Emperor’s New Clothes would now fact check the kid who saw him in the nude.
FACT - The clothes were in fact so fine that no one besides the almighty Emperor Fraudci has the gifted vision to see them. Empire scientists have proof in their detailed studies which will be available in the year 2525.
We are experiencing the most sophisticated propaganda campaign of all time. Anyone who still uses the "listen to the [establishment-approved] experts" heuristic to make sense of the world can be readily manipulated into doing anything. The Covid response (I like Eistenstein's term "pandemania) was already a humanitarian catastrophe. If more people don't wake up, something even worse is sure to happen in the future. And I feel powerless to stop it.
I've just reunited with my family for the first time since Covid (I live overseas) and could do nothing to stop my otherwise intelligent brother from taking his healthy three year old in for the first of three Pfizer injections. I can (and have) point him to all kinds of data, studies, inconsistencies, frauds, lies, etc., that reveal the corruption of mainstream narratives, and he just brushes it all off as "misinformation" and "conspiracy theories." This is some next level mind control. This newsletter does a great job illuminating the corruption. But how do we get past preaching to the choir?
I swear, everyday I feel like I'm living in an alternate reality. "Who's fact checking the fact checkers". A statement that has stuck w me since I read it a few years back
Jul 5, 2022·edited Jul 5, 2022Liked by Paul D. Thacker
My correspondence with FullFact and its director Leo Benedictus over the Conservative MP Christopher Chope, about the one MP concerned about Covid shot injury may be of interest. My original letter to them pointed out that although Sir Christopher may have made an inaccurate claim that it was much more nearly in range. Moreover, the endless gaslighting of the injured is wholly reprehensible. They were way out of line and should have apologised and withdrawn…
Me to FullFact (1.4.22):
‘Re : “Although Mr Chope claimed that “upwards of half a million” Yellow Card reports have been issued, as of 9 March 2022 (the most recent statistics available when the interview took place) there had been a total of 449,324 adverse events following vaccination (from a total of 167,234 reports).”
‘The figures cited in contradiction of Sir Christopher (note Sir Christopher - I am not big on titles but that is his) relate only to reports of the Pfizer product, not Pfizer, AZ and Moderna combined. I have made a tally of reports for all products to 23 March from published data. According to the MHRA there have been 450,567 Yellow Cards, 1,475,393 ADRs, 2,072 fatal reactions.
‘While the reports themselves are not confirmed the government warned in 2019: “ It is estimated that only 10% of serious reactions and between 2 and 4% of non-serious reactions are reported.”
‘Your report is quite evidently defamatory, misinformed and misleading. An apology is surely owed to Sir Christopher, the injured and their families.’
Leo Benedictus to me (8.4.22)
Hi there
Thanks for your email last week. I've now looked into this, and you are right that some of the figures in the article mistakenly referred to the total number of reports following vaccination with the Pfizer vaccine specifically, rather than all vaccines together. We've now corrected the article accordingly. Thanks so much for bringing it to our attention.
In fact, the correct figure at the time was 449,324 Yellow Card reports. This means that Sir Christopher's claim of "upwards of half a million" was still not correct.
On your second point, about the proportion of serious reactions that are reported, our article does explain why this figure should not be used in the way that Sir Christopher did. It says: "However, the very same notice Mr Chope refers to explicitly states that the statistics on Yellow Card underreporting should not be used for Covid-19, as there was an increased public awareness around the scheme during the rollout of the vaccines. A spokesperson for the MHRA told Full Fact: 'The actual rate [of underreporting] is unknown and likely to be highly variable as it will be influenced by public awareness and seriousness of events as well as publicity around the use of vaccines.'"
For these reasons, although you were right about the error over the number of Yellow Cards, I don't think the article was misleading or incorrect in describing the mistakes that Sir Christopher made.
I hope this explains our thinking on this.
All the best
Leo
Me to Leo (8.4.22)
Dear Mr Benedictus,
This is highly prejudicial: you were not only publishing false information about the number of Yellow Cards you were publishing false information about the number of ADRs, and if Sir Christopher was wrong by 50k in the first instance you were wrong by nearly 300k. It is not clear to me from where FullFact’s right to disparage Sir Christopher stems and the way you have treated the matter shows greater enthusiasm for defending the reputation of products and the programme than it does for professional objectivity.
It is also evident that you would rather gaslight people than allow a somewhat messy truth to emerge into the light. This is quite out of line with the conclusions of the recent Cumberlege review as I warned in August 2020, and you ought not to have any a priori view of the safety of vaccines (which are only industrial products and therefore could go wrong). It is well-known with so-called “passive” or “spontaneous” reporting databases that the problem is not over-reporting but massive under-reporting which can only be exacerbated by the pervasive political hostility towards acknowledging and reporting events. An official report into the US VAERS database of 2010, for example, asserted that under-reporting was more than 99% (p.6) and it was rapidly shelved. If the MHRA are now defensive about the performance of products they authorised their earlier warning (which is what I cited) that most cases would never get reported seems much nearer the mark.
If you wish to take the view that by and large people make frivolous or malicious reports that would be interesting - and I wonder just how many of the multitude of reports the MHRA have closely examined, contacted the informants etc. As a further observation the reports cannot be dismissed as background noise because on a statistical basis each of the three products has a completely different profile in terms of type of symptoms, average number of symptoms per card, and numbers of fatalities. The picture is not random at all, and those that report should have a right to be heard and taken seriously.
Finally, it is evident that on an “impressionistic” basis Sir Christopher is far nearer the truth than FullFact: despite the best efforts of government and mainstream media reports are off the scale, many are horrific and all are a matter of legitimate public interest. All this is without precedent and while the bad news is being buried by Parliament and the “trusted ” media, FullFact is apparently on hand to assist. On the best reading you have set lower standards of factual accuracy for FullFact than for Sir Christopher: you have not done a good job.
I look forward to your early response.
Sincerely,
John Stone
Leo to me (14.4.22)
Dear Mr Stone,
Thanks for your reply.
We've corrected the error in the article, which did not affect the conclusions in it. I don't think that anything else in this fact check is inaccurate, and Sir Christopher's claims were not right, for the reasons it explained.
There is ample evidence that the Covid vaccines currently in use are safe and effective. We have reported that evidence.
All the best
Leo
Me to Leo (14.4.22):
Dear Mr Benedictus,
No, the premise on which the article was written was completely wrong and you are still manifestly covering up: in the original the figure Sir Christopher cited while incorrect was much nearer the truth than the figure Ms Turnnage cited but still you play the rectitude card, and the “rectitude” is actually what defines your bias. If you were not biased you would be more concerned about clarifying the facts than doing someone down: instead your published statement is undoubtedly an obfuscation:
“The data for 9 March reflected the number of reports relating to the Pfizer vaccine and all Covid-19 vaccines, not the number of reports and suspected reactions across all vaccines as claimed.”
But it does only reflect the number of reports relating to the Pfizer product and in no way the numbers including the AZ vaccine which are much more dramatic - and additional to the Pfizer - so this is not true, and what it might be trying to tell people in an opaque way is that you were somehow right in spirit though technically wrong (instead of in fact being completely wrong on both counts). You also ignore the fact that the MHRA, as I have documented in my previous letter, know very well that by running a passive database they will only receive reports of a small fraction of cases, even when they are serious. Equally, you side-stepped the point that the harm profiles for the three products are entirely different and therefore cannot just be background noise.
If you are going to insist on your unimpeachable integrity you really must be prepared to face the difficult questions.
Yours sincerely,
John Stone
This is the link to the controversial article by Sarah Turnnage in its present form
This is great. Thanks so much for sharing. Even NPR is pissing me off these days. I always thought they were unbiased but every reporter sharing news of the vaccine for those 5 and under says the same thing "parents can finally breathe a sigh of relief," OR "parents have been waiting with bated breath," terribly unbiased remarks. Yet, the vast majority of parents DON'T want to vaccinate their young child. Where can we go to trust the news anymore?
"Kessler’s pious praise for the event was a tad too much for Bari Weiss:..."
Credit where credit's due, the linked column was written by Nellie Bowles, not Bari. Nellie gets a lot of things right - and some things wrong, sometimes astonishingly wrong - but either way, Nellie deserves the kudos for this (and Bari the kudos for hosting Nellie's TGIF columns on her, Bari's Substack).
Biological women (i.e., Meagan Murphy, a Canadian writer) have been permanently banned from Twitter because they continued to insist transwoman are not the same as biological women after being warned not to do so. Not sure if that was the result of fact-checking or "hate" speech.
Articles saying we're all run by reptilians or that the global warming is caused by trees and and algae somehow never get a fact check. Capitol Riots, Covid and Ukraine inforwars however will get you immediately censored. It's all completely upside down.
What the fact checkers will do is pick off some of the low hanging fruit and then they go after people - bad people syndrome (ad hominem). There is something offensive about the idea of the fact checker - the self or globalist appointed “honest brokers”. This is not engaging in informed debate - they set out to destroy reputations rather than even being genuinely interested in the subject. Anyone for example who criticises vaccines or pseudo vaccines is held to have no point by virtue of what they are doing: FullFact, for example, will tell you there is no evidence that the Covid shots are not safe or effective which is a ridiculous claim: if they were prepared to debate about the evidence which they don’t like they would be half-way to intellectual respectability but they make half-baked points and they attack people. In relation to science and particularly medical science it could not be worse: if a priori the products are safe and effective (from the perspective of the “fact checker”), it means they simply use bully tactics against the collateral damage and in scientific terms they are actively skewing the data - while human terms they hide the troops coming back from the war in body-bags. The whole point is to pre-empt serious discussion of serious issues by serious people and disqualify them in advance. Gossip-mongers pretending they have the ability to judge science (although maybe they are foolish enough to think they can).
I love these articles! In the midst of all the gaslighting happening in media, these articles keep me sane. Thank you!
Emperor’s New Clothes would now fact check the kid who saw him in the nude.
FACT - The clothes were in fact so fine that no one besides the almighty Emperor Fraudci has the gifted vision to see them. Empire scientists have proof in their detailed studies which will be available in the year 2525.
We are experiencing the most sophisticated propaganda campaign of all time. Anyone who still uses the "listen to the [establishment-approved] experts" heuristic to make sense of the world can be readily manipulated into doing anything. The Covid response (I like Eistenstein's term "pandemania) was already a humanitarian catastrophe. If more people don't wake up, something even worse is sure to happen in the future. And I feel powerless to stop it.
I've just reunited with my family for the first time since Covid (I live overseas) and could do nothing to stop my otherwise intelligent brother from taking his healthy three year old in for the first of three Pfizer injections. I can (and have) point him to all kinds of data, studies, inconsistencies, frauds, lies, etc., that reveal the corruption of mainstream narratives, and he just brushes it all off as "misinformation" and "conspiracy theories." This is some next level mind control. This newsletter does a great job illuminating the corruption. But how do we get past preaching to the choir?
I swear, everyday I feel like I'm living in an alternate reality. "Who's fact checking the fact checkers". A statement that has stuck w me since I read it a few years back
My correspondence with FullFact and its director Leo Benedictus over the Conservative MP Christopher Chope, about the one MP concerned about Covid shot injury may be of interest. My original letter to them pointed out that although Sir Christopher may have made an inaccurate claim that it was much more nearly in range. Moreover, the endless gaslighting of the injured is wholly reprehensible. They were way out of line and should have apologised and withdrawn…
Me to FullFact (1.4.22):
‘Re : “Although Mr Chope claimed that “upwards of half a million” Yellow Card reports have been issued, as of 9 March 2022 (the most recent statistics available when the interview took place) there had been a total of 449,324 adverse events following vaccination (from a total of 167,234 reports).”
‘The figures cited in contradiction of Sir Christopher (note Sir Christopher - I am not big on titles but that is his) relate only to reports of the Pfizer product, not Pfizer, AZ and Moderna combined. I have made a tally of reports for all products to 23 March from published data. According to the MHRA there have been 450,567 Yellow Cards, 1,475,393 ADRs, 2,072 fatal reactions.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-vaccine-adverse-reactions/coronavirus-vaccine-summary-of-yellow-card-reporting
‘While the reports themselves are not confirmed the government warned in 2019: “ It is estimated that only 10% of serious reactions and between 2 and 4% of non-serious reactions are reported.”
https://www.gov.uk/drug-safety-update/yellow-card-please-help-to-reverse-the-decline-in-reporting-of-suspected-adverse-drug-reactions
‘Your report is quite evidently defamatory, misinformed and misleading. An apology is surely owed to Sir Christopher, the injured and their families.’
Leo Benedictus to me (8.4.22)
Hi there
Thanks for your email last week. I've now looked into this, and you are right that some of the figures in the article mistakenly referred to the total number of reports following vaccination with the Pfizer vaccine specifically, rather than all vaccines together. We've now corrected the article accordingly. Thanks so much for bringing it to our attention.
In fact, the correct figure at the time was 449,324 Yellow Card reports. This means that Sir Christopher's claim of "upwards of half a million" was still not correct.
On your second point, about the proportion of serious reactions that are reported, our article does explain why this figure should not be used in the way that Sir Christopher did. It says: "However, the very same notice Mr Chope refers to explicitly states that the statistics on Yellow Card underreporting should not be used for Covid-19, as there was an increased public awareness around the scheme during the rollout of the vaccines. A spokesperson for the MHRA told Full Fact: 'The actual rate [of underreporting] is unknown and likely to be highly variable as it will be influenced by public awareness and seriousness of events as well as publicity around the use of vaccines.'"
For these reasons, although you were right about the error over the number of Yellow Cards, I don't think the article was misleading or incorrect in describing the mistakes that Sir Christopher made.
I hope this explains our thinking on this.
All the best
Leo
Me to Leo (8.4.22)
Dear Mr Benedictus,
This is highly prejudicial: you were not only publishing false information about the number of Yellow Cards you were publishing false information about the number of ADRs, and if Sir Christopher was wrong by 50k in the first instance you were wrong by nearly 300k. It is not clear to me from where FullFact’s right to disparage Sir Christopher stems and the way you have treated the matter shows greater enthusiasm for defending the reputation of products and the programme than it does for professional objectivity.
It is also evident that you would rather gaslight people than allow a somewhat messy truth to emerge into the light. This is quite out of line with the conclusions of the recent Cumberlege review as I warned in August 2020, and you ought not to have any a priori view of the safety of vaccines (which are only industrial products and therefore could go wrong). It is well-known with so-called “passive” or “spontaneous” reporting databases that the problem is not over-reporting but massive under-reporting which can only be exacerbated by the pervasive political hostility towards acknowledging and reporting events. An official report into the US VAERS database of 2010, for example, asserted that under-reporting was more than 99% (p.6) and it was rapidly shelved. If the MHRA are now defensive about the performance of products they authorised their earlier warning (which is what I cited) that most cases would never get reported seems much nearer the mark.
If you wish to take the view that by and large people make frivolous or malicious reports that would be interesting - and I wonder just how many of the multitude of reports the MHRA have closely examined, contacted the informants etc. As a further observation the reports cannot be dismissed as background noise because on a statistical basis each of the three products has a completely different profile in terms of type of symptoms, average number of symptoms per card, and numbers of fatalities. The picture is not random at all, and those that report should have a right to be heard and taken seriously.
Finally, it is evident that on an “impressionistic” basis Sir Christopher is far nearer the truth than FullFact: despite the best efforts of government and mainstream media reports are off the scale, many are horrific and all are a matter of legitimate public interest. All this is without precedent and while the bad news is being buried by Parliament and the “trusted ” media, FullFact is apparently on hand to assist. On the best reading you have set lower standards of factual accuracy for FullFact than for Sir Christopher: you have not done a good job.
I look forward to your early response.
Sincerely,
John Stone
Leo to me (14.4.22)
Dear Mr Stone,
Thanks for your reply.
We've corrected the error in the article, which did not affect the conclusions in it. I don't think that anything else in this fact check is inaccurate, and Sir Christopher's claims were not right, for the reasons it explained.
There is ample evidence that the Covid vaccines currently in use are safe and effective. We have reported that evidence.
All the best
Leo
Me to Leo (14.4.22):
Dear Mr Benedictus,
No, the premise on which the article was written was completely wrong and you are still manifestly covering up: in the original the figure Sir Christopher cited while incorrect was much nearer the truth than the figure Ms Turnnage cited but still you play the rectitude card, and the “rectitude” is actually what defines your bias. If you were not biased you would be more concerned about clarifying the facts than doing someone down: instead your published statement is undoubtedly an obfuscation:
“The data for 9 March reflected the number of reports relating to the Pfizer vaccine and all Covid-19 vaccines, not the number of reports and suspected reactions across all vaccines as claimed.”
But it does only reflect the number of reports relating to the Pfizer product and in no way the numbers including the AZ vaccine which are much more dramatic - and additional to the Pfizer - so this is not true, and what it might be trying to tell people in an opaque way is that you were somehow right in spirit though technically wrong (instead of in fact being completely wrong on both counts). You also ignore the fact that the MHRA, as I have documented in my previous letter, know very well that by running a passive database they will only receive reports of a small fraction of cases, even when they are serious. Equally, you side-stepped the point that the harm profiles for the three products are entirely different and therefore cannot just be background noise.
If you are going to insist on your unimpeachable integrity you really must be prepared to face the difficult questions.
Yours sincerely,
John Stone
This is the link to the controversial article by Sarah Turnnage in its present form
https://fullfact.org/health/christopher-chope-vaccine-damage-GB-news/
This is great. Thanks so much for sharing. Even NPR is pissing me off these days. I always thought they were unbiased but every reporter sharing news of the vaccine for those 5 and under says the same thing "parents can finally breathe a sigh of relief," OR "parents have been waiting with bated breath," terribly unbiased remarks. Yet, the vast majority of parents DON'T want to vaccinate their young child. Where can we go to trust the news anymore?
"Kessler’s pious praise for the event was a tad too much for Bari Weiss:..."
Credit where credit's due, the linked column was written by Nellie Bowles, not Bari. Nellie gets a lot of things right - and some things wrong, sometimes astonishingly wrong - but either way, Nellie deserves the kudos for this (and Bari the kudos for hosting Nellie's TGIF columns on her, Bari's Substack).
Biological women (i.e., Meagan Murphy, a Canadian writer) have been permanently banned from Twitter because they continued to insist transwoman are not the same as biological women after being warned not to do so. Not sure if that was the result of fact-checking or "hate" speech.
Excellent synthesis, thank you. Let do not forget the Ventavia part though !
Sorry guys, I fucked up and my wish got Monkey Pawed from 10 years ago:
https://www.facebook.com/michael.dambrosio/posts/pfbid0fFgq4vLAMEJz3RttK7fVfBguJjRzjC4h7BGoE2iL6rirsgVxw1cnZTHRSbn7as48l
Good god these “fact check” media outfits are the internet equivalent of cancer
Articles saying we're all run by reptilians or that the global warming is caused by trees and and algae somehow never get a fact check. Capitol Riots, Covid and Ukraine inforwars however will get you immediately censored. It's all completely upside down.
What the fact checkers will do is pick off some of the low hanging fruit and then they go after people - bad people syndrome (ad hominem). There is something offensive about the idea of the fact checker - the self or globalist appointed “honest brokers”. This is not engaging in informed debate - they set out to destroy reputations rather than even being genuinely interested in the subject. Anyone for example who criticises vaccines or pseudo vaccines is held to have no point by virtue of what they are doing: FullFact, for example, will tell you there is no evidence that the Covid shots are not safe or effective which is a ridiculous claim: if they were prepared to debate about the evidence which they don’t like they would be half-way to intellectual respectability but they make half-baked points and they attack people. In relation to science and particularly medical science it could not be worse: if a priori the products are safe and effective (from the perspective of the “fact checker”), it means they simply use bully tactics against the collateral damage and in scientific terms they are actively skewing the data - while human terms they hide the troops coming back from the war in body-bags. The whole point is to pre-empt serious discussion of serious issues by serious people and disqualify them in advance. Gossip-mongers pretending they have the ability to judge science (although maybe they are foolish enough to think they can).