Efforts to control the pandemic narrative began with a systematic suppression of any suggestion that it might have originated in a research lab of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, then moved on to denigrate, silence and smear critics of lockdowns, masks and vaccine efficacy and mandates.
A bill up for debate in the Queensland parliament on October 11th takes censorship to another level. If successful, it will fundamentally reshape the relationship between doctors, patients and health regulators.
The Australian Medical Network says under the new law “health bureaucrats will determine how doctors should approach treatment recommendations for their patients”, and health regulators will be given “the power to sanction doctors for expressing their professional opinion based on their assessment of the best available science”.
California’s legislature has just passed a similar law empowering the state’s medical board to revoke the licence of physicians who expresses opinions “contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus to the standard of care”.
So now it’s official. They have outlawed opinions.
Having overturned 100 years of settled science and policy orthodoxy on pandemic management with Covid, we are on the cusp of revolutionising the everyday practice of medicine by subordinating the professional judgement of doctors on the best treatment options for their patients to the directives of bureaucrats and health regulators.
As per an existing intergovernmental agreement, the Queensland change could be replicated in cascading legislative amendments in other states and territories to ensure a uniform national law (although passage by other legislative bodies is not guaranteed).
If not paused and stopped, this will affect every Australian, to the detriment of public health.
Let’s look at the practical implications of this in relation to the vexed issue of vaccines for young people. Denmark and Norway have banned Covid vaccines for healthy under-50s and under-65s respectively. On September 30th, Sweden announced an end to vaccine recommendations for 12 to 17-year-olds from November 1st. All three have excellent public health infrastructure and aggressively promote best-practice public health measures.
Yet our own Therapeutic Goods Administration has approved vaccines for children aged six months to five years. The four countries cannot all be ‘following the science’. NSW Health data back the Scandinavians’ conclusion that the Covid risk to children is minuscule. In the past four months (May 22nd to September 24th), just 0.1% of the 2,201 Covid deaths were aged 0 to 19. Almost all would have had serious underlying conditions. An article in Vaccine suggests that, for Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, added risks of serious adverse events are, respectively, 2.4 and 4.4 times higher than the reduced risk of hospitalisation. In a follow-up note, two of the authors note that the manufacturers’ clinical trials showed 125 adverse events per 100,000 vaccinated people, while preventing between 22 to 63 hospitalisations.
Another study in preprint by U.S., Canadian and British scientists estimates that to prevent one Covid hospitalisation in 18 to 29-year-olds, 22,000 to 30,000 of them must be boosted. But for every one hospitalisation prevented, there are 18 to 98 serious adverse events: a net expected harm.
Another new study of almost 900,000 children aged five to 11 in North Carolina, in the New England Journal of Medicine, adds to concerns that vaccines don’t just rapidly lose effectiveness; they might also be destroying natural immunity against reinfection.
Among children who had been infected by the Delta variant and didn’t get vaccinated, protection against reinfection fell from 95% in September last year to 53% at the end of May this year. In infected children who were also vaccinated, effectiveness had fallen to zero by May. The likely, albeit not definitive, explanation is that the vaccines themselves are damaging natural immunity.
Aseem Malhotra is a British cardiologist who initially promoted the Covid vaccines on TV to help overcome public hesitancy. When his fit and healthy 73-year-old dad died of a sudden heart attack six months after a second Pfizer dose, he spent six months analysing the data around vaccines. He now describes this as “perhaps the greatest miscarriage of medical science we will witness in our lifetime”.
He notes that Pfizer’s own trial showed slightly more deaths in the treatment than in the placebo arm and no statistically significant reduction in all-cause mortality.
Some experts point to a worrying trend of rising excess mortality among under-14s in Europe. Using British data, Malhotra estimates the risk of a Covid death in 12 to 15-year-olds is one in 76,000, against the risk of myocarditis of one in 27,000: nearly three times more. The number needed to vaccinate to prevent just one Covid death against the Delta variant reflects the steep age-segregated risk profiles, from 230 for over-80s to 93,000 for 18 to 29 year-olds. Against this, the risk of myocarditis ranges in different studies from one in 6,000 to one in 2,700 for 12 to 27-year-old males, once again demonstrating net harm.
In the two-part peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Insulin Resistance on September 26th, Malhotra concludes: “There is a strong scientific, ethical and moral case to be made that the current Covid vaccine administration must stop until all the raw data” have been released and “subjected to fully independent scrutiny”. He calls on the medical and public health professions to “recognise these failings and eschew the tainted dollar of the medical-industrial complex”.
Meanwhile, many of the claims advanced in support of the vaccines – that they stop infection and transmission, and entirely prevent severe illness and death – have had to be abandoned one after another, but were never ‘fact-checked’ by social media platforms.
Moreover, people who die inside 14 days of a vaccine dose are classified as ‘unvaccinated’. This distorts the statistics on the net harm-benefit balance to an indeterminate degree.
A poll by the Pew Research Centre in February mapped falling confidence in medical scientists since 2020. Malhotra argues that the rollout of vaccines under emergency-use authorisation without access to the raw data, the growing evidence of harms, and the resort to mandates whose major impact is to boost manufacturers’ profits “have highlighted modern medicine’s worst failings on an epic scale, with additional catastrophic harms to trust in public health”.
To summarise, for children the risk of severe illness or death from Covid is very slight – while the risks of serious reactions to vaccines are higher. Protection against risk of reinfection is at least as robust and may last significantly longer for children who are infected but not vaccinated, compared to those who are vaccinated. The long-term effects of Covid vaccines are unknown. Every one of these statements is contestable and subject to revision as the databank grows and more studies are published. Not one is so implausible as to be summarily dismissed.
In these circumstances, for health bureaucrats and regulators to claim a monopoly on scientific truth is scandalous. The effort to shut down legitimate debates on pain of excommunication from the medical profession represents a clear and present danger to public health. I certainly have more confidence in my consultant’s professional advice based on training, qualifications, experience and knowledge of my medical history, free of pressures to conform to the zeitgeist from bureaucrats and regulators, the latter often with compromising links to industry.
Those of us without medical credentials arouse understandable scepticism towards our critiques. This makes it all the more imperative not to silence medical professionals, but instead to welcome and encourage contestable policy recommendations from them.
Ramesh Thakur is Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University’s Crawford School of Public Policy and a former UN Assistant Secretary-General. This article was first published in the Australian.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
The Telegraph headlines :-
“Matt Hancock warns vaccine fake news is a ‘deadly threat’”
In any past normal society Hancock would be ended up behind bars or at least sacked for his gross incompetence, but no, Johnson, ploughs on with these totally corrupt agenda driven globalists.
Hancock is still young, plenty of time for him to face “justice”.
I ‘m not sufficiently familiar with the detail of the legislation. But are those responsible for deliberately engendering fear guilty of terrorist offences?
After all – this is the purpose of terrorist acts : to create disproportionate fear in the population, and even in terms of death toll, the victims of associated fear measures must now far exceed the twin towers fatalities.
From CPS website, Rick:
Terrorism is the use or threat of action, both in and outside of the UK, designed to influence any international government organisation or to intimidate the public. It must also be for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause.
Examples include:
https://www.cps.gov.uk/crime-info/terrorism
Thanks, Sam. Confirms my instinct.
Of course, the withholding of Ivermectin might be considered as : “endangering a person’s life”, as could coercing a ‘vaccine’ whilst withholding information about side effects….?
This quotation should go hand-in-hand with an email to local MPs while asking them if they received their copy of Laura Dobsworth’s State of Fear.
He knows he’s going to prison if the truth ever gets out
You think so? Blair is still running about earning good money with his nose in government policy after Iraq. The same will happen to this snivelling little shit no doubt.
Personally, I hope he’s tried for treason but he’s not the only one complicit in all this so will have his back covered.
He’ll get a knighthood!
Jimmy Saville had one, Nick Clegg and Keir Starmer have one so it seems they hand them out like sweets.
I’d like one too – so I can rock up to the queen and tell her where to shove her sword – preferably up the arse of Mancock.
I live for that day.
I don’t think there’s any point in fantasizing. It’s unlikely to happen.
What I would like to see is a growing awareness that destroys the establishment game-plan with growing antagonism to it. After that … we’ll see.
Sod zero covid, I want to see zero Hancock
I think it’s time to sue, sue and sue again!
Right. So have you started the ball rolling by employing a legal team?
Still using that meaningless, brain-dead term ‘Covid deaths’ without explanation. Why?
… and why yet another repetition of that stupid bar chart? The fake news business doesn’t need distribution help.
I wouldnt be surprised if a large percentage of the remaining 60% werent covid deaths either. Doctors dont always put the true reason for death down on death certificates. Dr Harold Shipman is unlikely to be the first and last Doctor to wield their power of trust in an evil way.
My impression is that, for any elderly person with a slew of conditions (as is very common in the very old, who are unkindly called ‘crocks’ in the trade), the death cert. mentions all the conditions and you take your pick. Of course, if you’re an NHS liar, you pick covvie and leave the rest.
My mother died in April, in a care home, fell and broke her hip, had it fixed, came home and the next day had a stroke and died 3 days later. What was on her death cert? “Old age”. Nothing else. The registrar was appalled and had to bounce it back to the coroner. So yes, death certs are as accurate as a Ferguson model.
Spot on. I’ve used the somewhat pejorative term “Shipman Certificates” elsewhere for the same reason. There appears to have been a substantial ‘transition’ on paper over the winter, for example. After all, the creation of a special ‘tick box’ (as it were) on the form was an open goal for some. As a result, the ONS weekly reports are probably best read with a degree of scepticism – not just in this place!
Of course, historically, Shipman committed suicide in the slammer, perhaps ‘cos someone turned a blind eye.
I’m well past believing our official figures.
Why wasn’t there an investigation into the gold standard of testing when it reveals positive in engine oil and pawpaw fruit.
I should think the real number is closer to 100%.
How about 99.9999999999999999999999999999999%. Even that might be understating the extent of the Covid death certificate fraud. See today’s OffG articlehttps://off-guardian.org/2021/06/02/counting-covids-deceptive-deaths/
I think “recent” can be taken out of the above and 40% is probably a large underestimate.
40% seems far too low.
Actual causes of death are probably things like motorcycle accidents, plane crashes, and gunshot wounds.
A friend just rang to say he believes I may have an asymptomatic beer deficiency
Well if my visit to the freedom pub saves just one life
The thing is, none of us believes a word their stats suggest any more.
The Fauci emails look cheering though.
Any straight to Wormtongue?
Blimey, that’s what I would truly call a “No shit Sherlock” piece of reporting from the Telegraph.
Will they count me as a covid death. I’m dead mad about all the bollocks and sick to death of Matt Hancock.
Little cheery news to read that Sir Kevan Collins has told auld Lard Arse to sick his schools rescue up his arse.
And yet this b.s. continues…