It was an evening in mid-March 2020. Almost two years had passed since I retired from the University of Arizona, where I was a Professor of Epidemiology in the College of Public Health.
I was watching the news from Israel, the country in which I lived during the first three decades of my life. The reporters were broadcasting a forthcoming catastrophe, a doomsday in the making. It was all about a new coronavirus epidemic which erupted in China and had reached Israel, Europe and parts of the U.S.
Like everyone, I have been following the news from the Far East since the beginning of the year. Although infectious diseases were not my subject matter research, epidemiologists are trained to think critically, to question what many accept at face value. The picture that emerged was far from clear. A few observations did not fit well with the apocalyptic predictions.
So, I decided to write a short article in Hebrew and submit it as an op-ed to a newspaper in Israel. That’s how the series of essays now published as The Covid Pandemic: Unconventional Analytical Essays (2020-2023) started. It was supposed to have ended about three years later with my summary of what has actually happened in Israel (as opposed to the official narrative), but I added a few more later articles on Covid vaccines. In between, I wrote about many aspects of the pandemic, drawing upon data from Sweden, Denmark, Europe, Arizona, the US, the U.K. and Israel.
Forty essays are included in the book. The first one was titled ‘Hold off on that Apocalyptic Consensus About the Coronavirus’ (March 24th 2020). All of them were written for the public at large and were data driven. They were not based on ‘opinion’ or ‘intuition’. They are science, as best as I know it. If written in a formal, academic style, many of these essays could have been submitted to epidemiology journals. Whether they would have passed the guards of official narratives is a different question.
What will you find in the book?
Back in 2020, I devoted several essays to lockdown-free Sweden and showed, unequivocally, the futility of lockdowns and the misleading comparison of Sweden to neighbouring Nordic countries. The last one in this series, published in 2022, was titled ‘Sweden or the World: Which was a Cautionary Tale?’, paraphrasing headlines that claimed the opposite in the spring of 2020.
Several essays have estimated the death toll of panic-triggered responses to the pandemic. By September 2021, before the return of the flu, between 15% and 30% of the excess mortality in the U.S. may be attributed to the so-called mitigation efforts (‘The Mystery of Unaccounted Excess Deaths in the U.S.’). These were lives that were lost in vain — at least 115,000 deaths and possibly twice as many. The consequences of lockdowns and disruptions of normal life did not end in 2021. Lives have continued to be lost in many countries, including the U.K. Some of the mechanisms are described in my essay ‘Covid: The Death Toll of Panic’.
In numerous essays, I studied excess mortality and explained why trends should be examined over an entire winter (‘flu years’), not by calendar years. Using this approach, I estimated the excess mortality in Europe (‘How Severe was the Pandemic in Europe?’). In the first year (2019-2020), it was only somewhat higher than in a previous season with severe flu (2017-2018). The second year (2020-2021) was very harsh but far from apocalyptic – about twice as severe as 2017-2018. In both years, all-cause mortality would have been lower without lockdowns.
Over a dozen essays cover various aspects of Covid vaccines. I showed severe biases in influential studies from Israel and estimated the correct effectiveness against Covid death, which ranged from mediocre to zero or sometimes negative, in the frail elderly. Using data from the U.K., I showed the questionable effectiveness of the first booster and the futility of the second (fourth dose). In three essays, I estimated the short-term fatality rate of Covid vaccines, which was unacceptable but fortunately not as high as others had suggested. Long-term fatality is difficult to estimate. One essay describes unacceptable rates of side-effects, as found in a largely unknown official survey in Israel (‘Downplaying the Side Effects of Boosters’).
Did Covid vaccines save millions of lives? Not according to a comparative analysis of Israel with Sweden in the winter of 2020-2021 (‘Thousands of Averted Covid Deaths in Israel: Science Fiction’). Nor did they reduce the delayed death toll of Covid in Denmark (‘Lockdown and Vaccines: Lessons from Denmark’).
In the last essay, which imagines a future perspective on Covid vaccines, I wrote:
Twenty years later, we are still studying the long-term morbidity and mortality consequences of disseminated lipid nanoparticles (the mRNA carriers), self- manufactured toxic spike protein and aberrant proteins in various tissues, elevated levels of IgG4 antibodies after repeated injections, and the integration of foreign DNA fragments into the genome.
These days, a group of scientists is studying cancer cells from vaccinated patients to determine if foreign DNA is present there. Chances are that you will not find much on this topic or on other vaccine-related effects in mainstream media. So, keep following the Daily Sceptic and Brownstone, as I have been doing for a long time. No end is in sight to the saga of Covid vaccines.
Dr. Eyal Shahar is Professor Emeritus of Public Health at the University of Arizona. His new book The Covid Pandemic: Unconventional Analytical Essays (2020-2023) is available now.
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Apologise? Er, I think all the British people historically involved in slavery back in the day are dead. So who is meant to apologise? How can you apologise on behalf of dead people? What a load of nonsense. What possible meaning can that have?
Let’s be honest, isn’t “apologising for slavery” more like “apologising for the relative success of European civilisation compared to Africa”?
What’s needed more often and more loudly is for someone with a brain to cut through the crap and spell it out for the hard-of-thinking.
Congratulations, keep it up.
I do not apologise.
I have never enslaved anyone.
If I had enslaved someone inadvertently I would probably apologise. As I have not, I won’t.
If I had enslaved someone deliberately then any apology would be hollow.
.
I firmly agree with your full stop.——–Just kidding
At least it is not a pointless comment.
Wish I had thought of that —-funny
You are too kind.
It is the sort of comment that I have to come here to make as Mrs Faffor had a humour bypass at birth.
There is a great deal of nonsense talked regarding the slave trade.
‘….military enslavement was by far the most significant method is important, for it means that rulers were not, for the most part, selling their own subjects but people whom they, at least, regarded as aliens. The fact that many exported slaves were recent captives means that they were drawn from those captured in the course of warfare who had not yet been given an alternative employment within Africa. In these cases, rulers were deciding to forgo the potential future use of these slaves. Some of the exports were slaves whom local masters wished to dispose of for one reason or another and those who had been captured locally by brigands or judicially enslaved.
This is exactly the situation described by da Mosto in his account of Jolof in 1455. After a description of the use of the slaves in the domestic economy, da Mosto noted that most slaves were captured in wars with neighboring countries and the civil wars. Many of these captives were integrated into the domestic economy, but the rest were sold to the “Moors” for horses.’
The Process of Enslavement and the Slave Trade
John K. Thornton
‘Military enslavement’ was as old as the hills. Once the apologies start, we will all have to apologise to each other and to ourselves.
At least Britain abolished the wretched trade……so could we ask the entire world to give us a round of applause, please, while we all give ourselves a big pat on the back…..
Or, alternatively, could the ‘apology’ blighters, whoever they may be, just drop the venality and stop being so silly?
White Slaves were 40% of the Roman empire’s population. A similar amount within the various Greek empires. Celts, Saxons, Teutons, the Vikings were all focused in large part on White slaving.
Then we have the Musulmans. 25 million White Slaves. 50 million Black Slaves. Don’t hear a god damn thing about it. One reason for the Viking invasions of this country was to provide White slaves to the Caliphs in North Africa and the Middle East.
Today right now in Africa some 5 million Blacks are enslaved by Arabs, Muslims and other Blacks. Zero whites involved.
This year and every year some 5000 Black Christian Nigerians will be killed by Black Muslims and if female, likely raped beforehand. Hundreds, probably thousands are sex enslaved by Black Muslims every single year, some are young school girls. But they are Black Christians so who gives a shyte – no one, not even the useless Churches.
I also hear there are no black people running around in Arab countries because the Arabs castrated their slaves. ——-Forgotten slavery: The Arab-Muslim slave trade | FairPlanet
No one today should apologise for the actions of anyone who was alive 100, 200, 300 years ago etc. Otherwise the Germans would never be done apologising. But how many people today blame Germans for what Germans did in the last 2 wars? It is well understood that those Germans back then were to blame for their actions and this has nothing to do with Germans alive today. —–Should Joachim von Heisenberg working as a butcher in Mannheim have anything to apologise for because his grandfather was in the SD or SS? ——Ah but the butcher in Mannheim is not the government I hear people say. —–But todays governments were elected by people alive today not by dead people who might have committed atrocities in the past and those current politicians cannot be held responsible for the actions of previous generations of politicians. ——-This “apologising” nonsense is like many other things in todays world political. Political agenda’s are behind all of the apologising, just as the wealthy western world is now apologising for having “appropriated” the earths atmosphere by it’s use of fossil fuels and must now pay the price for that by fobbing its citizens off with inferior energy solutions at great expense by way of “Apology”.
Indeed but as I said above it’s nothing to do with actions hundreds of years ago. It’s about the “success gap” now.
And the Arab persecution and enslavement of black Africans is still happening to this day, but because whites or Jews aren’t the so-called ”oppressors” in these examples, the West turns a hypocritical blind eye. Once more the Muslims seemingly have protected status, because ‘Islamophobia’. The Western ‘powers that be’ prefer to talk about and scapegoat the phantom menace that is the ‘far-right extremists’ but a quick look at any crime figures on terrorism easily contradicts their hollow assertions;
”Since Arabs first invaded Africa in the seventh century, murderous raids targeting innocent civilians have been a common feature of the spread of Islam in Africa. Today, in Mauritania, Black Mauritanians whose ancestors were taken into captivity centuries ago and whose status as chattel has been passed down through the generations, live in bondage, serving as slaves to their Arab Berber masters. Even though indigenous Africans in Mauritania were converted to Islam after the Arab conquest, race has trumped religion, and the Arab Berber rulers have treated the Black Mauritanians as they would infidels.
Modern-day Mauritania is essentially a racist caste system ruled by the 30% Arab Berber minority, called beydanes (“whites”). The Arab-controlled government has “banned” slavery five times since independence from France—in 1961, 1980, 1981, 2007, and 2015—yet today, absurdly, denies that it exists. According to the Global Slavery Index, approximately 149,000 Black Mauritanians still live there as slaves. These slaves remain in chains. They’re bred and are known to have been horrifically tortured in ways that rival and may even surpass Hamas’ torments. Yet these Black Muslim slaves who are passed down like the family furniture from the masters to their sons have no serious champions in the West.
Why are these horrors of real-world slavery, with women raped and men kept in chains, based on the color of their skin or their religion, not better understood and publicized in the West? Because the reigning progressive ideology taught in almost all American educational institutions divides the world into “oppressors” and “oppressed,” bestowing on the latter protected status. With the Arab and Muslim communities in America having been granted this new form of immunity, casting light on evil conduct committed by Arab colonial conquerers who enslave and murder Black Africans, is simply not allowed.”
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/arab-enslavement-black-africans
Great ——Cheers.
Excellent history article by former Royal Navy Officer Lewis Page.
Ethnic Europeans must strongly reject all attempts to impose a false “White Guilt” upon our whole ethnic group. There is no such thing as communal guilt, or ancestral guilt, or national guilt, or racial guilt.
These false concepts have been forced upon the German people, the Japanese people, the Spanish people, the English people (Welsh, Scots & Irish deemed to be ancestral victims of the English), the American people, Australian people, and all Ethnic Europeans around the world. It’s time to say “No!”, and teach our children to say “No! We are proud of our race, our history, and the western civilisation our ancestors worked so hard to build. And we will not apologise for any of it.”
Britain was not a slaving society in the era in question. It was not a Government policy. Slaves were not used in Britain. That some individuals and private companies – like the East India Company – were involved in slavery, does not mean Britain as a social, or political entity was involved.
The trans-Atlantic slave trade was started by Spain, mostly, but Portugal too. African slave taking was Government sanctioned and African slaves were initially brought to work in Spain.
Spain and Portugal shipped more than six times the number of slaves to their South American colonies, than were shipped to the British Colonies/USA in North America and West Indies. Oddly, neither are in the frame for reparations or opprobrium.
But the real significant point is, those slaves were bought – not captured – by European traders, at first from Arab traders but later from the Chiefs and Kings of powerful African tribes that had traded slaves for more than 1 000 years prior to Europeans setting foot in Africa.
Those idiots who want reparation need to go to the head of the supply chain, in Africa… or better still, just get lost.