34 Comments

Great work. Taibbi signposted me here, now I'm a fan.

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Same.

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Great work, Paul!

Facebook calling the BMJ a blog! We're going to a whole new level now!

https://nakedemperor.substack.com/

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Very enlightening article. Thanks for exposing this abuse of honest discourse, that if left unchallenged, poses a nail in the coffin of real science.

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Yes, it's almost completely nailed shut.

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Thank you !! It ALL starts with modern “original sin” and the Big Lie.

Key players in the Russia-gate hoax and impeachment “entertainments” are now hyperventilating about “all but certain imminent major war in Europe a la WW2” – repulsive ghouls Adam Schiff, colonel Alexander Windman (an extremist Ukrainian), Jake Sullivan, Hillary's top Russia-gate advisor and now Biden's national security expert and Fiona Hill (a rabid Cold War warrior on National Security Council).

Same lying bastards who led the scam of the century concocted by the SAME lying team -- Obama-Biden-Hillary-Pelosi-Schumer-Schiff and the rest of DNC-CIA/FBI cabal.

Adam Schiff has been, for years, a leading recipient of huge “donations” by arm industry – his main source of funds. Remember when Raytheon in 2013 put on a Beyonce concert to promote Adam Schiff? This despicable -- that human excrement and serial liar is among leading Congress war-mongers and recipient of arm industry donations.

http://politicalpartytime.org/party/36073/

Schiff is now driving government’s domestic terrorism legislation !! In his free time this loathsome grifter wants to write a novel – of all things about Holocaust.

The entire Russia-gate lying team is back in FULL power -- we are now paying the price for not fully unmasking the brazen scam of the century. Of course, Trump and GOP lunatics were and remain VERY bad – however, DNC lying and warmongering team is INFINITELY more dangerous. They will likely try to prevent 2022 elections - as "illegal" - in order to stay in power.

Remember – Biden was the governor of Ukraine after Obama’s successful coup in Ukraine in 2014; Biden was selecting and removing heads of industry and Ukraine’s puppet government, dismissing the federal judge investigating Burisma – a judge that State Dept. lauded for integrity only weeks before… The immense corruption of Biden family still needs to be investigated – Hunter’s Burisma was used to ‘wash” US dirty money. Thanks heavens that recent “colored revolution” coups in Belarus and Kazakhstan were not successful.

WHO will be the first current or former Democrat Congresswoman/man or Senator to publicly acknowledge and confirm the brazen scam of the century – DNC’s + CIA/FBI security complex (St. Obama/Biden/Hillary/Pelosi/Schumer, Jammie Raskin, etc. + Brennan, Clapper, Hayden, etc.) Russia-gate hoax and subsequent conspiracies, including 1/6 “armed insurrection”?

War-monger vampires must be stopped. Military-industrial complex must be defunded – US main “products” and exports are now

- weapons,

- coups

- and immense and all-encompassing corruption.

China is far more capitalist than the US, Russia has not been Communist for 30+ years, while the US is a corporate socialism (more polite term for fascism)

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Thanks Paul

Read the Taibbi too, a bit longer but much of the same as your content...

Keep up the truth reveal. Speaking freely is critical

Blessings

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Paul, This may be the best piece on disinformation **ever**! What a takedown of "science" writers. And you took it to an unimaginable level by capping it with the brilliant Brand piece. A genuine triumph over all the lying bastards!

What just occurred to me is that what makes this piece so exceptional is your moral clarity. You have spent so many years in the trenches that you know exactly who is full of it--and are willing to call them out. That makes you a hero of mine.

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I agree with everything Paul D. Thacker has said. I have been banned from Facebook about ten times for telling the truth. Facebook, The BBC, And quite a few News Papers have received 2.8 million dollars from Bill Gates. and many of the government employees, along with top officials in the hospitals are on the take. The WHO the FDA and the CDC are bought and paid for by Gates and Big Pharma, The Rockefeller Foundation.

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I have been wondering whether Reuters (Chairman sits on the Pfizer board of directors) farms out its fact-checkers to social media companies. Perhaps they are hired out to Google too.

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We don't know yet, but people are trying to figure it all out.

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Paul, World Economic Forum's "Young Global Leaders" Revealed.

Through its Young Global Leaders Program, the World Economic Forum has been instrumental, in shaping a world order that undermines all democratic principles. The program has nurtured compliant leaders acting as WEF agents in governments around the world. The consequences are far-reaching and may turn out to be devastating for humanity. I have to say then I mention names like Mrs. Merkel, Vladimir Putin, and so on they all have been Young Global Leaders of The World Economic Forum. But what they are really proud of now with the young generation like Prime Minister Trudeau, President of Argentina and so on, is that they penetrates the cabinets...it is true in Argentina and it is true in France now.

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I 100% support your indignation... your righteous indignation, your journalistic indignation, your anti-SCICOMM indignation, your thinking-man indignation, and your anti-vulture capitalist indignation.

Thank you for saying so, so indignantly.

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Always journalism, never SCICOMM! : )

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I'm posting the BMJ letter on my Facebook page to see if it garners a fact check.

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One day later, there's one Like and no fact check. :)

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Keep on reporting on the truth. Someone needs to look out for our health and safety since the FDA regulators for biologics don’t seem to be. I now have a greater understanding on ‘missing context’.

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I’m totally in agreement with the notion that “fact-checking” is often used in a particular way. I’m no friend of Big Pharma or of the ongoing mutually parasitic relationship between government, media, social media, and industry (heck let’s throw in the intelligence community, which has totally infiltrated the media and government), and arrangement which has turned public officials like Fauci into seemingly conscience-less, narrative-promoting shills for….whatever they’re told to shill for.

So much in this article yes, I agree with, including the notion that Pfizer is sleazy and doesn’t merit anyone’s blind trust.

The Ventavia thing though. This bothers me. I don’t have as much info as you do, because I’m not sitting on a trove of documents… but:

1) There is a problem with outfits like Ventavia: they wring every last dollar out of being part of a clinical trial. That should not be how we do clinical research. Let’s change that: but sloppiness, corner-cutting and greed to get their hands on the Pharma dollars are not the same thing as gaming the clinical trial and fixing the outcome. I’m not seeing evidence that happened here. Maybe you have such evidence in your “trove” but that would have made a more interesting set of revelations than what was revealed: that type of sloppiness will be familiar to anyone who knows about clinical trials.

2) The type of sloppiness I read about happening at Ventavia is unfortunately really common. Papers left out where someone could hypothetically be unblinded (but probably wasn’t, and wouldn’t have affected whether the vaccine worked or not). People getting slower calls back for their “adverse events” than were laid out in the protocol (but anyone who has a serious outcome is told to go to the hospital first— the delayed phone calls were for things like someone’s itchy or sore arm). By the way, everything including expected outcomes like fever, fatigue, arm soreness is called an “adverse event.” So it’s not the case that these poor people were dropping like flies of adverse events and no one would help them. No. They just didn’t get a timely phone call back for their minor complaints. Should they have gotten that? Per the protocol yes! (But the unreasonable overzealous nature of protocols today due to the insane requirements of iRBs is a really important story too. From what I can tell, sloppiness with the details of the protocol, while undesirable, did not harm anyone here nor affect the outcome.

3. Even if you threw out the thousand or so people in the clinical trial who came from Ventavia, there are still 40,000 more at other sites in the US. And there are tens of thousands more at sites in other countries. All of them basically got the same results: (1) safe; (2) effective. The Ventavia story is a story about Ventavia not a story about Pfizer (as much as I loathe and distrust Pfizer) nor a story about the vaccine.

4. Even if you threw out the clinical trials altogether (and there’s no reason to do that, but even if), you have the evidence of literally billions of doses of these vaccines having been given in the real world; and you have the real world health outcomes of people who received these and similar vaccines versus the unvaccinated. The jury has come back and rendered its verdict. The vaccine is extremely helpful.

So my concern is that this all gets jumbled together. You are talking about real problems that deserve real responses. Yes the government response has been dishonest, troubling and inept. Yes people like Fauci are not to be trusted. They are not “the science.” Yes the pharmaceutical industry is a shitty business that promotes a lot of expensive useless products (of which their mRNA vaccine is _not_ one). Media and social media just promote whatever story the government wants promoted, and “fact-checking” is a joke.

All those bad things are true. And yet: the Ventavia story is about Ventavia, and about organizations like it, that want to profit from clinical trials and cut corners. That’s an important story.

This is not a story about the vaccine itself, which by all indications has spared us a lot of suffering and death. Check out Katelyn Jetelina’s substack for an ongoing evaluation.

From where I’m sitting, the vaccine “true believers” waved the Ventavia story away without considering the real problems portrayed about how we do the research; and the antivaxxers used it as evidence that Pfizer wants to kill us all and became more entrenched.

Like… from where I’m sitting, no one put this information into proper perspective and so its value has been lost. It was just another tool used by people who want to promote an agenda instead of looking at reality and deciding on better policies.

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Well, if you have more information than the former criminal investigator who I quoted, please let us know.

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I already stipulated that I do not have "the trove" that you do, and I of course haven't seen what you supplied to the former criminal investigator who says, "The FDA knew something was wrong with some of the data and chose to do nothing."

That's a very broad claim, saying "something was wrong with some of the data" when no one -- neither you nor he -- specify in what ways something was "wrong" and whether it affected the outcome of the clinical trial (spoiler: everything I've seen indicates no, and if there were more serious problems than have been described elsewhere, it seems like the writers would have shared those).

What I saw (in another article that spelled out some of the details of the wrong-doing; and I assume you have those as part of your trove), was that some things were, as I already explained, "not precisely per the protocol" which means they have to be documented, and I think the claim is these deviations from the protocol were not documented, and that's where the whistle-blower comes in right?

So for example, the biggest specific claim I saw was that someone left some papers lying around instead of put away and locked up, which "potentially" could have unblinded a subject. Not even "did" unblind them, but potentially could have.

And even if it "did" unblind them -- to whom? To a passing research assistant, who would do what with this info, exactly? Call the patient and tell them, so they would change their behavior and mess up the data?

Leaving the papers out, when the protocol says that all papers need to be in your direct control or locked up, means that by definition I supposed "something is wrong with the data" -- but whether it affected the outcome of the trial, to determine whether the vaccine is safe and effective, is a real stretch.

But anyway -- how could something as "horrible" as leaving some papers unattended have happened? Simple. It happens all the time. You've got some paper lying on your desk, or a screen open on your computer, and you are called away for a moment and it turns into half an hour, and oops, that paper was lying there on the desk where anyone could have seen it in the meantime.

DID anyone see it? Well, the whistle-blower did. And complained.

And the "right thing to do" -- whenever something "horrible" like being called away from your desk happens, and you realize you left some papers on your desk unattended -- is to fill out a form, and say "This happened." Then others review your mistake and decide whether any harm was done and whether the data from that person needs to be thrown out or whether it can stay in.

So presumably in this case, the person who left the papers on her desk did not do the right thing, ie, did not fill out the right form -- and I would argue that's because (1) these places only care about speed and wringing dollars from clinical trials, and they don't hire enough people to do everything right ,and that's a real problem; and (2) because IRB requirements are so over-the-top these days that most people can't get through a clinical trial without making a lot of these little mistakes, each of which requires paperwork-and-review.

So you can see why, human nature being what it is, people take these shortcuts and choose to "forget" they left the papers on their desk and just skip filling out the form and being reviewed and scolded.

Is this wrong for them to do? Yes. If the whistle-blower's statements are accurate and Ventavia has shoddy practices, is this is a problem? Yes. Do we need to do clinical trials differently? Yes. But is this a specific problem with the Pfizer vaccine? Is this some kind of bombshell? No. It's happening right now, in some clinical trial mill today, with a cancer drug or a migraine drug or an antipsychotic. Someone has left some papers unattended and is going to "forget" to mention they did so. Someone is going to get a really slow phone call back in response to the side effects they're having (but they've been told to go to the hospital if there's anything seriously wrong).

Is this in a legalistic sense "fraud" if you haven't followed every aspect of the protocol, but proceed as if you have? That's for lawyers to say, but I wouldn't be surprised if the "criminal investigator" was correct. Lots of things are fraud. Fraud is bad. But is leaving papers unattended on your desk a scandal? Is a slow phone call a scandal? No.

I guess I'm saying, this story illustrates serious problems with how we do clinical trials, which need to be addressed, but those problems are less sexy to the general public than some hyped-up scandal being attributed to this particular vaccine, when we already have this built-in audience of people who are convinced the government is playing fast-and-loose with their well-being.

The whole system of doing clinical trials stinks. This stuff doesn't seem to have been particularly bad, as it goes. And what would have been the best course of action for the FDA? To hold up this vaccine from the public, when we have a 9/11's worth of Americans dying daily, because of some piddling-level claims that one of the mills was doing things that everyone knows they do? That would likely have created its own scandal. I can see why that would have been wink-winked through (if indeed it was, and if it's true that the FDA "knew something was wrong with some of the data" -- which is a mind-bogglingly vague claim if you realize the low threshold for saying "something was wrong" and the infinite meanings that might have).

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more mental sewage

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Nothing "got lost".

It is delusional to put everybody into two farcically polarized, opposing camps.*

It is delusional to think that there will ever be a "proper perspective" about a public policy issue that is mired in murk, corruption, incompetence, etc.

-----

* an actual MD delves into failed collective intelligence systems:

This describes how groupthink forms polar opposites:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pA_wJGjaGpo

excerpt/description:

Doctor Answers BANNED Questions About COVID - Dr Zubin Damania

Premiered Jan 23, 2022

Triggernometry

Hospitalist and clinical associate professor of medicine at UNLV School of Medicine, Dr Zubin Damania (aka ZDoggMD) joins us!

...

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

03:01 What is the Alt Middle?

[--->] 06:52 COVID Tribes: Antithesis vs Thesis

10:00 Acknowledging Biases

14:56 The Truth About Early Therapeutics

18:52 Joe Rogan, Censorship and the Failures of the Mainstream

23:23 Vaccine: Side Effects, mRNA, Hesitancy

32:06 What is Myocarditis?

34:02 Vaccine Mandates: Cases For/Against

41:56 Pandemic Outcomes: South America vs Africa

43:44 Why Don't We Talk About Obesity and Nutrition?

47:12 Elite Athletes: Heart Issues and Collapsing

51:13 Spike Protein Toxicity

55:50 Why People Distrust Big Pharma

01:00:15 How Scientists Should Communicate

01:06:43 Are the Unvaccinated a petri dish for variants?

01:07:55 Where Did Omicron Come From?

01:09:19 Gain-of-Function Research

01:10:28 Is Omicron the end of the Pandemic?

01:17:43 The Truth About Natural Immunity

01:24:29 Why Zubin Did Not Want the Booster

01:25:41 Long Term Effects of COVID-19 (Long COVID)

01:30:44 What Are We Not Talking About That We Really Should Be?

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I'm talking about the public's response, which is demonstrably falling into two polarized camps, which is *exactly the problem.* Not just two polarized camps, but two polarized camps that tend to be hyperemotional and irrational.

Whether or not you, or some select number of people you can point to, are the exceptions that prove the rule, does not make me "delusional," nor does a list of time stamps make you look like the rational discussant here.

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i'm autistic, not hyperemotional. Autists who are hyperemotional don't function well. If there's any controversy, I look at data and methods. And when I bother to look for bullshit, I can spot it.

I am read up on "48 Laws of Power," which is helpful for understanding disinformation, politics, and psychopathy.

So, no, the two camps aren't equivalent. There are idiots in both camps, true, but the strength of argument in both camps isn't identical. The pro-vaxx group engages in rationalization in defense of dodgy, ineffective, unsafe vaccines.

By the way, "chest-feeding" is now a vital sign on patient charts. Next up will be preferred gender pronouns on vital sign charts.

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The only thing that is "demonstrable" is that you have a crappy narrative that you claim to have data to support, but there is none.

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says a troll

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PROJECTION

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vapid drivel

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How Fact Checking Is Controlled and Faked.

Fact-checking is one part of the campaign to control what you see on line, and therefore what you think and how you perceive reality.

Everything you see and hear online has been co-opted, or taken over to serve a greater agenda.

Instead of real journalists and reporters the media is infiltrated with propagandists who dictate what's "fake news" and what's not.

The public is being manipulated to want their information censored by third-party "fact-checkers", which were introduced as a tool to confuse and control the public.

They use terms like, "Conspiracy theory," "Debunked", "Quackery" and "Antivaccine" they use as propaganda tools,

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Appreciate you spearheading the grind here to pull all this together. This kind of comprehensive review is the only way to corner team SCICOMM and let the truth begin to rise in the coming years.

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I'm new here. What's the "COMM" stand for? I can think of several possibilities.

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"science communication" basically, science PR.

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I signposted you on Malcolm Kendrick's blog.

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