Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

[stickdog99]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... raine.html

But emails from Hunter's abandoned laptop show he helped secure millions of dollars of funding for Metabiota, a Department of Defense contractor specializing in research on pandemic-causing diseases that could be used as bioweapons.

He also introduced Metabiota to an allegedly corrupt Ukrainian gas firm, Burisma, for a 'science project' involving high biosecurity level labs in Ukraine.

And although Metabiota is ostensibly a medical data company, its vice president emailed Hunter in 2014 describing how they could 'assert Ukraine's cultural and economic independence from Russia' – an unusual goal for a biotech firm.

Emails and defense contract data reviewed by DailyMail.com suggest that Hunter had a prominent role in making sure Metabiota was able to conduct its pathogen research just a few hundred miles from the border with Russia. ...

Metabiota also has close ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), suspected to be the source of the COVID-19 outbreak.

WIV was a hotspot for controversial 'gain of function' research that can create super-strength viruses.

Chinese scientists performed gain of function research on coronaviruses at the WIV, working alongside a US-backed organization EcoHealth Alliance that has since drawn intense scrutiny over its coronavirus research since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Researchers from the Wuhan institute, Metabiota and EcoHealth Alliance published a study together in 2014 on infectious diseases from bats in China, which notes that tests were performed at the WIV.

Shi Zhengli, the WIV Director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases who became dubbed the 'bat lady' for her central role in bat coronavirus research at the lab, was a contributor to the paper.

Metabiota has been an official partner of EcoHealth Alliance since 2014, according to its website.

[Harvey]

I can only assume they've left out a large subset of vaccinated people because that data doesn't fit the narrative.

Shouldn't be controversial, it's been standard operating procedure, at least since 9/11.

When AFP asked Pentagon spokesman Jim Turner why the Pentagon did not provide current statistics on the number of wounded in the global war on terror, he replied: “You are the first reporter who has ever asked.”

https://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/?p=1611

Pentagon spokesman Jim Turner said simply: "I have nothing on Iraqi civilian casualties."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4079059.stm

British ministers have repeatedly refused to concede the existence of any official statistics on Iraqi deaths. US General Tommy Franks claimed in 2002: "We don't do body counts."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/ ... count-iraq

This article was corrected to remove a reference to a 2006 study that has since been challenged. [The Lancet study, 660,000 civilian deaths by 2006]

Any proposed figure can be denied forever because it isn't official. Even though officially, a decision has been taken to provide no official figures.

The emerging cover-up must not be allowed to succeed.

[drstrangelove]

^ The crux is data. If people can be taught what data actually is, that being a useful yet arbitrary process for converting reality into metrical symbols and thereby reducing it to a purely quantitative value, which reality is not; or at least be convinced not to accept data on faith; then the optical nerve used by information authorities to control reality becomes severed. The internet basically created infinite optic nerves. Societies started to trip and fall because one eye would see one thing, the other another; but beyond that there started to be more than two eyes, so goodbye hegelian dialectics. You got the eye of the information authority, you know, the cyclops at the top of the pyramid, but then the base of the pyramid developed hundred of thousands of tiny eyes of its own, and all of a sudden the pyramid starts to lose its base. Middle of the pyramid starts to shirk but at the same time is called upon by the top to whip the bottom into shape, but its not working, the center cannot hold. The top is getting desperate, the stakes higher and higher, blackmail getting more extreme, you know, child rape and murder rings, but the eyes at the bottom can see, and those who will not advert their eyes bear witness. The top realizes it can no longer control reality, so become nakedly authoritarian and go after the three basic human needs instead: food, shelter, security.

[Grizzly]

Maybe it's easier this way... Anal swabs.

[stickdog99]

Vaccine Effectiveness Heads Towards Minus-400% as Death Rate Among Vaccinated Approaches Same as Unvaccinated, UKHSA Data Show

[MacCruiskeen]

Vaffanculo, figlio di puttana bastardo! Cagacazzo!

Neapolitans are good at swearing, and they know which fucking arseholes most deserve swearing at:

RadioGenova@RadioGenova 6 hrs ago

Mario Draghi at the restaurant in Naples welcomed by an angry crowd: "Vaccinate this cock. Piece of shit. Assassin. Fuck you!"

[Film, 25 s]

https://twitter.com/RadioGenova/status/ ... 8741890049

FORZA NAPOLI SEMPRE

[Harvey]

https://www.bmj.com/content/376/bmj.o702

The illusion of evidence based medicine

British Medical Journal, 16 March 2022

Jon Jureidini, Leemon B. McHenry

Evidence based medicine has been corrupted by corporate interests, failed regulation, and commercialisation of academia, argue these authors

The advent of evidence based medicine was a paradigm shift intended to provide a solid scientific foundation for medicine. The validity of this new paradigm, however, depends on reliable data from clinical trials, most of which are conducted by the pharmaceutical industry and reported in the names of senior academics. The release into the public domain of previously confidential pharmaceutical industry documents has given the medical community valuable insight into the degree to which industry sponsored clinical trials are misrepresented.1234 Until this problem is corrected, evidence based medicine will remain an illusion.

The philosophy of critical rationalism, advanced by the philosopher Karl Popper, famously advocated for the integrity of science and its role in an open, democratic society. A science of real integrity would be one in which practitioners are careful not to cling to cherished hypotheses and take seriously the outcome of the most stringent experiments.5 This ideal is, however, threatened by corporations, in which financial interests trump the common good. Medicine is largely dominated by a small number of very large pharmaceutical companies that compete for market share, but are effectively united in their efforts to expanding that market. The short term stimulus to biomedical research because of privatisation has been celebrated by free market champions, but the unintended, long term consequences for medicine have been severe. Scientific progress is thwarted by the ownership of data and knowledge because industry suppresses negative trial results, fails to report adverse events, and does not share raw data with the academic research community. Patients die because of the adverse impact of commercial interests on the research agenda, universities, and regulators.

The pharmaceutical industry’s responsibility to its shareholders means that priority must be given to their hierarchical power structures, product loyalty, and public relations propaganda over scientific integrity. Although universities have always been elite institutions prone to influence through endowments, they have long laid claim to being guardians of truth and the moral conscience of society. But in the face of inadequate government funding, they have adopted a neo-liberal market approach, actively seeking pharmaceutical funding on commercial terms. As a result, university departments become instruments of industry: through company control of the research agenda and ghostwriting of medical journal articles and continuing medical education, academics become agents for the promotion of commercial products.6 When scandals involving industry-academe partnership are exposed in the mainstream media, trust in academic institutions is weakened and the vision of an open society is betrayed.

The corporate university also compromises the concept of academic leadership. Deans who reached their leadership positions by virtue of distinguished contributions to their disciplines have in places been replaced with fundraisers and academic managers, who are forced to demonstrate their profitability or show how they can attract corporate sponsors. In medicine, those who succeed in academia are likely to be key opinion leaders (KOLs in marketing parlance), whose careers can be advanced through the opportunities provided by industry. Potential KOLs are selected based on a complex array of profiling activities carried out by companies, for example, physicians are selected based on their influence on prescribing habits of other physicians.7 KOLs are sought out by industry for this influence and for the prestige that their university affiliation brings to the branding of the company’s products. As well paid members of pharmaceutical advisory boards and speakers’ bureaus, KOLs present results of industry trials at medical conferences and in continuing medical education. Instead of acting as independent, disinterested scientists and critically evaluating a drug’s performance, they become what marketing executives refer to as “product champions.”

Ironically, industry sponsored KOLs appear to enjoy many of the advantages of academic freedom, supported as they are by their universities, the industry, and journal editors for expressing their views, even when those views are incongruent with the real evidence. While universities fail to correct misrepresentations of the science from such collaborations, critics of industry face rejections from journals, legal threats, and the potential destruction of their careers.8 This uneven playing field is exactly what concerned Popper when he wrote about suppression and control of the means of science communication.9 The preservation of institutions designed to further scientific objectivity and impartiality (i.e., public laboratories, independent scientific periodicals and congresses) is entirely at the mercy of political and commercial power; vested interest will always override the rationality of evidence.10

Regulators receive funding from industry and use industry funded and performed trials to approve drugs, without in most cases seeing the raw data. What confidence do we have in a system in which drug companies are permitted to “mark their own homework” rather than having their products tested by independent experts as part of a public regulatory system? Unconcerned governments and captured regulators are unlikely to initiate necessary change to remove research from industry altogether and clean up publishing models that depend on reprint revenue, advertising, and sponsorship revenue.

Our proposals for reforms include: liberation of regulators from drug company funding; taxation imposed on pharmaceutical companies to allow public funding of independent trials; and, perhaps most importantly, anonymised individual patient level trial data posted, along with study protocols, on suitably accessible websites so that third parties, self-nominated or commissioned by health technology agencies, could rigorously evaluate the methodology and trial results. With the necessary changes to trial consent forms, participants could require trialists to make the data freely available. The open and transparent publication of data are in keeping with our moral obligation to trial participants—real people who have been involved in risky treatment and have a right to expect that the results of their participation will be used in keeping with principles of scientific rigour. Industry concerns about privacy and intellectual property rights should not hold sway.

[Belligerent Savant]

Vaffanculo, figlio di puttana bastardo! Cagacazzo!

Neapolitans are good at swearing, and they know which fucking arseholes most deserve swearing at:

RadioGenova@RadioGenova 6 hrs ago

Mario Draghi at the restaurant in Naples welcomed by an angry crowd: "Vaccinate this cock. Piece of shit. Assassin. Fuck you!"

[Film, 25 s]

https://twitter.com/RadioGenova/status/ ... 8741890049

FORZA NAPOLI SEMPRE

Il più bello spettacolo degli ultimi due anni.Grazie amici napoletani

A longer clip here:

[stickdog99]

Hm - the science must've changed.

[drstrangelove]

They have now discontinued data collection on positivity rates stratified by vaccination status in the UK. Weekly surveillance report 13 from March 31st will be the last one.

From 1 April 2022, the UK Government will no longer provide free universal COVID-19 testing
for the general public in England, as set out in the plan for living with COVID-19. Such changes
in testing policies affect the ability to robustly monitor COVID-19 cases by vaccination status,
therefore, from the week 14 report onwards this section of the report will no longer be published.
Updates to vaccine effectiveness data will continue to be published elsewhere in this report.

- https://assets.publishing.service.gov.u ... eek-13.pdf

[stickdog99]

People Magazine: Blood Clots Like Hailey Bieber's Are Happening in 'Younger and Younger People'

[stickdog99]

Rough partial translation:

You’ll see this site that I recommend you visit often, Johns Hopkins, where you’ll see that we’re at almost 10 billion vaccinations [worldwide] and there have never been so many cases. In the United States, the situation is exploding. In France, which holds the record just after the United States, the situation is exactly the same. And what is extremely strange and interesting is the level of tension now, the demand for an increase in vaccine coverage with a vaccine for which we have the proof before our eyes that it does not work at all [to diminish the pandemic]. And so, it is extremely interesting. The best they can say is, “Alright, people who are vulnerable should be vaccinated,” which is true. It is possible that even with this new variant, it is useful, but there is no reason, none at all, to vaccinate a population that is not at risk because the epidemic flares up more and more as vaccination increases. And the more vaccines are given, the more cases there are. So we are in a complicated situation…

… we have departed from science. It is no longer science. It is belief and religion. This was very, very well defined by Karl Popper. Karl Popper was the first historian of science, the first analyst of the science of the 20th century. He said if you can’t show how your scientific theory could be proven false, it is not a scientific theory. It’s religion. Nobody really questions this way of thinking… If you can’t accept that your theory could be wrong, you’ve lost your credibility when you believe it no matter what. And so you start to exhibit religious behaviors that demand obedience. And I can describe two very large studies which show how when one has left the scientific world to enter the world of non-scientific conviction, one can make people do anything.

[stickdog99]

[Why U.S. Population Growth Is Collapsing](https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters ... =operanews)

LOL at The Atlantic. This couldn't have anything to do with almost a billion untested injections, now could it?

[Grizzly]

In this 121st in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.



This week, we discuss the newly published Together trial on the efficacy of Ivermectin in treating Covid, and the media’s response to said publication. We discuss mass formation, as detailed in Mattias Desmet’s book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism (not “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” as Heather said during the podcast; that is the name of Hannah Arendt’s 1951 tome). We discuss the left’s eagerness to be on the side of science, when it suits them, and we mention Solzhenitsyn. And we discuss the need for evidence-based medicine.

]

[alloneword]

They have now discontinued data collection on positivity rates stratified by vaccination status in the UK. Weekly surveillance report 13 from March 31st will be the last one.

Aw. And it was just getting interesting.

That final report appears to show a negative vaccine efficacy across all categories ('cases', 'hospitalisation' and 'death') with the exception of the risk of 'death' amongst 30 - 39 year olds.

Oh well, I guess we'll never know how it turns out in the end, now.