviruses.

So that’s the idea is we take the risk, pull this risk back right down to the sorts of risks that we endure, that we are happy to accept as a society. So that’s where we should be. Well, it’s inevitable that we will head there.

But it’s a question, how do we get there? And the vaccine, of course, gives us a very useful route for approaching that, but what the vaccine won’t do, I don’t think, it doesn’t seem to have the ability to do – particularly in the face of mutating virus population, is it’s not going to give you protection against infection, which would allow us like measles to get to a state where of endemic equilibrium without… where people were protected against infection through vaccination, but that’s not going to happen.

All we can do with this vaccine at the moment is protect those who are vulnerable.

Host ➝ 30:07

Yeah. Okay. So you mentioned herd immunity that it’s become a dirty word or dirty phrase. How did something that was seen such as simple pass of epidemiology become demonized? How and why, do you think?

Sunetra Gupta ➝ 30:24

Well, how I think is through confusion. So I think people assumed that herd immunity… well, it became a sort of a stand-in for a policy whereby you would allow the virus to just do its thing, let it rip as it were.

So it became interchangeable with that concept, which it isn’t because after all, I mean, herd immunity is just a phenomenon, whereas let it rip strategies is a decision on part of a government or a country or an individual.

That’s how it came to present to a certain group of people a policy that was unacceptable to them and carried connotations of not having any interest in the well-being of the elderly and the frail, which is rather unfortunate.

And generally speaking, I think the concept of herd immunity is misunderstood.

“One of the major sources of confusion is when people say, well, it’s not like flu, flu only kills, you know, 650,000 people a year, and that’s flu in its endemic state. And COVID of course has gone through an epidemic phase in which it is likely to have a much higher death toll. Flu in an epidemic phase would kill very many more people. But what we can expect COVID to do is settle to an endemic state.”

Sunetra Gupta

Theoretical Epidemiologist, Oxford University

And that people assume that once you reach herd immunity, the disease goes away and that’s not true. Herd immunity as such simply refers to the protection that you gain from other people in your community being immune, and thresholds of herd immunity are ones which when crossed make the infection decline.

But generally speaking, where we end up is at that threshold, which is an equilibrium state where infections neither growth nor decline, except in some sort of seasonal way, which is just a sort of bobbing up and down around equilibrium.

So these concepts, which are not terribly difficult to take on board, but also very easy to misunderstand, particularly if you have a desire, some sort of political desire to misunderstand them, and that’s what’s led to this.

And that’s what you’re really asking is why and the why is a complex, but I’ve just been reading a very, a manuscript of proofs, a very good book by Toby Green, which will be coming out, I think, in April. And one of the things he says is that there were people who were rightfully so keen to get rid of characters like Trump and Bolsenaro that they just decided to politicize this whole thing in a way that’s been incredibly unhelpful and damaging to a lot of people.

Basically the politicization of this scientific dialogue has been to the detriment. And when I say detriment, we’re talking a serious detriment to many ordinary people.

Host ➝ 33:18

What sort of data has been provided by countries where they’ve experienced variants, that people are asserting a more virulent and/or transmissible. Have we, cause I think what I saw in your slides was that that’s not really there, that this doesn’t exist.

But we’re seeing headlines that claim it is in South Africa, claiming that, you know, that it’s one that the vaccine doesn’t handle it. But is the data there, have you seen it?

Sunetra Gupta ➝ 33:49

So first of all, the data that have been misinterpreted and rather strangely by people who should be and are experts in the field, is that some of the variants, one of the one in Britain, for example, seems to be taking over from what was there before.

But as I explained, for something to take over, it doesn’t have to have hugely higher transmissibility. It’s just, you know, it’s a tug of war and, you know, you can attach a mouse to one end of the tug of war and pull the whole thing across to one side.

And that is more likely to be what happened then a large elephant having been attached to the other side. So there is no indicator… just because something is growing and taking over does not mean that it is hugely more transmissible and it’s sort of, it’s the inverse.

“Where we end up is at that threshold, which is an equilibrium state where infections neither growth nor decline, except in some sort of seasonal way, which is just a sort of bobbing up and down around equilibrium.”

Sunetra Gupta

Theoretical Epidemiologist, Oxford University

Cases rose because of seasonality without any doubt. And within that rising cases, so there’s sudden expansion, the strain that was slightly more transmissible is very likely to expand more and take over very quickly. It doesn’t serve, it does not merit or what it doesn’t justify at all is the panic and the closure of borders surrounding that narrative. So I think the narrative is flawed and the worry – it doesn’t matter – anyone can come up with narratives and narratives. They are all somewhat flawed, but when a flawed narrative is used or an improbable narrative is used to inflict these sorts of conditions, then one has to really think about how it needs to be questioned.

Host ➝ 35:44

So I’m just trying to understand your presentation to me seems to be saying that the last year has been the rise of a pandemic, but if it hasn’t yet they’re settling back to some sort of endemic equilibrium. All of that was going to happen one way or another.

And everything we’ve seen has been heading towards that. And you’re saying that the best thing to have done was removed the most vulnerable and while the rest of us kind of, for lack of a better term, endure or be part of that settling down to the equilibrium.

Sunetra Gupta ➝ 36:24

Yes, I think so. I mean, I think, I think that would, because, I mean, the main reason for that is that huge collateral damage that any other, I mean, so what can.

You can either suppress the infection or let it run its course and suppressing the infection is problematic for two reasons. One is that it’s a temporary measure. And secondly, because it has such a huge cost.

“The politicization of this scientific dialogue has been to the detriment. And when I say detriment, we’re talking a serious detriment to many ordinary people.”

Sunetra Gupta

Theoretical Epidemiologist, Oxford University

So one option of course, that one could consider is we suppress the infection until we have a vaccine, even if that vaccine only protects the vulnerable population. So that’s, you know, a possible strategy, but in order to figure out whether that strategy is a viable one, you need to think about two things. One is how likely is there to be a vaccine, which has always been, you know, a big question mark, fortunately, now no longer a question mark. And the second question is can we afford to stay in lockdown until that event and for most areas, most parts of the world, the answer’s no. And yet it happened.

Host ➝ 37:42

Did we suppress the virus at all, though? And in any of these attempts, did the, and if we did, did that just change behavior of the virus?

Sunetra Gupta ➝ 37:54

It’s very hard to say whether we were able to suppress the virus. I think it’s a question of, you know, how much lockdown is necessary. I mean, what’s the relationship between if there’s a scale of mitigation, severity of mitigation and success in suppressing the virus. I think that relationship is very non-linear.

So, but it’s very hard to say. In other words, what I’m saying is if you look at the trajectories in somewhere like Sweden or in the UK, the extent to… you can have two extremes in terms of explanations. You could say in one extreme, everything was just simply down to mandated or non-mandated non-pharmaceutical interventions and the other extreme, you can easily set up a model such as some of the ones I showed you where it’s all down to herd immunity and seasonality. Now the truth is going to be somewhere in between them.

And what I think, I don’t think we have the… we’re slowly starting to get the data that allows us to say where it actually lies, but what we need to do at the… the beauty of focus protection is that it says, it gives you a means of moving forwards, even with that uncertainty of which actually happened.

Sunetra Gupta ➝ 39:22

So rather than engaging in some kind of academic battle or quibble over what worked and what didn’t work. I think what we need to do is keep very much focused on the costs of all of this and globally as global citizens and come up with ideas such as focus protection, which now we can deliver through vaccination and, you know, prevent ourselves from entering a situation. The head of the army in Britain wrote today saying this form of nationalism is going to create major instability.

And he’s worried that this could lead to, you know, a major war or a set of wars because that’s what nationalism leads to after all. Deprivation and nationalism, well, we know what happened a hundred years ago in the face of that – Germany.

So we have to be very careful and we are seeing all sorts of rules and laws being brought in, and a huge disregard for the suffering that’s been caused to children and to the poor.

So I think that we really need to move forwards with those things, ideas in mind and not ascribe them as people are doing now to the virus itself, but take responsibility for those, for the acts of mitigation having caused these harms.

Host ➝ 41:01

Yes, it’s something that’s certainly troubles me is that the approach over the past year has been the nationalism of it. But a lot of the the way it’s been conducted has been very unsettling and changing of the global environment, the global geopolitical situation. But we will be covering that with some of our other speakers.

I’ve got a big question to ask of you and I, and that’s about the Great Barrington Declaration. Something that I was very, I was very proud to see you do. It was a very, it was a brave thing. Can you describe, though, what it felt like afterwards? Did you attract the attention you expected? Did it do the job you wanted it to do?

Sunetra Gupta ➝ 41:50

Well, I mean, and it attracted more attention than we expected, perhaps. I mean, there was, it’s certainly become part of the vocabulary of many of these debates. So, it certainly, and it gave people the license to express themselves, which, I mean, this has been a very sad part of all of this is, is finding people, finding that a lot of people are really afraid to speak out and this is really unfortunate. So it has given a platform to some people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to speak out. So those are all good things. But of course it’s been vilified and misrepresented. And at the moment it’s been weeks of relentless kind of ad hominem abuse that many of us have been suffering as a result of it.

Sunetra Gupta ➝ 42:58

So now, of course, I feel that there was no choice, but to do this. And it was good because it arose independently. It was a bunch of people independently coming together to say this. So it wasn’t a group of people who know each other and review each other’s papers and all sort of saying, hey, let’s do this.

It really was, it’s quite life affirming to see bunch of people around the world who didn’t even know of each other’s existence coming together out of their convictions to put something together and have other people sign up to it.

So it’s certainly altered my life, but overall I’d say in positive ways. But it’s hasn’t really listened to it. Not in the UK, even though some people think that the UK delayed putting in harsher measures because of it, which is unfortunately not the case… so it’s not really had the effect, the desired effect on policy, but it has certainly had an effect on public opinion, I think, and giving people the space to think about all of this. I hope in a more nuanced way.

Host ➝ 44:34

Yes. So taking the the focus protection format and it’s the way the vaccines can fit in. Do you think that the perspective of yourself and ourselves and the Great Barrington, that can have an influence, that we can change the way that we settle back into an endemic equilibrium?

Sunetra Gupta ➝ 44:57

Well, we were hoping very much that once these vaccines, now that they’re there, that, you know, I didn’t, I started to talk about the objections to the Great Barrington Declaration in terms of sort of biological facts like, is there herd immunity at all. But a very big kind of objection was that, how can you actually deliver focus protection, which is a, you know, a very valid point. That’s exactly what we wanted. We wanted a debate around that. There wasn’t a debate, it was more of an outright rejection.

You know, people laughing our faces, which seemed very odd because many of the ways that you would deliver focus protection are exactly what we do in lockdown anyway. It’s just restricted to a group of people rather than the whole population.

But we thought… we were hoping that the vaccine would give us a sort of a meeting point where focus protection could be delivered through the vaccine. And that would be the end of that. And those who said, well, we’re of the opinion that we should stay locked down until such a point arrives. I’m very happy to say that, yeah, maybe you’re right. I don’t mind.

What I really want now is for the children here to go back to school and for the damage that’s already been done to people’s lives to be limited. To go into mode of damage limitation, that the best we can hope for..

Host ➝ 46:36

Also one other question, if I may and that’s, that’s about vaccines again. So does, does MES vaccination, is that, is that necessary? Is that going to be the sticking points? Do you think it matters?

Sunetra Gupta ➝ 46:55

I think that’s going to be a problem. Yes, I agree. Because I think the way to use vaccines is to deliver focus protection. And I don’t think we should be vaccinating everybody. I think we should rely on a combination of focused protection through vaccination and naturally acquired immunity to provide with an absolutely solid impenetrable wall against this virus.

I also think that, you know, in a few years time, it may not even be that, you know, people will build up the immunity they need, that will see them through. Some people, you know, like people with comorbidities who aren’t succumbing to other coronaviruses are obviously not doing so because they’ve already been exposed to those coronaviruses at a time when they weren’t vulnerable. So, you know, the need for a vaccine will diminish with time, I think, but at the moment, it’s the most wonderful tool that we have to enact focus protection.

Sunetra Gupta ➝ 47:53

But we will, I think we’ll always need as we do with influenza at the moment you know, having herd immunity… if we did not have herd immunity in place for influenza, we would be in really serious trouble. And I think it’s very important that we allow that to occur.

“I don’t think we should be vaccinating everybody. I think we should rely on a combination of focused protection through vaccination and naturally acquired immunity.”

Sunetra Gupta

Theoretical Epidemiologist, Oxford University

We should be grateful that we can allow herd immunity to accumulate without suffering losses of life, especially in the young, by protecting the elderly and the frail and the vulnerable, those with co-morbidities using a vaccine. And through other means as well.

I mean, maybe vaccination, won’t be the best, won’t be something that all vulnerable people can have. So, you know, we need to keep in place this idea that we must protect the vulnerable through vaccination and other means and bring the risks of infection down through herd immunity. And I think that’s the only way forwards.

“the need for a vaccine will diminish with time”

Sunetra Gupta

Theoretical Epidemiologist, Oxford University

Host ➝ 49:01

Thank you, Sunetra. Really appreciate you joining us on a Friday evening and giving us your time again. Thank you. Bye, bye.

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Video Source https://www.covidplanb.co.nz/ (Copyright PLAN B International Covid Symposium: 2021, February 12 – Permission Obtained)

The post “I Don’t Think We Should Be Vaccinating Everybody” — Theoretical Epidemiologist Prof. Sunetra Gupta appeared first on Darachi.com.

“The Lockdowns Are Creating a New Virus. Then We Have a New Epidemic.” — Epidemiologist Dr Wittkowski

dryburgh-com — Mon, 22 Mar 2021 23:00:31 +0000

Dr Knut Wittkowski

Dr. Wittkowski received his PhD in computer science from the University of Stuttgart and his ScD in Medical Biometry from the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, both Germany. He worked for 15 years with Klaus Dietz, a leading epidemiologist who coined the term “reproduction number”, on the Epidemiology of HIV before. Around 1990, he was one of the few to predict that HIV would not spread among Caucasian heterosexuals. After teaching epidemiology at the University of Cairo and the American University of Beirut, he was for 20 years head of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design at The Rockefeller University, New York.

Dr. Wittkowski is currently the CEO of ASDERA LLC, a company discovering novel interventions against complex diseases from data of genome-wide association studies, including a nutritional intervention to reduce cellular support for virus replication and to improve cardiovascular and metabolic health as a natural strategy to reduce the burden and stop the continuation of the COVID epidemics.

Updates

March 23rd, AP News: Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel “We basically have a new pandemic. Essentially we have a new virus, obviously of the same type but with completely different characteristics. Significantly more deadly, significantly more infectious, and infectious for longer.” (Germany extends virus lockdown till mid-April as cases rise)

Transcript

Host ➝ 00:00

Welcome. Today it’s for anyone who may or may not know me, I am Tania The Herbalist, and today I have the privilege of talking and chatting with Knut Wittkowski. Knut is not any medical expert, actually. He’s got a master’s in biostatistics, a PhD in computer science, a doctor of science and medical biometry, including genetics and epidemiology. And you were former head of research, design and biostatistics at the Rockefeller Foundation.

Knut Wittkowski ➝ 00:36

And epidemiology at the Rockefeller University here in New York.

Host ➝ 00:42

Beautiful. Thank you for that. Well, you now have gone viral because of your expertise and your many articles and especially one of your most recent ones about how much lockdown policy does not actually agree with the established epidemiological policy. Because, of course, we know the experts controlling the local policy are motivated by fear and politics. Can you talk about that a little bit for us?

Knut Wittkowski ➝ 01:12

If we go back one year and if you still remember the reason for having a lockdown, people were afraid that the situation in the US, and in particular in New York, at the time would become as dire as in the North of Italy where the hospital system was totally overwhelmed.

And one could understand that even though I didn’t share that fear, but I could understand it. But a month later we had the data from the CDC that there would never be a major problem.

The hospital ship that had anchored in New York left. The Javits center, the conference center that had 2000 beds, was never used. The tents in Central Park put up by Mount Sinai hospital, also not used.

There was a shortage here and there, once in a while, but there was no, not even close to the hospital system collapsing.

So one could have reopened and said, well, it was three, four weeks, too bad. We were overly pessimistic, overly careful, but everybody would have understood that was erring on the side of caution.

Knut Wittkowski ➝ 02:52

And then suddenly the game posts shifted. It was not anymore about the hospital system collapsing. Today it’s not either.

We have currently something like less than 15% of all hospital utilization is due to COVID. That is noticeable, but it doesn’t mean that there is a major problem.

Again, there may be a local problem here or there, but that is not, should not be enough to run the whole economy against the wall.

So it became somewhat unclear what the objective of the lockdown should be. Should it be that the country should be locked down until there is no single virus around anymore? Somehow nobody actually explained that. Why should we control the virus? Why should we stop the spread? And could we?

Host ➝ 04:11

Right. So, from your expertise, what is the difference between COVID and influenza?

Knut Wittkowski ➝ 04:22

If we had not the tools to sequence the virus and had learned in late December [2019] or early January [2020], I forgot when it was, that this happened to be a coronavirus, one of those that hit us every now and then, rather than influenza virus that hits us a bit more frequently, we would not have seen any difference between this and the epidemic, for instance, of 2017/2018, which was also a bad flu.

Host ➝ 04:59

Right. And now if we let it run its course the way we do other viruses, how long do you think it would actually be before we could reach herd immunity?

Knut Wittkowski ➝ 05:08

It will take about six weeks and can be shifted a bit in different parts of the country, depending on where the virus gets there [“endemic equilibrium herd immunity”].

So it was here in New York earlier, and the epidemic ended even before the lockdowns started. I mean, that infections went down before the lockdown started. It came later in the South.

So in the South, we have seen the effect of flattening the curve. You are delaying the infections and illnesses and death for a couple of months until you reopen. And then the delayed events happen because lockdowns do not prevent anything from happening. They just delay it a bit.

Host ➝ 05:59

Is there any scientific background behind lockdowns?

Knut Wittkowski ➝ 06:04

Nobody has ever done a lockdown for any disease. So it was not quite clear how this experiment would end.

Host ➝ 06:16

Right, right. And so many are actually are, sorry, go ahead.

Knut Wittkowski ➝ 06:22

And what we saw was that it backfired in many ways. So one thing that we have seen, and we know since October, when the viruses in Spain and France had been sequenced, we know that because of the lockdowns giving the virus enough time to mutate, we had escape mutations that started the wave in November. So we are currently experiencing the result of the lockdowns. Without lockdowns, we would not have any COVID right now.

Host ➝ 07:06

Right. And it’s funny because many seem to argue that the lockdown measures is actually what decreased the potential mortalities that could have happened if it wasn’t for these measures. So really, how effective are the measures like social distancing, isolation, things like that.

Knut Wittkowski ➝ 07:22

They’re very effective. They have cost many jobs and the economy a lot of money. So they were very effective [sarcasm].

Host ➝ 07:32

Right, right. And here in Ontario, I’m in Canada in Ontario here, we’ve now got a stay at home order. So, you know, even things like going to bargaining and skating and things like that outdoors, they’re almost saying, don’t do, stay at home. Only leave for essentials

Knut Wittkowski ➝ 07:51

Because otherwise, we need that [restrictions breeding variants] urgently, because otherwise we run the risk that there will be no new epidemic in a few months [sarcasm]. Because the lockdowns are essential for the virus to develop new strains.

“because of the lockdowns giving the virus enough time to mutate, we had escape mutations that started the wave in November. So we are currently experiencing the result of the lockdowns. Without lockdowns, we would not have any COVID right now.”

Knut Wittkowski

CEO of ASDERA/Epidemiologist

Our immune system develops typically something like five or six different types of antibodies to protect us from mutations that might happen while we are infected to make sure that even if there is a mutation in one of the epitopes, the targets of the antibodies, if there is a mutation, then there should be other antibodies that still are sufficient to prevent the virus from being replicated and from spreading.

However, if you give the long enough and the virus mutates at a rate of one or two mutations a month. So if you give it three months, there’s a good chance that there will be six consecutive mutations, one for each of these antibodies.

And at the end, the human immunity does not capture the virus anymore. And the virus can spread.

We have, even though it’s technically mostly the same virus, but experience as if it were a totally new virus. And this is what we’re seeing right now.

“Nobody has ever done a lockdown for any disease. So it was not quite clear how this experiment would end.”

Knut Wittkowski

CEO of ASDERA/Epidemiologist

What we have seen since November is a new virus, or actually a family of new viruses, because similar things happened in Spain and France and in the UK and in South Africa and also in the United States. So it’s a very… the common thing, if you give the virus enough time with the lockdowns, it will mutate and you have the next epidemic.

Host ➝ 09:51

Right. And how important is it for us to be outdoors and being with nature and being outside and getting fresh air? Because I think a stay at home orders, I believe could be obviously detrimental, especially for the healthy and the young and children.

Knut Wittkowski ➝ 10:07

I mean, I don’t want to go there. It’s too frustrating to see a whole generation of children being deprived of their wellbeing and their development.

The children can not, it’s immunologically dramatic, because they cannot develop the immune responses that they need for the rest of their life.

They don’t have the social contacts that they have in school. They don’t learn.

If you’re taking away one year in the development – and it’s now getting more than that – one year in the development of a child that’s below the age of 10, you’re creating a huge gap and you’re preventing this child from having all the opportunities that they otherwise would have. And the tragic thing here is that there is no reason for it.

Children do not get ill – with very rare exceptions.

Yes, we have had in the United States, something like – I haven’t checked the last week.

So maybe it’s 30 deaths in children from age four to age fourteen. Thirty. We had over 50 from influenza during the same time period. Yes. It happens with every flu, a few children die. And I feel sorry for the families who are affected. For them, it’s a tragedy.

However, should we close down the country of 335 million people in the US, a bit less in Canada, but should we destroy the life of hundreds of millions of people, because there is a risk for some children. And most of these children who die have co-morbidities, have diabetes, have other diseases, other immune diseases. The balance, this is totally out of balance.

Host ➝ 12:51

Yeah. And at what point in time did you realize that these measures are going to kill more people than prevent?

Knut Wittkowski ➝ 13:01

That was known from the very beginning because the measures do not reduce COVID deaths, but they’re causing lots of others.

And so we knew from the very beginning that there would be more deaths because of the lockdowns, unless we are counting the risk that the hospital system would collapse and then we would have many deaths for other reasons.

But as soon as it was clear that the hospital system would not be collapsing – and it still is not collapsing – the lockdowns should have ended.

And the schools should never have been closed, because children, except for the very rare exceptions, don’t develop any severe illness. So they will not end up in a hospital.

Even the young adults don’t end up in hospitals in relevant numbers. We knew that 50% of all people who died, many of them in hospitals, were older than 80 years.

So if you are below the age of 60, your risk of having a severe disease or even dying is irrelevant. I mean, when we cross the street, we can always be hit by a brick and still not everybody wears hard hat all the time, because there is a theoretical risk that you may be hit by a brick.

And here, for those under the age of 60, about, it is a theoretical risk, like the many theoretical risks that we are facing every day in our life.

“That was known from the very beginning because the measures do not reduce COVID deaths, but they’re causing lots of others.”

Knut Wittkowski

CEO of ASDERA/Epidemiologist

And we have to take risks because otherwise we couldn’t live. And that’s what we have right now. We cannot live.

Host ➝ 15:17

Now. I have to ask you, how is the data for COVID being collected now in comparison to previous respiratory infections?

Knut Wittkowski ➝ 15:29

I have been working many years ago on HIV when I predicted correctly that HIV would never spread among the Caucasian heterosexual population, which at that time, politicians and media were very scared of. They thought all of Europe and the United States would become depopulated because of HIV. Didn’t happen.

But there actually, the reporting was good. We knew for every case and then “case” meant you have the disease, you have a problem. So for every case, it was reported, when was it diagnosed, and when was it reported.

So these days, the difference were there. And as epidemiologists, we could use that to make more sense of the data and the definitions were not changed all the time [unlike with COVID-19].

I just learned today that it seems that PCR, the definition of what a positive PCR test is, is being changed from running for 35 cycles to only running for 25 cycles, which makes the test less sensitive.

And then of course, we know that the vaccines are working [sarcasm] because there are fewer infections, except at the same time, the test was changed.

And we had had so many changes. What is a “case”? A case traditionally is somebody who has an illness, and then you find out why that person is ill.

Right now you have people who want to travel or have a job requirement. So they’re standing here on the street to get tested. And if they happened to get tested positive, they are called a case. They’re not ill, they probably will never be. They may not even be infected. They may just have some virus sitting in the nose that never got into the body. And you call them cases? Everything in this epidemic is done upside down. It almost feels like people want to obscure what’s going on because we know that during an epidemic, you don’t change the measures that you take, because then you cannot compare it anymore. And here it happens all the time, which is frustrating.

Host ➝ 18:28

Now I have to ask you because of course I admire your courage and you speaking out against this, but why do you find that more medical experts are not speaking about this, especially when you hear about MDs and even some neurologists, but you’re never hearing about a virologist or an epidemiologist that are really speaking out on this, which, like yourself, are the best people.

Knut Wittkowski ➝ 18:50

We have three virologists speaking out in the United States and only virologists. Different areas of science have different objectives. And people are trained for doing different things.

“Everything in this epidemic is done upside down. It almost feels like people want to obscure what’s going on”

Knut Wittkowski

CEO of ASDERA/Epidemiologist

An MD is trained to make a diagnosis with an individual patient, find the treatment, convince the patient that he or she should take the treatment, follow up and see how it works. This is by and large, what an MD is treated to do.

A virologist studies the structure of the virus. What is it composed of and where does it bind? And how does the cell with the virus binds, interact with the cell? How can, what would be potential vaccine? How, what structure, what epitopes would we use? Things like that.

And then there are epidemiologists who study how does the virus spread? What is the most effective thing to do against the spread of the virus? These questions, no MD and no virologist is trained to deal with these questions because you need mathematical models. You need a lot of experience in dealing with large sets of data, and that is something what epidemiologists do, and they were not heard in March or April.

Host ➝ 20:40

Now, one of the last questions that I have to ask you, of course, just to kind of give people a little bit of light because many are starting wake up more and more about the lockdowns kind of being worse than the disease itself, because there’s a lot of implications. What do you think is the proper solution to handle this virus? If you had the option, what’s your solution.

Knut Wittkowski ➝ 20:59

Okay. The first thing you already said, let’s reopen schools and the economy. There’s no reason to keep them closed.

Of course, masks can be helpful when worn by those who are vulnerable, and let’s presume masks are effective, and we’re still not quite sure whether they are, but let’s presume that they’re effective. And this would be one of the strategies, the vulnerable, those who have comorbidities and are older can use to pre-protect themselves, to self isolate while the virus is running among the low risk people and taking its natural course, which will have very few severe events and very few deaths. Because as I said, it is mostly the elderly who die.

So masks should be worn by those who are vulnerable and by the people who directly interact with the vulnerable, because if you are helping somebody from the wheelchair into the beds, or the other way around there is physical interactions and close proximity. And these are situations where the risk of transmission is highest. And so to help the elderly or the vulnerable to self isolate, those directly interacting with them should wear a mask.

And also, if possible, try to distance a bit. Everybody else should not because if everybody else does the same thing, then the vulnerable wouldn’t have an advantage anymore. The virus would spread a bit more slowly overall. It would spread at the same rate among the elderly and vulnerable as among the young and healthy.

So if everybody wears a mask and does other ways of distancing, we are increasing the number of deaths.

So just to put the numbers that we have in context. In the United States, we had so far about 400,000 deaths, 200,000 were from COVID-20, since November, which would not have been here without lockdowns.

Knut Wittkowski ➝ 23:42

And then among those among 200,000, 40% were in nursing homes. Now the nursing homes – we’ve been talking about protecting the vulnerable. If the vulnerable had been protected better, there would have been much fewer deaths. There may have been about a hundred thousand. A hundred thousand deaths is normal for a flu. It’s at the upper end, but this is nothing unusual for flu.

So we should keep everything open and we should focus on the things that are really dangerous. It’s not dangerous to be coughing or sneezing for a few days while you have a flu or even COVID like many people have.

It gets dangerous when you end up in the hospital, in the emergency room and then you may die. So we have to prevent that. And now I’m talking a bit pro domo. My company is working on something like that. One of these strategies where we are giving people the option to prevent, to reduce their comorbidities.

And without comorbidities, almost nobody dies.

Knut Wittkowski ➝ 25:16

And also to reduce the rate by which the virus spreads in the body, within the body. Because we are not dying of the virus itself. We could live with that virus forever. It would produce a couple of viruses on the side, but that’s not a big deal.

“There may have been about a hundred thousand. A hundred thousand deaths is normal for a flu. It’s at the upper end, but this is nothing unusual for flu.”

Knut Wittkowski

CEO of ASDERA/Epidemiologist

What we are dying off is the immune system. When it has the antibodies. After one week of incubation time, the immune system kills all infected cells. And if many cells are infected, like in the lung, then a large part of the lung cells are being killed. Now that’s causing a problem. If people are young and healthy, they can live with it. If they’re old and a bit fragile, that huge wound is killing them. So it’s the reaction of the immune system to the virus that’s killing. And that depends, how dangerous it is, depends on the viral load.

Knut Wittkowski ➝ 26:26

So when we can reduce the rate by which the virus replicates it’s by only 10%, then for every seven hour replication cycle. Then after the five days, we have reduced the number of cells that became infected by about 80 to 90%. And then the wound created by the immune system is much smaller and everybody survives it.

So we should not close down schools and the economy, we should focus on helping the elderly and vulnerable to self isolate. And we should also focus on dealing with the one problem that is really important, and that is preparing the immune system better to deal with that infection in a natural way so that the disease is not so severe. And if the disease is not so severe, then what are we talking about?

We are not closing the country down for the common cold. And if we succeed in reducing the severity of that disease to that of a common cold, and I think that is possible. And even if it were to the severity of a regular flu, then why do we need to lock down?

Host ➝ 28:07

All right. Thank you for that information, Knut. Is there anything else that you would want to add to any of this?

Knut Wittkowski ➝ 28:20

I think we covered most of the things. The advice to our politicians is very simple. I am not the only one. If you think of the Great Barrington Declaration that has been signed now by over a million scientists.

Knut Wittkowski ➝ 28:45

We have to stop the nonsense. We have entered a vicious cycle. With every new wave, we’re starting a new wave of lockdowns. The lockdowns are creating a new virus. Then we have a new epidemic. We’re starting a new lockdown that creates a new virus.

Einstein defined the word insanity, and said, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results. Doing lockdowns over and over again will have no other results than creating the viruses that are capable of starting a new epidemic. And then we are exactly at the point where we were before.

Although it may be a bit worse because the new virus may also be resistant against some of the cross immunity that we already had from other coronavirus infections. So we may need more people to get infected, to get over the next virus.

Knut Wittkowski ➝ 30:13

And then I have one fear.

And that is that every new generation of viruses here, the virus genome gets closer and closer to the human genome because our immune system can make antibodies only against stretches of genetic information on the genome that are unique to the virus.

And just a couple of weeks ago, three weeks or so, a paper was published and there it said less than 10% of the virus genome is available for the immune system to make antibodies against it. And then every generation, the virus mutates and becomes a bit closer to something that is already in the human genome. And then it becomes more and more difficult for the immune system to make antibodies. This situation has never arrised in the whole history of humankind. The lockdowns are creating a problem that has never existed. And for which nature did not find a solution. We should let nature do it. We should adjust. We should adapt. But we should not think that we can control nature.

Knut Wittkowski ➝ 32:06

My first name is Knut, and I had a namesake in the 11th century, more or less exactly a thousand years ago. And he got annoyed by people thinking he was so powerful he could do anything.

And so he walked to the beach and told the tide to stay away. Just to show that nature was much more powerful than even the most powerful King at the time. Of course the tide didn’t stay away.

“With every new wave, we’re starting a new wave of lockdowns. The lockdowns are creating a new virus. Then we have a new epidemic.”

Knut Wittkowski

CEO of ASDERA/Epidemiologist

Now, since then, during the last 1000 years, I don’t think there was a single politician who would have said nature is more powerful than I am. Politicians think they know everything better, everything better than nature. And they can control a virus like the tide. We cannot control the tide and we can not control a virus. We can only make it worse.

Host ➝ 33:25

Very well said, very well said. It’s true. Let nature run its course is really the ultimate thing that we can do for proper herd immunity and getting back to some form of normalcy. So I appreciate your wisdom. I appreciate your words. And I appreciate your work, Knut. Where can people find you if they want to connect with you on your website? I don’t know if you’re on social media, where can they connect with you more?

Knut Wittkowski ➝ 33:51

My name is unique. If you look for Knut Wittkowski, you will find me.

“We have to stop the nonsense. We have entered a vicious cycle. With every new wave, we’re starting a new wave of lockdowns. The lockdowns are creating a new virus. Then we have a new epidemic. We’re starting a new lockdown that creates a new virus.”

Knut Wittkowski

CEO of ASDERA/Epidemiologist

Host ➝ 34:00

Right. And, of course, your website is asdera.com. You’ve got lots of information there. So anyone who’s looking for it, interviews, articles, everything that you’ve done.

Knut Wittkowski ➝ 34:18

I will put this there too, as soon as it gets published. So thank you, Tania.

Host ➝ 34:25

Well, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. I appreciate it. And we’ll do this again hopefully soon sometime. Thank you.

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Vanden Bossche’s Theory: Mass Vaccination Will Breed Dangerous Variants – Fact or Fiction?

dryburgh-com — Fri, 19 Mar 2021 22:59:32 +0000

Background

The two posts I made regarding Vanden Bossche’s theory which claims mass vaccination is “transforming a quite harmless virus into an uncontrollable monster” attracted a lot of interest. Naturally people were then eager to know if it had truth.

I considered it having some degree of credibility, else I’d not have published it. However my cause is five-fold:

Struggle to maintain the power or right to express one’s opinions without censorship, restraint, or legal penalty. Second, the protection of sufficiently broad public discourse. Third, the protection of scientific discovery, a process which requires the free exchange of ideas. Fourth, provision of counterbalance to propaganda, namely biased or misleading information provided by mainstream media, typically in support of a political cause or point of view. Fifth, an extra voice for the more vulnerable in society; children, elderly, the sick and the poor.

Once something seems to have a degree of credibility and it’s censored by big tech (or looks likely to be censored), I add it to a list for consideration of publication.

Because of the interest expressed, I decided to have a first-round of validity scoring. I pinged three top-scientists, namely:

Dr Byram Bridle, Viral Immunologist
Dr Knut Wittkowski, Epidemiologist
Dr Mike Yeadon, Former Vice President and Chief Science Officer for Pfizer

And asked their thoughts in a few email exchanges.

I’ve posted their raw unedited emails below, along with the biography of each.

If there’s more interest, I’ll go to a round-two of validity scoring, taking into account the input below.

Dr Byram Bridle

BIOGRAPHY

Dr. Byram Bridle is an Associate Professor of viral immunology at the University of Guelph. His research program focuses on the development and optimization of vaccines for the treatment of infectious diseases and cancers. In March of this year he and two of his colleagues were commissioned by the government of Ontario to engineer several potential vaccine candidates to provide protective immunity against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), which is the causative agent of the coronavirus disease that emerged in 2019 (COVID-19).

In collaboration with the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, Manitoba, one of the vaccine candidates proved effective in protecting hamsters from COVID-19. This resulted in a contract being established with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) to develop a manufacturing process for the vaccine. A second contract has been established with the NRC to advance a second-generation CVODI-19 vaccine into the translational research pipeline. Dr. Bridle has also co-authored a series of lay articles in The Conversation to provide information to the lay public about the immunological aspects of COVID-19 and the development of vaccines.

His thought

EMAIL 1

Although Geert gets there by a slightly different route, we both end up at the same conclusion: that current design of the vaccines and the way they are being rolled out creates risk of the emergence of immunoevasive variants.

EMAIL 2

I don’t agree 100% with some of the minutiae of the scientific arguments, but that is a moot point.

I long ago drew a similar conclusion via a slightly different route through immunological and virological principles.

In short, I agree with the big picture argument being made.

I haven’t been so bold as to draw conclusions that are as ‘strong’, but I can’t disagree at all with Geert’s take-home message.

He is a respected scientist and has published many papers in well-respected journals. I can guarantee that he knows what he is talking about. I do think there is a high probability of our vaccine rollouts driving the emergence of dangerous variants.

In fact, I just initiated intense communications with my local health unit because they have just started a series of vaccination clinics and are not following the protocols approved by Health Canada (our regulatory agency).

In fact, Canada has unwisely chosen to be a ‘leader’ in extending the interval between the two doses of the COVID-19 vaccines to four months! There is no precedent in the world and no empirical data to back-up the decision. It was based on epidemiological modeling that had to incorporate several ‘assumptions’. All they focused on was theoretical effects on the immune system. They failed to consider effects on the virus.

Canada’s rationale is that it is better to get twice as many people with sub-optimal immunity for an extended period of time rather than maximal immunity in half the people. This is akin to having an outbreak of a dangerous bacterium but not enough antibiotics to go around. If one were to choose to administer the antibiotics for half the recommended # of days but to twice as many people, most scientists would agree that this would be an ideal scenario to promote the emergence of dangerous antibiotic-resistant variants. Physicians tell their patients to complete their antibiotic regimen, even when they start feeling much better part way in. To cut the treatment short = potentiation of risk of driving antibiotic resistance.

So why are we doing this in the context of SARS-CoV-2?!? The vaccine rollouts are already being done in a way that will drive the emergence of what we call ‘antigenic variants’; these are versions of the virus that have incorporated sufficient mutations to allow the target antigen (in this case, the spike protein) to change enough in structure as to become unrecognizable by the highly specific antibodies and T cells that were induced by the vaccines.

Specifically, the vaccines are being rolled out very slowly and are being distributed here and there (i.e. in piecemeal fashion). This means that vaccinated people will be intermingling with unvaccinated individuals. The latter can serve as a reservoir in the which the virus will have lots of time to incorporate random mutations and ‘test’ its ability to infect vaccinated people. If the latter happens, it would be result of an immuno-evasive variant emerging.

Adding unvalidated uses of the existing vaccines will only accelerate progress to this point. If a variant emerges that can bypass the immunity conferred by all current vaccines, we will be back to ‘square one’ and all our lockdowns for the past year will have been of zero net benefit.

We already have clear evidence this can happen: the Novavax, Johnson & Johnson, and AstraZeneca vaccines have all performed much poorer against the South African variant; AstraZeneca’s provides very little protection against it.

An article that backs this concept of vaccines driving antigenic variation was accepted for publication two days ago:

Antibody Resistance of SARS-CoV-2 Variants B.1.351 and B.1.1.7

…here are some concerning quotes:

“The recent emergence of B.1.1.7, B.1.351, and P.1 marks the beginning of SARS-CoV-2 antigenic drift”; “If the rampant spread of the virus continues and more critical mutations accumulate, then we may be condemned to chasing after the evolving SARS-CoV-2 continually, as we have long done for influenza virus.”

With respect to this latter statement, I have been convinced for a long time that SARS-CoV-2 will become endemic, just like influenza. This is the precise reason why I have tried to advocate for ‘learning to live with the virus’ since shortly after the pandemic began.

Importantly, the authors of this paper conclude that the way to avoid this is to maximize immunity as quickly as possible. Indeed, if vaccines are used in this way, an outbreak can be stopped in its tracks and there would be insufficient time and reservoir populations would be too small to support emergence of variants.

However, the authors are dreaming if they think our global vaccine rollout can be done in this proper way. It will never be fast enough. Everything we are doing in the vaccine rollout, in fact, is potentiating the emergence of variants.

It upsets me because public health officials are, in essence, driving the emergence of new variants that put you and me, and our families, friends and colleagues at risk of having to deal with potentially more dangerous version of this virus.

Personally, I would like to have much broader immunity than what the current vaccines induce. Broader immunity = less chance that a variant can evade it (because they can’t change too many components and maintain fitness).

By the way, the virology side of this is that coronaviruses naturally mutate over time. They employ an error-prone polymerase that randomly incorporates mutations when they copy their genetic material. This is a strategy that helps them adapt to new environmental pressures; such as narrowly-focused immunological pressure (and weak immunity caused by massive delays in administering second doses of vaccines).

An additional note: Some have argued that the emergence of partially immunoevasive mutants of SARS-CoV-2 prior to the rollout of vaccines invalidates the idea of vaccines potentiating this effect. However, one could argue that this observation actually supports the idea. The extended global lockdowns dramatically slowed progress towards natural immunity. Time and slow development of herd immunity = potentiation of immunoevasive mutants.

Dr Knut Wittkowski

BIOGRAPHY

His thought

EMAIL 1

It’s mitigation [e.g. lockdowns] that gives a virus more time. Vaccination is the opposite: it speeds up time to herd immunity.

EMAIL 2

I’m trying to find some logic in his arguments, that would relate to what we know about epidemiology, but I can’t.

Vaccination speeds up the development of herd immunity by reducing the wait time until the same person gets infected naturally. Speeding up the buildup of HI [herd immunity] reduces the chance that a lineage will successively develop escape mutations against all antibodies generated by the polyclonal immune response and thereby become resistant.

Hence, vaccination – if still effective when implemented – can be helpful, unless the politicians counteract the beneficial effect of vaccination (speeding up the development of HI) by mitigation (“distancing”, lockdowns, curfews, … ), all of which prolong the time it takes to develop HI.

One could argue that vaccines create fewer antibodies and, thus, increase the chance for shorter lineages to escape, but I can’t find this argument in his writings.

EMAIL 3

In a one-page summary written by him, some of his basic flaws are much easier to find:

“Why is nobody worried about ‘immune escape’ whereas Covid-19 has already escaped people’s innate immunity as reflected by multiple emerging, much more infectious, viral variants (most likely due to the global implementation of infection prevention measures)?”

In this sentence alone, he makes three fundamental mistakes:

I am worried about immune escape, as are many other people, see Wang … Ho (2021, Nature). The assumption that nobody is worried is wrong.
The escape we see is not from innate immunity (which are not specific to a particular pathogen), but from adaptive immunity (T-cells, antibodies, which are specific to a particular virus).
I agree that the problem is “global implementation of infection prevention measures”, but the lockdowns are the problem, not the vaccines. It is the lockdowns that are “transforming a quite harmless virus into an uncontrollable monster.”

EMAIL 4

I would replace [Geert’s claim of] “research expert” with “research coordinator” – “I was a coordinator of the Ebola program at GAVI. So we were interacting with several different vaccine companies …”. Role of a coordinator.

He is a PhD and DVM (veterinarian physician) not an MD.

He is not “board certified” in human virology or microbiology.

“Self-limiting diseases” – that’s COVID.

Viruses are not “intracellular”.

COVID is not “chronic” (chicken pox and herpes are) SARS-CoV-2 gets cleared.

Antibodies do not “translate to the mucosa”. The mucosa is where we have innate immunity.

Viruses don’t hide in cells, they get replicated in cells.

Viruses don’t “fully escape to [sic] our antibody responses.” We have neutralizing antibodies against viruses circulating in blood and we have non-neutralizing antibodies that direct killer T-cells to infected cells.

I agree with “it was a bad idea to do lockdowns that would also affect the younger people”.

The new “COVID strains” are not so much more infectious that young people need to be afraid of them. Maybe a few more become (mostly) asymptomatically infected. That’s it.

A virus doesn’t initially get “to the folks that have … weak immunity”. It infects everybody the same, but those with “weak immunity” may have more severe symptoms.

I agree that it would have been “the right thing to do, to protect [the elderly], and for them also to isolate, but … that is what we have not been doing.”

“If [young people] have quite decent innate immune response and therefore they are naturally protected … if they get in contact with coronavirus, it will boost their natural immunity.” – you can’t “boost” innate immunity.

“Vulnerable people [have] no humoral immunity”. Humoral immunity is the adaptive antibody mediated immunity. Except for newborns, everybody has it.
The older you get, the more types of memory t-cells you have to make different types of antibodies.

Innate immunity does not get “replaced by antigen-specific “immunity as people get older.” Partly true, it becomes less important as we develop more antibodies. (Note that he is later arguing that vaccines weaken the innate immunity.)

“Prophylactic vaccines should typically not be administered to people who are exposed to highly infectious pressure.” ???

“We are administering these vaccines in the heat of a pandemic … while … we are fully attacked by the virus”. – So what? That’s normal.

Among “people who get their first dose … the antibodies are not fully mature [sic], the titers are maybe not very high [that could be]. So their immune response is suboptimal [and] every single time you have an immune response that is suboptimal in the presence of an [infection/virus] … you are at risk of immune escape.” – Nonsense! … and then more nonsense.

“These vaccines don’t prevent infection” – No vaccine does.

“But in the meantime, … we give … by our interventions, the opportunity to escape to [sic] the immune system.” – Correct, but this applies to the lockdowns, not the vaccinations.

“The virus is not going to wait until we have those vaccines ready”. – Correct, but this merely makes the vaccine ineffective.

“… antibiotics …” are a bad example, because antibiotics evolve in the patient (with mutations every couple of hours), viruses evolve in the population (with 1-2 mutations per month).

EMAIL 5

Since Geert Vanden Bossche is now pushing “natural antibodies“ I looked into this in a bit more detail, the term has been used by some Boyden (196..) and Ochsenbein (1999), and recently reviewed by Palma (2018) and Holodick (2017), but it‘s nothing else than a subset of (mostly) IgM. There are none of the potentials or dangers pushed by GvdB associated with it. Newborns have a lot of them as part of the innate immune system and children lose most of them as soon as they develop adaptive immunity (antibodies).

It‘s still funny that somebody just created a more-or-less empty Wikipedia page for “natural antibodies“ and linked that page to “Antibodies“.

Dr Mike Yeadon

BIOGRAPHY

Dr Mike Yeadon is the former CSO and VP, Allergy and Respiratory Research Head with Pfizer Global R&D. Following 32 years at Pfizer he co-founded biotech company Ziarco Pharma Ltd. which was acquired by pharma giant Novartis.

Mike obtained a biological sciences Double First with Honours, and research based PhD in mechanisms of drug action.

His thought

EMAIL 1

His article has little science in it but lots of claims, the basis of which I cannot understand. He appears to have completely ignored T-cell immunity.

Negligible impact of SARS-CoV-2 variants on CD4+ and CD8+ T cell reactivity in COVID-19 exposed donors and vaccinees

Comprehensive analysis of T cell immunodominance and immunoprevalence of SARS-CoV-2 epitopes in COVID-19 cases

In terms of immune escape, additional publications to me support the idea that it’s extremely unlikely (whether that immunity is natural or due to vaccination).

EMAIL 2

No, I don’t agree with him that vaccination at present will lead to escape variants.

He chose not to address how it could be that variation could even begin to favour mutants which aren’t recognised in part by the vast majority of short pieces of the virus which are not altered.

Each individual uses a kind of combination lock, educating our T cells & also our antibodies to recognise between 20 & 40 separate protein snippets of the 10,000 amino acids that make up the virus.

The most changed variants are less than 0.3% different from the original sequence from Wuhan. So these are 99.7% identical to the original. It’s not possible that our bodies will not recognise every single variant as very close relatives of the original. No ones immune system will be fooled into thinking “this is a new virus, a new pathogen I’ve not seen before”.

The most important thing to communicate is how unlikely it is to evade what’s called “multi locus immunity”. It would be, probabilistically, as if the virus rolled a dice & got 20 sixes in a row (not quite, but this is the idea).

But let’s say it happened once. If there are enough replication events, maybe it will happen. Worst case is that individual may well be at risk, as if they had a suppressed immune system.

Here’s the reassuring part: because each of us uses a slightly different combination lock as we educate our immune systems through a kind of “molecular identity parade”, checking responses to hundreds of different protein snippets.

My selected set of 20-40 snippets which confers my immunity to this virus is DIFFERENT from the set of snippets another persons immune system is using.
So even if there’s an unlikely variant which escaped my combination lock immunity, it will not have escaped yours.

Put plainly: I do not believe immune escape mutants are at all likely to have clinical consequences but the most important thing is that even if escape happened, it would represent a threat to an individual, NOT to the community.

I do not understand how our Belgian colleague accommodates that concept, which has been demonstrated empirically in scores of convalescing people as well as those who’s immunity was conferred through vaccination.

But to finish on a positive note, I agree with his operational conclusion: do not vaccinate everybody.

We have different rationales for our conclusions, but those recommendations are pleasingly convergent!

More Resources:

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Should Children Get Vaccinated? — Dr Fauci vs Dr Lavine

dryburgh-com — Thu, 18 Mar 2021 17:06:43 +0000

Vaccinate Babies?

I woke to hear Anthony Fauci on broadcast television talk about scheduling to vaccinate children and babies! There is no logic or science to this. And every reason – scientific and moral – not to do this.

So I quickly looked up someone speaking science on the topic instead, found Jennie Lavine PhD, and placed her clip back-to-back with Fauci’s non-scientific clip, resulting in this combined two-minute video.

I extracted her clip from The British Medical Journal’s panel “Is Zero Covid possible?” (11 March, 2021).

I’ve uploaded the video to seven platforms, including those I loathe to touch, YouTube and Twitter, so that it may be spread as quickly and as easily as possible. Please share this post.

Please share across as many of the seven platforms above as you can, as well as into as many other platforms as you can.

If you wish to discuss the topic or the science, consider joining the Telegram Group.

P.S. If you believe that asymptomatic spread is a core driver of the disease, it is not – learn here (PDF).

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Global Coup d’État: Mapping the Corporate Takeover of Global Governance

Eva Medved — Wed, 17 Mar 2021 00:47:43 +0000

Watch ➥ LBRY | Rumble | Brighteon | Minds | Archive

Background

Decisions that deeply affect our lives are being made by secretive unaccountable bodies run by corporations. Decisions historically made by governments. This powershift is accelerating, and threatening democracy.

In this interview, Nick Buxton, publications editor and future labs coordinator for Transnational Institute (TNI), outlines the global and systemic trend towards corporate capture of global governance.

TNI has remarked:

The World Economic Forum has developed and pushed for the privatization of global governance for decades. The ‘Great Reset’ is just the latest iteration of the gradual corporate takeover of global institutions, such as the UN and other international bodies, that take critical decisions over the governance of global common goods like food, water, health, internet and others.

The WEF’s ‘Great Reset’ should more accurately be called the ‘Great Take Over’.

Transnational corporations in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic have been seeking to cement their control of global governance, ensuring it serves the interests of business and profits rather than the well-being of humanity.

Big tech, for example, many of them WEF partners (Amazon Web Services, Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, to name a few), have been greatly profiting from the coronavirus restrictions whilst simultaneously shadowbanning, deplatforming, demonetizing, and removing lawful user content that has been deemed by them, through non-transparent processes, to contradict unelected “global health authorities”.

Big tech companies allege that users who contradict “global health authorities” risk the “safety” of their users. For example LinkedIn felt the need to “protect” its users from a scientific paper by Professor Lauc, that postulated indoor humidity levels may have a role in COVID-19 severity risk, even though his paper had been accepted (those with an interest in the role of humidity, please see https://40to60rh.com).

Although I appealed, LinkedIn wrote back that I’d lost the appeal. They did not provide any counter-evidence or any reasoning, not even upon repeated requests. In fact, LinkedIn deplatformed me for “spreading false information” and cited that I’d posted Professor Lauc’s paper. Their termination email said that I could appeal. I wrote back that I would indeed appeal as I had never knowingly, let alone intentionally spread false information, and asked a couple of questions to help me frame my appeal.

Although I explicitly stated my reply was not an appeal (in order to be abundantly cautious that they would treat it as an appeal), I received an email back to say that I’d lost my appeal! I wrote back asking how I could lose an appeal that I never made, only to get a reply to say sorry that the decision is final.

To add to alarm. Although in the past few months, countries with a recent memory of communism, namely Hungary and Poland have started to draft laws to protect their democracy (e.g. making it illegal to censor lawful user content, i.e. protect free speech) from big tech, the United Nations is proposing to set up a digital governance body. It will mostly be dominated by Big Tech representatives so that we have a global big tech-led body for governance of big tech. Email and a self-hosted blog may be my last refuge.

There’s a lot of interlocking pieces to understand the chaotic “shit show” we’ve experienced for a year now. In addition to this interview, may I suggest also:

For those interested in more information specifically relating to the interview, these PDF slides may help:

It should be clear that the WEF is seeking to exploit the mostly manufactured crisis to entrench a governance model that favours the interests of transnational corporations. The UN has opened up its doors to the World Economic Forum, by signing a strategic partnership agreement with WEF that allows unprecedented access to the UN system.

It’s not a Great Reset that is needed. It’s a ‘Democratic Reset’.

Lynn Fries ➝ 00:00

Hello and welcome. I’m Lynn Fries, producer of Global Political Economy or GPE newsdocs. Today I’m joined by Nick Buxton.

He’s going to be giving us some big picture context on the Great Reset, a World Economic Forum initiative to reset the world system of global governance.

A worldwide movement crossing not only borders, but all walks of life, from peasant farmers to techies, is fighting against this initiative on the grounds that it represents a major threat to democracy.

Key voices from the health, food, education, indigenous people and high tech movements explained why in The Great Take Over: How we fight the Davos capture of global governance, a recent webinar hosted by the Transnational Institute. Today’s guest, Nick Buxton, is a publications editor and future labs coordinator at the Transnational Institute. He’s the founder and chief editor of TNI’s flagship State of Power report. Welcome, Nick.

Nick Buxton ➝ 01:13

Thank you very much, Lynn.

Lynn Fries ➝ 01:16

Nick, the Transnational Institute was co-organizer of The Great Take Over webinar. So what is it that you’re mobilizing against in opposing this great reset initiative?

Nick Buxton ➝ 01:30

What we’re really concerned about is this initiative by the World Economic Forum actually looks to entrench the power of those most responsible for the crisis we’re facing.

And in many ways it’s a trick, it’s a slight of hand to make sure that things continue as they are, to continue the same, that will create more of these crisis. More of these pandemics, will deepen the climate crisis, which will deepen inequality.

It’s not a Great Reset at all. It’s a great corporate takeover and that’s what we were trying to draw attention to.

What we’ve been finding in in recent years is that really there is something I would call it a kind of a global silent coup d’état going on in terms of global governance. Most people don’t see it and people are familiar, have become familiar with the way that corporations have far more influence.

Nick Buxton ➝ 02:23

And I’ve been integrated into policymaking at a national level. They see that more in front of them, people see their services being privatized.

They see the influence of the oil companies or the banking sector that has stopped actions such as regulations of banks or dealing with the climate crisis.

What people don’t realize is that at a global level there has been something much more silent going on, which is that their governance, which used to be by nations, is now increasingly being done by unaccountable bodies, dominated by corporations. And part of the problem is that that has been happening in lots of different sectors, but people haven’t been connecting the dots.

So what we’ve been trying to do in the last year is to talk with people in the health movement, for example, people involved in public education, people involved in food sector to say, what has happened in your sector.

Nick Buxton ➝ 03:21

And what we found is that in each of these sectors, global decisions that used to be discussed by bodies, such as the WHO, or such as the Food and Agriculture Organization, were increasingly done by these unaccountable bodies.

Just to give an example we have now the global pandemic and one of the key bodies that is now making the decision is a facility called COVAX. You would have thought global health should be run by the World Health Organization, that’s accountable to the United Nations. It has a system of accountability.

Well, what’s actually happening is that the World Health Organization is just one of a few partners but really [COVAX] it’s being controlled by corporations and corporate interests. In this case it is GAVI [The Vaccine Alliance formerly known as the Global Alliance for Vaccines & Immunization] and CEPI [The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations].

And they are both bodies, which don’t have a system of accountability, where it’s not clear who chose them, who they’re accountable to, or how they can be held to account.

Nick Buxton ➝ 04:20

And they are both bodies, which don’t have a system of accountability. Where it’s not clear who chose them; who they’re accountable to; or how they can be held to account. And what we do see is that there’s a lot of corporate influence in each of these bodies.

What this webinar was about was about bringing all these sectors together who have seen this silent coup d’état going on in their own sector to map it out. And so one of the things that you’ll see in the webinar is this mapping of the different sectors who are seeing this going on.

And the idea is just to give a global picture that this is something happening. We’ve had more than a hundred of these, they are called multi-stakeholder bodies come into the fore in the last 20 years.

And there’s been very little kind of taking note of that and taking stock of what’s emerging. And what’s emerging is this silent global coup d’état.

Lynn Fries ➝ 05:08

So what you find then in the big picture that you’re getting is that a global coup d’état has been silently emerging. And at the heart of it is a move towards the multi-stakeholder model of global governance. And that this is the model that is the path and mechanism of a corporate hijack of global and national governance structures.

The World Economic Forum agenda fits into all this, as the WEF of course is one of the world’s most powerful multi-stakeholder institutions. So Nick in explaining what all this means, let’s start with some of your thoughts on the history of how we got here.

Nick Buxton ➝ 05:49

I think what we had in the nineties was the kind of height of neoliberalism. We had the increasing role of corporations and the deregulation of the state. And it really starts to come through in 2000 with the Global Compact where the UN invited in corporations.

And the idea was that we’re going to need to involve corporations; one because we will need private financebecame the kind of mantra. So we need to involve corporations, they can be part of the solution. So it was partly finance. It was partly the withdrawal of states from kind of global cooperation. And that started to invite corporations into global governance where corporations were increasingly being invited into these kinds of bodies.

That dovetailed with this whole movement called Corporate Social Responsibility [CSR]. That corporations weren’t just profit-making vehicles.

Nick Buxton ➝ 06:46

They could be socially responsible actors. And so increasingly corporations were pitching themselves as not just corporate entities but as global citizens.

And one of the key vehicles for that, of course, was the World Economic Forum, which has really been articulating through Klaus Schwab and through their whole work this idea that corporations should firstly be socially responsible. And secondly as part of that, they should be treated as social entities and should be integrated into governance and decision-making.

That we needed to move from what was considered a kind of antiquated state led multilateral approach to a much more agile governance system. And this is again the kind of mantra coming in of the private sector being efficient. That the private sector if you involve them in decision-making, you would get more faster decisions. You’d get agile decisions. You’d get better decisions

Nick Buxton ➝ 07:51

So this all really came together. And in some ways, it’s even being consolidated even further.

The irony is that as you’ve had nationalists governments come to power, the kind of Trump America first in the world or Modi India first, they articulate a nationalist agenda but they haven’t actually questioned the role of corporations in any way whatsoever.

And as they’ve retreated from multilateral forums like the United Nations, they’ve left a vacuum that corporations have been able to fill. Corporations now say: we can be the global actors. We can be the responsible actors. We’re the ones who can tackle the big crises we face such as inequality, such as climate change, such as the pandemic.

So really we’ve had this convergence of forces coming together where as States have retreated corporations have filled the vacuum.

Lynn Fries ➝ 08:49

You noted earlier the World Economic Forum was one of the key vehicles for these ideas. The WEF also went big in filling that vacuum that you’re talking about. TNI reported the WEF Global Redesign Initiative stretching back to 2009 created something like 40 Global Agenda Councils and industry-sector bodies. So in the sphere of global governance, the WEF created space for corporate actors across the full spectrum of governance issues from cybersecurity to climate change you name it.

Nick Buxton ➝ 09:25

So yeah, the Global Redesign Initiative was one of the first initiatives that the World Economic Forum launched in the wake of the financial crisis. And their idea was that we needed to replace what was an inefficient multilateral system that was not able to solve problems with a new form of things.

So they were saying instead of multilateralism where nations make decisions in global cooperation we needed a multi-stakeholder approach, which would bring together all the interested parties in small groups to make decisions.

And the Global Redesign Initiative was really a model of that. They were trying to say: okay, how do we resolve issues such as the governance of the digital economy.

And their answer to it is we bring the Big Tech companies together, we bring the governments together, and we bring a few civil society players and we’ll work out a system that makes sense. And so you had a similar thing going on in all these other Redesign Councils. Really their models for how they think governance should be done.

And some of them have not just become models. They’ve actually become the real thing. So many of the multi-stakeholder initiatives we’ve seen emerge today have emerged out of some of these councils.

The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness [CEPI The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations] one of the key ones leading COVAX right now in response to the pandemic was launched at the World Economic Forum. So the World Economic Forum is now becoming a launch pad for many of these multi-stakeholder bodies

Lynn Fries ➝ 10:58

We should also note the World Economic Forum is a very well funded launch pad. As power points from The Great Takeover webinar put it corporations do not pay tax but “donate” to multi-stakeholder institutions. The WEF of course is funded by powerful corporations and business leaders. The power points also noted the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is of the main funders of multi-stakeholder institutions.

In contrast, multilateral institutions are being defunded on the back of falling corporate tax revenues for nation states. Given it depends on government donors, the UN regular budget that is the backbone of funding for the 1 country 1 vote multilateral processes of intergovernmental cooperation and decision making has taken a big hit.

Perhaps you could comment on some big picture implications on this kind of changing dynamic that’s going on between corporate actors and nation states.

Nick Buxton ➝ 12:03

Yeah. Yeah, I think what we’re seeing is that as gradually the corporations have become more powerful they have weakened the capacity of the state. So they have reduced the tax basis. You know most corporations have seen corporate tax rates fall dramatically and even more trillions are now siphoned away in tax havens.

So the entire corporate tax base, which used to play a much bigger role in state funding, has reduced. At the same time their influence over policies which benefit corporations has increased. So they’re reducing the regulations that were on them. They’re reducing all the costs that used to be imposed on them [inaud]. So you’ve had a weakening of the state and a strengthening of corporations.

And what’s happened at a global governance level is that they have also moved not just from influencing dramatically through their power, their economic power, political decision-making, but initiating this global governance thing is the next step forward. Because they’re not just saying that: we want to be considered and we will lobby to have our position heard. They’re saying we want to actually be part of the decision-making bodies themselves.

And the classic again is if we look at the pandemic with COVAX is that…. I looked actually at just at the board of GAVI the Global Alliance for Vaccines. If you look at the body the Board is dominated firstly by big pharmaceutical companies. Secondly, you have some nations and some civil society representatives but you have far more, interestingly, a large number of the Board are financiers. They come from the finance sector. They come from big banks.

I don’t know what they have to do with public health. And the WHO is just one of the players. So it’s suddenly over-crowded by others who have no public health representation. They’re being dominated by finance and pharmaceutical companies starting to really shape and guide decision-making.

And on the finance side, of course, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is now the big player in many of these things. And it’s not just donating; it’s also involved now in shaping policy. So those who give money in a philanthropic way, no matter how they earn that money or no matter what their remit is and who they’re accountable to, they’re only accountable to that to Bill and Melinda Gates ultimately, are now part of the decision making process as well.

And this has become so normalized that there seems to be very little questioning of it: we will bring together these players.

Now who chose them? Who chose this body to come together? Who’s it accountable to?

There was a British parliamentarian called Tony Benn. He says, if you want to understand democracy, you need to ask five questions: What power do you have? Who did you get it from? Whose interests do you serve to? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?

If you look at a body such as COVAX: where did they get the power from?

They just self convened. They just brought together a group of powerful actors. They will make a token effort to involve one or two civil society representatives, but the power very much lies with the corporations and with the financiers. Those who are financing it. And it’s not accountable. They chose their body.

The interests are very clear who it serves. It serves the pharmaceutical companies. They will, of course do certain things within the remit. But ultimately they will not undermine their business model. Even if that business model is getting in the way of an effective response to the pandemic.

We can’t get rid of them because we never chose them in the first place.

So it fails really the very fundamental principles of democracy. And yet it’s now being normalized as this is the way that global governance should happen.

Lynn Fries ➝ 16:12

Nick, comment briefly on an agreement that was quite a milestone in this process of normalization of multi-stakeholder-ism, as the way global governance should happen. I’m thinking of the strategic partnership agreement signed by the office of the UN secretary general with the World Economic Forum in 2019. So what’s some background and your response to that UN-WEF agreement?

Nick Buxton ➝ 16:41

Well, the World Economic Forum has been advocating this model of multistakeholder capitalism to replace multi-lateralism for a long time. And they have been gradually I would say kind of setting up parallel bodies. These multi-stakeholder bodies to make decisions on major issues of global governance, whether it’s the digital economy, or whether it’s how to respond to a pandemic. And so they’ve been advancing in this model alongside the UN for some time.

But what was really concerning to us is that they’re starting to increasingly engage with the UN and start to push this model within the United Nations. And the classic example was this strategic partnership which was signed in I believe June of 2019. I don’t think it went even in front of the [UN] General Assembly.

So it wasn’t discussed amongst the members [UN Member States]. It was a decision by the Secretariat of the UN without any at least any formal systems of accountability to sign a deal with the World Economic Forum that would essentially start to involve World Economic Forum staff within the departments of the UN.

They would become so-called kind of whisper advisors. The World Economic Forum would start to have its staff mingling with UN staff and starting to make decisions. And there was no system of accountability. There was no system of consulting more widely.

And we know the World Economic Forum is a business forum. If you look at its Board, it’s completely controlled by some of the most wealthy and powerful corporations. And many of those corporations are responsible for many of the crises we face. And yet here they were being open- armed welcomed into the United Nations to play a very significant role.

And we protested that. We said that this is not a way to solve global problems. To involve those who have been actually responsible for the crisis to resolve it will only lead to solutions that are either ineffective or actually deepen the crises we face.

We understand why the UN is doing it. It’s because of this lack of national support. It’s because of the defunding. They’re looking to kind of survive as an organization. And they’re going to the most powerful players in the world which are the corporations.

But what they’re going to end up doing is ultimately undermining the United Nations. It will actually damage the United Nations because it will remove all of the democratic legitimacy that it currently has.

We desperately need global collaboration and cooperation but it must be based on public and democratic systems of governance not unaccountable secretive forms of governance dominated by corporations.

Lynn Fries ➝ 19:35

So that’s pretty clear you oppose multi-stakeholder-ism because it’s an unaccountable, secretive form of governance, dominated by corporations. So as well as being unaccountable, the multi-stakeholder model is a voluntary and a market-based approach to problem solving. Comment on how that also fits into why you oppose the multi-stakeholder-ism.

Nick Buxton ➝ 20:03

Yeah. The solutions they’re looking for are volunteeristic where you can come in or out and they’re market-based. So they will never actually challenge the business model as it is.

Ultimately what happens is that they make decisions, which are not binding and actually force actors like corporations to do certain things. They’re based entirely on this voluntary model.

It’s a kind of a take it or leave it governance where you can do things that look good for annual report, but don’t actually change the way you actually operate. And so ultimately they won’t resolve the crises that we’re facing.

So it’s not just that they’re unaccountable but they are ultimately very ineffective.

So if we look at the climate crisis, for example, it will say the only way that we can deal with the climate crisis is market solutions. Even if we know that really the scale of the climate crisis, the urgency, and the timing requires us to take much more drastic solutions which will be state- led; which will require corporations to reduce emissions that will start to transform economies. That will have to be taken; these kinds of public decisions.

We’re ignoring that entirely for a model, which is based on kind of market incentives, which really do nothing to change the business model that has created the climate crisis.

Lynn Fries ➝ 21:21

Okay. So that goes a long way in explaining why you say the World Economic Forum Great Reset initiative is no reset at all. Nick, briefly touch on some of your further observations, like why is the multi-stakeholder model is based on market solutions, when push comes to shove the profit motive will always win out under this approach to global governance.

Nick Buxton ➝ 21:47

Yeah. Absolutely. Corporations will accept market solutions, which give them the power to really control the pace of change. And so you’ll see that they’re very happy to produce these corporate social responsibility reports, but they will fight tooth and nail against any regulation, which actually enforces social and environmental goals.

And they will fight on an international level to have trade rules to actually prevent States imposing social and environmental goals. So, there’s very much an approach where they’re willing to have greenwash. They’re willing to have the propaganda around social environmental goals but they will absolutely oppose any rules that would actually control their environmental and social impacts.

They do not want anything, which actually requires regulation, and impacts, which will actually force them to do certain changes. They want their changes to be very much ones that they control and which they shape. And ultimately that they can ditch at the moment it starts to challenge the profits that they want to make.

Lynn Fries ➝ 22:55

Let’s turn now to the coalition and in fighting for a democratic reset on a global governance. So a future where decision-making over the governance of global comments, like for example, food, water, health, and the internet is done in the public interest. And I see this coalition put together resources, and it’s posted on your website, you’re in the nexus of all this. So this time around in the wake of the COVID pandemic, what’s your read on the situation of people’s versus corporate power?

Nick Buxton ➝ 23:31

This global coup d’état that’s been going on silently in so many different sectors has been advancing because there hasn’t been enough information and knowledge about it. And also people haven’t been connecting the dots to see this is happening in every sector.

So what’s really important this year and I think it’s particularly important in the wake of the pandemic is that so many movements are coming together. The People’s Health Movement has come together; a lot of groups involved in food sovereignty, the trade union sector is coming together. They’re all saying: this is not in our name.

And of course, these are all groups that you’ll never see in a multi-stakeholder initiative. Whenever they do have civil society partners, they don’t involve people in the front lines. You won’t find one health union worker in the COVAX Initiative. You won’t have public health people really represented. So these movements are now starting to come together to say that we don’t want this.

And one of the things we did was launch this letter. It’s an Open Letter and its really alerting people to what’s going on. It’s saying that we’re facing this in so many different sectors.

The UN is opening the door, the UN Secretariat I should say is opening the door wide open to the World Economic Forum, which is the key body advance in multi-stakeholderism. And it’s changing governance as we know it and it has no systems of accountability or justice embedded in it.

And these movements are now coming together to say: we’re opposing this. We’re uniting our forces. And we’re going to fight back against this.

And we know more than ever before with the pandemic that nationalist solutions to the global crisis will not work. We need global cooperation. We need global collaboration.

But if we hand over all that decision-making to the pharmaceutical companies, for example, we won’t be dealing with real issues such as trade protections and TRIPS. And patents and everything that really benefits pharmaceutical companies and don’t advance public health. Because they are in control of the process; they won’t allow things that affect their profits.

So we need global solutions but the corporations, which actually worsen and deepen the crisis we face, cannot lead them.

Lynn Fries ➝ 26:02

So as we close,I just wanted to play a clip of a comment you made back in 2015 about a book you had co-edited titled The Secure and The Dispossessed.

I found a review of the book so relevant to our chat today. I just want to cite a few lines. It said: Among the books that attempt to model the coming century. This one stands out for its sense of plausibility and danger. It examines several current trends in our responses to climate change, which if combined would result in a kind of oligarchic police state dedicated to extending capitalist hegemony.

This will not work, and yet powerful forces are advocating for it rather than reimagining and working for a more, just, resilient and democratic way forward. All the processes analyzed here are already happening now, making this book a crucial contribution to our cognitive mapping and our ability to form a better plan.

So Nick, in wrapping up briefly comment on that book and then I’ll play the clip

Nick Buxton ➝ 27:13

Yeah, back in 2011 we noticed a trend going on in terms of climate change where there was a lack of willingness to really tackle the climate crisis on the scale it needs and with the tools and instruments that it needs.

But there was increasingly plans by both the military and corporations for dealing with the impacts of climate change. And they very much looked at it in terms of how do we secure the wealth of those and secure those who already have power and wealth and what that would mean. So in the face of climate crisis, the solution was very much a security solution.

We’ve already seen really an increasing role of military and policing and security and a real process of militarization of responses to climate change. Most obviously in the area of the borders, we see border walls going up everywhere. The response to a crisis has been to kind of retreat behind fortifications no matter the consequences.

And so that’s really a trend that we see increasingly is that our response to climate adaptation by the richest countries is really to militarize our response to it. And that’s a real, as that quote you just read, that’s a real concern because it’s a kind of politics of the armed lifeboat. Where basically you rescue a few and then you have a gun trained on the rest.

And it’s both totally immoral and it’s also ultimately one that will sacrifice all of our humanity because we need to collaborate to respond to the climate crisis. We need to find solutions that protect the vulnerable. We cannot just keep building higher and higher walls against the consequences of our decisions. We need to actually start to tackle the root causes of those crises.

And that was very much a picture we started to paint back in 2015 with the launch of the book, The Secure and The Dispossessed. But if anything it’s more pertinent and more prescient than ever before.

Lynn Fries ➝ 29:30

Nick Buxton. Thank you.

Nick Buxton ➝ 29:36

Thanks.

More Resources:

Video Source: GPEnewsdocs / Global Political Economy newsdocs (16 February, 2021)

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