Watch: Government Minister Admits Covid Vaccines Did Not Prevent Transmission
By Will Jones
Dan Hannan has posted on his YouTube under the heading ‘The vaccination scandal‘ a clip of him asking the Minister, Lord Markham, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Health, what the Government’s latest assessment is of the efficacy of the Covid vaccines. In response, the Minister admits that the vaccines did not significantly prevent transmission, leading Lord Hannan to comment beneath the clip: “So why the hell did we force them on to young people? Why did we insist on vaccine passports?”
Here’s the question and reply in full:
My Lords, may I ask my noble friend the Minister about the efficacy of the vaccine in preventing transmission. It does seem to have been very good at keeping people out of hospital and keeping people alive. But we built the most immense edifice of restrictions around the idea that it was preventing the transmission of Covid. We had vaccine passports and travel bass and it now seems that both the WHO and FISA knew at the time that its efficacy when it came to preventing transmission was negligible. Can my noble friend the Minister tell the House what is his Department’s latest assessment of the vaccine as a way of preventing giving other people Covid.
Lord Markham’s reply:
I think the main thing that the vaccine did was prevent, if you did get Covid, you having any bad effects from it all. So whilst it might not particularly reduce the transmission, it absolutely reduced the effects if you had it and the impact in terms of hospitalisations and deaths. That was the main benefit of the vaccine. And because we made it basically a less serious disease, that then enabled us to open up the country in the way that we were one of the first to get going again because we knew there was no longer the high risk from the disease that there was before.
The vaccine “enabled us to open up the country” again. Yet Sweden and South Dakota never shut down, and Florida reopened before the vaccines were available. I guess they’re magical places that don’t need vaccines to live as free people.
Let’s not forget, of course, that Boris Johnson admitted that two doses of the vaccines didn’t protect against “catching the disease” or “passing it on” back in October 2021. He also said the Government wanted “young people” and “kids at school” to be “getting their jabs with complete confidence”.
Of course, some scientists question whether the Covid vaccines were really any good at preventing serious illness or death either, but that’s for another day.
Reform Might be About to Wipe Out the Tories
By Will Jones
The local election results are as terrible for the Conservatives as feared and thanks to Reform they would have been lucky to have had only a 1997-style wipeout, says veteran pollster John Curtice in the Telegraph. Here’s an excerpt.
The overnight election results have been every bit as disappointing for the Conservatives as they might have feared.
The party is so far losing one in two of the seats they have been trying to defend. When all the results are in, it is at risk of suffering the catastrophic 500 losses of council seats that some analysts had predicted.
The party’s vote fell by 32.1 points in Blackpool South, making it the party’s third worst ever performance in a parliamentary by-election. With 16.9% of the vote, its best performance yet, Reform appears to have done much of the damage.
Moreover, in the local elections the Conservative vote fell most heavily in those wards where Reform fielded a candidate. The only silver lining for Tory HQ was that Reform only contested one in six of the wards where there was an election on Thursday. A full slate would have been even more devastating.
Meanwhile, some of the evidence underneath the bonnet of the headlines will particularly worry the party.
First, detailed ward by ward results collected by the BBC suggest that on average support for the party is down on last year’s local elections. That slippage is consistent with the message of the opinion polls that, rather than closing the gap on Labour, the party has actually lost ground over the last twelve months.
Second, the fall in Conservative support is proving to be highest in the party’s heartlands. The better the Conservatives did locally in 2021, that is, when most of the seats being contested on Thursday were last fought, the greater the fall in their support now.
Worth reading in full.
Their only I hope I suppose is that voters will give them more of a kicking in the locals than in the General Election. But the scale of Conservative failure, particularly on immigration but also on cost of living tied to Net Zero (and lockdowns, though it’s not clear how many voters blame them for that) should not be underestimated.
Meanwhile, Muslim voters have been giving Labour its own (much smaller) kicking over Gaza. From the Mail:
Labour has today sensationally lost control of Oldham Council after Muslim voters punished it over Gaza.
Sir Keir Starmer’s party has lost power in the town in Greater Manchester – and outgoing councillors say the leader’s face has been plastered on leaflets of independents who took their seats.
Speaking today Sir Keir was asked whether his stance on Gaza had been a factor in Oldham. He told the BBC: “There are some places where it’s a very strong factor… I respect that.”
Despite gains all over England from the Tories in yesterday’s local elections, Labour lost control of Oldham after gains by Independents, some of whom abandoned Sir Keir’s party over Gaza.
Labour “Set to Lose in West Midlands” as Muslims Desert Party Over Gaza
By Will Jones
Labour is set to lose the West Midlands Mayoral election because of anger among Muslim voters over its stance on Gaza, party sources fear, adding to the shock loss in Oldham and struggles elsewhere. The Telegraph has more.
Insiders warned that a marked shift in support amongst the city’s Muslim population could cost them their chance of victory.
They said Muslim voters had swung heavily behind an independent candidate, backed by George Galloway, who campaigned predominantly on Gaza.
A failure to unseat Andy Street, the Tory mayor of the West Midlands, would represent a setback for Sir Keir Starmer after otherwise good local elections for his party.
A loss would raise more questions over how his stance on Gaza, especially his early refusal to back a ceasefire, has damaged Labour’s standing among Muslims.
While the election took place on Thursday, the votes are not set to be counted until Saturday, when the result will be announced at around 3pm.
Surveys ahead of the race suggested that it was neck-and-neck with Richard Parker, the Labour candidate, polling just two points behind Mr. Street.
But it appears the Labour campaign has been derailed by Akhmed Yakoob [pictured], the independent who has been backed by Mr Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain. …
Failure to win the Mayoralty would represent another blow after Labour lost control of Oldham council and struggled for support in Bolton and parts of Newcastle.
In all three places, it faced challenges from pro-Palestinian independents and the Greens, who have called for an arms export embargo on Israel.
Defeated councillors in Oldham said anger over Sir Keir’s stance on Gaza had been a decisive factor in the loss of several seats to independents.
Darren Jones, the Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, admitted the loss of support amongst Muslim voters was worrying for the party.
Worth reading in full.
It could be that this is a kicking in the local elections that voters won’t give in the General Election. But either way, it shows that the Israel-Palestine conflict is at the very top of concerns for many Muslims and that this is a threat to Labour’s long-cultivated multicultural support base.
Stop Press: Labour has become embroiled in an internal racism row after a party source told BBC Midlands Today: “It’s the Middle East, not West Midlands that will have won Street the Mayoralty. Once again Hamas are the real villains.” MPs have claimed the remark conflates Muslim voters with Hamas and the central Labour party has distanced itself from the “racist” comment.
No ‘Bioweapon’: Montagnier Thought Coronavirus Was Manmade but Not Very Dangerous
By Robert Kogon
In light of the presence in the viral genome of so-called HIV inserts, the late French virologist and discoverer of HIV Luc Montagnier concluded that SARS-CoV-2 must have been created in a lab. He speculated that someone in Wuhan might have been trying to create an HIV vaccine – and, as I have shown in my recent article on ‘The Smoking Gun in Wuhan‘, he was right. Someone was: namely, an associate of the German-Chinese lab in the city who was himself based, however, at none other than the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Montagnier was convinced that SARS-CoV-2 was made in a lab, and he thought, more specifically, that the inventors had inserted sequences of HIV or the AIDS virus into an animal coronavirus, which was supposed to serve as vector for an HIV vaccine. But, in marked contrast to many current proponents of the ‘lab leak’ hypothesis – for whom the virus is nothing less than a ‘bioweapon’ – Montagnier did not think the virus was particularly dangerous or at least that it could remain so for any length of time. Indeed, in Montagnier’s view, SARS-CoV-2 could not remain dangerous for long precisely because of its artificial origins.
As he put it in the April 16th 2020 interview in which he first publicly flagged his suspicions about the origins of the virus, “Nature won’t tolerate just anything”. Referring to the research of his collaborator, the bio-mathematician Jean-Claude Perez, Montagnier said that a kind of natural “harmonisation” of the viral genome was underway and that foreign sequences which had been artificially inserted into it would quite simply be “deleted” as the virus mutated.
“We know a lot of things in molecular biology, we can tinker around,” Montagnier said more fully in his interview with the Pourquoi Docteur? health-news site.
But… nature won’t tolerate just anything. There are harmonisations. … This is to say that nature won’t allow for just any molecular construction. Or if it undergoes them, it tries to eliminate them. … What’s happening is that nature is eliminating these foreign bodies from the genome of the coronavirus. We are witnessing a spectacular number of mutations: what are called ‘deletions’, because precisely the bits that have been altered, the bits of HIV, are removed. Nature is removing them spontaneously as the virus passes from one patient to another.
As proof of his theory, in an interview with France’s CNews news television the next day, Montagnier noted that precisely the region of the genome containing the HIV inserts was mutating more rapidly than the rest and he cited a sample taken from a Covid patient on the West Coast of the USA in which the region had already been “practically destroyed”. (The CNews interview has been preserved here.)
It needs to be stressed that Montagnier was making these observations in mid-April 2020 – not even four months after the official start of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan.
Although Montagnier – who was a self-styled aficionado of all sorts of unconventional scientific theories and approaches – suggested that it might be possible to eliminate the foreign sequences in the virus using electromagnetic waves, his basic message was that nature was doing the job anyway. “Even if we do nothing,” he told Pourquoi Docteur?, “things will take care of themselves.”
Montagnier did add that this would be “at the cost of many deaths” – seemingly to preserve some interest in his electromagnetic wave theory, which he would then go on to expound. But, in general, his view was that SARS-CoV-2 was highly transmissible but not particularly pathogenic to begin with and that it had already lost much of its virulence by April 2020. (He elaborated upon his view in these terms in an interview with Sud Radio here.)
It is hardly surprising, then, that he would subsequently be a fervent opponent of COVID-19 vaccination, which he described as an “enormous mistake”. But that is another story…
(Translations by the author. The complete audio of the Pourquoi Docteur? interview has been preserved here.)
Robert Kogon is the pen name of a widely-published journalist covering European affairs. Subscribe to his Substack.
Are Children Less Like Their Parents Than We Thought?
By Noah Carl
On April 23, the Times ran an article with the title ‘Children are less like their parents than we thought, study finds’. According to that article, “the study suggests that people inherit surprisingly little of their personality –– so much so that parents and their children are only slightly more likely to resemble each other in temperament than pairs of strangers are”.
This is a very odd summary. Why? Well, the study in question was titled ‘Familial Transmission of Personality Traits and Life Satisfaction Is Much Higher Than Shown in Typical Single-Method Studies’. In other words, its main finding could be characterised as ‘children are more like their parents than we thought’.
So what’s going on?
René Mõttus and colleagues begin by noting that parent-offspring and sibling-sibling correlations for personality traits are usually based on self-report data. This means that researchers usually estimate the degree to which relatives resemble one another by asking each relative to fill out a questionnaire about their own personality.
However, the use of self-report data may lead to underestimation of parent-offspring and sibling-sibling correlations due to relatives using different reference groups for comparison, or having different interpretations of survey items. A father and his son may be similarly extraverted (by some objective standard) but the father may, for whatever reason, rate himself as less extraverted. For example, he may have spent more time with highly extraverted people during the course of his life.
In order to get round this problem, Mõttus and colleagues analysed data on the personality traits of relatives from two different sources: self-reports and ratings by third parties (mostly spouses/partners). So every relative’s personality was rated twice, once by themself and once by somebody else. This gave the researchers more accurate measurements of personality that are less affected by the idiosyncrasies of individual raters.
When they ran their statistical analyses using these more accurate measurements, they observed higher correlations than have been reported by previous studies. In other words, they found that relatives are more similar with respect to personality than those studies have suggested.
Specifically, they obtained estimates around r = .20, as compared to typical estimates of around r = .15 – which means that theirs are about a third higher. They also obtained higher estimates of heritability (which quantifies the genetic contribution to individual differences in personality). Interestingly, the latter finding is noted in the Times article, despite the fact that it basically contradicts the title.
So where did the bizarre title come from? Well, Mõttus and colleagues state in their conclusion that it is still “impossible to accurately predict a child’s personality traits from those of their mother or father”. Note: they are not saying it is impossible to predict a child’s personality traits, only that it is impossible to do so “accurately” (a somewhat subjective judgement).
To sum up: a new study was published (as a pre-print), and rather than reporting its main finding, the Times decided to emphasise a brief section in the conclusion, thereby giving the impression the study found the opposite of what it actually did.
As the World Takes Off, Net Zero Britain Stays Grounded
By David Craig
All around the world new airports are being built and existing airports enlarged in countries which appear to realise that the supposed ‘climate crisis’ and the need for Net Zero are just a load of nonsense.
The largest new airport project is probably in Dubai. Within 10 years Dubai’s main airport will move to a new desert mega-hub, projected to be the busiest on the planet. Located 28 miles south-west of Dubai, Al Maktoum International Airport will have the largest capacity of any on Earth, with the potential to carry up to 260 million passengers per year.
It will replace the existing Dubai International Airport, already the busiest in the world for international traffic, handling 87 million passengers in 2023. Given that the Dubaians are increasing the capacity of their airport from 87 million passengers a year to a massive 260 million passengers a year, it doesn’t look like they’re too worried about what the world’s greatest climatologist, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, calls “global boiling”. Just to put Dubai’s planned 260 million passengers a year capacity into context, Heathrow handles about 80 million passengers a year, Gatwick around 40 million, Manchester about 29 million and Birmingham just over 11 million.
In 2022, six new freight airports and 29 new general-purpose airports were built on the Chinese mainland, bringing respective totals to 254 and 399, according to a report from the Civil Aviation Administration of China. Moreover, an average of eight new airports are expected to open in the country every year for the foreseeable future, while more existing facilities are being expanded and upgraded.
Noida International Airport in Uttar Pradesh’s Jewar is set to be India’s largest when it is finally complete. Switzerland’s Zürich Airport International is in charge of building the project, worth an estimated $4 billion, with operations due to start in 2024. To begin with, it will open with a single runway and terminal building, with a capacity of 12 million passengers a year. But later phases of the construction could see capacity extend to 70 million passengers a year.
Poland is planning to build what has been billed as the country’s largest airport and one of the largest in Europe in Baranow county near Warsaw. The project involves building a passenger terminal railway stations and transport hub. It will initially be able to handle 40 million passengers a year.
Suvarnabhumi Airport (Bangkok’s main international airport) is adding two runways and a terminal, plus extending the existing terminal. This will increase its capacity to handle 150 million passengers annually, from the current 60 million. The estimated cost of this project is $3.7 billion.
Bangkok’s Don Mueang International Airport, used mainly by regional and budget airlines, will also undergo development, including a new terminal and building renovations. This expansion, projected to cost about $1.1 billion, will lift the airport capacity from 30 million to 50 million passengers per year by 2030.
In addition, Thailand is to start construction of its 290-billion baht ($8.8 billion) U-Tapao aviation city this year to handle over 65 million passengers a year. It involves turning the Vietnam-war-era U-Tapao airport into the third main international airport in the country. U-Tapao will link with a budget terminal, Don Muang airport, and the country’s main Suvarnabhumi airport. The project, called ‘Eastern Aviation City’ will cover 1,040 hectares and is expected to create 15,600 jobs.
Changi Airport Terminal 5 in Singapore has been designed with the “airport as a city” concept in mind, with each area a “series of neighbourhoods” with their own character. The project has required an injection of another $2 billion in investment and is estimated to cost around $10 billion in total. Construction is due to start in 2025, with the terminal operational by the mid-2030s. The project aims to add capacity of about 50 million passengers a year.
The construction of an $11 billion airport – Sangley Point international airport – in Manila Bay in the Philippines is gradually moving forward, after a consortium swooped in to bid for the work in 2021. Construction of a first runway, which is expected to take four years, will provide the airport with an annual capacity of 25 million passengers, before a second runway lifts that to 75 million.
In Vietnam construction of Vietnam’s $16 billion new airport – Long Thanh International Airport – in Ho Chi Minh City, billed as the most expensive infrastructure project in the country’s history, saw work on the runway start in late 2022. The first phase of the project involves building a new terminal and a 4km-long runway. Completion is due for 2025 and the airport will be able to handle 25 million passengers a year.
And while we’re on the subject of new airports, remember the Maldives? It’s the island chain which was supposed to disappear under the rising sea levels years ago. The Maldives is developing four new airports the largest of which is increasing annual passenger capacity from three million to 7.5 million:
Doesn’t look like the Maldives are too worried about supposed rising sea levels and ‘climate crisis’ either.
These are just a few of the many new airport projects being built around the world. Even if the U.K. wanted to build a third runway at Heathrow or to expand any other airports like Gatwick, that would probably be blocked for years by endless legal challenges from climate-catastrophist environmental groups on the grounds that increasing air travel capacity would risk derailing Britain from achieving its self-imposed, legally-binding, economically-suicidal Net-Zero targets. As for ever building a new airport anywhere in Britain – that is now unthinkable. In fact, not only are our dubious, plucked-out-of-the-air Net-Zero targets preventing us from building much needed new infrastructure like airports, roads, water reservoirs, power stations and such like, but they are also crippling our economy with some of the world’s highest energy prices, are destroying hundreds of thousands of jobs in manufacturing and associated industries as production moves to countries with lower energy prices and are driving us to national bankruptcy.
As much of the sane world builds a better future for its people, I suspect they are all laughing at our deranged Net Zero stupidity.
David Craig is the author of There is No Climate Crisis, available as an e-book or paperback from Amazon.
News Round-Up
By Toby Young
- “Anti-LTN party backed by Florence Pugh’s father wins three seats in Oxford” – Grassroots, anti-LTN political group capitalises on backlash against road chaos in Oxford’s council election, according to the Telegraph.
- “Boris Johnson turned away from polling station after failing to bring correct ID” – The former Prime Minister was turned away from his local polling station because he didn’t have any ID – a rule he introduced – but was eventually allowed to vote, reports the Telegraph.
- “Changing leader will not save the Conservatives: the two-party system can’t be bucked” – The Tory obsession with replacing Rishi Sunak blinds them to the fact that voters are simply fed up, says Charles Moore in the Telegraph.
- “Rebel Tory MPs ‘give up and go to the pub’ as plot to oust Sunak fails” – Despite results that left the Conservatives on track to lose 500 council seats, rebels admitted there’s no hope of replacing Sunak before the election, says the Mail.
- “‘He owns this now’: Tory rebels lay down their arms” – The Prime Minister has kept his head above water, with fractious colleagues backing off for now, reports the Times.
- “Voter apathy will unleash a Labour government far more dangerous than many realise” – Starmer’s cautious approach appears to be paying off, says Camilla Tominey in the Telegraph. But make no mistake: he is a socialist in centrist’s clothing.
- “Muslim vote collapse is a major warning sign for Starmer” – Labour enjoys solid night of local election results, but ongoing Gaza issue threatens to drag the party down in polls, says the Telegraph.
- “Why won’t widower get payout after wife’s AstraZeneca Covid jab death?” – BBC presenter Lisa Shaw died from complications caused by the AZ Covid vaccine, according to the Mail. But her husband isn’t entitled to any compensation.
- “Florida bans of lab-grown meat: ‘global elite’s dystopian bug food’” – Several U.S. states, including Florida, are moving to ban lab-grown meat, reports the Mail.
- “Inside the bizarre world of the ‘phalgina’” – So-called ‘phalginas’, a term made of the words phallus and vagina, are offered by multiple clinics in the US for ‘non-binary’, says the Mail.
- “Second Boeing whistleblower dies in two months” – Joshua Dean, who warned of manufacturing defects in Boeing’s 737 Max, developed pneumonia following a ‘fast-moving’ infection, making him the second Boeing whistleblower to die in two months, reports the Telegraph.
- “Global temperatures and reduced cloud cover” – We can debate the reasons for less cloud cover, but generally speaking less cloud/more sunshine leads to higher temperatures, says Paul Homewood in Watts Up With That?
- “Laurence Fox under police investigation over ‘upskirting’ photo” – An intimate photograph of broadcaster Narinder Kaur, taken by a paparazzi, was posted by Laurence Fox on his social media account, prompting a police investigation, according to the Telegraph.
- “How the feud between J.K. Rowling and her Harry Potter stars turned ugly” – The relationship started out well between the author and the young actors cast in the films, reports the Telegraph. So why and how did it grow sour?
- “Pro-Palestinian students target parents at Cambridge open days” – As Gaza protests continue on American and British university campuses, Jewish students have accused Cambridge university administrators of lacking ‘moral courage’, says the Times.
- “The police have officially started investigating ‘non-crime’” – Andrew Doyle looks at the phenomenon of non-crime hate incidents and marvels at this Orwellian concept that has been embraced by police forces across the United Kingdom.
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