23. The Basket
2.17.2023 The best of Rational Ground, Team Reality and many others...
Click HERE to see The (prior) Basket and HERE to see The (next) Basket
Click HERE to see The Conspiracy Basket
What you can find in this collection (these are my headlines, not the authors’):
Healthy User Bias & Wealth by Mathew Crawford
Give Us Back Sex-based Words by The 21st Century Salonnière
Did Vax Prevent 21M Deaths? by Dr. Peter McCullough
UK’s April 2020 Iatrogenesis by John Dee
Political Will by Sasha Latypova
IFR For Under 50s = 1 In 45,000 by Alex Berenson
Remodeling The Actin Cytoskeleton by Walter M Chesnut
Walensky Rejects Cochrane Review by Michael P Senger
Sequencing The Vaxes by Kevin McKernan
Urgency of Normal by Matt Shapiro
Antibiotic-Resistant Plasmids by Jessica Rose
Transmission Or Activation? by Tom Jefferson & Carl Heneghan
Magic Weight Loss Drug by Olivia Reingold
Lockdown Screentime Explosion by David Zweig
Florida Demands mRNA Transparency by Joel Smalley
VAERS Reports Rate By State by T Coddington
Omicron vs Influenza Hospitalizations by Dr. Peter McCullough
Wyoming vs Rhode Island ACM by Steve Kirsch
108 Country Pandemic Analysis by Joel Smalley
Non-Compliance Over Fear by el gato malo
mRNA Flu Jab Fails by Alex Berenson
New York Times Under Fire by Andrew Sullivan
Loss Of Trust In Public Health by Vinay Prasad
Healthy User Bias & Wealth by Mathew Crawford
the VSD [Vaccine Safety Datalink] is designed in a way that generates an illusion of safety and efficacy for all vaccines and biological products by ignoring the HUB [Healthy User Bias]. The VSD's own publications display a profound HUB with respect to the COVID-19 vaccines. In the VSD system, the vaccinated were as much as 72% less likely than the unvaccinated to die of non-COVID causes. For the majority of demographics, the HUB appears to be greater than 60%, and is highest with respect to the mRNA genetic quasi-vaccines.
When looking at signals of vaccine efficacy (VE) in U.S. county data, we find that median household income almost perfectly tracks (and usually outperforms) vaccine status as a determiner of who dies from COVID-19. In fact, more income seems to be more protective from COVID-19 for a county than vaccines. Maybe lockdowns weren't such a good idea…
Give Us Back Sex-based Words by The 21st Century Salonnière
The fact remains, however, that anyone who requires the services of the midwife is a woman (because “woman” is a long-established sex-based term, not a gender-based term), and if a group wants a word to describe their special gender status, they need to do something other than to appropriate a sex-based word, redefine it, and berate people who wish to use the sex-based word with its established meaning.
The long-neglected anatomy and physiology of “bodies with vaginas” (i.e., women) often has little or nothing to do with vaginas. For example, men’s and women’s heart attack symptoms are often very different, with many medical professionals taught to look out for men’s symptoms as “the standard,” and therefore, women’s symptoms are sometimes missed or overlooked with tragic results. This has nothing to do with anyone’s “vagina.”
A quick google will yield dozens of examples of the medically relevant differences between men and women, most of which are completely unrelated to anyone being a “body with a vagina.”
It’s not just dehumanizing. It’s inaccurate.
Did Vax Prevent 21M Deaths? by Dr. Peter McCullough
I was shocked when Watson et al, made the claim that vaccination helped prevent 14-21 million deaths in 2021. How can reviewers and editors allow an author group to make such a claim when no mortality benefit is granted by the US FDA who regulates the language of the consent form?
I agree with Klement and Walach; the SEIR model is invalid and Watson et al have falsely concluded there was a population mortality benefit with mass indiscriminate vaccination.
The preponderance of evidence is that the effect is in the opposite direction with more infections, COVID-19 deaths, vaccine injuries, disabilities, and fatal syndromes with the vaccination campaign.
UK’s April 2020 Iatrogenesis by John Dee
In a nutshell NG163 gave GPs and other medical professionals the green light to use powerful drugs such as morphine sulphate, midazolam and levomepromazine in end of life situations arising from COVID-19. All of these drugs come with cautions and contra-indications, as well as warning of side effects including respiratory depression and respiratory arrest
We’ve got an inexplicable spike in non-COVID care home death, inexplicable spikes for non-COVID diseases and conditions across several chapters of ICD-10 (particularly so for mental/behavioural disorders and diseases of the nervous system) and inexplicable spikes among all of the older age groups - and all of these spikes synchronised in time to just a couple of weeks in April 2020. A signal this persistent, this synchronised and this large should have raised alarm bells amongst many professionals and authorities like a tactical nuke going off in a small library
There is little doubt in my mind that during spring 2020 non-COVID cases were subject to COVID EOL protocols and attendant use of powerful medication. Given the enormity of this diagnostic error we have to consider whether COVID deaths observed during this period (or any other period) were also iatrogenic in nature.
Political Will by Sasha Latypova
So the third building block, this is political will. Now, many countries in the world obviously have not prioritized pandemic preparedness as their number one thing, and we understand that. You think about all the competing priorities, even of all the things that we heard about on stage today. But now everybody's paying attention. This idea we have a unique opportunity with worldwide political will to fight this pandemic. It's not too late. — Matt Hepburn, Enabling Technologies (DoD) & former Program Manager at DARPA
By “political will” Matt means that the governments of all countries of the world must submit to the “One Health” agenda (aka “one slavery”) driven from WHO/WEF and their owners - the BIS and the central banks. Where if you don’t have that particular “political will” you will suffer the fate of the Tanzanian President John Magufuli, or the Haitian President Jovenel Moise (who refused covid vaccines for Haiti as of April 2021, was assassinated by July 2021, but the connection is fact-checked baseless!) and a few others who questioned the dictatorship of the WHO and suffered grim consequences.
IFR For Under 50s = 1 In 45,000 by Alex Berenson
researchers compared the results from a nationwide sample of Covid infections in the Netherlands at several points in 2020 and 2021 to nationwide excess death totals. To determine the Covid death rate, they assumed all the excess deaths resulted from Covid infections.
This method likely overstates Covid deaths.
The researchers determined the death rate from Covid infections was about 1 percent overall in the Netherlands during 2020.
The researchers had to combine deaths under 50, because they had so few. They estimated that the 10.5 million people under 50 in the Netherlands had a total of 24 excess deaths during the second half of 2020.
10 million people, 24 deaths.
Remodeling The Actin Cytoskeleton by Walter M Chesnut
Looking at how the Spike Protein induces actin remodeling can help us explain the diverse pathologies which may emerge in Long COVID and after Spike Protein exposure.
I believe this apparent ubiquitous ability of the Spike Protein to remodel the cytoskeleton may be one of the missing links in understanding the pathogenesis of the Spike Protein.
If we examine the cytoskeleton and disease, we observe the entire panoply of conditions that can arise post COVID infection and Spike Protein exposure. This may also explain why the presentation is so heterogeneous. And why it is so unique to each individual.
Walensky Rejects Cochrane Review by Michael P Senger
Walensky managed to tell Congress that the CDC’s guidance to mandate masks in schools would never change regardless of new evidence, that the CDC had conducted no randomized controlled trials (RCTs) as to whether masks were effective because it was so obvious that they worked, and that COVID vaccines had been added to the child immunization schedule so they could be given to uninsured children
to say that the CDC’s masking guidance “does not change with time,” despite the recent Cochrane review, is effectively to admit that the CDC’s guidance does not change with new data or evidence
After discouraging Americans from obtaining facemasks in the initial weeks of COVID, the CDC made an abrupt about-face in April 2020, and facemasks soon became mandatory for day-to-day activities, which the CDC at the time had attributed to a change in “science.”
Sequencing The Vaxes by Kevin McKernan
This difference in cardiac risk between the vaccine and the virus should come as no surprise. Intramuscular (IM) administration comes with immediate potential access to the vasculature system.
Natural immunity provides mucosal antibodies and T-Cell recognition of the proteome derived from the entire 30kb viral genome where the vaccines are focused on a small ~4kb (1273 amino acids) region of the virus.
This narrow-epitope vaccine strategy, now has documented escape mutants where the majority of the mutations from Delta to Omicron are amino acid changing variants in the spike domain targeted by the vaccine program.
the vaccines are weakening patients immune systems and making them more susceptible to C19 and other infections.
m1Ψ is known to stall polymerases and induce higher rates of polymerase error. This may enable more efficient first strand synthesis from the plasmid DNA compared to the modified RNA. However, such high levels of polymerase inhibition would raise questions regarding the fidelity of the transcription using m1Ψ
These are potent contaminants in the vaccines being administered to children. Billions of these contaminants per injection is likely an under estimate of their the entire burden as these plasmids can self replicate in bacterial hosts. Multiple studies have demonstrated prolonged vaccine mRNA clearance. This could be the result of the m1Ψ in the mRNA or the transfection or transformation of DNA based expression vectors. The introduction of billions of antibiotic resistance genes in high copy replication competent plasmids should evoke concerns over accelerating global antibiotic resistance.
Urgency of Normal by Matt Shapiro
There are many people who take the cynical view that the CDC cannot be reformed, leaving two options: either we ignore the CDC or we abolish it.
As Covid became a clear threat in early 2020, the CDC was entirely remiss in their essential role of providing high-quality, state-by-state COVID data to the public. Similarly, as schools sought to open for in-person classes in late 2020 and early 2021, the CDC again failed in their core mission as a clearinghouse for objective scientific guidance and was instead issuing guidance that came directly from teachers’ unions.
However, it is in these failures that we can see the rays of hope for restoring trust in scientific institutions.
You can’t come to a school board and say “implementing the CDC’s policies is a bad idea” without an alternative expert-approved path. Even as we are living through the collapse of scientific institutional trust, most institutions (like schools or churches or hospitals) still want to base their policies on the advice of experts.
The Urgency of Normal is an initiative driven by a number of doctors and medical experts as an alternative path to the CDC’s formal recommendations for children and schools.
We’ve seen in the past few years two institutions that arose from those failures and we can see that shifting from one institution to another is not hard for people.
Antibiotic-Resistant Plasmids by Jessica Rose
following sequencing of the Moderna and Pfizer bivalent COVID-19 products is that there is a high level of dsDNA contamination in the Pfizer products. This dsDNA contamination is in the form of circular expression vectors containing a spike gene and two antibiotic resistance genes for kanamycin and neomycin.
These expression vectors do not belong in the shots. This is contamination and we do not know if these contaminants are accidental, or if they were put there. I would bet on the former, but either way it doesn’t matter: this is criminally negligent proof of bad manufacturing practices. It’s time to recall these products.
Plasmids are small circular DNAs that replicate separately from host cell DNA. Plasmids are primarily of bacterial origin
They are extremely commonly used in lab context
What isn’t brilliant or cool is that kanamycin/neomycin/spike-containing expression plasmids were found at high levels - levels that exceed the EMA specified dsDNA limits for these COVID-19 injectable products (they should be below 0.33% (330pg/mg)) - in the case of the Pfizer products, specifically. The Moderna products also showed these contaminants, however.
you are not only a spike manufacturing plant but you might also be an antibiotic resistant bacteria plant whereby these bacteria may also be expressing spike protein!
The commercial batches are not only likely of low %mRNA integrity, but might also be contaminated with antibiotic resistant spike gene-containing plasmids.
Transmission Or Activation? by Tom Jefferson & Carl Heneghan
respiratory viruses…They exist in some form or another; they can be transmitted; they need a host to replicate; when active, they can be detrimental to infected cells, they are unstable, and transmission from one host to another is hit-and-miss and complex.
We have known since at least 1918 that transmission is not a done deal. Experiments to reproduce “Spanish” influenza with secretions of dying soldiers failed to reproduce the syndrome.
Consistent reports of synchronous outbreaks many thousands of miles apart generated the activation hypothesis: respiratory viruses do not come or go anywhere. They are around us the whole time, and something activates them.
The continuous presence in one form or another would fit with the reports of the presence of antibodies in humans decades before the viral infection manifested itself.
Magic Weight Loss Drug by Olivia Reingold
Ozempic, taken once a week as a shot in the arm, stomach, or thigh, was first approved by the FDA in 2017 to lower blood sugar in people with type 2 diabetes. But the drug came with an incredible side effect: rapid weight loss.
Barone, 37, represents a new kind of Ozempic user, who gets the drug off-label from a medical spa that also provides Botox, fillers, and hair loss treatments
As the rumors kept growing, Ozempic quickly became headline news as the magic bullet for getting skinny. Hollywood elites were outed for using it. So were rich people in the Hamptons and the tech world, including Elon Musk.
Healthcare lawyer Harry Nelson says there are “well over 100” businesses across the U.S. now peddling off-brand semaglutide.
Lockdown Screentime Explosion by David Zweig
during the period of December 2020 through April 2021, screen time for kids aged 4 to 12 increased by nearly fifty percent, from 4.4 to 6.6 hours per day, versus pre-pandemic levels.
The news may be worse, still: remote schooling was not part of the survey, and the authors said that they don’t know how or whether parents included any hours that their kids may have spent on zoom classes in their daily tallies.
The numbers for minority kids are even more grim. Children who are part of racial or ethnic minorities had more screen time than white kids. Black children had far and away the most screen time, with 5.4 more hours per day.
the screen habits that began with the lockdowns persisted even after a semblance of normal schooling and other activities had resumed for most kids.
Florida Demands mRNA Transparency by Joel Smalley
In Florida alone, there was a 1,700% increase in VAERS reports after the release of the COVID-19 vaccine, compared to an increase of 400% in overall vaccine administration for the same time period
The findings in Florida are consistent with various studies that continue to uncover such risks.
Surgeon General alerts his State to the substantial increase in risks associated with the mRNA injection and demands transparency and honesty from the federal agencies.
To support transparency, the State of Florida reminds health care providers to accurately communicate the risks and benefits of all clinical interventions to their patients, including those associated with the COVID-19 vaccine as additional risks continue to be identified and disclosed to the public.
VAERS Reports Rate By State by T Coddington
First, let me address how ridiculous it is that the public health folks have dismissed reports in VAERS about COVID vaccines as unreliable. Hey folks, IT’S YOUR FRICKIN SYSTEM! If it is unreliable, what are you doing to fix it? If it’s not useful, why are we maintaining it?
you would need to argue that you are confident that people are intentionally entering false or misleading reports in order to damage the reputations of the vaccines. If this were the case, then we should see an anomalous level of reporting from “anti-vaxxers”.
if the premise above were true, then we should see more reports per dose of vaccine given in geographies with more “anti-vaxxers” (i.e. red states) than we do in the vax-loving blue states.
Omicron vs Influenza Hospitalizations by Dr. Peter McCullough
report on hospitalized cases of Omicron and Influenza A/B infections in Switzerland.
in-hospital mortality rates were 7.0 and 4.4% with 8.5 and 15.3% incurring cardiovascular events in the SARS-CoV-2 and Influenza A/B groups, respectively. This translated into nearly identical outcomes (ICU admission and death) at 30 days in both groups.
There appeared to be no impact of antecedent vaccination for either disease but for different reasons.
The COVID-19 vaccinations failed to stop hospitalization with the majority having been immunized. There was no statistical difference in death among those vaccinated verses not, 7.2 vs 9.3%, p=0.05, respectively.
Influenza vaccination appeared to have no impact because of very poor utilization (10%) with considerable missing data.
Wyoming vs Rhode Island ACM by Steve Kirsch
Wyoming is the least vaccinated state (52.8%) and Rhode Island is the most vaccinated state.
how these states fared when there was a huge COVID infection outbreak at the start of 2022 that affected both these states.
It turned out that the least vaccinated state had the lower rise in all-cause mortality (1.25 vs. 1.42) vs. avg mortality for the year.
The bottom line: higher vaccination —> higher deaths for all age groups. That’s why 15-year-olds with heart attacks are now the new normal when they were non-existent before the vaccines rolled out.
If the vaccine really worked, the state with the lowest vaccination rate should have the highest spike in all-cause mortality during a COVID wave. That wasn’t the case for the 45-64 age group and it’s arguably not true for the 65-74 age group if you believe that the higher cases are due to higher vaccination rates.
108 Country Pandemic Analysis by Joel Smalley
Paper can be found HERE
Higher countrywide COVID-19 vaccination rates »» higher COVID-19 deaths per country population.
Higher country healthcare costs per capita »» higher COVID-19 deaths per country population.
Higher annual income per capita »» higher COVID-19 deaths per country population.
Higher countrywide COVID-19 testing »» higher COVID-19 deaths per country population.
Higher country COVID response stringency (mandates, masking, social distancing, curfews, quarantine, business/school closings, banning or limiting public gatherings, lockdowns, travel ban, contact tracing, and PCR testing) »» higher COVID-19 deaths per country population.
Higher countrywide Hydroxychloroquine use »» lower COVID-19 deaths per country population.
Higher countrywide Ivermectin use »» lower COVID-19 deaths per country population.
Non-Compliance Over Fear by el gato malo
once you scare someone sufficiently and apply enough social pressure, you can make the anxious into a stampede demanding to "do something."
you can make even knowledgeable, rational people doubt themselves enough to go along to get along.
you can make them fear the mob.
90%+ of humans fail the asch conformity test.
even those who saw through this mostly failed to stand fast enough. you have to nip this in the bud. the minute they tell you something crazy, there must be mass non-compliance.
once they get the ball rolling with “2 weeks to flatten your resolve” the game is kind of over. they have the momentum.
you cannot give up “just a little free speech” to make the world safer/nicer/better. give up any, and the rest is just a privilege.
you cannot give up “just a little liberty” or “just a few rights.” look how the state bent doctors by threatening their licenses. look how they closed bars and restaurants using health codes. look how they threatened your right to work and your children to force your compliance.
mRNA Flu Jab Fails by Alex Berenson
Moderna’s leading mRNA influenza jab has failed, the company said yesterday.
In a large clinical trial, the vaccine appeared LESS able to stimulate the immune system than older flu jabs for two of four flu strains, the company said. It also had far higher rates of side effects than the older shots.
The lack of efficacy was notable because flu vaccines have almost no real-world efficacy, as Dr. Anthony Fauci himself conceded in a paper last month.
The trial began in June 2022 and covered 6,100 people in Argentina and other southern hemisphere countries.
New York Times Under Fire by Andrew Sullivan
an open letter from a thousand or so New York Times contributors, accusing the NYT of “follow[ing] the lead of far-right hate groups” in its coverage of transgender issues.
It’s an echo of Evergreen and Yale and Middlebury and Reed. The ploys are repeated because they work and there’s no downside. And almost all the university presidents caved. They held meetings and meetings; they apologized; they appeased; they conceded core liberal principles of free speech and dissent; they terminated dissident faculty; they equivocated and collaborated in the pursuit of “diversity” and then “equity.” In a word, they were pathetic.
One more criticism of the letter. It uses the terrible history of the NYT on coverage of gay men and AIDS in the 20th century as equivalent to the reporting of Bazelon, Baker, et al, today. This is unhinged. Transgender people today are fully covered under the Civil Rights Act; in the 1980s, gays had nothing. In the 1980s and 1990s, the NYT opposed using the word “gay” because it legitimized homosexuality in some way; today the NYT prints “queer” or “trans” or LGBTQ+ in almost every other article.
Today, the paper has published a mountain of empathetic coverage of trans people — over 800 stories in the past year.
Loss Of Trust In Public Health by Vinay Prasad
In other words, trust is justified based on how an organization or system performs. And the truth is, the entire public health apparatus, failed. In addition to that, leaders at FDA and NIH and CDC engaged in lies and propaganda. As such, they should lose your trust, and without serious reforms you should not return the trust of these organizations. Let me detail some of the failures:
Lack of debates/ smearing scientists who disagreed
Natural immunity counts for nothing
Masking efficacy
Myocarditis
Paxlovid
One size fits all booster recs
If you like this, and have a tinfoil hat, you might like The Conspiracy Basket. Check it out!
Thank you for putting this together every week! It is my favorite Substack ! Loved that stack on sex-terms being misappropriated btw -- what a great find!