 What is 'long COVID', who's really at risk of developing it, and why? Back in November 2021, I wrote an article called The “long COVID” PSYOP, about the weaponisation of the syndrome of persistent postviral symptoms after SARS-CoV-2 infection, aka 'postacute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2' (PASC), aka 'long-haul COVID', aka 'long COVID'. In that article, I stressed that postviral syndromes do genuinely occur after a wide variety of viral infections, but that the threat of 'long COVID' had been blown out of all proportion to its actual prevalence and severity. I also contended that one of the principle motivations for doing so was to terrorise people into accepting an experimental vaccine which they were (falsely) promised would protect them against this bogeyman. Since then, numerous articles have been published on long COVID which only confirm my thesis from 16 months ago. Over the next few posts, I'm going to walk you through some of these studies. Let's get started with a study that set out to discover whether teenagers are at risk of detrimental psychological and cognitive outcomes of COVID-19: Study #1: Comparison of mental health outcomes in seropositive and seronegative adolescents during the COVID19 pandemicTop-line summary: There was no difference in the prevalence of neurocognitive, general pain and mood symptoms in adolescents who had been infected with SARS-CoV-2 vs those who had not. The long version:In this study, 1560 German high school students underwent regular blood tests for antibodies to SARS-CoV-2, indicating that they had been exposed to the virus (with or without developing symptoms of infection). The adolescents also responded to a 12 question long COVID survey which asked them if they had experienced any of the following symptoms in the previous seven days: difficulty concentrating, memory loss, listlessness, headache, abdominal pain, muscle or joint pain, reduced physical capacity, insomnia, or changes in mood (happy/sad/angry/tense). Rather worryingly, each of these symptoms was reported by at least one-third of the students in the previous seven days... but there was no statistically significant difference between reporting rates in kids who had been exposed to SARS-CoV-2 vs those who hadn't, with one strange and inexplicable exception: those who had been infected were significantly less likely to report having experienced sad mood (indicated by the asterisk in the figure below). Go figure.  Female students reported a consistently higher prevalence of neurocognitive, pain and mood symptoms compared to male students, in keeping with a large body of research showing that a mental health 'gender gap' opens up in adolescence and persists through adulthood, with females having significantly higher prevalence of common mental health disorders than males (particularly in countries with the greatest commitment to gender equality, paradoxically enough). There was no difference in the prevalence of long COVID symptoms in adolescents who already knew they had had a SARS-CoV-2 infection vs those who were found to have antibodies to the virus but didn't report being diagnosed with infection. The authors pointed out that previous studies that had found a high prevalence of symptoms attributed to long COVID in children and adolescents, had no uninfected control group. Furthermore, they suggested that their results indicated that many, if not most, of these symptoms were likely caused or exacerbated by the impact of public health policies such as school closures and (anti)social distancing on the well-being of young people. Implications of this study:The threat of a tsunami of long COVID in children and adolescents has not materialised. Ill-considered, poorly-targeted, non-evidence-based pandemic policies have had a far more negative impact on young people's well-being than COVID-19 itself. Study #2: Associations of Depression, Anxiety, Worry, Perceived Stress, and Loneliness Prior to Infection With Risk of Post–COVID-19 ConditionsTop-line summary: People who were already experiencing psychological distress before experiencing a SARS-CoV-2 infection are more likely to report symptoms of 'long COVID'. The long version:This study recruited nearly 55 000 participants, who were already enrolled in one of three large, long-running and predominantly female cohort studies: the Nurses’ Health Study II, Nurses’ Health Study 3, and the Growing Up Today Study. The average age of participants was 57.5 years, and nearly two in five (38 per cent) were employed in health care. Participants were eligible to participate if they had no evidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection in April 2020. They answered a questionnaire to assess their levels of depression, anxiety, worry about COVID-19, perceived stress, and loneliness at baseline, and were then followed up with periodic surveys on their psychological function, COVID-19-related symptoms, degree of life impairment and any positive SARS-CoV-2 test results, until November 2021. Fascinatingly, during 19 months of follow-up, while a supposedly highly-contagious respiratory virus was supposedly wreaking havoc on the world, only six per cent of participants reported a positive result on a SARS-CoV-2 antibody, antigen, or polymerase chain reaction test. Remember, 38 per cent of participants were actively employed as health care workers during the study, and presumably many of them were directly involved with the care of patients diagnosed with COVID-19, and most or all would have undergone regular testing. Yet 94 per cent of participants didn't get infected. Of participants who did report a positive SARS-CoV-2 test result during the follow-up period, 44 per cent reported post–COVID-19 conditions. Of these, 87 per cent said their symptoms lasted two months or longer, and 56 per cent reported at least occasional daily life impairment related to post–COVID-19 conditions. Get the appThe most common symptoms were fatigue (56 per cent), smell or taste problems (44.6 per cent), shortness of breath (25.5 per cent), confusion/disorientation/brain fog (24.5 per cent), and memory issues (21.8 per cent). After adjustment for demographic factors, all the types of psychological distress assessed at baseline were significantly associated with an increased risk of post–COVID-19 conditions:
Check out this forest plot, which depicts the magnitude of various risk factors for predicting long COVID (the further the coloured symbol is to the right of the vertical line, the higher the risk; symbols to the left of the line indicate reduced risk):  Another interesting finding was that the only long COVID symptoms that tended to be more common in participants who were not psychologically distressed at baseline were the symptoms most characteristic of COVID-19 itself: persistent cough, and problems with taste and smell:  It was the more nonspecific symptoms - such as fatigue, brain fog, mood changes - that were more likely to be reported in participants with pre-infection psychological distress. So does that mean that the persistent symptoms reported by psychologically distressed people are 'all in their heads'? No, say the researchers. Here's their proposed mechanism that links a perturbed mind to long COVID symptoms: "Inflammation and immune dysregulation may link psychological distress with post–COVID-19 conditions. Distress is associated with chronic systemic inflammation, resulting in sustained production of proinflammatory cytokines and reactive oxygen species.19-23 Inflammatory cytokines have been proposed as possible causes of respiratory, neurological, cardiovascular, muscular, and gastrointestinal long-term COVID-19 symptoms.51-53 In addition, stress activates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, which can lead to chronic immune suppression. Immunosuppressive conditions have been found to be associated with risk of persistent symptoms after COVID-19,12 but findings were not conclusive.13,54,55 Furthermore, autoantibodies have been associated with both mental health conditions and post–COVID-19 conditions.14,56 In the central nervous system, mental health disorders are associated with chronic low-grade inflammation and microglia activation, which may cause cognitive impairment and long-term fatigue.57 Hypometabolism in the frontal lobe and cerebellum, a pathopsychological change associated with major depression, has also been implicated in post–COVID-19 fatigue.58-60" Associations of Depression, Anxiety, Worry, Perceived Stress, and Loneliness Prior to Infection With Risk of Post–COVID-19 Conditions In other words, there are measurable disturbances in the physiology of people who are suffering from psychological distress, and these disturbances have profound and multifactorial effects on the ability of these people to fight off infection and recover from its effects. (I’ve discussed the link between inflammation and impaired psychological and physical functioning in several previous articles, including Inflammation: why you’re fat, sick, tired, depressed and in pain… and what to do about it, Rumination inflammation and Hearts, minds and bodies on fire: Loneliness, social isolation, inflammation and COVID-19.) Implications of this study:People presenting with long COVID should be assessed for psychological distress, and the treatment plan must include comprehensive and effective strategies for addressing it. Thank you for reading Empowered! This post is public so feel free to share it. Study #3: Long-lasting Symptoms After an Acute COVID-19 Infection and Factors Associated With Their ResolutionTop-line summary: The factors most strongly associated with having long COVID are those most strongly associated with having any chronic disease: obesity, older age, and being anxious or depressed. The long version:This study involved over 53 000 participants in three French population-based cohorts, who were surveyed about persistent COVID-19 symptoms, defined as "symptoms occurring during the acute infection and lasting 2 or more months". Of those who were infected by SARS-CoV-2 during the first wave of COVID-19 in France (confirmed by antibody testing), fully one third reported no symptoms of COVID-19 whatsoever. Of those who did report acute symptoms, 90 per cent were fully recovered within 12 months, and 92 per cent after 18 months. The persistent symptoms that were least likely to resolve were memory loss, sleep disorders, joint pain, heart palpitations, loss of taste or smell and attention or concentration disorders:  Where things get really interesting though, is the analysis of factors associated with delayed recovery. Those factors were: being older than 40 (and especially older than 60), female, anxious or depressed, obese, suffering from chronic respiratory disease, having five or more symptoms of acute COVID-19, or having a history of cancer, diabetes or cigarette smoking. (After statistical adjustment for unspecified factors, older age, female sex, obesity, history of cancer or smoking, and having five or more acute COVID-19 symptoms remained statistically significant.):  In other words, being already in a state of poor physical and/or mental health made participants less likely to recover from a viral respiratory illness. What a surprise.
Implications of this study:Fat, sick people are more likely to become seriously ill when they contract a respiratory illness (as I explained in my previous article When Two Pandemics Collide: How obesity affects COVID-19) and more likely to have a delayed or incomplete recovery. That's because they're fat and sick. If our 'health authorities' were genuinely interested in reducing the burden of 'long COVID' they would be pivoting our disease care system to a true health care system focused on preventing chronic illness and treating it with evidence-based lifestyle medicine programs, rather than squandering taxpayers' dollars on an ever-growing arsenal of pharmaceuticals. Stay tuned for Part 2 of this series! https://robynchuter.substack.com/p/long-covid-truth-lies-and-propaganda https://substack.com/profile/29386713-robyn-chuter
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 ... and that’s good news My very first posts on Substack formed a three-part series called ‘The Death of Science’ (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). In Part 1 of this series, I dissected a 2017 document produced by the World Health Organization, titled ‘Best practice guidance: How to respond to vocal vaccine deniers in public’. As I wrote in that previous article – which I strongly encourage you to read, or re-read, in full as it’s highly relevant as background to this post – “This document, which is intended to equip spokespeople of health authorities to deal with ‘vocal vaccine deniers’ – defined as ‘individuals who do not accept recommended vaccines, are not open to a change of mind no matter the scientific evidence and are actively advocating against vaccination’ – is a true masterwork of anti-science doublethink. The authors do not trouble themselves with providing any scientific evidence to support their advocacy for universal uptake of all ‘recommended’ vaccines, nor do they address the numerous examples of blatant conflicts of interest that plague the process by which novel vaccines become ‘recommended’. Instead, they not only rely on the spurious claim of ‘scientific consensus’ for such advocacy, but strongly advise their target audience – health spokespeople – to do the same. Such spokespeople are explicitly urged to avoid engaging in open scientific debate with those who raise questions about vaccination, but instead to utilise ‘psychological research on persuasion’ and ‘training in rhetoric’ including story-telling, expression of moral conviction, gestures and facial expressions, and the use of sound bites, to ‘frame messages’ – not to the so-called ‘vocal vaccine denier’ but to other members of the audience who may have concerns about vaccination but have not yet taken a firm position on vaccination. With no apparent awareness of their internal contradictions, the authors of this document smear ‘vaccine deniers’ as having ‘characteristics that are similar to other types of science deniers and to religious and political fanatics in that they adhere to a belief that is impossible to challenge, even if challenge is the fundamental tenet of scientific progress’, while also acknowledging that many of these ‘science deniers’ are ‘very highly educated individuals who are well aware of the available scientific literature’.” The death of science? Part 1 Well, you’ll be thrilled to know that the World Health Organization (WHO) has recently written another handy-dandy guide for public health officials who get paid to gaslight the public:  Its title, ‘Vaccine crisis communication manual: step-by-step guidance for national immunization programmes’, exudes a faint whiff of panic, an impression which grows stronger when one reads the authors’ definition of ‘vaccine crisis’: “This manual defines a vaccine crisis as an event which will most likely or has already eroded public trust in vaccines and/or vaccination and the authorities delivering them and may create uncertainty. This requires immediate action and an effective response to curb the negative impact.” Vaccine crisis communication manual: step-by-step guidance for national immunization programmes, p. iv Oh, you mean events like record excess mortality in Australia, and pretty much every other country that injected a high proportion of its citizens with experimental COVID ‘vaccines’? Yeah, I guess that runs the risk of “erod[ing] public trust”. SubscribeBut what is the “immediate action” and “effective response to curb the negative impact” that the WHO authors call for? Is it, say, a thorough investigation into the “vaccine-related events” in which independent scientists, clinicians and pathologists are invited to pore over the medical records and autopsy reports of people who suffered injuries or death after receiving a vaccine? Or a no-holds-barred inquiry into conflicts of interest in vaccine development, policy, procurement and administration? Or maybe it’s a panel of independent statisticians, data analysts and demographers, convened to do a 360° analysis of the impact of each vaccine on health along the lifespan, and across communities? Silly me. I thought for a moment that they might have been referring to the “negative impact” on the people who suffered “vaccine-related events”. But of course they weren’t. The only “negative impact” that keeps them up at night is the negative impact on the vaccine-industrial complex of growing mistrust of the ever-growing array of jabs that public heath authorities want to press on every man and his dog. 1 As always, I urge you to read the entire document for yourself. I must warn you though, that you may experience a strong urge to vomit, hurl objects at the wall or yell obscenities, so you might want to brew a calming cup of chamomile tea first. Here are some of the key points that jumped out at me: 1. AEFIs are never, ever, ever, caused by vaccines. Ever.The authors were at pains to point out that adverse events following immunisation (AEFI) are not necessarily causally related to vaccination. In fact, in a 32 page document, I counted nine variations on the theme of “just because something bad happens after a person gets a vaccine, doesn’t mean the vaccine caused it” (let me know if I missed any):
In other words, it is taken as a given by the WHO team that their readers will never have to deal with a serious AEFI that was actually caused by any vaccine that has been approved by WHO itself, or any government instrumentality, so the correct response of the “vaccine crisis coordination group” is always to hose down the public’s concerns and reassure them that all vaccines are safe and effective. It follows from this that… 2. Because AEFIs are never caused by vaccines, there is no need to improve pharmacovigilance systems. In fact, there’s barely any need to even mention that they exist.Pharmacovigilance mechanisms such as VAERS, the Yellow Card system and DAEN were set up to collect reports from medical practitioners and the general public on all events that take place after administration of a vaccine (or other pharmaceutical product), so that safety signals can be promptly detected, and thoroughly investigated to either establish or rule out a causal relationship. It is not up to the reporting individual to decide whether the adverse event was causally related, or was merely a coincidence. However, when a new pharmaceutical product has been introduced into a population, the precautionary principle applies, or should apply: all adverse events that take place after administration of the product should be assumed to be causally related until proven otherwise. In a sane world with good governance practices, ‘proven otherwise’ doesn’t mean asking the company that made the product whether they reckon their drug or vaccine dunnit, and then taking their word for it. It also doesn’t mean asking a panel of your buddies with a viper’s nest of conflicts of interest with the vaccine industrial complex, whether a causal relationship exists between adverse events and vaccines. But that’s how the vaccine ‘safety’ system works, in Australia and overseas… which is why we can have safety signals like this…   … and still have the products linked to these adverse events not just available to the public, but aggressively pushed on them. Yet there is only one mention of pharmacovigilance/AEFI systems in the text of the document (on page 8; blink and you’ll miss it), and this is in the context of preparing for vaccine crises – as in, how to do damage control once the excrement has already hit the oscillator – not how to improve the function of such systems in order to enhance public safety. Again, the implicit assumption underlying this document is that all approved vaccines are safe and effective, so members of a “vaccine crisis coordination group” will never, ever be faced with a situation in which an AEFI was actually caused by a vaccine. Therefore, there’s little need for them to familiarise themselves with their jurisdiction’s pharmacovigilance mechanism (if it even has one), let alone to advocate for improvements in its function, or in the analysis of reports made to it. Instead… 3. The sole task of a “vaccine crisis coordination group” is to persuade the public to shut up and take all their damn vaccines, already… oops, I mean, to build the public’s trust in vaccines.Remember, dummies – vaccines are always safe and effective, otherwise the government wouldn’t let those completely trustworthy Big Pharma companies sell them (well, aside from the Cutter incident, the 1976 swine flu vaccine fiasco, the RotaShield rotavirus vaccine debacle, and the 2009 Pandemrix vaccine disaster, just to name a few of the incidents in which vaccines were acknowledged by authorities to be causing an unacceptable level of harm, and withdrawn from the market). So if you’re a right-thinking member of a “vaccine crisis coordination group”, your sole mission in life is to persuade the public to “trust” in the safety and effectiveness of vaccines. The word “trust” (or its antonym, “distrust”) appears no less than 34 times in the document. If “trust” were the trigger word in a drinking game, you’d be blind motherless drunk before you got halfway through reading it. Here are some sample screenshots, just to give you a hint of how central the notion of trust is to this entire enterprise:        Is it just me, or does anyone else feel mildly suspicious about a bunch of WHO flunkeys schooling a bunch of government flunkeys in how to sweet-talk the public into trusting them and the liability-free Big Pharma products they’re peddling? “Just trust me – would I lie to you?” You know what might help in rebuilding “the public’s trust in immunization and the authorities delivering them [sic]”? Thorough and transparent investigation of each and every serious AEFI by regulators, including Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), and full disclosure of the results of these investigations to the public. As opposed to, for instance, TGA suppressing publication of its own causality assessments concluding that COVID ‘vaccines’ directly led to the deaths of four young Australians, including two minor children. (Wanna know TGA’s justification for lying to the public about how many Australians have been killed by COVID jabs? It’s a corker: “The decision maker determined that disclosure of the documents could undermine public confidence and reduce the willingness of the public to report adverse events to the TGA.” BREAKING: Australia’s drug regulator hid vaccine deaths from the public, concerned that ‘disclosure could undermine public confidence’ You can bet your bottom dollar that public confidence would be undermined if they found out that COVID jabs killed two kids and two young adults with their whole lives ahead of them, and who had a statistically zero chance of suffering serious illness or death related to COVID-19. As for how the publicising of these deaths would reduce the public’s willingness to report adverse events, if you can make sense of this complete non sequitur, I’d love to hear from you. I’m sure the government would too; I hear they have plenty of lucrative taxpayer-funded job opportunities for talented bullsh*t artists.) Thank you for reading Empowered! This post is public so feel free to share it. Speaking of spending public money… 4. Members of “vaccine crisis coordination groups” should constantly be snooping on the public to find out what they think of vaccines.If you’ve already played the “trust” drinking game with this document, for god’s sake don’t play it again with “monitor” or you’ll end up with acute liver injury. You’ll find no fewer than 38 mentions of this creepy word in the 32-page document, including these:    That’s a whole lotta monitoring going on. Can you imagine any government agency spending this much time and effort (and money) to track what people think of any other medical product? Why doesn’t the WHO advise governments to “monitor” public opinion about antibiotics, given their acknowledgement of the rapidly-accelerating antibiotic resistance crisis which is already killing close to 100 000 Americans per year? (Meanwhile, there was a total of just 13 deaths from measles between 1999 and 2020, according to the CDC WONDER database.) What’s so bloody special about vaccines, that warrants this extraordinary degree of government intrusion into the lives and even the minds of citizens? A paranoid conspiracy theorist might conjecture that this obsession with vaccines has something to do with an extraordinary sentence penned by British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, in his 1952 book The Impact of Science on Society, namely: “Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible.” This sentence is often cited in isolation, but I’m going to quote it in its full context: “Scientific societies are as yet in their infancy. It may be worth while to spend a few moments in speculating as to possible future developments of those that are oligarchies. It is to be expected that advances in physiology and psychology will give governments much more control over individual mentality than they now have even in totalitarian countries. Fichte 2 laid it down that education should aim at destroying free will, so that, after pupils have left school, they shall be incapable, throughout the rest of their lives, of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished. But in his day this was an unattainable ideal: what he regarded as the best system in existence produced Karl Marx. In future such failures are not likely to occur where there is dictatorship. Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible. Even if all are miserable, all will believe themselves happy, because the government will tell them that they are so.” [emphasis mine] The Impact of Science on Society pp. 65-66 In the oligarchic scientific society of Russell’s nightmares, you’ll own nothing, take all your jabs, and be happy. Yet there’s some good news concealed within this tawdry WHO propaganda piece, namely… 5. The WHO is really scared of people and organisations that ask questions about the safety and efficacy of vaccines.If we were already in Bertrand Russell’s oligarchic scientific society, there would be no need for all this monitoring and trust-building. The WHO wouldn’t have to urge governments to allocate budgets for “vaccine crisis coordination groups”, and the members of such groups wouldn’t have to spend their days combing through random social media posts, and their nights fretting over the threat of “a baseless accusation made by a powerful anti-vaccination group… suddenly gaining widespread attention”. Vaccine Crisis Communication Manual, p. 7At first blush, the phrase “powerful antivaccination group” is patently absurd. The vast majority of vaccine risk awareness groups are founded by the parents of vaccine-injured children (more accurately described as “ex-vaccinators” than “antivaccinators”) and run on the smell of an oily rag, relying on volunteers and small-bickies donations from the public. In stark contrast, the global vaccine market was worth a cool US$141 billion in 2021, while governments have unfettered access to taxpayers’ money to purchase celebrity endorsements and favourable media coverage of vaccines, in order to persuade the tax cattle to line up for their shots. And yet the vaccine industrial complex Goliath lives in such terror of the stones hurled at it by “antivaxx” David that it devotes considerable resources to developing strategies to deflect them. Why? Because Goliath needs our consent. Rounding up non-compliers and force-vaccinating them at gunpoint is (perhaps) technically feasible, but costly in both financial and trust capital. Nation states that claim to operate on democratic principles must use soft power to achieve domestic policy objectives, or risk electoral backlash. And that means that we the people hold more power than we realise. Peaceful mass non-compliance with the immoral, illogical and unscientific edicts that governments have issued over the past three years – mask mandates, physical distancing rules, business closures, limits on funeral and wedding attendance, shutting out visitors from nursing homes and the bedsides of dying people, and of course, mandates to take an experimental ‘vaccine’ that was never tested on its ability to stop transmission – would have not just led to the end of the diktats themselves, but to the governments issuing them. There simply wouldn't be enough police to issue tickets, or courts to hear contested fines, or prison cells to lock the noncompliers up, if thousands of people and businesses in every suburb and town across this country had just declared ‘Freedom-I won’t!’ And then there were none (Please, please take a few minutes out of your busy day and read Eric Frank Russell's short story, And Then There Were None.) If, after thorough evaluation of the evidence, you decide that a particular vaccine (or any other pharmaceutical product) is not the best option for you, your child or your pet, you can just say no. There may be consequences to your choice: you may have to get a different job, or make alternative arrangements for the care and education of your child, or find a new vet. However, the consequences of complying, either against your better judgement or because you have simply outsourced your decision-making to ‘experts’, may also be serious. Just ask all the parents of vaccine-injured children… or the people who submitted to COVID jabs to ‘keep their jobs’, but are now too disabled to work (I have several clients in this position). And when your government has become so merged with the vaccine industrial complex that it is no longer possible to discern where one ends and the other begins, it is no longer worthy of your consent, and you have a moral duty to   Do vaccines increase or decrease the number of children who die in the first year of life? Two researchers set out to answer this question. You'll never guess what happened next. Back in April 2022, I wrote two articles about the impact that the COVID-19 ‘vaccine’ debacle has had on the confidence of the general public and the medical profession in vaccines in general. In the first of those articles, Why you need to stop saying “I’m not an antivaxxer, but…”, I mentioned the 8.93 per cent decline in Florida’s infant mortality rate that coincided with a marked drop in the percentage of children who were fully compliant with the CDC-recommended childhood vaccination schedule. Specifically, there was a 14.1 percentage point drop in children aged 24 to 35 months in the state who were ‘up to date’ with their shots, from 93.4 per cent in 2020 to 79.3 per cent in 2021, and a 5.8 percentage point drop in 1-2 year olds, from 73 per cent in 2020 to 67.2 per cent in 2021. Huh. But aren’t vaccines supposed to reduce the number of infant deaths by protecting tiny babies with immature immune systems against dangerous infectious diseases? Well, that’s the theory. As I mentioned in that previous article, according to John and Sonia McKinlay’s exhaustive analysis of US data, medical interventions for infectious diseases (including vaccines, antibiotics and diphtheria toxoid) accounted for a measly 3.5 per cent of the steep reduction in total mortality that occurred between 1900 and 1973 in that country; most of that reduction was due to the dramatic decline in deaths from infectious disease. The vast bulk of the decline in infectious disease mortality was directly attributable to ‘old fashioned’ public health interventions including provision of clean water and uncontaminated food, sanitation, and improved housing standards. And that brings me to three studies which grapple with the important question, ‘Do childhood vaccines help or hinder the attempt to reduce infant mortality?’ Reading and dissecting these studies is an object lesson in how science should and should not be conducted, and the types of statistical sleights-of-hand that researchers can use to torture the data until it confesses, even to crimes that were never committed. These studies essentially constitute a debate between two teams of researchers, one calling vaccine orthodoxy into question, and the other staunchly defending it. Let’s step through these, in the order in which they were written: Study #1: ‘Infant mortality rates regressed against number of vaccine doses routinely given: Is there a biochemical or synergistic toxicity?’This study, published in the journal Human & Experimental Toxicology in 2011, was coauthored by Neil Miller and Gary Goldman. You might remember Goldman from my previous article, Backlash: How the vaccine pushers turned true believers into vaccine sceptics – Part 2. In 2002, he quit his job as a research analyst when his employer, the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, refused to publish his discovery that their paediatric chickenpox vaccination campaign was associated with a dramatic increase in the incidence of shingles in both children and adults. This agency then collaborated with the CDC in a lengthy harassment campaign to try to prevent Goldman from publishing his findings independently. Rather than being intimidated into silence, Goldman’s bruising experiences prompted him to become curious about the safety and efficacy of vaccines in general. In collaboration with Miller, Goldman conducted a linear regression analysis on the relationship between infant mortality rates in 34 highly developed countries, and the number of vaccine doses on the immunisation schedules in those countries.
Importantly, most of the nations included in this study had coverage rates in the 90–99 per cent range for the most commonly recommended vaccines – DTaP, polio, hepatitis B, and Hib (when these vaccines were included in the schedule), minimising the impact of any potential confounding effect of variability in coverage rates. Remember this – its importance will become evident when we discuss Study #2. Here are the 34 countries with the lowest infant mortality rates in the world, as of 2009:  (Does it strike you as odd that Cuba has a lower IMR than the wealthy country that has maintained an embargo on it since 1962, crippling its economic development and hindering its access to medical supplies?) And here are the number of vaccine doses on each nation’s vaccination schedule, as of 2008-2009:  From Infant mortality rates regressed against number of vaccine doses routinely given: Is there a biochemical or synergistic toxicity?After performing an initial exploratory analysis which indicated that there was indeed a relationship between the number of vaccine doses and IMR, Goldman and Miller then compared average IMRs between groups of nations whose vaccination schedules specified 12-14, 15-17, 18-20, 21-23 and 24-26 doses of vaccines before the age of 12 months. They produced the following chart, which indicates a statistically significant difference in IMRs between countries that give 12–14 vaccine doses and (a) those giving 21–23 doses (61 per cent higher infant mortality rate) and (b) those giving 24–26 doses (83 per cent higher IMR):  (For those unfamiliar with statistics, ‘r‘, or Pearson’s coefficient, represents the strength of association between two variables – in this case, number of vaccine doses and infant mortality rate. The value of r is always between +1 and –1. The closer to +1 r is, the stronger the positive association between the variables. The p value, or probability value, is a statistical measurement used to validate a hypothesis against observed data. The lower the p value (i.e. the smaller the number), the greater the statistical significance of the observed difference; or, in layman’s terms, the less likely it is that the result is due to simple random chance rather than a true association.) In the discussion section of their paper, Goldman and Miller point out that many developing nations have extremely high vaccine coverage rates yet their IMRs continue to be appalling, and emphasise that no amount of vaccines will compensate for the absence of foundational public health measures: “For example, Gambia requires its infants to receive 22 vaccine doses during infancy and has a 91%–97% national vaccine coverage rate, yet its IMR [infant mortality rate] is 68.8. Mongolia requires 22 vaccine doses during infancy, has a 95%–98% coverage rate, and an IMR of 39.9.8,9 These examples appear to confirm that IMRs will remain high in nations that cannot provide clean water, proper nutrition, improved sanitation, and better access to health care. As developing nations improve in all of these areas a critical threshold will eventually be reached where further reductions of the infant mortality rate will be difficult to achieve because most of the susceptible infants that could have been saved from these causes would have been saved. Further reductions of the IMR must then be achieved in areas outside of these domains. As developing nations ascend to higher socio-economic living standards, a closer inspection of all factors contributing to infant deaths must be made.” Infant mortality rates regressed against number of vaccine doses routinely given: Is there a biochemical or synergistic toxicity? They go on to discuss the introduction of ‘sudden infant death syndrome’ to medical nomenclature in 1969, after national immunisation campaigns were initiated in the US in the 1960s, and its rapid rise to become the leading cause of postneonatal mortality by 1980. They speculate that overvaccination may impose a toxic burden on infants’ health, and call for rich nations with high vaccine doses and relatively high IMRs to “take a closer look at their infant death tables to determine if some fatalities are possibly related to vaccines though reclassified as other causes”. The response to this study by academics and policy-makers was deafening silence, until late in September 2021, when a professor from Brigham Young University, Elizabeth Bailey, and several of her students, produced an as-yet-unpublished paper which accused Goldman and Miller of “inappropriate data exclusion and other statistical flaws”. Which brings us to… Study #2: ‘Infant Vaccination Does Not Predict Increased Infant Mortality Rate: Correcting Past Misinformation’This paper was first uploaded to the pre-print server medRxiv in September 2021. It has since undergone three revisions without yet being accepted for publication in any peer-reviewed journal. It is a sign of the extraordinary times that we live in, that in the very title of their paper, the authors denigrate Goldman and Miller’s peer-reviewed, published study as “misinformation”. This is not how scientists behave when they wish to challenge each others’ views. But as we shall see, this is not primarily a scientific paper, but a propaganda piece that explicitly aims to reduce the general ‘vaccine hesitancy’ that “has intensified due to the rapid development and distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine” – by which I presume they mean that the public has finally twigged to the fact that the inadequately-tested, rushed-to-market COVID-19 ‘vaccines’ are neither safe nor effective, and are wondering whether their asleep-at-the-wheel regulatory agencies have been similarly lax with all the other vaccines that are pumped into them, and their children. (Hint: they have been.) The authors begin their paper with the stock trope that vaccines are “viewed as one of the greatest public health successes of all time”. As examples of that success, they cite smallpox, poliomyelitis, measles, rubella, tetanus, diphtheria, Haemophilus influenzae type b and unspecified “others”. Yet the McKinlay paper cited above concluded that medical measures made little to no impact on deaths from measles, diphtheria, smallpox and poliomyelitis in the twentieth century; the CDC acknowledges that tetanus mortality had already markedly decreased before routine vaccination began; rubella mortality was already negligible before a vaccine was developed (although this usually benign disease can wreak havoc on the developing foetus when contracted during pregnancy); and implementation of Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) vaccination has resulted in an increase in infections caused by non-vaccine preventable strains, and antibiotic-resistant strains of the bacteria. The authors then go on to claim that “addressing vaccine hesitancy by increasing public confidence in vaccine safety has the potential to positively impact public health and save lives”. To reiterate my earlier point, the contention that vaccines have, do, or will “save lives” is called into question by the McKinlay paper. Furthermore, the net public health impact of vaccination has never been assessed, as this would require a comparative longitudinal study of the overall health of vaccinated vs unvaccinated groups within the same population, and the CDC admits that it has not conducted such a study, nor does it hold any record of such a study. Finally, the authors get down to the real purpose of the paper: discrediting Goldman and Miller’s study. They seem to be particularly bothered that “this manuscript is in the top 5% of all research outputs since its publication, being shared extensively on social media with tens of thousands of likes and re-shares” (perhaps especially since they can’t even manage to get their own paper published in a peer-reviewed journal after nearly a year and a half, let alone shared widely). Their chief criticism is that Goldman and Miller cherry-picked data, selecting only 34 countries out of a dataset that included 185 countries. In addition, they accused Goldman and Miller of relying on vaccine schedules rather than data on actual vaccine doses administered. They conclude that the chief determinant of IMR is actually the Human Development Index, and that, in complete contradiction to Goldman and Miller’s conclusions, “fewer vaccine doses in the schedule were predictive of higher infant mortality rate.” How did Goldman and Miller respond to this critique of their paper? Let’s turn to… Study #3: ‘Reaffirming a Positive Correlation Between Number of Vaccine Doses and Infant Mortality Rates: A Response to Critics’Published in the peer-reviewed journal Cureus on 2 February 2023, this paper examines the claims made in Study #2, and reanalyses the data from the original study published in 2011. As always, I urge you to read the paper (and the other two referenced above) for yourself, but here’s my quick-and-dirty summary:
 Table 1: Data characteristics and linear regression analysis outcomes of original Miller-Goldman study and the reanalysis by Nysetvold et al. aWhen the residuals are not normally distributed, the hypothesis is that they are not from a random dataset. The amount of residual error in the model is inconsistent across the full range of observed data. bThe model is sensitive to these outliers that represent poor quality data from Third World nations with the highest IMRs. This has the effect of changing the magnitude of the correlation coefficient and altering both the slope and y-intercept of the best-fit line. cThe linear regression analysis of Nysetvold et al. is irredeemably confounded due to varying vaccination rates and socioeconomic disparities between developed and Third World nations that have the effect of attenuating the significant positive correlation between IMR and number of vaccine doses that was found among nations with top-ranked IMRs.
It gets even worse. In the supplementary material for the paper, Goldman and Miller reveal that in earlier versions of their critics’ paper, the authors made several libellous statements that were so egregious that “an attorney contacted a faculty chairman to inform the Bailey team that their article sets a poor example to students that libel is acceptable, and suggested that they remove their malicious and false statements prior to going forward with publication. Although this language was adjusted in later versions, it served to reveal author bias and demonstrated a misunderstanding and misuse of basic scientific methodologies.” The original version of the paper also made false claims about the funding source for Goldman and Miller’s paper, and, despite claiming that they used an “identical dataset” for IMRs as that which was used in Study #1, they in fact used a different dataset retrieved from an alternate resource containing less recent IMR data; as one example, “the IMR for Sierra Leone in the CIA dataset that we used is 81.86 but the Bailey team has it listed as 154.43 and used this figure in their analyses.” But yeah, apart from all that, it was quality work. Thank you for reading Empowered! This post is public so feel free to share it. Goldman and Miller go on to discuss the biological plausibility of an association between infant vaccination and sudden infant death, citing:
“A positive correlation between the number of vaccine doses and IMRs is detectable in the most highly developed nations but attenuated in the background noise of nations with heterogeneous socioeconomic variables that contribute to high rates of infant mortality, such as malnutrition, poverty, and substandard health care.” Reaffirming a Positive Correlation Between Number of Vaccine Doses and Infant Mortality Rates: A Response to Critics Why does this matter?The significance of this tale of three papers goes way beyond a somewhat entertaining spat between two teams of data nerds. (“Cop this regression analysis straight in your goolies! Right back at you with a devastating odds ratio analysis to your solar plexus!”) The salient difference between Goldman and Miller, and Elizabeth Bailey and her coauthors, is that the former are independent researchers while the latter are attached to an educational institution. As evolutionary biologists Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein frequently point out in their Dark Horse podcast, universities have been entirely captured by an entity that might be described as the medical-academic-pharmaceutical-industrial complex. Their apparatchiks, like Elizabeth Bailey, perform something that has the cosmetic appearance of science but is definitively not science, in the sense of conforming to the scientific method and the attitude of radical scepticism that underpins it. If you recall Gary Goldman’s story, which I recounted in Backlash: How the vaccine pushers turned true believers into vaccine sceptics – Part 2, he took a job as a research analyst with the LA County Health Department having never questioned the safety or effectiveness of vaccines. However, when the data that he was analysing indicated that chickenpox vaccination was leading to significant harm in the form of increased incidence of shingles, Goldman followed those data where they led, even though this meant revising his entire belief system (not to mention losing his job and suffering significant harassment by his former employer). The lesson of the last three years of COVIDiocy has been that only a tiny minority of scientists display this level of integrity and commitment to uncovering the truth and disseminating it to the public. And when they do so, they are vehemently opposed by the majority, who have, through some strange quirk of human psychology, assumed the interests of the medical-academic-pharmaceutical-industrial complex as their own. Substacker El Gato Malo (the Bad Cat) frequently writes of the politicisation of science and the need to open data to public scrutiny and crowd-source its analysis through a genuine peer review system. This is the way of the future. Open the books. Free the data. Question everything.  By: Robyn Chuter Health authorities have repeatedly stated that you're more at risk of developing myocarditis from COVID-19 than from the 'vaccine'. They lied. Remember when the COVID-19 ‘vaccines’ were sold to you as completely safe and effective? Sure you do.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=-348hoZNidA&embeds_euri=https%3A%2F%2Frobynchuter.substack.com%2F&feature=emb_logo (Wow. That didn’t age well.) Remember when the authorities who told you they were completely safe and effective, admitted that they ‘very rarely’ cause myocarditis and pericarditis (collectively called ‘myopericarditis’)? You almost certainly do. Remember when those authorities told you that you should take them anyway, and give them to your kids, because the risk of developing myopericarditis (or other cardiac pathologies) as a complication of COVID-19 was greater than the risk of developing it as an adverse reaction to the experimental transfection agent? And remember when they told you that this very very rare myopericarditis was very very mild? I’ll bet you do. Remember when a cohort study of 23.1 million residents across four Nordic countries found that the risk of developing myocarditis in the 28 days after two injections of the Pfizer transfection agent was 5.31 times higher in males 16 to 24 years of age than it was in the pre-‘vaccination’ period, during which SARS-CoV-2 was widely circulating? In 16-24 year old males who received two shots of the Moderna product, the risk was 13.83 times higher than in the pre-‘vaccination’ period. Oh, you don’t remember this study being loudly trumpeted by the corporate media? Funny, that. It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the fact that this study clearly showed that the risk of injection-induced myocarditis in young men far exceeded their risk of infection-induced myocarditis, could it? Remember when researchers found that the incidence of myopericarditis was 162.2 per million after dose two in US males aged 12–15 (that’s a risk of 1 case of myopericarditis per 6200 boys who received two doses), and 93 per million in males aged 16–17 (risk of 1 in 10,800), compared to a background rate of 2.1/million cases per week in boys); that 86.9 per cent of patients were hospitalised (does that sound ‘mild’ to you?); and that the risk of being hospitalised for myopericarditis after two shots of mRNA transfection agent was 2.8 times higher than the risk of being hospitalised for/with COVID in boys aged 12–15, and 1.6 times higher in boys aged 16–17? You mightn’t remember this one, because the pro-injection ‘experts’ tried to bury it, insisting that it was inappropriate to use the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), which was set up by the US government to detect safety signals from vaccines, to conduct research on a safety signal of a vaccine. Because Science™. Remember when Swedish researchers published a report on the autopsy findings on 37 people who had died at the Karolinska University Hospital of acute respiratory distress syndrome attributed to COVID-19, and found no replicating SARS-CoV-2 in the heart tissue of the deceased people, and no indications of myocarditis? “Furthermore, any sign of virus-induced cytopathic effects or any antiviral lymphocytic reaction typical for viral myocarditis was not detected in any cases. Also, signs of antiviral inflammation were not observed. Some studies claim there is a sign of lymphocyte infiltration in the Covid-19 heart [24]. For example, multifocal lymphocytic myocarditis was observed in a small fraction of the cases in a multicenter COVID-19 pathological study [25]. Furthermore, quantitative analysis of inflammatory infiltrates in COVID-19 hearts showed a higher number of CD68+ cells proposing that COVID-19 may cause a different type of myocarditis than conventional viral myocarditis, one that is associated with diffusely infiltrative monocyte/macrophage cells [26]. However, we didn’t detect any lymphocyte or granulocytic infiltration in the Covid-19 cohort as a hallmark of myocarditis.” Morphological changes without histological myocarditis in hearts of COVID-19 deceased patients No? You don’t remember that one? I guess it didn’t quite fit the narrative that COVID-19 myocarditis was much more dangerous than injection-induced myocarditis, did it? Remember when an international team of researchers published a review of all the reports that they could find of people who died of/with COVID-19 in the pre-injection era (a total of 548 deceased people), whose autopsy reports identified cardiovascular pathologies, and found a “low prevalence of myocarditis in COVID-19”? “The median reported prevalence of extensive myocarditis, multifocal active myocarditis, and focal active myocarditis were all 0.0%, and the median prevalence of inflammatory infiltrate without myocyte damage was 0.6%.” COVID-19–Associated cardiac pathology at the postmortem evaluation: a collaborative systematic review If you don’t remember it, that’s probably because it received next to no publicity. I wonder why. Finally, do you remember when Israeli researchers published a cohort study of almost 200 000 people, comparing rates of myopericarditis for which hospitalisation was required (i.e. moderate to severe cases), in the pre-injection era, in people who had had COVID-19 (defined as at least one positive PCR test for SARS-CoV-2; yes, I know this is a nonsensical diagnostic criterion but it’s the one the Branch Covidians use, so I’m happy to see them hoist with their own petard), to rates in those who had not… and finding that there was no increase in rates of either myocarditis or pericarditis in people who had had COVID? The rate of myocarditis in post-COVID-19 patients was 0.0046 per cent, while in the control group who had never had COVID-19 it was… 0.0046 per cent. 0.0056 per cent of post-COVID-19 patients were diagnosed with pericarditis, compared to 0.0088 per cent of controls. What? You haven’t heard of this study? Your doctor didn’t tell you about it, even though it was published in April of last year? Well, if you weren’t told about any of these studies before being injected with a novel RNA transfection agent, you weren’t given informed consent. If you were told that your teenage son’s risk of getting myocarditis was higher if he got COVID than if got the shot, neither of you was given informed consent (in fact, you were outright lied to). As the Australian Medical Professionals Society (AMPS) has pointed out in a letter sent to all Australian doctors on 11 January 2023, the federal government, the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency and the Australian Immunisation Handbook all oblige Australian doctors and other vaccination providers to obtain informed consent before administering any treatment, including vaccines (or products deceptively labelled as vaccines). “For consent to be legally valid…It must be given voluntarily in the absence of undue pressure, coercion or manipulation…It can only be given after the potential risks and benefits of the relevant vaccine, the risks of not having it, and any alternative options have been explained to the person.” Australian Immunisation Handbook Furthermore, AMPS notified doctors that they do not have any government liability protection with respect to the novel COVID-19 transfection agents. And do you know what that means? If you, or a loved one, developed myopericarditis (or any other adverse event that your doctor should reasonably have known about) after receiving a COVID-19 injection, and you were not informed of the risk of this event prior to being injected, you can sue the person who administered the product to you. Can you imagine how quickly this entire disastrous enterprise could be stopped, if every single person who suffered an adverse reaction, and every single person who lost a loved one, sued the ‘vaccine’ provider for failing to give them informed consent? Professional indemnity insurance premiums would shoot through the roof, doctors and other vaccine providers would refuse to administer the shots for fear of being sued… and who knows, doctors might even remember that their role is to care for their individual patients, not to serve as the commissars of the biosecurity state. P.S. If you are part of, or know of, a legal firm willing to represent people injured by the experimental injections, please provide contact details in the comments section below. Legal firms who may be able to assist you with filing suit against a vaccine provider who did not give you informed consent: https://www.advocateme.com.au/ https://aflsolicitors.com.au/about http://woodburnsolicitors.com/home.html https://www.sydneycriminallawyers.com.au/   (With apologies to Paul Simon) In last week's post, The Great Australian Die-Off, I discussed the alarming increase in excess mortality - deaths above the expected level, in a given population over a given time-period - that has occurred in Australia since the roll-out of the experimental RNA transfection agents (falsely marketed to the public as 'vaccines') began. As I noted in that article, there was no excess mortality in Australia in the pre-injection phase of the declared COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, Neil and Fenton's analysis of data from around the world indicates that neither COVID itself, nor long COVID, nor lockdowns, nor rationing of healthcare services, can explain the excess mortality seen in the 30-odd countries for which they could obtain adequate data on each variable. I strongly encourage you to read their article The Devil's Advocate: An Exploratory Analysis of 2022 Excess Mortality before continuing on, as it neatly dispenses with the pathetic (non)explanations for excess mortality that the legacy media have vomited up in service of their corporate masters, such as this pathetic waste of cybercharacters from that former bastion of journalistic integrity, the Sydney Morning Herald, or this piece of scintillating stenography ("We asked the TGA if the jabs are killing people, and they said 'Nah, course not!'") from the Canberra Weekly, or this remarkably fact-free 'fact check' from the Trusted News Initiative's bottom-shelf whore, the ABC. Of course, the fact that jab-happy nations are racking up excess mortality whereas largely unjabbed Africa has shrugged off COVID while racking up lower excess mortality than Eurasia and the Americas, does not prove that the experimental transfection agents are responsible for the unexpected deaths. As I discussed in If the COVID-19 injections work, why are more people dying? Part 2, the Bradford Hill criteria, otherwise known as Hill’s Criteria for Causality, are used to distinguish causal from non-causal associations between phenomena. Here are those criteria:
Back when I wrote that article, far less was known about biologically plausible mechanism/s by which the transfection agents could cause injury and death, which are required to fulfil criterion #4. In the ensuing year, many scientific papers have been published (and many more yet-to-be-published papers have been uploaded to preprint servers) which elucidate those mechanisms. No doubt more will become evident in the months to years to come, so I will update this post as new information comes in. Importantly, the accumulating body of evidence on mechanisms of harm dispenses with the hand-waving arguments quoted in the 'RMIT ABC Fact Check', namely that the excess non-COVID deaths couldn't possibly have been caused by the safe-and-effective™ vaccines, because they were attributed to dementia, cancer, ischaemic heart disease, cerebrovascular diseases, and infectious diseases other than COVID... and as for the historically unprecedented number of deaths attributed to "unspecified diseases", the Australian Actuaries Institute's spokesmuppet Karen Cutter dismisses these with the air-headed claim that "this is a large 'catch-all' category" from which it is difficult to draw conclusions. Well, yeah, it's very difficult to draw conclusions about whether someone's death was caused by an RNA transfection agent if you don't utilise the correct procedures during autopsy, or you don't autopsy them at all. (For detailed presentations on how to detect spike protein generated by the transfection agents and the immune reaction to them during autopsy, and how to distinguish this from the effects of infection with SARS-CoV-2, watch the videos on this page.) Mechanism #1: Impaired immune functionBy now, many people have seen the following graph, from a study of Cleveland Clinic healthcare workers, which shows a clear dose-response relationship between COVID-19 shots and the risk of getting COVID - that is, the more injections, the more infections:  The Cleveland Clinic study confirms many people's anecdotal observations that their multiply-jabbed friends are not just 'getting COVID' (whatever that means) every second Tuesday; they're also picking up all manner of other infections. Meanwhile, those who either decided against receiving any experimental injections, or called it quits after the initial series, are remaining remarkably unscathed. Several papers elucidating mechanisms of immune suppression that could explain these phenomena have been published:
To summarise, a growing body of evidence shows that COVID-19 transfection agents impair immune function in ways that increase susceptibility to infection with SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses, and decrease the immune system's ability to suppress latent viruses. Those who wish to argue that the excess deaths seen in Australia and overseas are at least partly due to after-effects of COVID-19, and to the reemergence of influenza, need to reckon with the fact that the transfection agents are causing people to become repeatedly reinfected with SARS-CoV-2 and to be more susceptible to infection with other viruses. SubscribeMechanism #2: Extensive damage to the cardiovascular systemA review article published in November 2022, 'Clinical cardiovascular emergencies and the cellular basis of COVID-19 vaccination: from dream to reality?', sifted through data from published case reports, studies and pharmacovigilance databases to compile a comprehensive list of adverse effects of the experimental transfection agents on the heart, blood vessels and cellular components of blood. These damaging impacts include:
The authors even provided a handy-dandy chart summarising all the fun and exciting ways that the experimental transfection agents can damage your cardiovascular system:   At the end of their discussion of the transfection agents' association with cardiac arrest and death, the authors make a summary statement which you should read several times, slowly, to let it sink in: "Given the observed mortality, recommendations for vaccination in the elderly (aged >80 years) should be reconsidered. In patients with multimorbidity in a suboptimal situation before vaccination, vaccine-drug and vaccine-disease interactions in polypharmacy users might have contributed to worsened health outcomes (Qamar et al., 2022). The general vaccination response and potential immune stimulation might be sufficient to trigger decompensation of underlying diseases and prompt death (Thomas et al., 2021)." Clinical cardiovascular emergencies and the cellular basis of COVID-19 vaccination: from dream to reality? In other words, the people whom we're told are in gravest need of the experimental transfection agents, because they are at the highest risk of a severe outcome of SARS-CoV-2 infection, are also at the highest risk of being fatally injured by the jabs. Do you see now how utterly duplicitous it is for Professor Tom Marwick, director of the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute, to wave away the excess deaths as just an escalation of a preexisting burden of cardiovascular risk factors, or for the Australian Actuaries Institute's Karen Cutter to insist that the injections couldn't possibly be causing excess deaths because most of those deaths are occurring in the elderly, whereas the majority of young and middle-aged adults got jabbed too? Even if one accepts their argument that COVID-19 itself is causing increased cardiovascular deaths because of the damaging effects of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein on the heart and blood vessels, let's remember that the risk of infection with currently-circulating strains of the virus is increased, in a stepwise fashion, the more jabs one submits to. Whichever way you try to slice and dice it, either directly or indirectly the injections are causing excess cardiovascular deaths. Mechanism #3: Impaired synthesis of regulatory proteinsThe authors of the previously cited paper 'Innate immune suppression by SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccinations: The role of G-quadruplexes, exosomes, and MicroRNAs' also noted that they have identified "potential profound disturbances in regulatory control of protein synthesis and cancer surveillance" triggered by the large amounts of spike protein production induced by the injections. These disturbances could "potentially have a causal link to neurodegenerative disease, myocarditis, immune thrombocytopenia, Bell's palsy, liver disease, impaired adaptive immunity, impaired DNA damage response and tumorigenesis." In other words, by messing with the body's normal patterns of response to infection, the mRNA injections set off a cascade of harmful effects that ripples throughout virtually every system of the body. But is there evidence that this is indeed happening? The authors found an unprecedentedly high number of reports of each condition mentioned above in the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), the US vaccine pharmacovigilance tool. In addition, case reports of these types of injuries are increasingly appearing in the medical literature, such as this report of a 60 year old doctor who developed lymphoma in his left cervical lymph nodes five months after completing his primary series of Pfizer transfection agents in his left deltoid muscle, only to experience rapid development of cancerous lesions in his right armpit and neck, within eight days of receiving a Pfizer booster in his right deltoid:   Conclusion
The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) asserts that it is "false and unscientific to automatically conclude that vaccines caused these [excess] deaths". I agree. Each unexpected death should be thoroughly investigated by unbiased experts, rather than being airily dismissed as 'Sudden Adult Death Syndrome', which we're now all supposed to believe is incredibly common; somehow we just didn't notice before that perfectly healthy young and middle-aged people were abruptly dropping dead in the midst of their daily activities, or going to sleep and never waking up. (See Mark Crispin Miller's Substack for a gut-wrenching weekly compendium of reports of these ‘died suddenly’ deaths from all over the world.) Subject to permission of the deceased's family, an autopsy should be conducted on each of these deaths, using the protocol developed by experienced German pathologist, Dr Arne Burkhardt. This protocol includes immunohistochemistry to detect the spike and nucleocapsid proteins of SARS-CoV-2 (which distinguishes infection from inoculation as a cause of death), and to detect infiltration of tissues by specific immune cells that respond to components of the injections. When the TGA insists that "There is no credible evidence to suggest that COVID-19 vaccines have contributed to excess deaths in Australia or overseas", I can only assume that they are, like Admiral Nelson, holding the telescope up to their blind eye. Nelson's recklessness won battles; the TGA's is costing thousands of Australian lives. Despite all the obfuscation, misdirection and outright lying of the government, its media mouthpieces and even trade associations like the Australian Actuaries Institute, there are far more proven mechanisms by which the COVID-19 transfection agents damage, disable and kill, than ways that Paul Simon came up with for leaving your lover: You just slip out the back, Jack Make a new plan, Stan You don't need to be coy, Roy Just get yourself free Oh, you hop on the bus, Gus You don't need to discuss much Just drop off the key, Lee And get yourself free Slip out the back, Jack Make a new plan, Stan You don't need to be coy, Roy You just listen to me Hop on the bus, Gus You don't need to discuss much Just drop off the key, Lee And get yourself free 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover The fact that the agency charged with ensuring that the medicines Australians take are safe and effective shows no interest whatsoever in investigating the historically unprecedented tsunami of injuries and deaths that has occurred since the 'vaccine' roll-out began, speaks volumes on whom they really serve. https://robynchuter.substack.com/p/there-must-be-fifty-ways-to-leave?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=298162&post_id=99364887&isFreemail=false&utm_medium=email https://substack.com/profile/29386713-robyn-chuter?utm_source=about-page  Australia is in the grip of an unprecedented surge of excess deaths. Why doesn't anyone in power care? As Australians prepare for our most divisive national public holiday, Australia Day, it’s time for me to revisit a topic that I last discussed around this time last year, in two posts, If the COVID-19 injections work, why are more people dying? Part 1 and Part 2.  https://robynchuter.substack.com/p/if-the-covid-19-injections-work-why?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web  https://robynchuter.substack.com/p/if-the-covid-19-injections-work-why-9dd?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web That topic is the unexplained (or at least, officially uninvestigated) increase in excess mortality that has occurred since the roll-out of the RNA transfection agents commonly known as ‘COVID-19 vaccines’. This excess mortality is evident in many, if not most countries around the world that pushed these transfection agents onto their populations. However in honour of the day on which this glorious nation was originally founded, as a penal colony on which the British Empire could dump the overflow of petty criminals generated by its rapid industrialisation, in this post I’ll be focusing on excess mortality in the land Down Under. Let’s start with defining some terms that will be used throughout this article:
The benefit of using excess mortality as a metric to assess the impact of both COVID-19 and the various policy responses to it is that it circumvents the ‘died with COVID vs died from COVID’ conundrum. While eminently qualified people could (and have) argued all day over whether infection with SARS-CoV-2 was a major, minor or insignificant contributing factor to the demise of people who are included in the ‘COVID death count’, total mortality leaves nothing to argue about. Either one is officially dead, meaning a death certificate has been issued and the death is registered with the jurisdiction’s central registry and included in national statistics, or one is not. If a population was confronted with a deadly pathogen to which they had no immunity (which was the story we were all told about SARS-CoV-2), we would expect to see mortality increase over baseline at first, as those with the least resistance (the elderly and medically fragile) succumbed. Then, as the population gained immunity to the pathogen, mortality would eventually drop below baseline. This phenomenon is known as mortality displacement, or the harvesting effect: the deaths of many people with seriously compromised health are pulled forward by anything from a couple of days to a year or so, leaving fewer frail people to die in the subsequent year. Furthermore, if a successful intervention was developed against the pathogen – such as a safe and effective vaccine that hastened the development of herd immunity and protected medically fragile people against serious illness, we would expect to see mortality decline even further below baseline, as the lives of those closest to death are prolonged somewhat by such an intervention. Let’s see how these predictions stack up against measurable reality. Total mortalityNotably, mortality was lower in 2020 – the year of the Deadly New Virus – than the average of the previous five years, by all measures, while it increased in 2021 and 2022. Specifically:
 COVID-attributed mortalityTurning our attention to deaths involving COVID-19 throughout the pandemic period:
But why? What’s driving the excess mortality?To examine the impact of the transfection agents on overall mortality, Denis Rancourt and coauthors compared mortality data derived from the ABS in the pre-injection era (from the declaration of a pandemic by the World Health Organization on 11 March 2020 until the beginning of the injection roll-out in mid-April 2021), to the post-injection era. They note that there was “no detectable excess all-cause mortality” in the pre-injection phase of the declared COVID-19 pandemic. However, all of that changed once the injection roll-out began: “Starting in mid-April 2021, the all-cause mortality per week in Australia shows a sustained increase of >10 %, during which it never returns to its seasonal low value (of approximately 3,000 deaths/week) and attains highs of >4,000 deaths/week in June-July-August 2022… Over the measured period of the step-wise increase in all-cause mortality (mid-April 2021 through August 2022; 14 % larger all-cause mortality than in recent pre-vaccination periods of same time duration; 62 million administered vaccine doses) there are 31±1 thousand excess deaths of all causes in Australia, whereas no excess deaths are detected in the prior 13-month period since a pandemic was declared (mid-March 2020 through mid-April 2021).” Probable causal association between Australia’s new regime of high all-cause mortality and its COVID-19 vaccine rollout Drilling down even deeper into the data, Rancourt et al found that the initial injection roll-out in 2021 was followed by surges in mortality, while the unseasonal mortality spike in early 2022 tracked the booster campaign to a remarkable degree:   Defenders of the transfection agents will no doubt argue that most of these excess deaths are due to COVID-19 itself, not the injections. There are several rebuttals to this claim:
As Rancourt and his coauthors put it, “The question is unavoidable: Why would Australians suddenly (at the start of the vaccine rollout) start dying in excess of something mostly if not entirely other than COVID-19, after 13 months of a declared pandemic during which there was no detectable excess all-cause mortality?” Probable causal association between Australia’s new regime of high all-cause mortality and its COVID-19 vaccine rollout … and why would the deaths accelerate at the point where SARS-CoV-2 had transitioned to endemic status, becoming little more than a common cold virus? (And no, the arguments that all those excess deaths are due to delayed effects of COVID-19, long COVID, lockdowns or reduced quality of healthcare are not tenable, as demonstrated by Martin Neil and Norman Fenton.) Is this excess mortality really such a big deal?The Australian Institute of Actuaries 1 thinks so. In December 2022, they calculated excess mortality of 13 per cent using ABS data, which they described as “incredibly high”. Spokeswoman for their Covid-19 Mortality Working Group, Karen Cutter, didn’t mince her words: “Mortality doesn’t normally vary by more than 1 to 2 per cent, so 13 per cent is way higher than normal levels… I’m not aware [of anything comparable] in the recent past but I haven’t gone back and looked [historically]. They talk about the flu season of 2017 being really bad, and the mortality there was 1 per cent higher than normal. So it’s well outside the range of normal.” Excess deaths in Australia ‘incredibly high’ at 13%: Actuaries Institute analysis of ABS data Ms Cutter went on to list a number of possible contributing factors, including a harvesting effect after two years of low flu deaths, exacerbation of cardiometabolic disease by COVID-19 and reduced healthcare provision, all of which have been shown to be not connected to the increased excess mortality by Neil and Fenton and Rancourt et al. Oddly, she dismissed outright any link between the experimental transfection agents and the 15 400 excess deaths that her institute calculated had occurred between January and August 2022, while admitting she can’t back her own claim: “There is zero evidence that vaccines are causing these deaths as far as I’m concerned, but I cannot prove it.” Excess deaths in Australia ‘incredibly high’ at 13%: Actuaries Institute analysis of ABS data Indeed. Ms Cutter called for an urgent investigation by the Australian Government into the unprecedented level of excess mortality in 2022. Her frustration and alarm were very evident: “I feel like somebody should be doing something – but I don’t know who and what.” Excess deaths in Australia ‘incredibly high’ at 13%: Actuaries Institute analysis of ABS data Apparently it just doesn’t occur to well-meaning professionals like Karen Cutter that the government has no desire whatsoever to launch an investigation into the tsunami of excess deaths that has crashed down upon its population. Perhaps she should have a chat with the MD/PhD who writes on Substack under the pseudonym Ah Kahn Syed (say it out loud; you’ll get it) whose attempt to draw attention to the horrific excess mortality back in August 2022  https://arkmedic.substack.com/p/australias-excess-death-toll-just?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web … was met with deafening silence from government and its propaganda poodles: “There were over 25,000 reads of that short article and not one media or government representative attempted to make contact to discuss it. I guarantee that they know that it was being discussed. Instead of enacting an urgent investigation, their response instead was to try to make the data look better and find some excuse.” The Australian Bureau of (Lies, Damned Lies and) Statistics The good doctor also pointed out that the number of excess deaths represented a nearly 9 standard deviation (9-sigma) increase, and shared a handy-dandy chart from Wikipedia which illustrates how often you might expect to see events at each sigma level:  You’ll note that it stops at 7-sigma. I guess there’s not much point in going beyond that.
Ms Cutter naively insisted that the large volume of excess deaths could not possibly be due to the experimental transfection agents, because only 947 reports of death occurring in the context of these agents have been received by the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), and of these just 14 deaths have been confirmed by TGA as likely related. However, as former AMA president Dr Kerryn Phelps recently pointed out, adverse events are vastly underreported because of the pressure placed on doctors to get in line with the public health narrative: “Vaccine injury is a subject that few in the medical profession have wanted to talk about. Regulators of the medical profession have censored public discussion about adverse events following immunisation, with threats to doctors not to make any public statements about anything that ‘might undermine the government’s vaccine rollout’ or risk suspension or loss of their registration.” Dr Kerryn Phelps’ submission to the Parliamentary Committee on Long COVID and Repeated COVID Infections (#510) But beyond the intentional underreporting, doctors often fail to recognise adverse reactions to vaccines, including the COVID transfection agents, because they do not understand the multitude of ways that these products can exacerbate existing pathologies, and cause new ones. In the next post, I’m going to summarise some of the most well-studied mechanisms by which COVID injections can cause injuries and death. COVID VACCINE CLASS ACTION: Calling Australian vaccine injured and families of the deceased1/16/2023  By: Rebekah Barnett A proposed Covid Vaccine Class Action is calling for Australians severely injured by Covid vaccines to come forward. This proposed action will represent a group of more than 100 vaccine injured, including the deceased.  The group behind the class action is No More Silence, a not for profit formed for the purpose of fundraising for the legal and associated costs for class action proceedings in the Federal Court of Australia, on behalf of those injured by the Covid vaccines. The class action is free to join. Compensation will go to Covid vaccine injured patients only. The class action is self-funded by the doctor (who at this time remains anonymous) who initiated the action, with additional funding via a crowdfunding campaign. YOU CAN DONATE TO THE CLASS ACTION HERE The action will argue that the TGA, Prof John Skerritt and others are responsible for the compensation of injuries due to failures in regulating (approving and monitoring) the Covid vaccines. There is now a fair amount of circumstantial evidence that the TGA was incompetent at best (and criminally negligent at worst). You can read a brief summary of just some of the most serious concerns via Letters From Australia:  Journalist Rebecca Weisner expanded on TGA errors and oversights in a recent piece for Spectator Australia, Are genetically modified vaccines safe?, in which she states, “It is painfully obvious that the TGA does not have the expertise to assess the safety of the Covid vaccines.” WHO CAN JOIN THE CLASS ACTION?
Email admin@nomoresilenceau.com with as much information as possible:
If you are not injured, but you wish to support the class action financially, you can do so here: DONATE TO THE COVID VACCINE CLASS ACTION I have spoken to the founder of No More Silence, who wishes to remain anonymous. The person is a doctor who witnessed many vaccine injuries first-hand, and is motivated to redress the lack of acknowledgement, support and compensation available to these victims. A final note to those who may have championed Covid vaccine mandates, or who unwittingly participated in the social pressuring of people to ‘roll up’ and take an improperly tested jab for the public good - This is an opportunity to set things right. If you can afford it, you might consider making a financial contribution to the class action. You can also forward this information on to friends who you know are either injured, or who are in a position to financially contribute. There will be other opportunities. Just make sure you take one (or several) of them. https://rebekahbarnett.substack.com/p/covid-vaccine-class-action-calling?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=791657&post_id=96968865&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email   If you’re unvaccinated, you are now allowed back in the Nine News building. A leaked internal email from Nine News reveals that the Nine Workplace Conditions of Entry COVID-19 Policy was dropped earlier this week. The policy change applies nationally. The workplace entry policy had been in place since December 2021, meaning that unvaccinated staff were unable to enter their place of work for just over a year. State-imposed workplace mandates were dropped around the country between April-June 2022, but in most cases, workplaces were allowed to retain their own workplace proof of vaccination requirements under their OH&S provisions.  The email states that the majority of the feedback on the policy was in favour of removing vaccination requirements for employees and visitors. This was taken into consideration along with changes in government recommendations. Australia is one of the most highly vaccinated countries in the world, and yet since mid 2022 it has been reported that many Australians have been onto their second, third or fourth infections. Only the most devout Branch Covidians are seriously arguing, by faith alone, that Covid vaccines prevent transmission of the virus to the degree that would be required to have any meaningful impact in a workplace, let alone a pandemic. The workplace entry requirement must have been very unpopular to people who have eyes and full cognitive function.  Nine News still strongly recommends boosters for all staff, and will offer paid leave to those who wish to attend a vaccination appointment. I would remind readers that obesity is one of the greatest risk factors in determining the severity of Covid outcomes. The CDC suggests that obesity may even triple the risk of hospitalisation with Covid. Two thirds of Australian adults are overweight or obese. 1 If Nine News were following the science, I might have thought that they would offer paid leave for employees to go to the gym for a workout. The news may come as a pleasant surprise to former Nine News sports reporter and AFL legend, Warren Tredrea. Tredrea is currently suing Nine News South Australia for banning him from the studio and forcing him out of his job due to his vaccination status. The case is still in progress.  SOURCE This policy change may well provide an opportunity for Nine News to return to its stated values of Diversity and Inclusion, which, until this week, was an ugly hypocrisy adorned with lovely Indigenous art.  https://rebekahbarnett.substack.com/p/nine-news-quietly-drops-covid-vaccination?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=791657&post_id=96241831&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email
 This Christmas, I gained some insight into the psyche of the Cult Covidian. You see, I know a Vaccinator. Specifically, this person was promoted to lead a Covid vaccination taskforce, until recently being deployed to team Monkeypox (not joking). I will use the pronoun ‘they’, not because ‘they’ are non-binary, but rather to protect their identity somewhat. Several days before Christmas I shared my latest work in a Whatsapp group that this person is in - the Umbrella News piece I did on vaccine injury in the wake of Dr Kerryn Phelps’s own bombshell injury revelation. For context, over the past two years there has been a respectful kind of nodding acknowledgement of each other’s work and stakes in the game. Early in the vaccination program I asked The Vaccinator, “what’s the difference between the various brands of vaccines?” They couldn’t tell me. I probed further - what’s in them though? What are the active ingredients? “I don’t know,” they shrugged, “I’m just glad for the promotion.” Shortly after their own Covid vaccination, The Vaccinator exhibited what is now a well-documented side effect of the vaccines, but at the time was still officially denied by all sources due to ‘absence of evidence’ (which is so often conflated with evidence of absence). The Vaccinator went to many doctor’s appointments to deal with this issue and complained bitterly about the symptoms, totally baffled by them. To the best of my knowledge, neither The Vaccinator nor the doctor ever joined the dots that they were dealing with a very common Covid vaccine side effect (if they did, it would have been many months later, after numerous appointments). Remember, this person was responsible for giving informed consent to hundreds, thousands of people before jabbing them with Covid vaccines. So when I dropped this article into the group chat, I knew it might cause a bit of a fizz. It was more of an eruption. Swearing ensued. Personal attacks. Demands that I cease and desist my line of work. And then, a complete boycott of a Christmas event that we were both due to attend. Why? Because I make The Vaccinator ‘feel bad about themselves.’ (And doesn’t modern pop psychology say that you should only hang out with people who make you feel good?) So Christmas was cancelled, and the relationship is, for now, in the deep freeze. A rather severe reaction to an article, and yet we see these kinds of reactions on social media every day. I just hadn’t experienced one at such close range. Over Christmas (which was rescheduled to encompass several satellite events to ensure that The Vaccinator and I were never in the same room) I had the opportunity to reflect on what the flurry of activity that had unfolded in the group chat revealed about the psyche of the Cult Covidian. 1. They perceive talk of vaccine injury as a direct attack upon their identity. This is a very tribal response and is apparent in the extremes of all cults/tribes, not just Cult Covidians. However, in this specific Cult, appeals to witness and support the injured are taken as an existential threat. This is completely baffling to non-Cult members, who can see merit in the delivery of healthcare (which includes vaccination to those who want it under conditions of informed consent), whilst also acknowledging that all medications come with side effects, which must be mitigated and managed. 2. They cannot face the idea that they may have caused harm, so instead they try to force you not to point it out. “You make me feel bad about myself” is likely the appropriate response to realising that you may have mindlessly and unquestioningly jabbed several, tens, or even hundreds of people into a state of injury. This could form a unique opportunity for personal and professional growth. Or you could just double down and cut off anyone who is pointing to uncomfortable realities, in order to avoid addressing the dissonance. 3. They make it all about themselves (a common human foible). Social justice goes out the window when Cult Covidians are confronted with vaccine injury. Suddenly, the oppressed (coerced and gaslit) minority is unimportant. The only thing that matters is their own feelings and that sweet promotion. As with point 2, all people are prone to this, but this particular blind spot around vaccine injury seems to be unique to the Cult Covidian. 4. They have completely succumbed to the black and white conditioning of our government and media - you are either pro-vax (good) or anti-vax (bad). There is no room for anyone to be pro-vax and pro-injured, or pro-vax but also pro-choice, or pro-choice and pro-injured. You’re with us or you’re against us. Drawing attention to the collateral damage of the vaccination program is ‘against us’. On this occasion I was a bit blindsided by the intensity of the reaction that my article provoked, and so our exchange was chaotic and combative. I don’t regret sharing the article, as I think all health practitioners ought to be exposed to the impacts of their work, good and bad. An ignorant practitioner can be deadly to a patient. However, if I'd paused a longer beat I would rather have responded with questions like:
Sarcasm and irony can also work, especially with a grin. A friend describes his brother’s favourite quip: "You see so and so was fully vaxxed and then died from Covid. Gee, lucky he was fully vaxxed or .... (pause) he’d be DOUBLE DEAD." If anyone else has walked into a situation like this, I'd like to hear how you handled it.         By : Rebekah Barnett This poster was part of the SA Gov Fully Vaxxed campaign of May 2022. The core message was if you have not had a booster, you are not fully vaxxed.     I can't help noticing the timing ... all traces of this poster disappeared not long after Senator Alex Antic asked the Health Minister for the evidence supporting the poster’s implication that boosters will stop/reduce transmission.   |
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April 2023
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