![]() By Robyn Chuter A new review has comprehensively debunked the serotonin theory of depression. Whilst I was in the midst of writing last week’s post, The ADHD scam, a systematic umbrella review was published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, on the so-called serotonin theory of depression. This theory posits that low levels of, and/or low activity of, the neurotransmitter (brain communication chemical) serotonin is causally associated with depression. The review concluded that “The main areas of serotonin research provide no consistent evidence of there being an association between serotonin and depression, and no support for the hypothesis that depression is caused by lowered serotonin activity or concentrations.” The serotonin theory of depression: a systematic umbrella review of the evidence My first reaction to the review was “No sh*t, Sherlock”. I’ve been writing about the complete lack of evidence for the “serotonin deficiency” and “biochemical imbalance” theories of depression for most of the last decade. For example,
I’ll tell you what I was surprised by in a minute, after I’ve précised the paper. Here are the key findings:
In summary, “The main areas of serotonin research provide no consistent evidence of there being an association between serotonin and depression, and no support for the hypothesis that depression is caused by lowered serotonin activity or concentrations. Some evidence was consistent with the possibility that long-term antidepressant use reduces serotonin concentration.” The serotonin theory of depression: a systematic umbrella review of the evidence Or, as Joanna Moncrieff expressed it in layman’s terms, in the press release for the publication, “I think we can safely say that after a vast amount of research conducted over several decades, there is no convincing evidence that depression is caused by serotonin abnormalities, particularly by lower levels or reduced activity of serotonin… Many people take antidepressants because they have been led to believe their depression has a biochemical cause, but this new research suggests this belief is not grounded in evidence.” No Evidence That Depression Is Caused by Low Serotonin Levels Let that sink in for a moment. “No convincing evidence” doesn’t mean “nobody has designed proper experiments to investigate these theories, so they might still be true”. It means everyone and their dog has been trying nine ways to Sunday to show that there’s some kind of connection between serotonin and depression, for decades, and despite blowing uncounted sums of taxpayers’ money in research grants on it, they’ve come up with nada, big fat nothing, diddly squat. Are you surprised by these findings? If not, congratulations – my guess is that you’ve (gasp) done your own research and discovered that psychiatry/psychopharmacology is a monumental fraud. If you are surprised, I don’t blame you, and you’re not alone. According to the authors of the review article, “Surveys suggest that 80% or more of the general public now believe it is established that depression is caused by a ‘chemical imbalance’ [15, 16]. Many general practitioners also subscribe to this view [17] and popular websites commonly cite the theory [18].” The serotonin theory of depression: a systematic umbrella review of the evidence Big Pharma, its pimps (doctors) and its poodles (the media and entertainment industry) have done a stellar job of persuading the public that the tissue of lies known as the “serotonin theory” of depression, and the “biochemical imbalance theory of mental illness” more broadly, are solidly grounded in science. Now, do you want to know what did take me by surprise, when this paper was published? It was this comment by co-author of the paper, Dr Mark Horowitz, who is described as “a training psychiatrist and Clinical Research Fellow in Psychiatry at UCL [University College London] and NELFT [North East London NHS Foundation Trust]”: “I had been taught that depression was caused by low serotonin in my psychiatry training and had even taught this to students in my own lectures. Being involved in this research was eye-opening and feels like everything I thought I knew has been flipped upside down.” No Evidence That Depression Is Caused by Low Serotonin Levels Say what? How is it even possible that a person can undergo psychiatric training and not be aware that there is not, and has never been, any persuasive evidence for the serotonin hypothesis of depression? Remember, the person who first proposed this hypothesis, George Ashcroft, had already abandoned it due to lack of evidence in 1970. You know, 1970, as in over fifty freakin’ years ago. How exactly does a person get through medical school, internship and residency, and then a psychiatric fellowship, without ever stumbling across the vast professional and popular literature critiquing the foundational dogmas of psychopharmacology? And what does this tell you about medical education more generally? Might the fact that a person who lectured medical students on psychiatry was unable to uncover the complete lack of evidence for one of his core beliefs, until well into his career, shed some light on doctors’ behaviour during the manufactured COVID crisis? Ya think????? Although in popular parlance, the term apocalypse has come to connote universal or widespread destruction or disaster, it derives from the Greek word ἀποκάλυψις (apokálupsis) which translates to “revelation” or “disclosure”. I’ve often wondered (usually after having to explain to yet another client that their depression was not caused by serotonin deficiency or biochemical imbalance), ‘Just how many “revelations” and “disclosures” do there have to be before people stop believing this giant pile of crap?’ Observing the massive traction that this review article has gained, I’m cautiously optimistic that the colossal swindle known as psychiatry has finally reached its Apocalypse Now moment. The message that there is no scientific basis to the serotonin theory of depression (and therefore to the hundreds of millions of prescriptions written every year for drugs that aim to manipulate serotonin levels) has been relentlessly plastered across both legacy and new media since the article was published. With trust in the pharmaceutical-medical-industrial complex plummeting due to the disastrous performance of COVID injections and approved treatments, and the unfathomable cowardice of the medical profession which has stood by as the multi-layered tragedy unfolded, I expect a lot of patients who have been prescribed these drugs are going to be asking their doctors some very awkward questions. Let me make myself very clear: Human suffering in the face of life’s vicissitudes is real. But the notion that this suffering is due to “biochemical imbalance” is, quite frankly, held only by complete morons. As Mark Horowitz put it, “One interesting aspect in the studies we examined was how strong an effect adverse life events played in depression, suggesting low mood is a response to people’s lives and cannot be boiled down to a simple chemical equation.” No Evidence That Depression Is Caused by Low Serotonin Levels You don’t say. Professor Moncrieff’s critique of her own profession’s mendacity and careless disregard for the effects of serotonin-manipulating drugs on patients’ brains is trenchant and well-aimed: “Our view is that patients should not be told that depression is caused by low serotonin or by a chemical imbalance, and they should not be led to believe that antidepressants work by targeting these unproven abnormalities. We do not understand what antidepressants are doing to the brain exactly, and giving people this sort of misinformation prevents them from making an informed decision about whether to take antidepressants or not.” No Evidence That Depression Is Caused by Low Serotonin Levels I love the smell of honesty in the morning.
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![]() WA and VIC lead the pack in data obfuscation and threat inflation (and unfortunately, people are buying it) When the data don’t support the narrative, some fancy footwork is required. WA Premier Mark McGowan was caught lying about the number of unvaccinated West Australians in hospital, which I posted about last week. WA Health now confirms that yes, they have been labelling all Unknown cases as Not Vaccinated the whole time. As detailed in my post below, the fine print disclaimer “includes unknown vaccination status” was added to WA Covid update reports in brackets after the Not Vaccinated category label from 10 June 2022 onwards. The disclaimer was added due to a high volume of phone calls to the department asking whether Unknowns were being buried in the Not Vaccinated group. A good lesson that an old school public pressure campaign can result in government action (even if tiny). This statement is characteristically unclear, but we can glean that Unknown cases are non-WA residents, and/or people who have not updated their Medicare address, and/or people who have been vaccinated overseas. Most significantly, the Unknown group includes vaccinated hospital admissions. Therefore, the combined Not Vaccinated group in WA Health report clearly includes people with 1 or more doses of vaccination. If it seems that I’m labouring this, that’s because it’s a big lie with big implications. This tactic artificially inflates the rate of Not Vaccinated cases in Covid hospitalisations and deaths. In NSW last reported week, 0% of hospitalisations were 0 dosed, and, 20.5% were Unknown. Combine them together in a category titled Not Vaccinated and you get the headline: 1 in 5 hospitalisations Not Vaccinated! Despite there being 0 unvaccinated hospitalisations. And that’s exactly the kind of headline we’re seeing all over the country, week in, week out. The oligarchal nature of media ownership in Australia means that the key talking points in our major broadsheets and tabloids filter down, often word for word, into our regional publications too. Headlines like the below litter cafe tables from Denmark to Dampier. These faulty stats are proffered to pressure the under-vaccinated (because the goalposts are shifting from ‘fully vaxxed’ to ‘up to date’) to get ever more doses as they roll out. Booster uptake is lagging Down Under, and one of the most effective ways to push uptake is the threat of hospitalisation or death, as we’ve seen from the pandemic playbook since vaccine roll out in February 2021. The other very effective way to drive uptake is vaccine mandates, which Australian state and territory leaders wielded with iron fist while the myth of transmission prevention still had legs. Today, that myth hangs by a thread thanks to headlines like this: And admissions like this: Without claim to the prevention of transmission, all our leaders have to fall back on for justification of vaccine mandates is the common good argument: Mandates are justified so as to relieve the strain on our healthcare system. (Never mind that we’ve had 2 years and 4 months to prepare for this. Never mind that there are willing and able healthcare workers who would love to return to work, but cannot due to mandates, or that billions of dollars were chucked at interventions that don’t work and newly built resilience centres that are sitting empty.) Those who’ve been able to work over the past 12 months without limitation may not rub up against the effects of mandates in their day-to-day life, and so may not be aware of the full extent of the damage to livelihoods, mental health, healthcare systems and the economy that is still in play. Mandates are in place in many Australian industries and businesses, either by government directive or by discriminatory policies implemented by the businesses themselves.1 For mandates to maintain (and possibly be brought back in full force as new variants ramp up) by edict of corporation or of government, there must be popular support. And in the absence of evidence that mandates are reducing the spread of Covid (they’re clearly not), the only tool left in the kit is a blunt hammer to belt home the necessity of mandates to save our healthcare system. Everyone wants to support our beleaguered healthcare system. Many will even support the stripping of basic civil rights of anyone who might pose a threat to said healthcare system, by dint of getting sick from a virus that everyone is catching. And so, governments and shilling media outlets must prove to the public, unequivocally, that booster uptake and mandates are necessary and justified. Unfortunately, they can’t do this with the unadulterated data, so they adulterate it. Readers of this Substack already know that the data do not support the message that more jabs leads to reduced strain on the healthcare system. NSW is the only state (as far as I’m aware) to publish hospitalisation rates by vaccine dosage from 0 through to 4+ in separate categories, and the data show the anti-narrative. More doses correlates with higher rates of hospitalisation, and those higher rates are increasing in margin week on week. 3 and 4+ dosed are also consistently overrepresented in NSW Covid deaths. SOURCE In WA, official reports show that the 64.4% of the population that has received 3 or more doses of Covid vaccine is making up 62-66% of hospital admissions every week. In Tasmania’s last reporting period, the 89.3% of the population that has received 2 or more doses (bizarrely, they don’t break out 2, 3, 4+ in the data) accounted for 76.6% of hospital admissions and 72.5% of ICU admissions due to Covid (as opposed to with Covid. Pretty sure Tasmania is the only state to make this distinction).2 The real story here is the incredibly high numbers of vaccinated and boosted Australians in hospital with Covid. This trend has similarly been observed in Canada, the USA , Portugal, West Germany, The Netherlands, and various other highly vaccinated European countries. What do you do when the data don’t support the narrative? This brings us back to the tactic used by various governments including Western Australia and Victoria, whereby the 0 dose cohort are lumped in with Unknowns (including those vaccinated overseas and anyone who didn’t update Medicare when they moved house) in one big ol’ group called Not Vaccinated. Respective health departments disseminate punchy one-liners such as ‘25% of those in hospital are not vaccinated’, or ‘one in three Covid hospitalisations are not vaccinated’, and on a technicality, they avoid legal entanglement. The category is indeed called Not Vaccinated, despite including a potential multitude of vaccinated cases. I’ve previously noted that with the use of that other trick of framing hospitalisation rates with eligible population vaccination rates instead of all population vaccination rates, government and media are painting a picture that is, unfortunately for us, fairly divorced from reality. And then there’s the fact that in most state reports, key information is simply left out. It’s nigh impossible to review a data set that is missing chunks of data. An example of this is WA reports listing vaccination status for hospitalisations but not deaths or ICU, or Tasmanian reports breaking out 0 and 1 dose hospitalisations, but mixing the data for 2+ doses. It is of concern to me that when trustworthy sources (government, legacy media) report false and misleading statistics, the general reader is inclined to take the misrepresentation as fact, to the point of denying all evidence (or possibility) of the contrary. Take John, who I found lurking in the comments thread under a WA Government post pushing Covid vaccines: It’s highly likely that John is referencing this article, or a version of it. The journalist reports, ”Newly released mortality data shows one-third of Victorians who died with COVID-19 in the first half of this year were unvaccinated, despite the unvaccinated cohort making up just 4 per cent of the state's over-12 population.” You can probably see where this is going. Might I draw your attention to the word underlined in red on the table below, which accompanies the text of the article3: SOURCE
As for 4% figure (eligible unvaccinated population), this is misleading on two counts. First, to frame all population death statistics, we should use all population vaccination statistics. The all population percentage of unvaccinated Victorians is 13.7%. Second, these deaths occurred throughout the first half of the year. The proportion of the Victorian population that is 0 dosed will have changed over the course of this 6 month period. The journalist compared a cumulative 6 month figure against today’s vaccination rates. I tried to engage John in a discussion of facts, but he proved a closed mind. And this really is the problem. Independent journalists, Substackers and Facebook commenters can pound the keyboard all we like, and it will make a dent. But John is representative of the large majority who still trust government, public health institutions and legacy media to tell the truth. As long as people like John eat up everything they’re fed, false and misleading though it may be, public support will prevail for bad and unjustifiable policies. The question is, why the obfuscation in government record keeping and news media reporting? Why don’t WA and VIC simply record 0 doses in the manner that NSW and TAS do, and as states do for all other dose rates? Why don’t states make their data open source so that the public and relevant experts can assess their governments’ performance? If government officials are the public servants they purport to be, then they will make no bones about being accountable to the people who voted them into their nice offices and handsome salaries. It is perhaps encouraging that WA Health and the like are resorting to such underhanded tactics in their handling and presentation of Covid data. It signals that the house of cards may well be about to collapse. And the sooner we get to the truth of things, the sooner we can commando crawl our way out of this hot mess. 1 Only last week, the 4th jab was mandated for employees of the Queensland Police Service aged over 50. A longtime acquaintance of mine who has worked in the WA justice system for more than a decade was served notice of termination last month for the reason of ‘failing to follow an order’, that order being to submit to an unecessary medical procedure. Hero to Zero is a collective of healthcare workers who want to work, but are not allowed to due to mandates. A swathe of big businesses including RAC, Bendigo Bank and BHP have opted to keep vaccination requirements in place even though the government no longer requires them to do so. 2 I have not yet dug into Tasmanian data in detail (due only to time constraints) but I think it’s important to note that while Tasmania does show high rates of hopsitalisation for the 2+ dosed cohort, it also shows disproportionately high rates of hospitalisation for the 0 dosed cohort. I don’t have a working hypothesis for the disparity between TAS and NSW as yet. If anyone has an educated opinion on this, I’d love to hear it in the comments. At the very least, what the Australian data show at this point in time is that the hypothesis that vaccines prevent hospitalisation (and hence, strain on the healthcare system) is not supported by the 2+ dosed hospitalisation data. The 0 dosed data is inconclusive due to obfuscation in state reporting, and due to showing conversely underrepresentation (NSW) and overrepresentation (TAS) in the states that do not obfuscate the data. 3 Though John did not differentiate between Unvaccinated and Unknowns, the journalist notes that, “The department said that people whose vaccination status was categorised as "unknown" until it's established, usually make up about 3 per cent of deaths.” I would like to know how the department knows this, and if they know it, why don’t they report Unvaccinated and Unknown as separate line items. BONUS CONTENT How to Lie with Statistic, NSW edition: NSW might be the most transparent state when it comes to Surveillance Reporting, but they’ve got plenty of other tricks up their sleeve. See the below from Dr Ah Kahn Syed for more lying with statistics (as if we haven’t had enough of it already): ![]() By :Rebekah Barnett But get boosted to save our healthcare system! Only 10/3402 (0.3%) of NSW Covid hospitalisations in the past 6 weeks were unvaccinated. In the past 2 weeks, only 1 unvaccinated person was hospitalised with Covid (0.08%) out of total 1, 303 hospitalisations. If you are following government health advice or any mainstream news outlet in Australia, this should come as a great surprise. Just yesterday, the Australian Medical Association vice president Dr Chris Moy urged Australians to, “have as many of the Covid vaccines as you are eligible for,” in a bid to combat the strain of surging BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants on our healthcare system. Several days prior, ATAGI greenlit a second Covid-19 vaccine booster for adults 30-64 (it was already available for 65+) in order to, “help reduce severe disease from the emerging surge of Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 subvariant infections, and to reduce the burden on Australian hospitals and the healthcare system in coming months.” In a characteristically bold display of overreach, WA premier Mark McGowan yesterday encouraged everyone over the age of 30 go out and get the 4th jab, even though ATAGI makes no such blanket recommendation for this age group. And yet, for all the science, health advice, and political pressuring, NSW data seem to be telling the alt-narrative. Last week I posed the question: Is NSW starting to show negative efficacy for Covid vaccines? Since then, a most helpful reader sent this much more comprehensive data set my way, and with the addition of a new week of data (epidemiological week 26), NSW is looking rough. Credit to @LCHF_Matt (Twitter) for pulling this set together, which displays epidemiological weeks 21-26 and shows data in raw and per 100k formats. First take: that’s a lot of 4+ dosed people in hospital. And the general trend indicates that the rate of 4+ dosed hospitalisations is increasing. With the extra data provided in this set, I was able to adjust my graphs from last week to compare hospitalisations against entire population vaccination status, and add a 4+ dose column. Adding in week 26, hospitalisations compared to vaccination status is looking like this: We can see that the 0 dose group takes up next to no hospital beds (0.3%) despite making up 13.2% of the total NSW population. The 3 dose group looks bad, but 4+ doses is where any supposed benefit disappears entirely, accounting for 14.1% of hospitalisations but only 9.5% of the total population. It would be silly to look at whole population numbers without taking age into account. Severe Covid outcomes correlate with old age, which we see in the below graph showing NSW Covid hospitalisations by age group over weeks 21-26. In the past 6 weeks in NSW, someone aged 90+ was 38 times more likely to end up in hospital with Covid than someone in their 20s. While the 0 dose group includes all children under 5 and likely a proportion of healthy, younger adults, the 4+ dose group is more likely to comprise of adults over 65 and the immunocompromised, as ATAGI restricted 4th and 5th doses to these groups (until adjusting their advice at the end of last week). This might go some way to explaining why the 0 dose group is so underrepresented in hospitalisations and the 4+ dose overrepresented, but it cannot cover for the fact that the vaccines are supposed to make up the difference. Since late January 2022, when health bodies and mainstream media started to back away from the notion that the vaccines prevented transmission due to the obvious fact that they don’t, a new catch-cry sounded from ministerial and health body press releases. Reverberating across news sites, social media, and lunch room chat - The vaccines prevent severe illness and death. It’s important to get vaccinated to ease the burden on the healthcare system. Earlier this year, while picnicking at the Swan River in Perth, I overheard a group discussing whether unvaccinated people ought to pay their own healthcare costs, or even be denied a hospital bed as penalty for refusing the Covid vaccines. Social media users declared that mandates were necessary and fair, so as to prevent unvaccinated people from, “clogging up the healthcare system.” NSW health minister Brad Hazzard urged the unvaccinated population to, “give a damn about someone other than yourself,” stating that unvaccinated people were, “six times more likely to end up in hospital and 13 times more likely to end up in ICU." Giving the benefit of the doubt, let’s assume that everyone really believed what they were saying. ATAGI, health ministers, journalists, picnickers. Let us suppose that they were operating according to the best information they had at the time. But as the information changes, so too should the advice. Prevailing health advice took a sharp turn away from get vaccinated to prevent infection and transmission and veered hard towards get vaccinated to ease the burden on the healthcare system when, despite the availability of clinical trial evidence to justify the former statement, real world data consistently and unequivocally showed it to be untrue. In 6 weeks of NSW data we cannot claim evidence that the statement get vaccinated to ease the burden on the healthcare system is untrue everywhere and all the time, but it does demonstrate that it is untrue in NSW over the past 6 weeks. Not only does it appear that the vaccines have failed to prevent severe illness in the NSW population over this time, they are inversely correlated with poor outcomes as the doses increase. NSW hospitals are jammed with 3 and 4+ dose recipients. This should pique the interest of journalists all over the country. As for deaths with Covid, the outcomes for the 3 and 4+ dosed population are similarly poor: The 3 dose group make up 53.3% of Covid deaths but only 42.9% of the NSW population. The 4+ dose group accounts for 13% of deaths, yet only 9.5% of the NSW population have received 4+ doses. The 0 dose group is also overrepresented by a slim margin: 14% of deaths vs. 13.2% of the total NSW population. Now, deaths is where the data gets tricksy. Two things to cover here:
On its face it sounds like a long shot. Surely not in Australia. The government just wouldn’t do that. But, it seems that maybe they would. Dr Syed tracks some strange and shifty sleights of hand by NSW Health in their data reporting. These tricks include inexplicably conflating the 0 dose and Unknown categories between epidemiological weeks 8-20, thus confusing efforts to track hospitalisations and deaths by vaccination status. The aforementioned helpful reader has an FOIR in progress which will hopefully shed light on the decision making process behind this. In week 21 the reports return to the original format of separating out the 0 dose group from the Unknown group. This is where it gets interesting. Dr Syed notes that, with the reintroduction of the 0 dose / Unknown separation, the 0 dose death rate suddenly spikes in relation to hospitalisation rates. Dr Syed’s graph below illustrates the point. An anomaly is not proof of data fixing, but taken together with the strange trick of blending 0 dose and Unknown data, and with the NSW government’s apparent disinterest in the fact that their own data do not support their public position at this time, I believe it is within the bounds of reason to be suspicious of NSW Health’s reporting of deaths in the 0 dose group. Is this science? Or is this politics?
In an opinion piece for the Financial Review, former federal deputy chief medical officer Nick Coatsworth notes that, as the Covid environment has changed, so should government and business response adjust to the new conditions. Coatsworth quotes Australia’s foremost infectious disease bioethicist Zeb Jamrozik: “There are worrying signs that current vaccine policies, rather than being science-based, are being driven by socio-political attitudes that reinforce segregation, stigmatisation and polarisation …” If our leaders and institutions are committed to following the science, we will see them continue to assess the information as it arises and adjust their policies and rhetoric accordingly. If our leaders are committed to pushing ideological, financial or other agendas, we can expect to see dogma in place of reason, policies based on outdated information, and public health strategies that benefit large corporations at the expense of the people. Play on. ![]() By : Robyn Chuter https://robynchuter.substack.com/p/the-adhd-scam Is ADHD a biologically-based neurodevelopmental disorder or the poster-child for psychiatric fraud? As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, psychiatry has a validity problem. In science, validity refers to the extent to which a concept, conclusion or measurement is well-founded and likely corresponds accurately to the real world. If an experiment is valid, its results really do measure the concept being tested. If a diagnosis is valid, it is grounded in biological reality1. But as even the former director of the US National Institutes for Mental Health (NIMH), Thomas Insel, admitted back in 2013, psychiatric diagnoses suffer from a “lack of validity”. Insel set the science cat among the pharmaceutical-medical-industrial complex pigeons by announcing that NIMH – the largest funder of research on “mental illness” in the world – would be “re-orienting its research away from DSM categories” because of this lack of validity. The DSM, or Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, is often described as the Bible of the field of psychiatry. As Insel pointed out, however, “it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each.” The problem Insel identified is that the definitions of all these supposed mental and psychological disorders are based on symptoms, descriptions and markers of conditions – in other words, they’re vague and highly subjective: “Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever. Indeed, symptom-based diagnosis, once common in other areas of medicine, has been largely replaced in the past half century as we have understood that symptoms alone rarely indicate the best choice of treatment. Patients with mental disorders deserve better.” Psychiatry in Crisis! Mental Health Director Rejects Psychiatric “Bible” and Replaces With Nothing Insel announced that NIMH would be replacing the DSM with “Research Domain Criteria (RDoC)”, which define mental disorders not through lists of signs and symptoms but instead using more specific genetic, neural and cognitive data. However, he then went on to admit that “we cannot design a system based on biomarkers or cognitive performance because we lack the data” [emphasis added]. The significance of Insel’s statements on the lack of objective evidence for so-called mental illnesses and disorders cannot be overstated. It reveals the entire field of psychiatry, and the psychopharmacology that has been its therapeutic mainstay since the 1950s, to be a giant fraud. Insel was essentially admitting not only that psychiatric diagnoses lacked validity, but that, therefore, there was no biologically valid theoretical basis for the use of psychiatric drugs. So, did the replacement of DSM labels with RDoC generate an explosion of knowledge on the biological basis of “mental illness”, resulting in greatly enhanced diagnostic accuracy and an explosion of evidence-based, rational treatments? Hell, no. Psychiatry today is the same shell game as it ever was. Let’s take attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as an example. According to psychiatrists, ADHD is “a neuro-developmental disorder, characterised by developmentally inappropriate levels of inattention, hyperactivity and impulsiveness”. Remarkably, given that children follow the same neurodevelopmental trajectory no matter where they are born, the global prevalence of ADHD varies widely, from 2 per cent to 7 per cent. In the US, roughly 9 per cent of children have been “diagnosed” with ADHD at some point in their lives. Here are the diagnostic criteria for this supposed condition, according to the DSM-V:
Well, here’s a clue: The youngest children in the class are the most likely to be diagnosed with ADHDBuilding on previous studies that found that children who were the youngest in their school year had higher rates of diagnosis with ADHD, researchers analysed data from over a million school children in Scotland and Wales. These two countries within the UK have different birthday cut-offs for school entry (1st March for Scotland vs 1st September for Wales) and different policies for holding back children whose birthdays fall within the eligibility range for school entry, but are considered too developmentally immature to start school. Scottish children are ten times more likely than Welsh children to be held back for a year if they would otherwise be among the youngest in the year. Hence, whilst the prevalence of diagnosed ADHD in Welsh schoolchildren was lowest in the children who were the oldest in their school year, and highest in the youngest children, in Scotland, “the prevalence of ADHD increased from the oldest quartile to the second youngest, but then fell in the youngest quartile”: However, after the researchers adjusted their data for the Scottish holding-back policies, they found that “If the children who were held back a year had been in their expected schoolyear, the prevalence of ADHD in Scotland across the four quartiles from oldest to youngest would have been: 0.79%, 0.89%, 0.97% and 1.01% (chi trend, p < 0.001).” Age within schoolyear and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder in Scotland and Wales In other words, the relationship between relative age within school year and ADHD was restored once Scotland’s holding back policies were accounted for. The researchers concluded that “Children younger within schoolyear are more likely to be treated for ADHD, suggesting immaturity may influence diagnosis.” Age within schoolyear and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder in Scotland and Wales In other words, teachers and parents are more likely to view the behaviour of children with younger relative age within a class as being “developmentally inappropriate” and therefore indicative of ADHD. But the youngest children in a class may be a full year younger than the oldest, and a year is a long time in child development! On the basis of these ill-informed parental and teacher judgements, millions of children who are simply immature have been stigmatised as suffering from a “developmental disorder”, and prescribed potent psychostimulant medications. But if ADHD is a genuine neurodevelopmental disorder, shouldn’t there be a more reliable way of distinguishing it from simple developmental immaturity? Is ADHD a biological disorder?If ADHD was truly a biological disorder, you would expect there to be identifiable, measurable differences in the brains of children who had it. Yet when researchers at Duke University performed MRI scans on the brains of over 10 000 children aged 9-10, 949 of whom met the diagnostic criteria for ADHD, they found only minor differences in the brains of the kids who supposedly had this disorder: “In the full model, which included potential confounding variables selected a priori, we found only 11 significant differences across the 79 brain measures after false discovery rate correction, all indicating reductions in brain measures among participants with ADHD. Cohen’s d values were small, ranging from −0·11 to −0·06, and were not meaningfully changed by using a more restrictive comparison group or alternative diagnostic methods. Simulations indicated adequate statistical power to detect differences even if there was substantial diagnostic misclassification.” Structural brain measures among children with and without ADHD in the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development Study cohort: a cross-sectional US population-based study For those not familiar with statistics, a Cohen’s d value of 0.8 is considered a large effect size, 0.6 is a medium effect size and 0.2 is a small effect size. So the effect sizes found in this study were really bloody tiny and therefore, unlikely to be useful in diagnosing the so-called condition (as the researchers themselves acknowledged). The failure of the study to identify any brain-based biomarker of ADHD did not change the conviction of the study’s lead author, Jonathan Posner, MD that ADHD is indeed a biological condition. Posner, perhaps not coincidentally, is a member of The Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology founded by Mortimer Sackler, of the infamous Sackler family largely responsible for the opioid epidemic that has cost the lives of nearly half a million Americans. According to their website, “The Institute is the product of the vision of Mortimer D. Sackler, MD who saw the need to better understand the developmental processes leading to health and disease.” That sounds like a worthy mission, until you reflect on the fact that the Sackler’s family company, Purdue Pharmaceuticals, framed its mission as helping physicians and the public “understand” the (non-existent) problem of undiagnosed and undertreated pain. This is how the Sackler family justified Purdue’s aggressive marketing of highly addictive opioid drugs like OxyContin. So forgive me for being just a little cynical of Mortimer Sackler’s motives; I’m not sure that the word “understand” means the same thing to you and me as to members of the Sackler family. Referring to the debate over whether ADHD is truly a biological disorder or simply a reflection of normal variation in attention, Posner averred: “While this finding rekindles that long-standing debate, we do believe it is a biological disorder… It can be both—a biological disorder, but also have normal variations within that.” MRI Scans Show Few Brain Differences in Children With ADHD Got that? Sure, there is normal variation in attention-related behaviour between kids, but even though there are no major differences in the brains of kids who are down the low end of the attention bell curve, we believe that they really do have a “biological disorder” anyway. Because Science™. Posner and his coauthors urged other true believers in the biological basis of ADHD to keep scouring the land for the footprints of the mythical beast they had failed to find: “Future studies might need to incorporate other MRI modalities, novel statistical approaches, or alternative diagnostic classifications, particularly for research aimed at developing ADHD diagnostic biomarkers.” Structural brain measures among children with and without ADHD in the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development Study cohort: a cross-sectional US population-based study Or, in other words, “we just torched tens of thousands of taxpayers’ dollars in grant money and found diddly squat, but we’re going to keep riding this gravy train anyway rather than question our underlying premise that these kids have something wrong with their brains.” In a press release for the study, Posner stressed that “it’s important to note that ADHD can be impairing” and that “treatments help with that”. By treatments, of course, Posner means drugs. Specifically, central nervous stimulants such as methylphenidate (Ritalin, Concerta), dextroamphetamine/amphetamine (Adderall) and dexmethylphenidate (Focalin), which are the most frequently-prescribed medications for this “condition”. These drugs all have significant potential to cause abuse and dependence, and trying to get off them can trigger withdrawal symptoms such as severe tiredness, sleep problems, and mental/mood changes such as depression. The prescribing information for these drugs is highly revealing; the manufacturers essentially admit that the diagnostic criteria for ADHD are flimsy, no one really knows how the drugs ‘work’, they haven’t been tested for efficacy past a couple of months despite almost always being prescribed long-term, and it’s up to doctors to determine whether the patient can go off them, by assessing their “functioning”… whatever that means, in the absence of a valid diagnostic test! For example, here are some excerpts from the prescribing information for Concerta: “Specific etiology of this syndrome [ADHD] is unknown, and there is no single diagnostic test… There is no body of evidence available from controlled trials to indicate how long the patient with ADHD should be treated with Concerta®. It is generally agreed, however, that pharmacological treatment of ADHD may be needed for extended periods. The effectiveness of Concerta® for long-term use, i.e., for more than 7 weeks, has not been systematically evaluated in controlled trials. The physician who elects to use Concerta® for extended periods in patients with ADHD should periodically re-evaluate the long-term usefulness of the drug for the individual patient with trials off medication to assess the patient’s functioning without pharmacotherapy. Improvement may be sustained when the drug is either temporarily or permanently discontinued.” Concerta – drugs.com The justification for prescribing dangerous mind-altering and heart-damaging drugs (for which there’s now a thriving black market) to schoolchildren as young as six is that by settling down their restless minds and bodies, stimulants help kids learn better. But is this true? Psychostimulants don’t enhance learning or academic outcomesIt’s remarkable that the claim that stimulant drugs improve children’s ability to learn has never actually been put to the test, until researchers from the Center for Children and Families at Florida International University conducted this study. In an elegant study design, 173 children aged 7-12, who met DSM-5 criteria for ADHD, took part in a triple-masked, within-subject, AB/BA crossover trial. Children undertook two consecutive 3-week phases of daily, 25-minute small-group instruction in both (a) subject-area content (science, social studies) and (b) vocabulary. They took methylphenidate during one of these phases, and a placebo during the other, so each child served as their own control. Neither the children, their parents nor the instructors knew whether the children were taking the drug or placebo. The stimulant drug was highly effective at increasing the time that children spent sitting in their seats and staying focused on their tasks, and at improving their classroom behaviour: “When taking medication, children completed 37% more arithmetic problems per minute and exhibited 53% fewer classroom rule violations per hour.” ADHD: Medication alone doesn’t improve classroom learning for children – new research But the kids didn’t learn any more of the science, social studies, and vocabulary content during the periods they were taking these drugs: “In this controlled study, there was no detectable impact of extended-release methylphenidate on the learning of units of academic material taught via small-group, evidence-based instruction. Methylphenidate improved seatwork productivity and classroom behavior, as in many previous studies, but these benefits did not translate into improved learning of academic material.” The effect of stimulant medication on the learning of academic curricula in children with ADHD: A randomized crossover study Can you even wrap your mind around this travesty? Children are being prescribed powerful and dangerous stimulant drugs in order to make teachers’ (and parents’) jobs easier by zonking them out so they sit still, stop disrupting other kids, and give the illusion of paying attention to their work, while receiving no benefit to their academic performance and hence their life prospects. It’s bad enough that stimulant drugs are all risk and no benefit for kids; the fact that they’re prescribed for a “condition” for which no biological basis has been found, just adds insult to injury. Speaking of injury, can you guess which drug, recommended by doctors for fevers and pain relief during pregnancy, increases the risk of genuine neurodevelopmental disorders? Paracetamol – bad for bubs’ brains (and bodies)A review of 25 years of research in humans, animals and in vitro on the prenatal use of paracetamol (known in the US as acetaminophen), concluded that the children of mothers who took this over-the-counter drug whilst pregnant with them were more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD and autism, and to have a lower IQ. Girls whose mothers took paracetamol during their pregnancy were also found to have a higher risk of language delays and early onset of puberty, whilst boys showed indicators of disturbed masculinisation including a higher risk of undescended testicles (cryptorchidism) and reduced anogenital distance. And, in stark contrast to the lack of evidence for a biological basis for generic “ADHD”, research has revealed a neurobiological link between exposure to paracetamol during gestation (a critical time for the formation of all organs including the brain), and functional alterations in children’s brains. Specifically, children who were found to have paracetamol in their meconium (first bowel movement), indicating that their mothers had taken the drug whilst pregnant with them, were not only nearly 2.5 times more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD by the age of 9-11 years, but there was a dose-response relationship: each doubling of exposure increased the odds of an ADHD diagnosis by 10 per cent. Using functional MRI scanning, researchers found a neurobiological correlate of in utero exposure to paracetamol which helped to explain the children’s behaviour: “Children with acetaminophen detected in meconium showed increased negative connectivity between frontoparietal and default mode network nodes to clusters in the sensorimotor cortices, which mediated an indirect effect on increased child hyperactivity.” Association of Prenatal Acetaminophen Exposure Measured in Meconium With Risk of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder Mediated by Frontoparietal Network Brain Connectivity The frontoparietal network is involved in executive function, otherwise known as cognitive control – the higher-level cognitive skills that help us organise our thoughts and activities, prioritise tasks, manage time efficiently, and make decisions. The default mode network is a system of connected brain areas that show increased activity when a person is not focused on what is happening around them, such as when daydreaming. By screwing up the connections between these vital brain regions and the regions which process sensory inputs and decide on responses to them, prenatal exposure to paracetamol appears to make children more hyperactive. So we have a drug that is recommended by drug regulators and doctors for use in pregnancy, and is taken by roughly 50 per cent of pregnant women worldwide (and up to 65 per cent of pregnant women in the US), which appears to be causing brain injuries in children that result in disruptive behaviour for which powerful brain-altering stimulants are prescribed, usually for many years and even decades. A cynical person might conclude that this is all a giant racket. Finding hope in the produce aisleWhat’s a parent to do if their child’s inability to focus their attention is causing problems at home and in school? According to the Micronutrients for ADHD in Youth (MADDY) Study, the higher the intake of fruits and vegetables, the lower the severity of inattention in children diagnosed with ADHD. Given the vast pre-existing literature on the benefits of fruit and vegetable consumption for various aspects of cognitive function, this finding points, once again, to possible biological mechanisms for certain challenging behaviours in children that are attributed to “ADHD”. Does it make more sense to label kids who have trouble paying attention because their brains are deprived of nutrients found in fresh produce as suffering from a “neurodevelopmental disorder”, or a dietary deficiency? Of course, not all inattentiveness in children is attributable to dietary factors – but that’s just the point. There are a multitude of reasons why children might be inattentive, hyperactive, disruptive, disorganised, or frequently bored. Poverty, poor nutrition, family violence, lack of parenting skills, a mismatch between the child’s learning style and educational environment, insufficient sleep, excessive use of devices, nature deficiency, brain damage from in utero exposure to alcohol or drugs, and plain old immaturity are just some of these reasons. Throwing children into the “wastebasket diagnosis” of ADHD does absolutely zero to address any of these underlying drivers of behaviour. Even worse, being diagnosed with ADHD is frequently a one-way ticket on the stimulant drug train, which for many kids, ends up being a journey straight to hell: Back in 2013, Thomas Insel wrote that “patients with mental disorders deserve better” than the DSM-guided practice of psychiatry was offering them.
I would go one step further. We need to stop thinking of “conditions” such as ADHD as being “mental disorders”, and instead approach all children and all adults who are struggling to live productive, fulfilling lives as individuals who require holistic assessment and a whole-of-life approach to solving their problems. In my clinical practice, I have found that I can get the best results for my clients using a synthesis of the insights gained by evolutionary psychology and personality psychology to provide a framework for understanding the problems of living, and Lifestyle Medicine along with techniques for change developed by energy psychology to address them. This client-centred approach is the polar opposite of psychiatry’s cookie cutter process of diagnosis and treatment. Which approach should you take, if you or a loved one has been diagnosed with ADHD or some other “mental disorder” or “neurodevelopmental disorder”? It’s up to you, of course, as all your healthcare choices should be. But before you choose which course of treatment to follow, you should know that since psychiatry embraced psychopharmacology in the late 1950s, there has been a dramatic explosion in the number of adults and children disabled by “mental illness”, as Robert Whitaker painstakingly documented in his paradigm-smashing book Anatomy of an Epidemic. Does that prove that psychiatry is a fraud, and diagnoses such as ADHD are a scam? You be the judge. Update: One of my readers, Peter Tomkinson shared (https://robynchuter.substack.com/p/the-adhd-scam-podcast/comment/7937258) a link to a powerful presentation by Dr James Davies, which summarises his eye-opening book ‘Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm Than Good’. I read the book several years ago, and it vastly enhanced my understanding of what is wrong with psychiatry. You can watch the presentation here: ![]() By : Rebekah Barnett https://rebekahbarnett.substack.com/p/more-boosters-more-hospitalisations?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email NSW Covid data show alarming trend for 4+ dosed population The NSW Covid data just keep getting worse. I’m in amazement that no mainstream media outlet is reporting on this. There is reporting on the surge in hospitalisations, but no mention of the fact that they’re almost all vaccinated. By end of page, there is always the obligatory advice to get boosted because, “safe and effective.” The NSW Respiratory Surveillance Report for epidemiological week 27 is in, and there is a clear trend emerging. The 4+ dose group is over represented by a factor of 2.1 in NSW Covid hospitalisations, climbing from 9% in week 21 to 19.8% in week 27. This despite the fact that only 9.5% of the NSW population is 4+ dosed. Additionally, unvaccinated patients comprise 0.3% of hospitalisations, coming in at under 1% of total NSW Covid hospitalisations for the 7th week running. By comparison, unvaccinated people make up 13.2% of the NSW population, including children. The portion of the NSW population that is eligible for Covid vaccination but remains 0 dosed is: 3.3% age 16+, 17.5% age 12-15, 50.3% age 5-11. Vaccination rates taken from HERE and HERE. Deaths: the only groups over represented this week are the 1, 3 and 4+ dose groups, with the 3 and 4+ groups showing the most significant over representation. This pattern is consistent with data from week 21 up until now. Last week, 45 out of the 95 reported deaths were aged care residents. Of the 6 people who died under the age of 65 years old, 4 were triple vaccinated and 2 were doubled vaccinated. By deduction, the 11 unvaccinated people who died with Covid last week were over the age of 65. For anyone reading my Substack for the first time, I want to clarify that I do not think single weeks should be taken on their own. For further context, please see my previous posts on NSW Surveillance Reports HERE and HERE. El Gato Malo has also recently reported on the trend of higher vaccination rates correlating with higher hospitalisation rates in the USA. Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking on the bad cat’s theory that Covid vaccines can cause more Covid deaths while looking like they prevent them. The Covid vaccines do seem to offer some benefit (mainly to older people) for reducing death by Covid. At the same time, however, they seem to be driving reinfection for reasons explained by Geert Vanden Bossche, among others. As the theory goes, while unvaccinated people have a higher death rate on the first round of infection, the vaccinated population is more prone to reinfection. Hence, over the course of multiple infections, the vaccine efficacy for deaths is eliminated or reversed. Building on this theory, an Israeli study published in the New England Journal of Medicine a fortnight ago found that the likelihood of Covid infection increased in people aged 60+ as their dose rate also increased. Big thanks to another helpful reader for handballing this my way. SOURCE and explainer article via Israel National News It’s early days for this theory, but it’s got me wondering - is the over representation of the 3 and 4+ dosed population in NSW hospitalisations and deaths due in part to reinfections? This would not be the only factor in play, but it’s interesting. To me, there is a case for tracking the rate of Covid reinfection by vaccination dose rate in the Australian population. SOURCE and explainer article via Israel National News It’s early days for this theory, but it’s got me wondering - is the over representation of the 3 and 4+ dosed population in NSW hospitalisations and deaths due in part to reinfections? This would not be the only factor in play, but it’s interesting. To me, there is a case for tracking the rate of Covid reinfection by vaccination dose rate in the Australian population. ![]() Rebekah Barnett A quick update on this, from a couple of days ago. In this post, I made a conservative, educated guess that the proportion of the WA population that remains unvaccinated is 9.8%. Since then, I’ve found an up to date source and it turns out I was close, but slightly under. The actual figure is 11.4%. The below table shows Australian vaccination rates for the whole population (aged 0+) by dose, and by state. The table comes from COVID Live, which pulls data from media releases and verifies it against state and federal health departments. The zero dose column was added by me. When comparing hospitalisation and death rates to vaccination rates, we should use this whole population figure for the zero dosed population, as opposed to the ‘eligible population’ figure that politicians often quote. The whole population zero dosed rate will skew young (although maybe not for long since the TGA provisionally approved Covid vaccines for infants today), so age stratification should also be taken into account for any meaningful analysis. In other news Down Under, masks are back on the MSM agenda in a big way as cases continue to spike through the roof (this means the vaccines are working). It was only a few months ago that The New York Times acknowledged what was already evident to a great many lay people and experts. Masks work in controlled lab settings, but efficacy drops to little or nil in broader everyday settings. I found John W. DeFeo to be comprehensive in explaining : Why do mask mandates fail? Finally, ABC announced this week that the Australian Government has 155 million unused doses of Covid vaccines that they don’t know what to do with. I did a quick calculation and I estimate the value to be approx $3 BILLION. Thread below if you can read it without crying. BONUS CONTENT
McGowan managed to lie in 3 different ways in just one social media post. Here are 4 shareable tiles to set the record straight. ![]() By - Robyn Chuter https://robynchuter.substack.com/p/covid-19-injections-are-messing-with In Part 1 of this series, I summarised the four major ways in which COVID-19 injections have interfered with the complex interactions between SARS-CoV-2 and the human immune system, then zoomed in on the first problem: the narrow and short-lived immune response that they generate. In Part 2 I laid out the evidence that the injections are causing people to become susceptible to repeated infection, most likely through the mechanism of ‘original antigenic sin’, otherwise known as the Hoskins effect and immune imprinting. And in Part 3, I described the consequences to individuals of the inability to clear viral infection that results from a limited and fixated immune response to SARS-CoV-2. Finally, in Part 4 I will set what has been discussed in the previous posts into the current global context, explaining why we now have a parade of immune escape variants of SARS-CoV-2 that are turning COVID-19 into the endless pandemic. Problem #4. COVID-19 injections prevent highly-injected populations from attaining herd immunity and instead select for highly transmissible and (eventually) virulent variants Let’s start by defining our terms. “Herd immunity” or “community immunity” refers to a state in which a sufficiently large proportion of a population has become immune to a particular infectious disease to prevent widespread transmission of the infectious agent. Herd immunity provides protection against infection to those who have not yet become immune to the disease. The term “herd immunity” was coined by A. W. Hedrich, after meticulous analysis of the epidemiology of measles in Baltimore from 1900-1931. Hedrich calculated that when more than 55 per cent of children under 15 years of age had become immune to measles via contracting and surviving the infection, measles epidemics ceased. By the end of an epidemic, 30-35 per cent of children under 15 remained susceptible (non-immune). With only isolated cases of measles occurring, the proportion of non-immune children gradually increased; when it reached 45-50 per cent of children under 15, another measles epidemic was triggered. Hence, natural measles occurs in waves or cycles of epidemics, with the interval between cycles determined by how long it takes for the pool of ‘susceptibles’ to increase to the level required to trigger an epidemic – 2-3 years in large urban centres. Despite its origins as a description of a phenomenon induced by the development of natural immunity, the term “herd immunity” has been hijacked by the medical-pharmaceutical-industrial complex which promotes vaccination as the sole means of eradicating infectious diseases (despite abundant evidence that old-fashioned public health interventions such as providing clean water and sewage disposal, adequate nutrition and decent housing largely eradicated the scourge of infectious disease from Westernised countries, long before vaccination campaigns began). This hijacking reached its zenith (or nadir, depending on how you look at it) in December 2020, when the World Health Organisation (WHO) changed the definition of herd immunity on its website, just before the global roll-out of COVID-19 injections began. Here’s WHO’s definition of herd immunity from its Coronavirus disease (COVID-19): Serology, antibodies and immunity page, up until 12 November 2020: And here’s the version that appeared on 13 November 2020: In a feat worthy of the Ministry of Truth, WHO attempted to memory hole nearly a century of established biology and epidemiology (not to mention millennia of human experience), expunging the entire concept of natural immunity and entirely appropriating the term “herd immunity” for the vaccine ideology. (Side note: Did you catch the massive gap between the 55 per cent threshold for herd immunity to measles that Hedrich calculated in the pre-vaccine era, and the 95 per cent target for vaccine-dependent herd immunity? Not to mention the fact that multiple measles outbreaks have occurred in populations with over 95 per cent measles vaccination rates.) The resulting firestorm of controversy generated by people who had actually read immunology textbooks forced WHO to alter its definition once again, on 31 December 2020: Note how WHO predicates its prejudice against attaining herd immunity through recovery from infection on the premise that “vaccinated people are protected from getting the disease in question and passing on the pathogen, breaking any chains of transmission.” But as WHO knew perfectly well, none of the clinical trials for COVID-19 injections were set up to ascertain whether the experimental substances prevented infection or transmission, and the definition of “COVID-19” used in these trials was incredibly lax: having even one mild symptom – such as a headache or a cough – along with a positive RT-PCR test result for SARS-CoV-2, qualified participants as having the “disease” of COVID-19. Peter Doshi had penned a stinging editorial on the rank inadequacy of these trials in The BMJ on 21 October 2020, more than two months before the WHO’s weasel-worded second update to its definition of herd immunity. So how’s that “vaccine”-induced herd immunity to COVID-19 coming along? Well, the triumphant tone of the vaccine promoters has become somewhat more muted of late. Just last November, Associate Professor James Trauer, who heads the Epidemiological Modelling Unit for the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at Monash University, gushed that “New South Wales is probably the best example of a part of Australia that’s close to herd immunity… They’ve made a huge difference to the epidemic through vaccination, clearly, and that’s been the major thing that’s turned it around in that state. Maybe it’s not quite herd immunity, but it’s pretty close… We’re mostly seeing daily death numbers in the single digits across the country, which is so much better than other countries have managed.” Is the prospect of herd immunity still alive in Australia? … and then we woke up and smelt the COVID coffee: What a difference a few months (and a conga line of increasingly transmissible immune escape variants) makes. We’ve gone from this: It’s not just the failure to prevent infection and transmission that has shaken the vaccine true believers out of their herd immunity fever dream. As mentioned in Part 3, by impeding both the innate and acquired arms of the immune system, COVID-19 injections favour the emergence of versions of SARS-CoV-2 that are highly resistant to the incomplete and inflexible immune response that they generate. And then, as injected people exhale, infectious aerosols containing these immune escape variants are spewed from deep in their lungs, out into the air. In indoor settings with inadequate ventilation and/or low humidity, these aerosols can remain suspended for hours, causing new infections at both short and long ranges. As also discussed in Part 3, COVID-19 injections impair the clearance of SARS-CoV-2, setting the scene for extended viral replication and the development of many more mutations in the virus’ genetic code, and increasing the probability of variants with tropism for the lung. According to Muller’s ratchet, ordinarily, mutations that increase transmission are more favourable to the propagation of respiratory viruses than mutations that increase virulence (disease severity). Simply put, a virus that leaves its host well enough to mix with others has a greater chance of spreading itself around than one that renders its host bed-ridden. However, a virus that doesn’t trigger a robust immune response but does cause extensive shedding of infectious virus can overcome Muller’s ratchet, becoming both highly infectious and – eventually, as it continuously mutates inside its host’s body – highly virulent. Belgian vaccinologist, Geert Vanden Bossche has described in detail the dire consequences of repeated booster shots on virus-immune system interaction, which may eventually pressure SARS-CoV-2 to completely break through adaptive immune defence. The likely result is antibody-dependent enhancement, the disastrous amplification of infection by injection-induced non-neutralising antibodies, which plagued earlier attempts to develop vaccines against coronaviruses. According to Vanden Bossche, “Asymptomatic vaccinees abundantly spread highly infectious SC-2 [SARS-CoV-2] immune escape variants as well as other highly infectious, immunogenically related viruses to other parts of the population. Consequently, in a highly vaccinated, well-mixed population, vaccinees with a mature and healthy innate immune system are now to be considered an asymptomatic reservoir for transmission of new, highly infectious SC-2 immune escape variants and other highly infectious diseases to the remainder of the population.” Immuno-epidemiologic ramifications of the C-19 mass vaccination experiment: Individual and global health consequences Remind we, are we seeing immune escape variants? Yes, we are: “Importantly, BA.2.12.1 and BA.4/BA.5 display stronger neutralization evasion than BA.2 against the plasma from 3-dose vaccination and, most strikingly, from post-vaccination BA.1 infections… post-vaccination BA.1 infection mainly recalls wildtype-induced humoral memory. The resulting elicited antibodies could neutralize both wildtype and BA.1 and are enriched on non-ACE2-competing epitopes. However, most of these cross-reactive NAbs are heavily escaped by L452Q, L452R and F486V.” BA.2.12.1, BA.4 and BA.5 escape antibodies elicited by Omicron infection Or, in English, the latest Omicron variants have acquired mutations that help them dodge antibodies induced by the injections. And when people get infected with Omicron after they’ve taken their shots, their immune system churns out antibodies that are matched to the original, now long-extinct Wuhan strain of SARS-CoV-2. These antibodies have some capability of neutralising the original Omicron but not the spin-offs – precisely because the injections are driving the virus to mutate at an ever-faster pace. “Our data show that BA.2.12.1 and BA.4/BA.5 substantially escape NAbs [neutralising antibodies] induced by both vaccination and infection. Moreover, BA.4/BA.5 NAb titers, and to lesser extent BA.2.12.1 NAb titers, were lower than BA.1 and BA.2 NAb titers, suggesting that the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant has continued to evolve with increasing neutralization escape.” Neutralization Escape by the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron Variants BA.2.12.1 and BA.4/BA.5 Oh yeah, and variant-specific boosters won’t help (and will probably make the situation worse): “Together, our results indicate that Omicron may evolve mutations to evade the humoral immunity elicited by BA.1 infection, suggesting that BA.1-derived vaccine boosters may not achieve broad-spectrum protection against new Omicron variants.” BA.2.12.1, BA.4 and BA.5 escape antibodies elicited by Omicron infection OK, so if Vanden Bossche is correct, we should expect greater spread of the most highly transmissible immune escape variants in populations with higher rates of injection. Like this, perhaps? The green lines were drawn in by the German academic who goes by the nom de plume Eugyppius; they mark the boundaries of the old German Democratic Republic – that is, communist East Germany – which was still a thing when I studied German in high school (the Berlin wall fell in my final year). Oddly enough, people who’ve lived under Communism are a tad suspicious of authority, as Eugyppius indicates: “East Germans have direct experience with government propaganda, and have proven more resistent (sic) to the vaccination campaign than Westerners. Their reward, after being much maligned by state media, is now higher levels of natural immunity and lower rates of BA.5 infection, which appears to prefer vaccinated populations.” Omicron BA.5 Prefers Hypervaccinated Masking West Germans, Avoids the Former DDR You can also read Eugyppius’ explication of the progression of both the pandemic and the injection campaigns in the former West and East Germany here, and his pungent response to the lamestream media sock puppets’ (yep, they have them in Germany too) attempt to “debunk” him here. Back to Vanden Bossche: “The resulting enhanced viral transmission rate is likely to ignite new pandemics, not only of new, highly infectious, and antigenically shifted SC-2 variants (typically labeled as ‘variants of concern’) but also of avian influenza virus and monkeypox virus.” Immuno-epidemiologic ramifications of the C-19 mass vaccination experiment: Individual and global health consequences Hmmm, so maybe, perhaps, just possibly we might see something kinda, sorta, just vaguely like Australia’s current horror flu season? According to The Guardian, “Australia has had its worst May on record when it comes to flu cases… The national disease surveillance system reported about 65,770 confirmed influenza cases in May – more than double the month’s previous record, which was set in 2019. As of 5 June, the national surveillance system had this year received nearly 88,000 reports of flu cases – more than 47,800 of them, diagnosed in the previous fortnight. The system was notified of 27 flu-related deaths in the year to date, and more than 730 people were reported as admitted to hospital because of influenza since April. Of those hospital admissions, about 6% went directly to intensive care.” Australia’s monthly flu cases more than doubled previous record in May (Side note: Of course, the Bill Gates-funded Guardian pushes influenza vaccination as the solution to this unfolding disaster, despite the Cochrane review concluding that it reduces the absolute risk of influenza in healthy adults by 1 per cent and likely has “little or no appreciable effect on hospitalisations”. In addition, a study examining the shedding of infectious influenza virus in the exhaled breath of flu patients found that “fine-aerosol viral RNA was also positively associated with having influenza vaccination for both the current and prior season.” That is, people who had taken both last season’s and the current season’s flu jab shed more highly infectious virus particles in their breath than those who had not been vaccinated. The real superspreaders are those who obediently line up for their flu shot every year.) Vanden Bossche goes on to propose that “As currently circulating Omicron (sub)variants become more and more resistant to potentially virulence-neutralizing vaccinal Abs… infection by these variants will rapidly become highly virulent in vaccinees, but not in the unvaccinated.” Immuno-epidemiologic ramifications of the C-19 mass vaccination experiment: Individual and global health consequences If Vanden Bossche’s hypothesis is correct, here’s what we can expect to see: “As the second viral immune escape event (enabling ADED [antibody-dependent enhanced disease]) does not affect the unvaccinated, the proportion between vaccinated and unvaccinated people needing hospitalization because of severe C-19 disease is expected to rise rapidly in the age group between 10 and 60 years… This will be the most sensitive, and hence, first measurable signal of the evolution of SC-2 toward an infectious behavior that will be responsible for initiating a massive ADED-mediated incidence of severe disease and hospitalization in the overall vaccinated part of the population.” Immuno-epidemiologic ramifications of the C-19 mass vaccination experiment: Individual and global health consequences And then: “The case fatality rate in the vaccinated population will rapidly and dramatically increase, first in the vaccinated elderly (+ the vulnerable) and soon thereafter also in the rest of the vaccinated population.” Immuno-epidemiologic ramifications of the C-19 mass vaccination experiment: Individual and global health consequences Hmmm, rising hospitalisation and death rates in highly injected populations – you mean as highly injected as this? Let’s recap. To fulfil Geert Vanden Bossche’s prophecy of COVIDoom, we would have to be observing immune escape variants of SARS-CoV-2 proliferating and concentrating in highly-injected populations, developing mutations that facilitate greater and greater capacity to evade injection-induced antibodies, until they eventually break Muller’s ratchet and become both infectious and virulent. At this point we would see not only rising hospitalisation and death rates from COVID-19, but from other infectious diseases such as influenza. What can be done to avert this impending catastrophe?
There are many things we need to learn from this dark episode in human history, but the most important of them can be summed up in this classic number from one of my favourite bands: https://odysee.com/@devilsnight:6/The-Who-Won't-Get-Fooled-Again:6
![]() By : Rebekah Barnett https://rebekahbarnett.substack.com/p/the-fine-line-between-news-and-satire?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email A few days ago I noted that all cause deaths are up in Australia. Considerably up. And thus far, we’re not getting much by way of explanation except for hints at death by climate change, or gardening-induced heart disease. The day after I posted this, The Telegraph in the UK published this article titled, Excess deaths are on the rise - but not because of Covid. From the article, “Latest data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show there were 1,540 excess deaths in the week ending June 24 but only around 10 per cent were due to coronavirus.” WOAH. That leaves 90% of excess deaths unexplained. The journalist, Sarah Knapton, cites health experts’ fears that the pandemic response, lack of access to healthcare and even the cost of living crisis may be to blame. Knapton concludes with a call from Dr Charles Levinson for a comprehensive government enquiry into this spike in excess deaths. Incredibly, she does not mention climate change as a contributing factor, despite the risks posed by hot nights. The problem and analysis is much the same as the contents of an article written by the same journalist for The Telegraph 9 months ago, titled, Analysis: Thousands more than usual dying - and not from Covid. In this article, Knapton offers some hard stats for the period of 2 July 2021 - 24 September 2021 indicating that the bulk of excess deaths were caused by ischemic heart disease, heart failure, circulatory diseases such as stroke and aneurysm, respiratory infections, and other complications related to liver and diabetes. Knapton notes that the NIH’s focus on Covid response left many patients with no diagnosis or treatment for other life-threatening conditions, potentially contributing to the rise in deaths. Lack of immunity from lockdowns is another cause put forward to explain the hike in deaths related to infectious diseases in particular. Any explanation for a problem as significant and far reaching as a steep and prolonged increase in all cause deaths is bound to be multifactorial. However, there is one huge, glaring factor that remains unspoken. No one will mention it. And when I say no one, I mean Western Governments and mainstream media. This is what we get instead. More bamboozlement. What a time to be alive! Exercise is deadly. Skipping breakfast will strike you down. And shovelling snow? Risky business. Is there anything that doesn’t cause heart disease these days? Or, in the past two years specifically, since our feeds are now populated with warnings of heart disease and early death on the daily?
Occam’s razor suggests that the simplest hypothesis is usually the one most worth pursuing. What has changed in the past 2 years? Has there been any sort of medical intervention that was applied to a majority of adults in Western countries? And among whose key listed side effects are heart disease and other life-threatening issues? No, say mainstream media. We’re going to scratch around in the bottom of Mary Poppin’s magic bag for the most random selection of explanations possible and try to force these puzzle pieces together with clag glue and pure willpower. They will hold together, dammit. The line between news and satire truly has become as thin as the edge of Occam’s razor. Postnotes:
![]() By: Robyn Chuter In Part 1 of this series, I summarised the four major ways in which COVID-19 injections have interfered with the complex interactions between SARS-CoV-2 and the human immune system, then zoomed in on the first problem: the narrow and short-lived immune response that they generate: In Part 2 I laid out the evidence that the injections are causing people to become susceptible to repeated infection, most likely through the mechanism of ‘original antigenic sin’, otherwise known as the Hoskins effect and immune imprinting: And now, in Part 3, I’m going to focus on the consequences to individuals of the inability to clear viral infection that results from a limited and fixated immune response to SARS-CoV-2. Problem #3. An ineffective immune response leads to high viral load and favours viral dissemination It stands to reason that if a person isn’t able to generate a very effective immune response against a virus, the virus will be able to replicate freely in the person’s cells resulting in a high viral load. Here’s why: The initial response to viral infection is handled by the innate immune system, which releases chemicals such as interferons that set in motion a whole suite of antiviral activities, as well as prodding the acquired immune system to initiate the process of developing immunological memory. The acquired immune system produces antibodies and activated T cells which mop up any remaining infection, and ensure a speedier and more targeted immune response to any subsequent attempt by the virus to establish infection. In a person with a normally-functioning immune system, the innate immune response results in the viral replication phase of COVID-19 peaking 3-4 days after infection and then rapidly declining such that the RNA copy number is below an infectious level by day 10. However, because COVID-19 injections suppress the innate immune system’s response to viruses by a number of mechanisms including profoundly impairing type 1 interferon signalling, they permit much more viral replication than occurs in unjabbed people with an intact immune system. And because they fixate the acquired immune response on the now-extinct Wuhan variant of SARS-CoV-2, they hinder the development of immunological memory, permitting prolonged infection and reinfection. The consequences of this interference with normal immune activity are evident in populations with high rates of COVID-19 injection (including high uptake of one or more booster shots), such as Israel and Portugal, which are seeing surging (and completely unseasonal) rates of serious illness, hospitalisation and death attributed to the BA.5 Omicron variant. Israel’s “coronavirus czar” (an interesting title, given that a “czar” is an unelected autocratic ruler) Professor Salman Zarka was quoted as saying that “the new variant BA.5 is quickly gaining traction and is more resistant to vaccines than previous strains.” “The strain caused relatively mild illness among young people, but we can see a rise in hospitalizations.” Prof Salman Zarka, Israel sees 70% spike in number of seriously ill COVID patients within a week In other words, the BA.5 strain has evolved to infect those who have taken one or more COVID injections more efficiently, and while most people will only experience a common cold-like illness from this infection, hospitals are seeing a rise in serious cases. Why? Because BA.5 (and its close cousin, BA.4), appear to replicate very efficiently in human lung tissue, unlike the ‘original’ versions of Omicron which replicated like crazy in the mouth, nose and upper airway, but not in the lungs. Under normal circumstances, if you have a high viral load in your nose, mouth and bronchus, you can expect common cold symptoms such as a headache, stuffy or runny nose, sore throat and cough. These symptoms are caused not by the virus itself but by the immune response to infection. A vigorous innate immune response results in production of inflammatory chemicals that destroy the virus-infected upper airway cells. It’s unpleasant, but not life-threatening. But if a virus manages to replicate efficiently in your lungs, and your immune system destroys large numbers of virus-infected epithelial cells (the cells that line the lungs), gaps start to form in that lining. Large numbers of viral particles can slip through those gaps and enter the blood vessels that line the airways, and from there, they can infect other organs. As noted in Why COVID-19 “vaccines” will never end the pandemic, COVID-19 injections cannot possibly prevent you from getting infected with SARS-CoV-2, because they don’t stimulate the production of secretory IgA which neutralises viruses at the mucosal level; the antibodies produced in response to the injections are confined to the bloodstream. So the only justification for using these injections at all would be for the prevention of severe disease by stimulating the production of neutralising antibodies. But as discussed in Part 2 (and further confirmed here), the antibodies stimulated by COVID-19 injections don’t effectively neutralise the Omicron variant, because they were made to ‘match’ the original Wuhan strain of the virus, which is now completely extinct. This impaired neutralising capacity allows the virus to travel through the bloodstream unhindered, and to infect cells in other organs (viral dissemination). An autopsy study conducted in the pre-Omicron era (January to November 2021) found that people who had died of COVID-19 after receiving either one or two injections had more viral dissemination than people who were uninjected. Only 16 per cent of the uninjected deceased had detectable SARS-CoV-2 outside of their upper airways and lungs, compared to 38 per cent of the double-jabbed and 69 per cent of the single-jabbed. Organs which were found to have been infected by the virus included the heart, kidney, pancreas, spleen and pituitary gland: “A high rate of viral dissemination detected by RT-qPCR within the organ system was an unanticipated result in this study, which was especially accentuated in the partially vaccinated compared to fully vaccinated cases (11 of 16 vs. five of 13, respectively; P = 0.144). In several cases, RT-qPCR identified the RNA of SARS-CoV-2 in all investigated samples, including cerebrospinal fluid, CNS, and soft tissues. This is in strong contrast to a previously published collection of the Augsburg series of nonvaccinated lethal SARS-CoV-2 infections, in which the frequency of viral dissemination was rare, with a rate of only 16% (three of 19)17 instead of 69%.” High viral loads: what drives fatal cases of COVID-19 in vaccinees? – an autopsy study RT-PCR tests on the nasopharynx and lung tissue of injected people who had died of COVID-19 found low cycle thresholds, indicating a high viral load of SARS-CoV-2. All but two of the deceased individuals for whom serology was available had anti-spike antibodies, underlining the lack of protection against infection and viral replication in the airways that these antibodies confer. A strong correlation was found between the absence of antibodies to the nucleocapsid protein of SARS-CoV-2 – which, as discussed in Part 1, is inhibited by COVID-19 injections – and the degree of viral dissemination. Nucleocapsid antibody appears to be critical to stopping the virus from spreading throughout the body, so the fact that injections retard development of these antibodies is deeply concerning. The authors of the study noted the vitally important role of autopsies in understanding the pathophysiology of disease, and indicated their dismay that “reports on autopsies of SARS-CoV-2 breakthrough infections are widely lacking”. Given the rather damning findings of their own study, the dearth of autopsy reports on fatal outcomes of breakthrough infections are perhaps not too surprising. As mentioned, the autopsy study covered deaths that occurred before the emergence of the Omicron variant. Omicron is an immune escape variant – that is, it has acquired mutations that render it resistant to the immune response engendered by COVID-19 injections. While it was initially welcomed as a variant with low pathogenicity (disease-causing potential), as mentioned above, its subvariants BA.4 and 5 appear to have reacquired the tropism for (capacity to infect) the lung that the original Omicron had lost. Let’s consider why this might happen. In a person with an intact immune response, the innate immune system would quickly bring a variant like the original Omicron, which was good at infecting the upper airways but lousy at infecting the lung, under complete control. The result: a common cold-like illness that lasts less than a week and generates enhanced mucosal immunity which is protective against subsequent symptomatic infection. This is the experience that largely uninjected populations, such as South Africa, have had with Omicron; a spike of ‘cases’ that subsided quickly, resulting in fewer deaths than in all previous waves, and was succeeded by a downturn in the death rate. In contrast, heavily-injected Australia has suffered several mortality spikes since the supposedly mild Omicron variant attained dominance, and the death rate continues to tick up inexorably. First let’s look at a comparison of injection rates between the two countries: And now the outcome data: What we are experiencing in Australia is precisely what we would expect to see, given what we know about the impact of these experimental injections on the immune system:
And in the mean time, due to their high viral load, they are exhaling large numbers of viral particles with high contagiousness and tropism for the lung. We’ll explore the consequences of that in Part 4. ![]() By : Rebekah Barnett All cause deaths are up by 17.5% in Australia's first quarter. Less than half of these deaths are due to Covid-19. In 2022, 44,331 deaths occurred by 31 March, which is 6,609, or 17.5% more than the historical average. Of these deaths, 3, 111 are attributed to Covid-19. These deaths account for 47% of the 6, 609 increase on the historical average. That leaves 3, 498 excess deaths unaccounted for from Jan - Mar 2022. What could be the cause for these excess deaths? In times like these, it’s best to ask the experts. In April this year, QLD Minister for Health and Ambulance Services, Yvette D'Ath revealed a 40% rise in code 1 emergency calls to its ambulance services. Watch her explanation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDf3un2f_dU&feature=emb_logo “I don’t think anyone can explain why we saw a 40% jump in code 1s… I’ll walk into an ambulance service and they’ll say, we had a 30% increase in code 1s yesterday. Can’t tell you why. We just had a lot of heart attacks and chest pains and trouble breathing, you know, respiratory issues. Sometimes you just can’t explain why those things happen.” D'Ath confirms that she cannot provide an explanation for the sudden spike in heart attacks, chest pains and breathing difficulties. Perhaps the media can offer some insight. Journalists are experienced in asking probing questions and identifying key themes. Climate change, gardening, tight socks and sleep. There it is, folks. Or should I say, folx.
"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back." — Carl Sagan |
AuthorOur articles and rebuttal pieces are written by our writers on our volunteer team Archives
April 2023
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