Thank you Karyse Day [1] for drawing attention to the problem of the bias and intimidation inherent in the term "anti-vaxxer". The term has been around perhaps since the 19th century but has evolved a new context. Three years ago I drew attention to the remarks of Seth Berkley, director of the vaccine lobby organisation GAVI, in the Spectator proposing that "anti-vaxxers" be excluded from social media, which meant in effect not only that certain people should not be allowed on social media but that criticism of vaccines should not be allowed on a generic basis - an extremely serious matter[2].
Unfortunately, this has also been a hobby-horse of the present Prime Minister. In August last year Reuter's recorded Boris Johnson as saying [3]:
“I’m afraid people have just been listening to that superstitious mumbo-jumbo on the internet, all that anti-vax stuff..."
On 24 September 2020 he told the UN [4]:
“There are today people who are still actually anti-science, a whole movement called ‘the anti-vaxxers’ who refuse to acknowledge the evidence that vaccinations have eradicated smallpox and who by their prejudices are actually endangering the very children they want to protect."
By February this year the Sunday Telegraph was reporting [5]:
"Posting anti-vaccine propaganda on social media could become criminal offence, Law Commissioner says
New Law Commissioner Penney Lewis is leading wide-ranging review into whether UK's offence and abuse laws are fit for the Social Media age..."
And once again the Prime Minister was quoted last month [6]:
“There’s all these anti-vaxxers now,” Johnson told medical workers at a doctor’s surgery in London. “They are nuts, they are nuts.”
While there are a lot of very fed up people I am extremely dubious there is a movement called "the anti-vaxxers" or that they are posting propaganda: at the very best this is a simplistic claim [7,8]. At a time when the government is supposedly trying to earn trust for a range of potential SAR-CoV-2 vaccines the continued disparagement and repression of people who raise questions about a class of products - which after all cannot be inherently safe - speaks for itself. It creates an atmosphere of prejudice and intimidation - such as described in the Cumberlege review [9] and should be seen and understood for what it is.
While Charles Wilson (of GM) was misquoted as saying "What's good for GM is good for the US", there is no doubt that the pharma, the politicians, the physicians, the scientists, the media, the celebs-all project a mantra that "What's good for Pfizer and Moderna is good for the World". I was tempted to change the word "World" for "Universe", but maybe this might be taking it a tad too far. At this time, though.
At the end, Tom Jefferson says, “We are regressing to the 80s where you pick and choose your evidence."
Intriguing. I wonder what specifically Mr. Jefferson is referring to. Perhaps the science around AIDS? IDK.
I also wonder if we really have to go all the way back to the 80's to find people picking and choosing their evidence. It seems to me that people who have favored medicine or medical treatments based upon, say, plants (which are the original source of a great many patented and approved medicines) have consistently faced a kind of "religious opposition" to their message for decades.
I mean, is Mr. Jefferson suggesting this "religion" works in historical waves? Were the 80's bad but the 90's good? When was there ever a golden era of honest scientific evaluation of alternative solutions and narratives? When was there a time of honest and courageous medical journalism? Did that ever really exist?
Perhaps Tom Jefferson views it somewhat in terms of the rise and fall of Cochrane and EBM, but I suspect the message of the Cumberlege report is that gaslighting has always paid a large part of medicine, which skews the results both in terms of scientific knowledge and common humanity. I suspect with vaccination this problem goes back to Jenner, or variolation before that.
I'm not familiar with the history of Cochrane and evidence based medicine.
I do remember a lot of EBM controversy in the media when Obamacare was being legislated. It seems to me that the "pro EBM" media was ridiculing the "anti science" critics of proposed provisions in that law which would have centralized at the federal level a standard, approved definition of EBM.
In other words, the conflict was truly not about scientific evidence. At all. It was actually about who would have the power to write the official list of drugs and therapies that could actually be funded by insurers, and which could not. The real underlying debate was about taking a great deal of power away from individual medical doctors, medical investigators and patients and transferring all of that power to a federal agency bureaucrat. The debate was about profit and power, not science. The "pro EBM" side actually wanted to reduce the amount of honest, open scientific discussion and investigation, not increase it.
I suppose the project was to evaluate evidence with a statistical slant - of course that might be deadly for some patients, you might still get it wrong, or might still be perverted. Nevertheless, Jefferson and Heneghan plainly formed a team who were sceptical of the direction of things in early 2020.
One thing I have also noted in this, and I think II first noted it in the controversy over the WHO malaria vaccine for children in very early 2020 was that goal posts had moved from the claim of overwhelming benefit to net benefit. This is the WHO letter (my attempts to respond at the time were not posted):
Of course, if in order to save 50 people you were to sacrifice 49 that might be net benefit but it would not be a very good way of doing things: in fact we seem now to have been persuaded with Covid products into accepting very low levels of effectiveness and high levels risk, and the claim now is that this is net beneficial, which is somewhere between uncertain and an outright lie.
It bothers me even with BMJ that the controversy over whether products are safe and effective, adequately trialled etc, which has been brought forward by Peter Doshi and Paul Thacker here has been rather eclipsed by the argument about social justice, ie whether poorer nations are getting enough. Such fairness we might be able to make-do without, and of course the African nations, India, China, Brazil, Indonesia led the way in opposing the recent WHO proposed extension of International Health Regulations.
This is nothing new to those of us in the low-carb world. Nutritional research is pretty abysmal on the whole, for a variety of reasons including corporate influence and careerism. With Covid, more people have noticed. I suppose that could be considered a silver lining.
Yup. Whether it's the terrible impact of the sugar-laden, low fat diet, the links of the childhood vax schedule to autism and other maladies, treatment of Lyme disease, the danger of statins, or the Covid vax, the response is the exact same, outright gaslighting. People who question the official narrative are ridiculed as crazy and dangerous.
It dawned on me the other day that all five of them are the direct result of government/corporate cronyism, and all five directly resulted from the government vociferously telling us to do the exact opposite of what turned out to be true. Also in all five cases, smart people saw through it and "did their own research". Lastly, in all of them the government will never admit it was wrong (and it likely caused Lyme with biological weapon experiments).
People labeled Atkins as a menace to society, but it turned out that low carb actually worked very well and wasn't a gimmick. Fortunately, we had people like Gary Taubes who really dug in and got to the bottom of what was going on. Atkins was one of the first who said, "yes, they are all wrong and misleading you and I'm right" who turned out to be totally vindicated. The gov't has slowly backed away from low fat by pretending it never happened, they never have admitted it was a mistake.. The ADA still has sugar-laden recipes for diabetics, just telling them to ensure they "cover" it with enough insulin injected. LOL. They turn off comments on their posts because people openly mock them now.
This corrupt system is finally falling apart, the covid vax might just be the final straw.
I cannot talk to my sister or her family about the Covid shots or any vaccines which she still to this day believes are perfectly safe. The key word is BELIEVE. Yes it’s so true that this is now in the world of a religion- a fanatical one at that.
I was speaking to a colleague about this yesterday . . .
By now surely everyone who uses Facebook and Twitter knows there are filters in place to ensure they do not get all the news, all the information that's available. If so, how can these people pretend they are making informed choices about, say, whether or not a novel GMO vaccine should be administered to their children? As Bill Maher says, these are people who won't allow their kids to walk to the bus stop without a helmet.
Because the instant you look beyond social media to "do your own research," the delta between the actual science and what you see on Facebook is alarming (I assume; I don't use Facebook, but I am aware of how easy it is to get banned or censored there).
It's become a platitude now, especially among Substack contributors, but there is really only one explanation: faith. Aspects of the (disastrous) official response to Covid, particularly faith in the novel vaccines, have become dogmas with a strikingly religious flavor and moral power.
At the very end of this interview, Dr Naomi Wolf concludes that the cloud of maddening mass formation we see in so many seemingly intelligent people is the product of some kind of demonic spell. This is not coming from Alex Jones or David Icke mind you but from someone who up until 2 years ago was the darling of the liberal elite. The entire interview is brilliant but a bit scary. https://forbiddenknowledgetv.net/we-have-entered-the-last-stage-of-tyranny-dr-naomi-wolf/
Excellent, thank you. Censorship of certain scientific viewpoints has, to me, been one of the most alarming things about the Covid era. I first noticed it with the demonization of John Ioannidis in March 2020.
Thanks. Vaccines indeed fit into the narrative as a sort of magic that protects against “cooties.” Our human instinctual fear of “cooties” explains MUCH of the spectrum of COVID irrationality. https://youtu.be/AlTzoV1kqE8
The truth needs no protection, only partial-truths do.
We allowed this to happen by handing over our responsibilities to soulless institutions that only values matter, status and ideology. No wonder we are marginalised, consumed by the beast we handed our power too.
Thanks for the great article: Push back. We have to make these Institutions irrelevant by becoming self-reliant and replacing this corrupt all consuming system.
The vaccine group had almost DOUBLE the incidence rate of neoplasms as the placebo group (0.95 vaccine vs. 0.51 placebo).
Ditto for immune system disorders (1.05 vaccine vs. 0.51 placebo).
And reproductive system and breast disorders were also worrisomely elevated (2.00 vaccine vs. 1.25 placebo). That one is notably concerning because the table shows the increase is concentrated in the younger age group. Alarmingly, the FDA briefing document ( https://www.fda.gov/media/158912/download - Page 67) shows 25 miscarriages compared to 41 live births.
Thank you Paul. It seems to me that slowly and painfully the truth about all this is being exposed. First the likely origin of the virus was highlighted, then the truth that the vaccines did not prevent onward transmission was accepted. Slowly the lack of efficacy of NPIs is coming out (particularly exposed by the ongoing disaster in China), and now we have to consider the issue of what is causing excess deaths in middle aged people in a number of countries. Keep on keeping on. We have to hope the truth will eventually surface.
Even if the vaccine were 100% safe and 100% effective, even if it were a placebo, we would still be morally obliged to reject it, because it is imposed by coercion, by a mandate. By acquiescing to medical coercion we would be acquiescing to the taking away of the right to free medical consent not just from ourselves but from our children and from future generations, and we do not have the right to do this. Every other right can be subverted by medical coercion, even if not today than someday in the future. Nothing exposes people to a greater risk of harm than taking away their right to free medical consent. We also know from history that what governments do to people is far worse than any naturally occurring virus.
Thanks Paul, I warned where this was going in this Rapid Response to a report of the Cumberlege review in BMJ August 2020.
https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3099/rr-5
Regarding the Use of the Term "Anti-Vaxxer"
Dear Editor
Thank you Karyse Day [1] for drawing attention to the problem of the bias and intimidation inherent in the term "anti-vaxxer". The term has been around perhaps since the 19th century but has evolved a new context. Three years ago I drew attention to the remarks of Seth Berkley, director of the vaccine lobby organisation GAVI, in the Spectator proposing that "anti-vaxxers" be excluded from social media, which meant in effect not only that certain people should not be allowed on social media but that criticism of vaccines should not be allowed on a generic basis - an extremely serious matter[2].
Unfortunately, this has also been a hobby-horse of the present Prime Minister. In August last year Reuter's recorded Boris Johnson as saying [3]:
“I’m afraid people have just been listening to that superstitious mumbo-jumbo on the internet, all that anti-vax stuff..."
On 24 September 2020 he told the UN [4]:
“There are today people who are still actually anti-science, a whole movement called ‘the anti-vaxxers’ who refuse to acknowledge the evidence that vaccinations have eradicated smallpox and who by their prejudices are actually endangering the very children they want to protect."
By February this year the Sunday Telegraph was reporting [5]:
"Posting anti-vaccine propaganda on social media could become criminal offence, Law Commissioner says
New Law Commissioner Penney Lewis is leading wide-ranging review into whether UK's offence and abuse laws are fit for the Social Media age..."
And once again the Prime Minister was quoted last month [6]:
“There’s all these anti-vaxxers now,” Johnson told medical workers at a doctor’s surgery in London. “They are nuts, they are nuts.”
While there are a lot of very fed up people I am extremely dubious there is a movement called "the anti-vaxxers" or that they are posting propaganda: at the very best this is a simplistic claim [7,8]. At a time when the government is supposedly trying to earn trust for a range of potential SAR-CoV-2 vaccines the continued disparagement and repression of people who raise questions about a class of products - which after all cannot be inherently safe - speaks for itself. It creates an atmosphere of prejudice and intimidation - such as described in the Cumberlege review [9] and should be seen and understood for what it is.
[1] Karyse Day, 'Re: Cumberlege review exposes stubborn and dangerous flaws in healthcare', 25 August 2020, https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3099/rr-3
[2] John Stone, ' The Shadow War on Disease: Arbitrary, Oppressive and Unaccountable Medicine', 9 July 2017, https://www.bmj.com/content/357/bmj.j2449/rr-13
[3] 'UK's Johnson slams 'mumbo-jumbo' about vaccines after measles rates rise', Reuter's 19 August 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-health/uks-johnson-slams-mumb...
[4] United Kingdom - Prime Minister Addresses General Debate, 74th Session (UN 24 September 2019) @ 8.30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zf4YEyh7erE&app=desktop
[5] Mike Wright, 'Posting anti-vaccine propaganda on social media could become criminal offence, Law Commissioner says', 1 February 2020, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/02/01/posting-anti-vaccine-propaga...
[6] 'Johnson says anti-vaxxers 'are nuts'', Reuter's 24 July 2020, https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-britain-vaccinatio-...
[7] John Stone, 'An appeal to authority is not the same as an appeal to knowledge', 15 May 2019, https://www.bmj.com/content/365/bmj.l2144/rr-0
[8] John Stone, 'Brave new World', 17 May 2019, https://www.bmj.com/content/365/bmj.l2144/rr-5
[9] Helen Haskell, 'Cumberlege review exposes stubborn and dangerous flaws in healthcare'
BMJ 2020; 370 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.m3099 (Published 06 August 2020)
While Charles Wilson (of GM) was misquoted as saying "What's good for GM is good for the US", there is no doubt that the pharma, the politicians, the physicians, the scientists, the media, the celebs-all project a mantra that "What's good for Pfizer and Moderna is good for the World". I was tempted to change the word "World" for "Universe", but maybe this might be taking it a tad too far. At this time, though.
Perhaps also of interest:
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/news/british-prime-minister-boris-johnson-systemic-patient-abuse-and-state-repression/
At the end, Tom Jefferson says, “We are regressing to the 80s where you pick and choose your evidence."
Intriguing. I wonder what specifically Mr. Jefferson is referring to. Perhaps the science around AIDS? IDK.
I also wonder if we really have to go all the way back to the 80's to find people picking and choosing their evidence. It seems to me that people who have favored medicine or medical treatments based upon, say, plants (which are the original source of a great many patented and approved medicines) have consistently faced a kind of "religious opposition" to their message for decades.
I mean, is Mr. Jefferson suggesting this "religion" works in historical waves? Were the 80's bad but the 90's good? When was there ever a golden era of honest scientific evaluation of alternative solutions and narratives? When was there a time of honest and courageous medical journalism? Did that ever really exist?
Perhaps Tom Jefferson views it somewhat in terms of the rise and fall of Cochrane and EBM, but I suspect the message of the Cumberlege report is that gaslighting has always paid a large part of medicine, which skews the results both in terms of scientific knowledge and common humanity. I suspect with vaccination this problem goes back to Jenner, or variolation before that.
I'm not familiar with the history of Cochrane and evidence based medicine.
I do remember a lot of EBM controversy in the media when Obamacare was being legislated. It seems to me that the "pro EBM" media was ridiculing the "anti science" critics of proposed provisions in that law which would have centralized at the federal level a standard, approved definition of EBM.
In other words, the conflict was truly not about scientific evidence. At all. It was actually about who would have the power to write the official list of drugs and therapies that could actually be funded by insurers, and which could not. The real underlying debate was about taking a great deal of power away from individual medical doctors, medical investigators and patients and transferring all of that power to a federal agency bureaucrat. The debate was about profit and power, not science. The "pro EBM" side actually wanted to reduce the amount of honest, open scientific discussion and investigation, not increase it.
I suppose the project was to evaluate evidence with a statistical slant - of course that might be deadly for some patients, you might still get it wrong, or might still be perverted. Nevertheless, Jefferson and Heneghan plainly formed a team who were sceptical of the direction of things in early 2020.
One thing I have also noted in this, and I think II first noted it in the controversy over the WHO malaria vaccine for children in very early 2020 was that goal posts had moved from the claim of overwhelming benefit to net benefit. This is the WHO letter (my attempts to respond at the time were not posted):
https://www.bmj.com/content/368/bmj.m734/rr-1
Of course, if in order to save 50 people you were to sacrifice 49 that might be net benefit but it would not be a very good way of doing things: in fact we seem now to have been persuaded with Covid products into accepting very low levels of effectiveness and high levels risk, and the claim now is that this is net beneficial, which is somewhere between uncertain and an outright lie.
It bothers me even with BMJ that the controversy over whether products are safe and effective, adequately trialled etc, which has been brought forward by Peter Doshi and Paul Thacker here has been rather eclipsed by the argument about social justice, ie whether poorer nations are getting enough. Such fairness we might be able to make-do without, and of course the African nations, India, China, Brazil, Indonesia led the way in opposing the recent WHO proposed extension of International Health Regulations.
This is nothing new to those of us in the low-carb world. Nutritional research is pretty abysmal on the whole, for a variety of reasons including corporate influence and careerism. With Covid, more people have noticed. I suppose that could be considered a silver lining.
Yup. Whether it's the terrible impact of the sugar-laden, low fat diet, the links of the childhood vax schedule to autism and other maladies, treatment of Lyme disease, the danger of statins, or the Covid vax, the response is the exact same, outright gaslighting. People who question the official narrative are ridiculed as crazy and dangerous.
It dawned on me the other day that all five of them are the direct result of government/corporate cronyism, and all five directly resulted from the government vociferously telling us to do the exact opposite of what turned out to be true. Also in all five cases, smart people saw through it and "did their own research". Lastly, in all of them the government will never admit it was wrong (and it likely caused Lyme with biological weapon experiments).
People labeled Atkins as a menace to society, but it turned out that low carb actually worked very well and wasn't a gimmick. Fortunately, we had people like Gary Taubes who really dug in and got to the bottom of what was going on. Atkins was one of the first who said, "yes, they are all wrong and misleading you and I'm right" who turned out to be totally vindicated. The gov't has slowly backed away from low fat by pretending it never happened, they never have admitted it was a mistake.. The ADA still has sugar-laden recipes for diabetics, just telling them to ensure they "cover" it with enough insulin injected. LOL. They turn off comments on their posts because people openly mock them now.
This corrupt system is finally falling apart, the covid vax might just be the final straw.
I cannot talk to my sister or her family about the Covid shots or any vaccines which she still to this day believes are perfectly safe. The key word is BELIEVE. Yes it’s so true that this is now in the world of a religion- a fanatical one at that.
I was speaking to a colleague about this yesterday . . .
By now surely everyone who uses Facebook and Twitter knows there are filters in place to ensure they do not get all the news, all the information that's available. If so, how can these people pretend they are making informed choices about, say, whether or not a novel GMO vaccine should be administered to their children? As Bill Maher says, these are people who won't allow their kids to walk to the bus stop without a helmet.
Because the instant you look beyond social media to "do your own research," the delta between the actual science and what you see on Facebook is alarming (I assume; I don't use Facebook, but I am aware of how easy it is to get banned or censored there).
It's become a platitude now, especially among Substack contributors, but there is really only one explanation: faith. Aspects of the (disastrous) official response to Covid, particularly faith in the novel vaccines, have become dogmas with a strikingly religious flavor and moral power.
At the very end of this interview, Dr Naomi Wolf concludes that the cloud of maddening mass formation we see in so many seemingly intelligent people is the product of some kind of demonic spell. This is not coming from Alex Jones or David Icke mind you but from someone who up until 2 years ago was the darling of the liberal elite. The entire interview is brilliant but a bit scary. https://forbiddenknowledgetv.net/we-have-entered-the-last-stage-of-tyranny-dr-naomi-wolf/
Well, anyone who can unironically refer to demonic spells is not herself untainted by a bit of religious hysteria.
Excellent, thank you. Censorship of certain scientific viewpoints has, to me, been one of the most alarming things about the Covid era. I first noticed it with the demonization of John Ioannidis in March 2020.
Thanks. Vaccines indeed fit into the narrative as a sort of magic that protects against “cooties.” Our human instinctual fear of “cooties” explains MUCH of the spectrum of COVID irrationality. https://youtu.be/AlTzoV1kqE8
Wonderful post. One of the punchiest on the issue of censorship/wrongthink to date.
The truth needs no protection, only partial-truths do.
We allowed this to happen by handing over our responsibilities to soulless institutions that only values matter, status and ideology. No wonder we are marginalised, consumed by the beast we handed our power too.
Thanks for the great article: Push back. We have to make these Institutions irrelevant by becoming self-reliant and replacing this corrupt all consuming system.
Vaccines are not vaccines, magically...
They are a religious experience of worship of viruganda. Big Harma has us hypnotized.
Like US of Arrogance war in Russia, hacksxxxines are a loser for all.
Suicide is trending ....get yours now we are told....how kind...
yep .. black magic in very many ways
Here are some alarming facts about the supposedly "safer" Novavax:
Source- Clinical trial NEJM publication (Supplementary Appendix, Table S14): https://www.nejm.org/doi/suppl/10.1056/NEJMoa2116185/suppl_file/nejmoa2116185_appendix.pdf - see page 48
The vaccine group had almost DOUBLE the incidence rate of neoplasms as the placebo group (0.95 vaccine vs. 0.51 placebo).
Ditto for immune system disorders (1.05 vaccine vs. 0.51 placebo).
And reproductive system and breast disorders were also worrisomely elevated (2.00 vaccine vs. 1.25 placebo). That one is notably concerning because the table shows the increase is concentrated in the younger age group. Alarmingly, the FDA briefing document ( https://www.fda.gov/media/158912/download - Page 67) shows 25 miscarriages compared to 41 live births.
"Antibodies are like electrolytes."
https://twitter.com/GauteNilsen/status/1567955591980515328
Thank you Paul. It seems to me that slowly and painfully the truth about all this is being exposed. First the likely origin of the virus was highlighted, then the truth that the vaccines did not prevent onward transmission was accepted. Slowly the lack of efficacy of NPIs is coming out (particularly exposed by the ongoing disaster in China), and now we have to consider the issue of what is causing excess deaths in middle aged people in a number of countries. Keep on keeping on. We have to hope the truth will eventually surface.
Even if the vaccine were 100% safe and 100% effective, even if it were a placebo, we would still be morally obliged to reject it, because it is imposed by coercion, by a mandate. By acquiescing to medical coercion we would be acquiescing to the taking away of the right to free medical consent not just from ourselves but from our children and from future generations, and we do not have the right to do this. Every other right can be subverted by medical coercion, even if not today than someday in the future. Nothing exposes people to a greater risk of harm than taking away their right to free medical consent. We also know from history that what governments do to people is far worse than any naturally occurring virus.