... and what it teaches us about public health

By : Robyn Chuter
https://robynchuter.substack.com/p/beating-measles-with-toilets-the?s=r


The attempt to eradicate measles globally has manifestly failed, and there is growing acknowledgement that it is vaccine failure rather than failure to vaccinate that is responsible for the resurgence of measles in highly-vaccinated populations, with measles outbreaks occurring in both developed and developing countries in populations with 99%+ measles vaccination coverage.
Furthermore, acquiring measles in childhood is associated with protection against many chronic conditions. For example:

• The Newcastle Thousand Families Study, a prospective cohort of 1142 individuals born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1947, found that a childhood history of measles was associated with a 61% lower risk of dying of cancer during ages 15-60 years.
• Getting measles in childhood was found to reduce the odds of developing chronic lymphocytic leukaemia by 43% in an Italian case-control study involving 1771 controls and 649 leukaemia cases from 11 Italian areas.
• Similarly, a history of childhood measles infection was found to be associated with a lower risk of both Hodgkin and non-Hodgkin lymphoma (particularly follicular B-cell NHL).
• A UK population-based case-control study found that having had 2 or more childhood infectious diseases (including chicken pox, measles, mumps, pertussis and rubella) was associated with a 55% lower risk of Hodgkin lymphoma in young adults (16–24 years).
• Similarly, a population-based case-control study of San Francisco Bay area women found that having had measles before the age of 10 was associated with a reduced risk of Epstein-Barr virus-positive Hodgkin lymphoma.
• Allergic diseases including dust mite allergy and asthma are less common in children who have had measles; children in Guinea-Bissau who had had measles were found to have roughly half (12.8% vs 25.6%) the risk of atopy – the tendency to produce an exaggerated immunoglobulin E (IgE) immune response to otherwise harmless substances in the environment – as children who had been vaccinated and not had measles.
• The acute stage of measles infection appears to suppress the activity of the malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, such that only 25% of children with measles had malaria parasites in their blood vs 88% of children without measles.
• Intractable epileptic seizures have been observed to disappear following acute viral infections including measles.
• A case-control analysis of Parkinson’s disease and infections in childhood conducted in a cohort of 50 002 men who attended either Harvard College or the University of Pennsylvania between 1916 and 1950 found that a history of measles prior to college entrance was associated with a 47% lower risk of developing Parkinson’s disease.

How do we thread the needle between the very real risks of serious illness, lifelong complications and death in undernourished, immunocompromised children who contract measles, and the apparent protection against multiple serious diseases of adulthood conferred by measles infection in otherwise healthy, well-nourished children?
Should we spend $US 2.3 billion per year on vaccines in a vainglorious attempt to eradicate measles from every corner of the globe? Or would that money be better spent on providing the fundamentals of public health – like toilets – to the millions of people in developing countries who lack them?

To reduce hunger and the nutrient deficiencies that increase the risk of serious outcomes of infection with measles and other childhood diseases, how about promoting traditional farming methods that increase the nutrient density of crops instead of persuading governments of impoverished nations to pour money they don’t have into Bill Gates’ vanity projects like the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), which has resulted in 30% higher rates of undernourishment in the countries which adopted his high-tech, chemical-dependent, patented seeds – which, by sheer coincidence, are produced by companies that he owns major stakes in?
And given that, after measles vaccination began in the US, the death rate from measles was found to be almost ten times higher in counties with the lowest median household income than in the wealthiest counties, why have public health authorities focused so obsessively on jabbing every last child with multiple doses of vaccines, rather than pushing for policies that close the poverty gap – and in so doing, reduce the risk of all infectious diseases as well as many chronic ones?

As I wrote in my miniseries on philanthrocapitalism and public health (Part 1 and Part 2), the public health movement has been hijacked by the profit motive – and it’s not just people in developing countries who are suffering from it.
We are at a most interesting point in history, where the abject failure of pharmaceutical solutions to COVID-19 (injections that don’t stop infection or transmission, and antiviral drugs that don’t prevent hospitalisation or death) is becoming more evident every day, while our governments continue to throw taxpayers’ money at these white elephants.
Perhaps we may take the publication in a major medical journal of a study on the infectious disease-reducing power of the humble toilet as a sign that it’s time we forced our public health authorities to euthanise the Frankenstein monster version of Big Pharma/Public Health Inc that they’ve been pushing on us, and take public health back to its roots.
And if you want to personally contribute to an initiative to provide toilets and improve sanitation in developing countries, order your toilet paper from the good folks at Who Gives A Crap, who donate 50% of their profits to doing just that. Sure beats the crap out of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The attempt to eradicate measles globally has manifestly failed, and there is growing acknowledgement that it is vaccine failure rather than failure to vaccinate that is responsible for the resurgence of measles in highly-vaccinated populations, with measles outbreaks occurring in both developed and developing countries in populations with 99%+ measles vaccination coverage.

Furthermore, acquiring measles in childhood is associated with protection against many chronic conditions. For example:

• The Newcastle Thousand Families Study, a prospective cohort of 1142 individuals born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1947, found that a childhood history of measles was associated with a 61% lower risk of dying of cancer during ages 15-60 years.
• Getting measles in childhood was found to reduce the odds of developing chronic lymphocytic leukaemia by 43% in an Italian case-control study involving 1771 controls and 649 leukaemia cases from 11 Italian areas.
• Similarly, a history of childhood measles infection was found to be associated with a lower risk of both Hodgkin and non-Hodgkin lymphoma (particularly follicular B-cell NHL).
• A UK population-based case-control study found that having had 2 or more childhood infectious diseases (including chicken pox, measles, mumps, pertussis and rubella) was associated with a 55% lower risk of Hodgkin lymphoma in young adults (16–24 years).
• Similarly, a population-based case-control study of San Francisco Bay area women found that having had measles before the age of 10 was associated with a reduced risk of Epstein-Barr virus-positive Hodgkin lymphoma.
• Allergic diseases including dust mite allergy and asthma are less common in children who have had measles; children in Guinea-Bissau who had had measles were found to have roughly half (12.8% vs 25.6%) the risk of atopy – the tendency to produce an exaggerated immunoglobulin E (IgE) immune response to otherwise harmless substances in the environment – as children who had been vaccinated and not had measles.
• The acute stage of measles infection appears to suppress the activity of the malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, such that only 25% of children with measles had malaria parasites in their blood vs 88% of children without measles.
• Intractable epileptic seizures have been observed to disappear following acute viral infections including measles.
• A case-control analysis of Parkinson’s disease and infections in childhood conducted in a cohort of 50 002 men who attended either Harvard College or the University of Pennsylvania between 1916 and 1950 found that a history of measles prior to college entrance was associated with a 47% lower risk of developing Parkinson’s disease.

How do we thread the needle between the very real risks of serious illness, lifelong complications and death in undernourished, immunocompromised children who contract measles, and the apparent protection against multiple serious diseases of adulthood conferred by measles infection in otherwise healthy, well-nourished children?
Should we spend $US 2.3 billion per year on vaccines in a vainglorious attempt to eradicate measles from every corner of the globe? Or would that money be better spent on providing the fundamentals of public health – like toilets – to the millions of people in developing countries who lack them?

To reduce hunger and the nutrient deficiencies that increase the risk of serious outcomes of infection with measles and other childhood diseases, how about promoting traditional farming methods that increase the nutrient density of crops instead of persuading governments of impoverished nations to pour money they don’t have into Bill Gates’ vanity projects like the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), which has resulted in 30% higher rates of undernourishment in the countries which adopted his high-tech, chemical-dependent, patented seeds – which, by sheer coincidence, are produced by companies that he owns major stakes in?
And given that, after measles vaccination began in the US, the death rate from measles was found to be almost ten times higher in counties with the lowest median household income than in the wealthiest counties, why have public health authorities focused so obsessively on jabbing every last child with multiple doses of vaccines, rather than pushing for policies that close the poverty gap – and in so doing, reduce the risk of all infectious diseases as well as many chronic ones?

As I wrote in my miniseries on philanthrocapitalism and public health (Part 1 and Part 2), the public health movement has been hijacked by the profit motive – and it’s not just people in developing countries who are suffering from it.
We are at a most interesting point in history, where the abject failure of pharmaceutical solutions to COVID-19 (injections that don’t stop infection or transmission, and antiviral drugs that don’t prevent hospitalisation or death) is becoming more evident every day, while our governments continue to throw taxpayers’ money at these white elephants.
Perhaps we may take the publication in a major medical journal of a study on the infectious disease-reducing power of the humble toilet as a sign that it’s time we forced our public health authorities to euthanise the Frankenstein monster version of Big Pharma/Public Health Inc that they’ve been pushing on us, and take public health back to its roots.
And if you want to personally contribute to an initiative to provide toilets and improve sanitation in developing countries, order your toilet paper from the good folks at Who Gives A Crap, who donate 50% of their profits to doing just that. Sure beats the crap out of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

​
A paper published in BMJ Open in April 2022 has found that an increase in the number of households that have toilets is associated with a decreased number of cases of measles in Indian children.
The first question that might pop into your head upon reading this is probably “What do toilets have to do with measles?”
I’m glad you asked.
​
As every student of public health learns, by far the largest percentage of the precipitous declines in death rates from infectious diseases that occurred in the twentieth century, was accrued long before there were any effective medical interventions. Tuberculosis, whooping cough, scarlet fever, typhoid, diphtheria and measles had all but disappeared as causes of death in Westernised countries, long before antibiotics, toxoids and vaccines were developed to treat or prevent them.
​

Jodie Munro O’Brien, the Courier Mail ‘journalist’ (I use the term loosely, for reasons that will become evident) tasked with reporting the story, simply reiterated the official government narrative that the ban on prescribing hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 had been instituted because of fears that off-label use for this purpose would lead to “a supply shortage, leaving those already prescribed the drug for other, unrelated ailments without their medicine.”
If you’re wondering, “Why didn’t the government look for ways to increase the supply of hydroxychloroquine, rather than threatening doctors and pharmacists with six months in the slammer or a fine of nearly 14 grand for making it available to sick people?” then you’re thinking like a journalist. Perhaps you could apply for Ms Munro O’Brien’s job… or perhaps not, since the legacy media prefers stenographers to actual journalists.
And indeed, the hydroxychloroquine supply problem was promptly solved by Queensland businessman Clive Palmer, who bought 40 million doses of the drug from overseas sources by late April 2020 (i.e. just a few weeks after Jeanette Young issued the ban), and donated more than 22 million of them to the national medical stockpile before being informed by a Commonwealth Health Department spokeswoman on 18 June 2020 that “no further donations were required”.
However, despite these facts having been reported in the very newspaper which employs her, Ms Munro O’Brien simply regurgitated the Queensland Health spokeswoman’s illogical explanation for Gerrard’s action:
“A Queensland Health spokeswoman said the revocation of the ban was because there was no longer a supply shortage threat, but the medication was still not approved for Covid-19 treatment.”
Restrictions that threatened doctors with a $13000 fine if they prescribed a certain drug revoked
Say what? The “supply shortage threat” was solved almost two years ago. And since off-label prescription of drugs is perfectly legal and universally practised (accounting for up to 40% of prescriptions for adults and up to 90% in some hospitalised paediatric patients), no “approval” is required for doctors to prescribe hydroxychloroquine for prevention or treatment of COVID-19.


Jeanette Young’s criminalisation of the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 patients was just one of a Series of Unfortunate Events that befell this 65+ year old drug that is included in the World Health Organisation’s Model List of Essential Medicines, in the weeks before and in the months after that body declared that COVID-19 was a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern” (PHEIC, which I presume is pronounced like “fake”) on 30 January 2020.
Mathew Crawford has covered the many twists and turns of this gothic tale in The Chloroquine Wars section of his must-read ‘Rounding the Earth’ Substack, but here is a chronology of some of the most significant events:

• On 15 January 2020 – two weeks before WHO declared its PHEIC for COVID-19 – the French medical health agency rescinded its 2008 authorisation of over-the-counter sales of more than 200 commonly-used drugs, including hydroxychloroquine, in community pharmacies. The French government’s restrictions on prescription of the drug escalated over the ensuing months, prompting the formation of a doctors’ collective calling themselves “Let Doctors Prescribe” to advocate for the restoration of physicians’ freedom to exercise their clinical judgment. A representative of the collective, Dr Violette Guérin, complained in late March 2020 that

“Today there is an escalation of directives aimed at restricting [hydroxychloroquine’s] use from the Directorate General of Health. And it remains authorized in the setting where it is the least effective, that is to say in the intensive care units.”
“We want to self-prescribe chloroquine”, asks a group of doctors

• On 11 March 2020, Dr John Gerrard treated actor Tom Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson for COVID-19 at Gold Coast University Hospital. No details of the treatment they received have been issued, due to patient confidentiality. However, a retrospective observational cohort study of the first 197 COVID‐19 patients managed by Gold Coast Hospital and Health Service, between February and April 2020, coauthored by Gerrard, clearly shows that chloroquine drugs were in use at the time Gerrard treated Hanks and Wilson: “Twenty‐one patients received hydroxychloroquine (mean duration of therapy 4.4 days), one patient received chloroquine (5 days).” 63 patients were hospitalised (54 for medical reasons and the remainder for “observation”, “public health reasons” and “social reasons”), 5 required intensive care unit admission and 3 required intubation; no patients died. No concerns were expressed in this paper about any toxicity of chloroquine drugs.
• On 24 March 2020, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) announced that GPs and specialists except those practising dermatology, intensive care medicine, paediatrics and child health, physician and emergency medicine, were no longer permitted to prescribe hydroxychloroquine, citing “demand shortages” created by use of the drug for treatment of COVID-19 that “pose… a serious health risk to individuals currently using this medication”. Note that TGA did not raise any safety concerns about the off-label use of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19, merely putative supply issues.
• Also on 24 March 2020, the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, issued an executive order barring pharmacists from dispensing “hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine except when written as prescribed for an FDA-approved indication; or as part of a state approved clinical trial related to COVID-19 for a patient who has tested positive for COVID-19, with such test result documented as part of the prescription. No other experimental or prophylactic use shall be permitted, and any permitted prescription is limited to one fourteen day prescription with no refills”. In other words, with one stroke of his pen, Cuomo cancelled out physicians’ right to prescribe chloroquine drugs off-label and prevented people who were already taking these drugs for FDA-approved purposes from obtaining a sufficient supply to last them through the 100-day shutdown that he imposed four days earlier, on 20 March.
• Then on 28 March 2020, the governors of the US states of Michigan and Nevada issued executive orders prohibiting physicians from prescribing, and pharmacists from dispensing, “hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine to patients for the treatment of COVID-19 outside of a hospital”. Both orders cited the same justification as Jeanette Young – the concern that hoarding of the drug by people afraid of contracting SARS-CoV-2 infection would threaten its availability to people taking it for “a legitimate medical purpose” – thus arrogating to themselves and their bureaucrats, most of whom are not licensed medical professionals, the right to decide what constitutes “legitimate medical purposes”. Furthermore, restricting the drug to hospitalised patients ensured that it could not be used in the early treatment of COVID-19, when its benefits are the most pronounced.
• On the same day, 28 March 2020, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) permitting “emergency use of oral formulations of chloroquine phosphate (CQ) and hydroxychloroquine sulfate (HCQ) to be distributed from the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS)” (my emphasis) for use in treating people with COVID-19. This implies that there were perfectly adequate reserves of hydroxychloroquine for such purposes, which would have spared the supply available in community pharmacies, thus invalidating the concerns with supply issues that the governors of Michigan and Nevada invoked as the rationale for their executive orders.
• On 22 May 2020, one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals, The Lancet, published a study which claimed to draw on a multinational registry comprising 671 hospitals located in six continents. Analysing data supplied by the Surgical Outcomes Collaborative (managed by Surgisphere Corporation), which supposedly included over 96 000 patients hospitalised for COVID-19 between 20 December 2019 and 14 April 2020, the authors concluded that patients treated with chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine (alone or in combination with a macrolide antibiotic, such as azithromycin), had between a 33% and 45% higher chance of dying than those whose treatment did not include a chloroquine drug, as well as up to triple the risk of developing a potentially lethal type of abnormal heart rhythm called ventricular arrhythmia.
  There was just one small problem with the Lancet study – the dataset was completely fake. Six days after its publication, on 28 May 2020, more than 120 researchers and medical professionals published an open letter addressed to the study’s authors, and Lancet editor Richard Horton, raising serious concerns about the integrity of the data source, study methodology and statistical analysis.
  And on 5 June 2020, Lancet issued a retraction notice, in which the study’s authors claimed that Surgisphere had denied them access to the full dataset for the purposes of independent peer review. No wonder, since the dataset simply did not exist. It subsequently emerged that Surgisphere – a company which had claimed to run one of the largest and fastest hospital databases in the world – had only a handful of employees, few of them with any background in data analysis or scientific background; their “science editor” was actually a science fiction author and fantasy artist (which seems oddly appropriate) while their marketing executive worked as an adult model and events hostess. Apparently, neither the authors of the Lancet study (led by cardiologist Mandeep Mehra, who is a professor at Harvard Medical School as well as a director at Boston’s Brigham & Women’s Hospital) nor the journal’s editorial and peer review team, were capable of discovering these facts for themselves. I’m sure the fact that Mehra’s employer, Brigham & Women’s Hospital, was also running two clinical trials for the drug remdesivir, sponsored by the $1000-per-pill drug’s manufacturer, Gilead, had absolutely nothing to do with Mehra’s lapse in judgement.
• However, despite the retraction, the damage to hydroxychloroquine had already been done. On 26 May 2020, the WHO paused recruitment to the hydroxychloroquine arm of its global randomised clinical trial to identify effective treatments for COVID-19, SOLIDARITY, citing the Lancet study as justification. The UK and French regulatory bodies followed suit, halting their national trials of hydroxychloroquine. And while WHO resumed the hydroxychloroquine arm of SOLIDARITY on 3 June (two days before the Lancet retraction), recruitment into these trials had become difficult due to the bad publicity.
• On 5 June 2020, the chief investigators of the UK Randomised Evaluation of COVid-19 thERapY (RECOVERY) Trial, which received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust, reported that they had called an early halt to the hydroxychloroquine arm of the study due to interim analysis of data showing “no beneficial effect of hydroxychloroquine in patients hospitalised with COVID-19”. This interim analysis was posted on the preprint server medRxiv on 15 July 2020 and published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) on 19 November 2020.
  The NEJM article concluded that COVID-19 patients given hydroxychloroquine were 9% less likely to be discharged from the hospital alive within 28 days than those who did not receive the drug, and 14% more likely to require mechanical ventilation after hospitalisation.
  And on reading the details of the treatment and dosage schedule, these dismal results are no surprise. The trial was not just set up to fail, it was arguably designed to kill patients.
  Firstly, treatment began a median of 9 days after symptom onset. Hydroxychloroquine works by inhibiting viral replication, which peaks in the first few days after symptom onset and ceases by around the eight day after onset of symptoms of COVID-19. In other words, by the time patients enrolled in the RECOVERY trial received hydroxychloroquine, it was too late for the drug to provide any clinical benefit to them.
  Secondly, those randomised to receive hydroxychloroquine were given 800 mg of the drug at baseline, another 800 mg 6 hours later, followed by 400 mg every 12 hours for the next 9 days or until discharge, whichever occurred earlier. In the Supplementary Appendix, the authors justify this dosage schedule as follows:
  “The hydroxychloroquine dose regimen was based on previous pharmacokinetic modelling of plasma and whole blood hydroxychloroquine concentrations in healthy volunteers, the treatment of malaria and in rheumatological conditions. The choice of dose and predicted safety margins were also informed by pharmacometric studies of chloroquine in the treatment of both severe and uncomplicated malaria and in self-poisoning.”
  But as David Jayne, professor of clinical autoimmunity at Cambridge University, pointed out, this dosage schedule does not remotely resemble those used for either malaria or rheumatological disease, and substantially exceeds the known toxic dose of hydroxychloroquine. In an article in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), Jayne shared his concerns:

​“Current recommended doses for rheumatologic disease are typically 300-400 mg/day and… the maximum dose for malaria has been 800 mg in the first 24 hours. ‘The reasons behind the dose selection in the RECOVERY trial are unclear,’ he says.
‘Hydroxychloroquine overdose is associated with cardiovascular, neurological, and other toxicities, occurring with doses over 1500 mg, and higher doses are associated with fatality.’ He is concerned that hydroxychloroquine toxicity may have contributed to the adverse outcomes and that conclusions based on these results may be unreliable.”
Covid-19: The inside story of the RECOVERY trial

• On 15 June 2020, FDA revoked its EUA for chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine. It cited the early termination of the hydroxychloroquine arm of the RECOVERY trial as one of its principal reasons for doing so, but the press release announcing the revocation revealed that some of the mud flung by the discredited Surgisphere data-that-wasn’t had stuck: “Additionally, in light of ongoing serious cardiac adverse events and other potential serious side effects, the known and potential benefits of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine no longer outweigh the known and potential risks for the authorized use.”
  
  
  
• On 19 June 2020, the hydroxychloroquine arm of WHO’s SOLIDARITY trial was “discontinued for futility“, although WHO only announced that it was terminating the hydroxychloroquine trial on 4 July 2020, on the grounds that the drug produced “little or no reduction in the mortality of hospitalized COVID-19 patients when compared to standard of care.” In fact, the interim results, published in the NEJM, were that hydroxychloroquine increased the risk of death by 19%.
  Once again, hydroxychloroquine was administered too late to show benefit (most patients had already been in hospital for two or more days before treatment commenced) and a toxic dose was administered: 800 mg at baseline, another 800 mg after 6 hours, then 400 mg every 12 hours for 10 days. In other words, patients received 2000 mg of hydroxychloroquine in the first 24 hours of treatment – well in excess of the dose of 1500 mg that is known to be potentially fatal.
  And WHO had been alerted that its hydroxychloroquine dosage schedule was hazardous back in May 2020 by the Indian Council of Medical Research, which warned that the dose being used in international trials was four times higher than that specified in the protocol set by the Indian government to treat severe COVID-19 patients requiring ICU management.
• Low-income nations continued to utilise hydroxychloroquine for pre-exposure prophylaxis and early treatment, with considerable success:
  
  

After considering these facts, several important questions arise:

• Why did multiple jurisdictions in rich countries impose restrictions on doctors’ ability to use hydroxychloroquine for pre-exposure prophylaxis and early treatment of COVID-19 in outpatient settings, all at around the same time, and all citing the same demonstrably false rationale (the concern that supply of the drug to people who were already taking it for non-COVID-related conditions would be compromised, when ample amounts were already in national stockpiles, or were quickly obtained)? Unless one is a coincidence theorist, this coordination hints at an organised hit job on hydroxycholoroquine, a cheap generic that is one of the world’s most widely prescribed drugs, with a long history of safe use, even in pregnancy and breastfeeding.
• Why did the RECOVERY and SOLIDARITY trials use a dosage schedule of hydroxychloroquine that is known to be toxic and potentially fatal? And why did they restrict the use of the drug to advanced stages of COVID-19 when their own clinical trial protocols made it clear that the researchers understood that its mechanism of action as an antiviral was no longer relevant once patients had passed the viral replication stage?
• What does Queensland’s Chief Health Officer, John Gerrard, know about the use of hydroxychloroquine for treatment of COVID-19? He presided over the infectious diseases department of Gold Coast University Hospital during the first wave of infections in early 2020, when chloroquine drugs were used to treat more than 10% of COVID-19 patients. What are the real reasons for his revocation of Jeanette Young’s directive, given that the rationale proffered by the Queensland Health spokeswoman – that there were no longer any supply concerns – is demonstrably false, the supply problem having been solved nearly two years prior (and indeed, 5 months before Young renewed the directive)?
• And finally, why have doctors simply acquiesced to the dramatic erosion of their right to practise medicine, including the right to prescribe TGA-approved medicines off-label if the scientific literature provides evidence of potential benefit – which it very clearly does, in the case of properly-prescribed hydroxychloroquine?

I guess the Courier Mail‘s hard-hitting journalist, Jodie Munro O’Brien, will be working tirelessly to get us answers to all these questions, any day now.

https://robynchuter.substack.com/p/the-strange-tale-of-hydroxychloroquine?s=r
https://empowertotalhealth.com.au/

By Ludwig Van
https://100monkey.substack.com/
​
I'm not a scientist, but something about the latest ivermectin study in Fairfax does not add up.
Sure, "Major study confirms ivermectin useless against COVID-19" makes a compelling headline, and for many it will settle the argument on the side of "THE SCIENCE"…but what does the study really say? 
Does it really cut the mustard in light of the 80+ positive trial results from studies for this potential miracle drug?
​
It is important to note that this is not the first randomised controlled study (RCT) that has been done on ivermectin and Covid-19.
There have been 33 RCTs involving 7,100 people in total with a 56% positive result for ivermectin, cutting hospitalisations and death in half for those who have been given it.
Early treatment was by far the most effective with 60% recovery rate compared to placebo. Late treatment was only 23% effective in comparison. 
​
The meta study suggests giving ivermectin in the early stages of Covid can save lives and even, to a lesser extent, later on in the disease progression.
If you include all studies, including observational, 129,000 people have been trialed with a 65% positive outcome.
The media has been silent on the overwhelming positive studies that have come out over the past 2 years, but for some reason jumped at the chance to publish anything negative, such as the following study which currently seems to be the toast of the town in the strange world of MSM.

The Reis Study ‘ Effect of Early Treatment with Ivermectin among Patients with Covid-19’

• The study took 1,358 people out of 10,467 patients, 6,952 who were excluded because they were either A not eligible or B excluded themselves. Out of the 3,515 leftover, 1,358 patients were allocated to the ivermectin study with 679 given 400 μg of ivermectin per kilogram per day for 3 days, and the other 679 received a placebo for either 1, 3, or 14 days. (This is not nearly enough by the way. Most experts recommended giving ivermectin for a week, or until symptoms subsided)
• Out of this 679 in the placebo group, only 288 people followed the protocol to 100% adherence in other words, they dropped out of the study) to the end of the study, while 624 of the ivermectin group followed protocol by 100%.
• While the ivermectin arm of the study only saw around 9% drop out or discontinue using the drug (which they had no idea was ivermectin or placebo)

Why did 60% of the placebo arm of the study drop out? 
Was it so obvious that they were not receiving a placebo that they decided that it wasn’t worth it? 
Or even worse, they physically couldn’t go on any further.
Obviously, this is just speculation on my part, but there was no explanation given for the disparity in numbers by the authors so speculation is the best we can do in this instance.
Knowing this, how on earth did the authors come up with a total of 111 people having a primary outcome event when only 288 people completed the study? 
This not only does not make any sense but invalidates the study completely.

As you can see, even with their flawed and sketchy data, ivermectin beat the placebo in nearly every avenue. 
In this study, your risk of death was 12.0% lower, your risk of mechanical ventilation was 23.0% lower and your risk of hospitalisation was 17.0% lower. None of these were mentioned in the trial summary or article parroting the trial summary. 
​
So as you can see, this was a positive study. The results were statistically significant and it was not reported as such by the authors of the study or the presstitutes tasked with fear-mongering propaganda.
Now let’s look at the safety and efficacy data of ivermectin before it was demonized by big pharma;
Ivermectin was discovered in 1975. Below are just some of the FACTS about this incredibly safe drug.

• Ivermectin as a drug has an amazing and very good safety profile. It has been used safely for 40 years in humans (yes, not just horses!)
• There have been over 4 billion doses given to humans.
• “There are several reports of ivermectin toxicity in animals following ‘off-label’ use, yet in humans, in general, only a very low-level incidence of serious adverse side effects (SAE) has been reported. Analysis of the first 11 years of mass global Mectizan® use identified a cumulative incidence of one SAE case per 1 million treatments”. (10)
• It won the Nobel prize for its discovery by William C. Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura after they discovered its analog Avermectin was effective against infections caused by roundworm parasites.
• It’s listed by WHO as an ‘Essential Medicine’ in most developing countries and is so safe and widely used that you can buy it over the counter.
• It is generally considered safer than Aspirin.

The financial interests
The authors of the Reis, Lopez-Medina study clearly state time and time again in their disclosure statement that there were no conflicts of interest in the funding of the study, from people or organisations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Google or AstraZeneca. But reading into the two “not for profit” groups that donated to this study, you can clearly see that this is a lie.
As you can see in the disclosure statement below, the author ticked no to any conflicts of interest..

​

​
The following excerpt is from IVMmeta regarding the financial conflicts of interest and likely data manipulation of the study:
“Two ivermectin trials to date involve very large financial conflicts of interest [López-Medina, Reis] — companies closely involved with the trial or organizers stand to lose billions of dollars if ivermectin efficacy becomes more widely known. The design of these trials favors producing a null outcome as detailed in [López-Medina, Reis]. Note that biasing an RCT to produce a false positive result is difficult (suppressing adverse events is relatively easy [Evans]), but biasing a trial to produce a false negative result is very easy — for example, in a trial of an antiviral that works within the first 24 hours of symptom onset, trial organizers only need to avoid treating people within the first 24 hours; or with a disease like COVID-19, organizers only need to select a low-risk population where most people recover quickly without treatment. We note that, even under the very suboptimal designs, these trials produced positive results, although without statistical significance.”
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The major donors of the study were a group called the Rainwater Charitable Foundation which in 2018 was given $19,681,052 by the Fort Worth Children’s Partnership (FWCP). 
The FWCP was given $211,300 by the (drum roll please) Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2020.
Fast Grants was the other contributor, which is made up of a group of billionaires which include, The Audacious Project which is funded by Bill Gates,  The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which the Facebook founder has essentially made his own version of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. At the initiative, Zuckerberg funds & “creates tools'' in order to identify NEW ways to treat disease, something that an effective Ivermectin would render useless If it was found to treat not just Covid, but the list of other diseases that it is touted to be able to treat. 
Zuckerberg actively funds the “neutral” FastGrants to the tune of millions of dollars, as do other tech heavyweights like Jack Dorsey, Reid Hoffman, Elon Musk, Chris and Crystal Sacca. 
Schmidt Futures (Eric & Wendy Schmidt from Google) give money to FastGrants while also actively funding new DNA sequencing and new technologies merging AI and Biologics with their collaboration with the Broad institute to “connect biology & machine learning for understanding programs of life”. 
Where have we heard this machine-human hybrid talk before, “cough cough”? Did someone say Klaus Shwab & the World Economic Forum?

Google is also directly funding the parent company of AstraZeneca, Vaccitech, which was responsible for the viral vector and blood clot-inducing vaccine Oxford-AstraZeneca.
Currently, Fast Grants is funding 24 different Sars-COV-2 vaccines as well as discrediting its biggest (and cheapest) rival, Ivermectin. Not including any vaccines funded by individual investors.
Not sure how you read it, but to me, this is a massive conflict of interest and has big tech, big pharma, and Bill Gates fingerprints all over it!
As I said at the start of this article, I am not a scientist nor I am a doctor. But I do have a basic understanding of the terminology used in scientific studies and even I can see this for what it is.
I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of the lies and fraud that have gone into this paper. 
I have heard rumors that this very paper has been doing the rounds in the peer review circles for around 6 months, trying to find scientists and journals corrupt enough to give it the tick of approval for publication, and even with this, it still shows positive efficacy for treating Covid-19 in the early stages.
The efforts that have gone into discrediting this drug have been nothing less than extraordinary. And this only tells us one thing. This drug works, and if the truth is allowed to come out, the ‘Pandemic’ would be over. 
This is something that the ‘powers-that-be’ cannot allow to happen.

1. Brisbane Times Article

https://web.archive.org/web/20220401141543/https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/major-study-confirms-ivermectin-useless-against-covid-19-20220330-p5a9bp.html

1. Ivermectin Meta Study

https://ivmmeta.com/

1. The BBC’s recent article “False Science” disintegrates under scrutiny.

https://bird-group.org/the-bbcs-recent-article-false-science-is-disintegrating-under-scrutiny/

1. NEJM full study

https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2115869

1. Disclosure statement

https://www.nejm.org/doi/suppl/10.1056/NEJMoa2115869/suppl_file/nejmoa2115869_disclosures.pdf

1. Nobel Prize 2015

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2015/press-release/

1. Fort worth charitable foundation & the gates foundation

https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/committed-grants/2020/08/inv021297

1. Zuckerberg Foundation & Pharma

https://www.pharmaceutical-business-review.com/news/facebooks-mark-zuckerberg-announces-3bn-funding-to-help-cure-diseases-5012395/

1. Broad Institute & Schmidt Futures

https://www.broadinstitute.org/news/broad-institute-launches-eric-and-wendy-schmidt-center-connect-biology-machine-learning

1. Ivermectin Toxicity

https://www.cell.com/trends/parasitology/fulltext/S1471-4922(14)00126-3

1. FastGrants Donor List

https://fastgrants.org/

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Unmasked Queensland sees Covid cases rising again??

Better chuck on your face nappy and hope for the best as the mild flu which is the BA.2 variant of Omicron (the virus formally known as Sars-COV-2) is coming roaring back because the inconsiderate government has lifted restrictions too early… 

What’s going on here?
You may be wondering, why is lack of a mask mandate at fault now that cases have risen slightly while nobody said the inverse when we were having tens of thousands of cases a day while everyone was wearing these face decorations?
This was never something that was blamed on the masks that everyone was wearing as positive tests to the ‘deadly’ virus skyrocketed at the end of 2021 in every state bar WA.
​
On 17th December 2021, Queensland registered 20 positive PCR tests for Sars-COV-2 and a mask mandate was bought in. By New Years Day 2022, we had 5844 cases and only 2 weeks later on the 15th of January, we had seen our peak of 37,148. All while having every woman, man and child over the age of 12 masked up. This fell to a low of 265 cases on the 5th of March, the day after the Mask mandate was dropped in most settings.
At this same time, Victoria also saw their cases rise for the first time after being stable at around 6k cases a day (all while having a mask mandate in place since 2020) to a high of 9700 on the 16th of March. The mandate was lifted on the 21st of February but the virus waited till late March to come after those maskless people, exactly the same time it has in Queensland? Give me a break.
The more likely answer is we are coming into Autumn while a more infectious strain of the virus has started to circulate.
The BA. 2 variant of Omicron which has been said to be 30% more infectious than the original variant is now becoming the dominant strain of the virus. While more infectious, it is also less likely to cause serious disease and In the last couple of weeks, this variant now makes up over half the cases across Australia. The same couple of weeks since masks have been taken off.
This is akin to saying that increased Icecream sales in summer is the cause of an uptick in shark attacks. To use their own words against them, Correlation does not equal causation.
So I ask you. Is this about masks? or is this about more and more vaccinated people crowding in pubs, clubs and other venues where they couldn’t before, all while there is a more infectious strain of the virus circulating?
Queensland premier Annastacia  Palaszcuk says at the end of this article  “I’m very concerned about the impact that unvaccinated people could have especially coming into contact with elderly people, that’s why mandates have been put in place at places like hospitals and our aged care homes to ensure the most vulnerable in our community are kept safe.”
All this while basically admitting that the vaccinated are the ones spreading the virus in the crowded venues. How is this supposed to stop the spread of Covid again Anastasia?
The blatantly ridiculous fact is that the QLD state government seem to be admitting that masks are more effective (They’re not) than preventing transmission than the magical vaccine we were forced to wait for until we got even a little of our “freedom” back. even with 91% of Queenslanders vaccinated against covid.
Wake up Australia. It’s not the masks. And if you won’t take my word for it, take the only randomised controlled study done on the topic in the Annals of Internal Medicine
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/m20-6817

By Ludwig Van

Brisbane Times - March 17th
https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/queensland/unmasked-queensland-sees-covid-19-cases-rising-again-20220317-p5a5ll.html

​

By : Robyn Chuter

Back in the years BC (Before COVID) I wrote about a huge range of health topics. If you haven’t already done so, you can browse my voluminous Article Library on topics from aging and longevity to cardiovascular disease, diabetes to the psychology of lifestyle change, and women’s health to weight loss.
My aim in writing these articles has always been to unearth the “buried treasure” in medical journals – the fascinating and sometimes even potentially life-changing findings that are bound up in near-impenetrable jargon and frequently behind a paywall – and present it to people who don’t have a background in science, so they can actually make use of this (mostly) publicly-funded research.
I still keep a file of articles that I come across when reading medical journals, that I’d like to write about when the manufactured COVID crisis is over. Look, I know what you’re thinking – This is never going to be over; didn’t the world’s leading doctor, Bill Gates, tell us there would be another one that would “get attention”?
Yes, I know. But I need to maintain some hope, so just indulge me, OK?

Here are a few medical journal articles I’d been saving up for a sunny, manufactured-COVID-crisis-free day. I’m going to briefly summarise the findings of each study, and then I’m going to ask you a question about them (so don’t tune out and skip this bit). Ready? Let’s go.
1. ‘Association Between Childhood Body Size and Premenstrual Disorders in Young Adulthood’This prospective cohort study (i.e. a study in which participants are followed by researchers over a long period of time) included 6524 US female participants from the Growing Up Today Study, which recruited the children of participants in the famous, ongoing Nurses’ Health Study (NHS) II.
Participants who had been overweight in early adolescence were more likely to suffer from premenstrual disorders in their mid-20s, with those who had been obese around the time of puberty having a higher likelihood of suffering from severe premenstrual symptoms that emerged before the age of 20:
Participants who had an earlier menarche (age at first menstrual period) were more likely to have a premenstrual disorder; having more body fat is known to be associated with earlier menarche.
Participants who had been overweight in early adolescence, but subsequently became lean, did not have an increased risk of premenstrual disorders in their mid-20s, indicating the benefits of effective weight loss programs for prevention of this common female malady.
2. ‘Higher adiposity and mental health: causal inference using Mendelian randomization’In this study, researchers used data gathered from over 145 000 participants in the UK Biobank, a large and ongoing study investigating the respective contributions of genetic predisposition and environmental factors (including nutrition, lifestyle, sleep habits and medication use) to the development of a wide variety of health conditions.
Specifically, researchers examined the association between higher body fatness (adiposity) and depression risk, teasing out the contribution made by the metabolic dysfunction associated with obesity – high triglycerides, low HDL-cholesterol and increased diabetes risk – which is known to be associated with heightened risk of depression.
You see, some people have genes that make them more prone to accumulating excess body fat, and some have genes that make them resistant to metabolic dysfunction even when they are carrying excess fat, while others have genes that make them highly susceptible to metabolic dysfunction.
The researchers found that even in people with metabolically favourable genetic variants, carrying excess body fat was associated with a 50% higher risk of currently being depressed, along with a lower sense of well-being.
In a nutshell, being overfat is bad for your mental well-being even if you’re blessed with “good genes” that insulate you against developing metabolic dysfunction.

3. ‘Evaluation of Adiposity and Cognitive Function in Adults’This was a cross-sectional analysis (i.e. data gathered at a single time-point) of the relationship between body fatness, visceral adipose tissue (deep abdominal fat), cognitive function and evidence of vascular brain injury, in 9189 Canadian and Polish adults aged 30-75 years. Participants were all free of cardiovascular disease, which can impair cognitive ability and is associated with increased fat mass.
Both increased general body fatness and higher visceral adiposity were associated with a greater risk of vascular brain injury – that is, damage to the blood vessels in the brain which causes “silent brain infarction”, an area of dead brain tissue that hasn’t yet become clinically apparent because it is too small to cause stroke symptoms, but can still erode cognitive capacity.
Likewise, participants with either higher body fat or higher visceral fat (or both) scored lower on tests of cognitive function. In fact, carrying around too much fat contributed more to the risk of having significantly poorer cognitive function than average, than not completing high school or having cardiovascular risk factors (signified by IHRS [INTERHEART Risk Score]) such as high blood pressure, both of which are known to reduce cognitive ability):
4. ‘Association of Body Mass Index in Midlife With Morbidity Burden in Older Adulthood and Longevity’This was a prospective cohort study in which nearly 30 000 participants were followed up for over 40 years, starting in 1967, to assess the impact that overweight and obesity in midlife (around age 40) have on health status and health care expenditure in later life (65 and older), and lifespan.
Compared to seniors who were at a healthy weight in their 40s, by later life, those who had been overweight or obese in their 40s were far more likely to be living with a quality-of-life-impairing illness, including cardiovascular disease.
And the fatter participants had been in their 40s, the sicker they were by their mid-60s and beyond (although the class III obesity curves are likely impacted by the so-called “healthy survival bias”, in which only the small minority of people with bullet-proof genes – the types who can smoke a pack of Camels a day, eat greasy food, do no exercise and still kick on to 95 – survive past a certain age):
Median cumulative health care costs after age 65 in people who had been overweight in their 40s were $12 390 higher than for people who had been normal-weight in their 40s. And those who had classes I and II obesity in midlife cost the US Medicare system an additional $23 396 compared to their slim counterparts.
Of the original cohort who had died by the time of this analysis, those who had classes I or II obesity in midlife lived on average 1.5 years less than people who were normal-weight in their 40s, while those with class III obesity in their 40s lost a full 4.6 years of their potential lifespan. Not only that, but fewer years of their lives were lived in good health, unimpaired by any illness:
To summarise, if you’re carrying excess body fat in your 40s, you will be sicker for a greater part of your senior years, and more costly to the taxpayer-funded health care system even though you’ll live a shorter life than healthy-weight peers.
Quiz questionWhat is the common thread that connects these four articles?
Congratulations, you win the prize:
Carrying too much fat on your body is bad for you, at every stage of life, and is highly likely to make you more miserable, less smart, sicker and prematurely dead.
And this is not news; just ask an actuary whose job is to calculate life insurance premiums.


Yet, despite the clear evidence that obesity is harmful, the postmodernism-informed field of Fat Studies is thriving. Papers such as this one in the sociological press, and this one which was published in a medical journal, argue that we should stop thinking of obesity as a health issue, and instead frame “fat acceptance” as a social justice issue:
“Fatphobia in the United States has always been intimately connected to other systems of oppression like sexism, racism, and classism.”
Fat Is a Social Justice Issue, Too
“Scholars of fat studies understand fatness as a way of thinking about bodily diversity. This literature maintains that fatness should be uncoupled from pathology, as such framings attach fatness to a sense of moral weakness and failed citizenship, and can fuel stigma in various settings, even health care. Such an uncoupling is increasingly supported by medical and population health research, which suggests that people who are labelled obese are not necessarily unhealthy.”
Fat acceptance as social justice
(N.B. I’ve written two previous article about the fat acceptance and Health At Every Size movements; see Is the ‘Health At Every Size’ movement helping or hurting? and Larger body, shorter life.)
Obesity and COVID-19In this Age of COVID, there is overwhelming evidence that obesity is second only to age as a risk factor for developing severe disease from SARS-CoV-2 infection, requiring admission to hospital, being admitted to an intensive care unit, requiring mechanical ventilation, and dying of COVID-19. I’ve discussed this in my prior articles, When Two Pandemics Collide: How obesity affects COVID-19, How to slash COVID-19 hospitalisation rates by two thirds and The personal and public health threat of obesity in the age of COVID.
Systematic reviews and meta-analyses collectively involving millions of patients (see here, here, here, here, here, here and here) have found up to a 3+ times greater risk of being hospitalised and up to a 60% greater risk of dying in obese individuals compared to those with a healthy weight, and three and a half times greater risk of dying in over 65s.
Furthermore, there’s a dose-response relationship between excess body fat and COVID deaths: analysis of data from a large managed health care system in the US, Kaiser Permanente, found that
“Compared with patients with a BMI of 18.5 to 24 kg/m2 [normal-weight], those with BMIs of 40 to 44 kg/m2 [severe obesity] and greater than 45 kg/m2 [morbid obesity] had relative risks of 2.68 (95% CI, 1.43 to 5.04) and 4.18 (CI, 2.12 to 8.26), respectively.”
Obesity and Mortality Among Patients Diagnosed With COVID-19: Results From an Integrated Health Care Organization
How do advocates for fat acceptance deal with this mountain of incriminating data? They tendentiously claim that we can’t blame the increased risk of poor outcomes on obesity itself, because “body weight may not be an independent predictor of poor health outcomes”.
This is patently absurd. Not only does increased body weight (or more to the point, increased body fatness) raise the risk of a host of health conditions that are themselves risk factors for poor health outcomes, but the Kaiser Permanente study cited above found that the association between excessive body fat and risk of dying of COVID-19 was “independent of obesity-related comorbidities and other potential confounders”.
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What are we to make of such stubborn denial of easily-verified reality? Is the fat acceptance movement a spontaneously-arising, organic movement that is flourishing because it offers a more accurate understanding of fatness, or a superior way to interpret and respond to the personal and social challenges it presents, than the medical framing of it as “obesity”?
Clearly not. Not only is it entirely unmoored from biological reality, it (along with all the other flavours of postmodernism-inspired identity politics such as critical race theory, intersectionality, fourth-wave feminism and ableism1) fosters a grievance culture that sanctifies victimhood and disavows personal agency. Does anyone truly believe that telling obese people patent falsehoods about the negative impact of excess body fat on their health and well-being, while persuading them that their real problem is that they’re victims of an oppressive system which marginalises and stigmatises them, is helpful to them?
So here’s a subversive thought. What if the fat acceptance movement has been intentionally nurtured and promoted by forces that profit from the increased prevalence of obesity? Big Food, Big Pharma and Big Healthcare immediately spring to mind as obvious beneficiaries. All enjoy cosy relationships with the state and its ideological handmaidens, including the academic institutions that groom the Mandarin class to occupy their assigned roles in the corporate-state apparatus.
And beyond financial profit, powerful institutions benefit from the confusion, extreme polarisation, intolerance of dissent and denunciation of the liberal ideals of free speech and openness to discussion and debate, that fat activism and other flavours of identity politics foment.
Radical ideologies demand enforcement of their precepts, and enforcement requires centralisation of power. The slide toward the northern pole of the political compass’ authoritarian-libertarian axis has been greatly accelerated by the rise of identity politics.
The purveyors of woke ideologies clamour for the outlawing of anything they judge as “hate speech” – unlike the old left which championed free speech even if it involved ideas distasteful to most – and the excommunication from society of anyone “holding unacceptable views”.
And the political class couldn’t be happier with the censorious climate generated by the woke mob: It provides cover for the ratcheting up of their own control over the speech, actions and even thoughts of the populace, and greases the skids for their projects of marginalisation, exclusion and punishment of dissenters (like denying “unvaccinated” people the “free” medical treatment for COVID-19 that their taxes have already paid for). Once the agitariat has been whipped up into a frenzy, it’s not hard to turn their rage onto other objects, as Orwell so trenchantly described:
“The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp. Thus, at one moment Winston’s hatred was not turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at such moments his heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen, sole guardian of truth and sanity in a world of lies. And yet the very next instant he was at one with the people about him, and all that was said of Goldstein seemed to him to be true.”
Nineteen Eighty-Four
There are many possible reasons for the near-total lack of public discussion about the serious impact that obesity has on individuals’ risks of bad outcomes of COVID-19, let alone on the healthcare system.
But the outrage culture fostered by identity politics plays, at the very least, a facilitating role. Even if politicians, health bureaucrats or journalists were aware that obesity is the leading controllable risk factor for severe COVID-19, most would reflexively self-censor for fear of the backlash they would cop if they called for open discussion of this sensitive topic.
In a world where morality has become deformed by cancel culture, merely imagining being accused of fat-shaming and victim-blaming is enough to stop all but the most hardy souls from pointing to the metaphorical elephant in the room.
And for politicians, health bureaucrats and captured agencies like TGA and ATAGI, who had already decided at the very beginning of the manufactured COVID crisis that vaccination was “our only way out of the pandemic”, the tacit embargo on open discussion of Australia’s obesity problem and how to address it, is most convenient. Formulating whole-of-government policies to comprehensively reengineer our obesigenic environment would necessitate dropping agricultural subsidies that artificially lower the cost of obesity-promoting foods, which would throttle the political donations flowing from Big Oil, Big Ag and Big Food, as well as opportunities for lucrative post-political-life employment or board membership in these industries. And that’s just one mote of the fallout from effective anti-obesity policies.
No wonder the Commonwealth Department of Health downplays the major role played by obesity in the severity of COVID-19, relegating it to second-last on its list of risk factors, and falsely claims that only severe obesity (BMI>40 kg/m²) increases risk.

And so, while I doubt that even a handful of the people wielding power and influence in this country could coherently explain any of the concepts discussed in Fat Studies to the non-cognoscenti, the undeniable fact is that the radical ideologies spawned by post-modernism (all of which are obsessed with power dynamics between social and cultural groups) are not threatening the centralising, totalising power of the state; they are reinforcing it. The state always seeks to expand its power and control over the governed, and is adept at both crafting and inserting narratives that reinforce its authority, and manipulating narratives that spontaneously arise to serve its own ends.
To distil this rather discursive post:

1. Obesity is bad for you. It’s bad for your health, psychological well-being, quality of life and cognitive capacity.
2. Obesity is the most important risk factor for severe COVID-19 that you can do something about (unlike age).
3. Fat activism is based on postmodern philosophies that reject science, and even the concept of health itself, as “just another oppressive force of Western colonial hegemony (since objective truth doesn’t exist and is merely manufactured as a tool of oppression)”.
4. The censorious environment engendered by the rise of identity politics such as fat studies serves the interests of the corporate-state apparatus, which is happy to make use of any tool it encounters to consolidate its own power and control.

And to free ourselves from this ever-encroaching leviathan, we need to take radical responsibility for ourselves and our families, on every plane: supporting our physical health with species-appropriate nutrition, physical activity, sleep and sunlight exposure; fine-tuning the quality and quantity of our information diet; and building community with other philosophically aligned people in order to co-create decentralised solutions for everything we require in order to survive and thrive, from the most basic survival needs of water, food and shelter to the most complex human drives for intimate relationships, personal fulfilment and spiritual communion.
I have many more thoughts on this which I’ll be sharing in subsequent posts. Please join the conversation in the comments section below.

https://robynchuter.substack.com/
https://empowertotalhealth.com.au/

The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) have provisionally approved the Pfizer vaccine for use in children aged 5-11 years. The roll out will begin on 10 January 2022.
 
Let’s take a look at the facts.
 
According to the Department of Health, at the time of writing, there has been 64,388 cases of COVID-19 in those aged 0-19. Tragically, three children have lost their lives.
 
However, on closer examination, the three children who passed away did so with COVID-19, not from COVID-19. This is an important distinction.
 
According to a report in The Age, a “child aged under 10 years, who died with COVID-19, also had other serious comorbidities”.
 
The article also states that a “15-year-old Melbourne girl who health authorities said had a “a number of health conditions” also died with the virus”.
 
A report in The Guardian claimed that a “teenager from south-west Sydney died in August after contracting pneumococcal meningitis, and while he was also Covid-positive it was not the reason for his hospitalisation or death”.
 
It is clear that all three deaths were due to other causes, and not from COVID-19. Yet, they are listed as COVID-19 deaths on the Department of Health website.
 
University of Sydney infectious diseases paediatrician Robert Booy said that the “risk of deaths associated with COVID-19 in children and teenagers were extremely low compared even with vaccinated adults… Of the 25 deaths in COVID-positive children and teens up to the age of 16 recorded in Britain until March this year, half of them were in children who had a major medical problem… For example, Down syndrome, cerebral palsy or severe heart and lung disease.”
 
A study conducted in Germany and published on the preprint server MedRxiv found that “SARS-CoV-2-associated burden of a severe disease course or death in children and adolescents is low”.
 
“The lowest risk was observed in children aged 5-11 without comorbidities. In this group, the ICU admission rate was 0.2 per 10,000 and case fatality could not be calculated, due to an absence of cases.”
 
Another study conducted in Sweden and published in the New England Journal of Medicine demonstrated a “low incidence of severe Covid-19 among schoolchildren and children of preschool age during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic”.
 
Children are not at risk of severe illness, hospitalisation and death from SARS-CoV-2. Vaccinating children against COVID-19 is completely unwarranted and unnecessary.
 
The Australian Product Information for the Pfizer vaccine shows that the Phase 2/3 trial (Study C4591007) included 2,268 children aged 5-11, of which 2,158 were followed up for at least two months after the second dose.
 
Of these 2,268 children, 3 in the vaccine group and 16 in the placebo group developed COVID-19, resulting in a vaccine efficacy of 90.7%, according to the New England Journal of Medicine. This is known as relative risk reduction.
 
On closer inspection, 19 children out of 2,268 developed COVID-19, which equates to 0.8% of the total number of participants. The absolute risk reduction of the COVID-19 vaccine for those aged 5-11 is 1.9%. This is the actual efficacy of the vaccine, and is a more accurate measure of an individual’s overall risk.
 
Not only is the vaccine unwarranted given the mild nature of SARS-CoV-2 in children, it is also ineffective at preventing mild to moderate disease.
 
However, the most disturbing statement in the Australian Product Information is this:
 
“THE SAFETY EVALUATION IN STUDY C4591007 IS ONGOING.”
 
A vaccine, which is still in the clinical trial phase until July 2024, according to National Institutes of Health (NIH), and which uses technology that has never been used on a mass population previously, is being injected into children with unknown longer-term safety.
 
This is completely unforgiveable. This defies all reason and logic. The vaccine should never have been provisionally approved for children aged 5-11 based on this data.
 
According to the Australian Product Information, “the most frequent adverse reactions in children 5 to <12 years of age that received 2 doses included injection site pain (>80%), fatigue (>50%), headache (>30%), injection site redness and swelling (>20%), myalgia and chills (>10%)”.
 
The following adverse reactions from post-market experience were derived from spontaneous reports and the “frequencies could not be determined and are thus considered as not known”:
 

• Anaphylaxis and hypersensitivity reactions (e.g., rash, pruritis, urticaria, angioedema)
• Myocarditis and pericarditis
• Diarrhoea and vomiting
• Pain in the extremity (arm)
• Extensive swelling of the vaccinated limb

 
The New England Journal of Medicine summarises the safety and efficacy in children aged 5-11 as follows:
 
“Limitations of the study include the lack of longer-term follow-up to assess the duration of immune responses, efficacy, and safety. However, longer-term follow-up from this study, which will continue for 2 years, should provide clarification. This study was also not powered to detect potential rare side effects of BNT162b2 in 5-to-11-year-olds.”
 
What dystopian nightmare are we living in?
 
Let that sink in.
 
The longer-term follow-up “should provide clarification” and the study was “not powered to detect potential rare side effects”.
 
What if the longer-term follow up provides clarification that the vaccine is unsafe for use in children? It will be too late. The damage will have already been done.
 
We have seen from post-market assessment that serious adverse reactions are occurring in children aged 12-17, especially myocarditis and pericarditis.
 
According to the TGA’s COVID-19 vaccine weekly safety report, there have been 137 cases of suspected myocarditis and 109 cases of suspected pericarditis in those aged 12-17 following vaccination with the Pfizer vaccine.
 
“We have observed a higher-than-expected number of cases of myocarditis in vaccinated compared to unvaccinated individuals for Comirnaty (Pfizer). The Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety at the World Health Organization has recently stated that current evidence suggests a likely causal association between myocarditis and the mRNA vaccines.”
 
A study in Clinical Infectious Diseases demonstrated a “significant increase in the risk of acute myocarditis/pericarditis following Comirnaty vaccination among Chinese male adolescents, especially after the second dose”.
 
“The overall incidence of acute myocarditis/pericarditis was 18.52… per 100,000 persons vaccinated.”
 
In other words, 1 in every 5,400 children. The clinical trial for those aged 5-11 only had 2,268 participants. This sample size is not large enough to detect an adverse event such as myocarditis or pericarditis.
 
Another pre-print study in MedRxiv concluded that “post-vaccination CAE (cardiac adverse event) rate was highest in young boys aged 12-15 following dose two. For boys 12-17 without medical comorbidities, the likelihood of post vaccination dose two CAE is 162.2 and 94.0/million respectively. This incidence exceeds their expected 120-day COVID-19 hospitalisation rate at both moderate (August 21, 2021 rates) and high COVID-19 hospitalisation incidence.”
 
Why are we putting children at risk of a serious heart condition, along with other severe side effects, for a virus that they have almost no chance of dying from?
 
And finally, this article in the British Medical Journal.
 
“The number of children that would need to be vaccinated to protect just one adult from a bout of severe covid-19 – considering the low transmission rates, the high proportion of children already being post-covid, and most adults being vaccinated or post-covid – would be extraordinarily high”.
 
“Moreover, this number would likely compare unfavourably to the number of children that would be harmed, including for rare serious events.”
 
“There is no need to rush to vaccinate children against covid-19 – the vast majority stands little to benefit, and it is ethically dubious to pursue a hypothetical protection of adults while exposing children to harms, known and unknown.”
 
Enough is enough. It’s time to stand up.
 
We need to protect our children, for they are our future.

​By Dr Daniel Niemiec

​Two of Australia’s biggest sporting codes, the AFL and NRL, have succumbed to medical apartheid.
 
The AFL has made vaccination compulsory for all of its players.
 
The NRL has “issued a directive to clubs that left the mandating of vaccinations in their respective hands”.
 
The Canterbury Bulldogs have informed their players and officials that they expect them to be fully vaccinated. Bulldogs general manager Phil Gould said that “those with the ability to make a difference also have an obligation to do so and at the Bulldogs we take our community responsibility really seriously”.
 
If they took their responsibility ‘really seriously’, they would do their research properly and see the devastation that the vaccines are causing. They would encourage medical freedom, and they would support freedom of choice. They would stand up to tyranny and inspire children and adults around the country to do the same.
 
Several brave players have spoken out against vaccine mandates, including Nelson Asofa-Solomona (Storm), Luke Thompson (Bulldogs), John Asiata (Bulldogs), Dylan Walker (Sea Eagles), Api Koroisau (Panthers) and Jason Taumalolo (Cowboys).
 
Asofa-Solomona posted the following on social media: “Front line nurses speaking out. Ask the question, why are they willing to lose their job to not get the juice? What are they seeing that we don’t see?”
 
Front line nurses are speaking out because they witness firsthand the significant adverse events presenting in hospitals. Adverse events such as myocarditis, anaphylaxis, Guillain-Barre syndrome, Bell’s Palsy, blood clots, strokes and many other neurological, cardiovascular and immunological conditions. We should be listening to the nurses, not shunning them.
 
The NRL have even gone as far as to create segregation within clubs. They have reportedly “told clubs to designate separate eating and bathroom areas for players who are yet to receive two jabs”.
 
“The protocols also restrict players who are unvaccinated or have only had one jab from using indoor gyms, public transport and going to the pub. Additionally, they cannot have visitors at their home or attend other households.”
 
What sort of world are we living in? When did being healthy pose a danger to society?
 
The vaccine does not prevent transmission of the virus. This alone should put an end to all vaccine mandates. A vaccinated person is just as likely to transmit the virus as an unvaccinated person.
 
A preprint study found that there was “no significant difference in cycle threshold values between vaccinated and unvaccinated, asymptomatic and symptomatic groups infected with SARS-CoV-2 Delta”.
 
“Our study is consistent with other recent reports showing similar viral loads among vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals in settings with transmission of the Delta variant.”
 
“A substantial proportion of asymptomatic, fully vaccinated individuals in our study had low Ct-values, indicative of high viral loads.”
 
Another study in the Lancet showed that “fully vaccinated individuals with breakthrough infections have peak viral load similar to unvaccinated cases and can efficiently transmit infection in household settings, including to fully vaccinated contacts”.
 
A study in the European Journal of Epidemiology demonstrated that “at the country-level, there appears to be no discernible relationship between percentage of population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases in the last 7 days. In fact, the trend line suggests a marginally positive association such that countries with higher percentage of population fully vaccinated have higher COVID-19 cases per 1 million people.”
 
Different states and territories have issued different sets of rules.
 
NSW have banned unvaccinated players from training with teammates until December 15 or when the state is 95% vaccinated. However, in QLD, all players can partake in pre-season training while adhering to NRL protocols, but that could change on December 17 when the state opens its borders.
 
Meanwhile, in the ACT, all players can partake in pre-season training while adhering to the NRL protocols, but in VIC, unvaccinated players cannot partake in any team activities.
 
This is another sign that vaccine mandates are purely political and not based on health, science or any semblance of logic.
 
When asked about their club’s vaccination status by Fox Sports, all clubs were willing to share this information except for the Canberra Raiders and New Zealand Warriors. Fox Sports and nearly all of the NRL clubs are obviously unaware that a person’s vaccination status is a private medical record and sharing this information is a breach of privacy and confidentiality.
 
The Canberra Raiders stated that “we won’t be commenting on player vaccination rates”, whilst the New Zealand Warriors said that player vaccination rates “is not information we will make available”.
 
At least these two clubs have some understanding of privacy laws.
 
AFL and NRL players are young, fit and healthy men. They are generally at no risk of developing severe illness, requiring hospitalisation or dying from COVID-19.
 
According to Stanford University Professor John Ioannidis, the infection fatality rate (IFR) for those aged 20-29 is 0.014%, and for those aged 30-39, it is 0.031%. In other words, players aged 20-29 have a survival rate of 99.986%, whilst those aged 30-39 have a survival rate of 99.969%.
 
To put this into perspective, all of these players have more chance of dying in a car accident than they do of dying from COVID-19. Should they be banned from driving too?
 
The NRL and AFL have sold their souls to medical fascism. They are participating in medical apartheid, and for that, they should be truly ashamed.
 
Players, like everyone else in society, have the right to choose what they put into their bodies, and they, like everyone else, should not lose their jobs, incomes and careers because of that choice.
 
This is especially true for a product with no long-term safety data, and more reported deaths from this one vaccine than all other vaccines in the past 30 years, as shown by the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) in the US.
 
It’s time to wake up Australia. We are being run by totalitarian governments and organisations that have no regard for an individual’s health or safety.
 
There are already reports surfacing of athletes suffering from cardiac arrest and death in other countries following vaccination. With myocarditis presenting at alarming rates in younger males, are we going to see our sporting stars suffering from heart issues whilst training or playing?
 
To the AFL, NRL and other sporting codes, and to all of the players and officials, you have the power to stop this discrimination and segregation. You are role models for many young men and women in this country. They look up to you. Many follow your every move.
 
It’s not too late. Do the right thing and say no to medical apartheid. Not only for yourselves, but for the entire country.