26. The Basket
2.26.2023 The best of Rational Ground, Team Reality and many others...
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What you can find in this collection (these are my headlines, not the authors’):
Media Driving Flu Policies by Elissa M Brown
Reforming The CDC by Matt Shapiro
Is “Covid Myocarditis” Real? by Josh Stevenson
Mortality Rates During Wave 1 by Joel Smalley
Comprehensive Inquiry Needed by Michael P Senger
ONS Still Undercounting Unvaxxed by Martin Neil & Norman Fenton
Avoiding “Early” Ventilation by Dr. Pierre Kory
Did Unvaxxed Cohort Shrink by 10%? by el gato malo
ONS’ “Ghost Population” by Dr. Clare Craig
Pfizer’s Mysterious Pregnancy Trial by Maryanne Demasi, PhD
Metformin To Treat Long Covid by Walter M Chestnut
Climate Change Skulduggeries by Douglas Brodie
Bird Flu Good News by Alex Berenson
Ukraine: Is US Involvement Prudent? by Andrew Sullivan
Death Amongst The Healthiest by A Midwestern Doctor
ACM By Sex & Age by USMortality
Singapore Perinatal Deaths by Aussie17
Jabs Went From Useless To Harmful by Okay Then News
ONS Is Biased Sample Data by John Dee
Politicized Science by el gato malo
The Importance Of Roald Dahl’s Stereotypes by Ella Nixon
Media Driving Flu Policies by Elissa M Brown
I was surprised to be receiving mask advice for cold and flu season. My understanding was that the best available evidence offered little support for masking as a way to prevent the spread of influenza or a flu-like illness in the community.
I started by looking at the scientific literature, which showed no changes to the evidence base. The CDC’s official guidelines for flu prevention were almost entirely unchanged from previous years.
Our team conducted a systematic search for articles containing flu prevention advice in high circulation newspapers in the United States, before and after the pandemic.
We found a 15-fold increase in the number of articles containing advice to wear a mask to avoid the flu. The number of articles recommending social distancing and improved ventilation also increased significantly, 496% and 1,369% respectively.
Reforming The CDC by Matt Shapiro
The first step in reconciliation needs to be the acknowledgment of the wrongs done. There needs to be recognition either from within the CDC or from someone who has direct control over the CDC (like the President) that there has been damage done due to poor information or poor guidance in the past.
the second component of restoring trust: there must be a changing of the guard. Even with a public admission of wrongs, people will not be willing to place trust back in an organization where such a massive wrong can be committed without consequence. The CDC will need to publicly dismiss the most visible figures of the COVID crisis.
eventually people are going to need to see changes in tone and policy to be convinced that the CDC is reliable again. Demonstrating that commitment to change will be the hardest and the most controversial part of an effort to reform the CDC.
The CDC needs to abandon its previous strategy of presenting itself as the only possible monolith of public health information and become a forum in which those experts can make their case. Instead of labeling these alternate opinions as misinformation, they need to bring them into the agency and allow their voices to be heard under the umbrella of CDC authority.
Is “Covid Myocarditis” Real? by Josh Stevenson
it should be glaring that the overall incidence of Myo/Pericarditis among 11-30 yr old men in Rhode Island in 2020 was low. Lower than 2019 in fact. Clearly even if the claim that Covid causes Myocarditis is true, it’s already so rare that it didn’t increase the population level burden over baseline.
Now take a look at 2021 and ask the question- what would be causing the population-wide increase in this cohort from both prior years? Covid? or mRNA?
Mortality Rates During Wave 1 by Joel Smalley
for women, there is no materially different outcome in all-cause mortality amongst different ethnicities, except for lower deaths in the Chinese. When you lift the myopic veil of COVID, there’s a whole world of more reliable insight you can discover.
In other words, to the extent that female ethnic minorities may have fared worse in COVID terms, it does not appear in overall mortality. COVID deaths appear to be displacing deaths from other causes for one reason or another.
The same is not true for the males, where there is a disproportionately higher mortality rate for Black African and Caribbean and Bangladeshi
Comprehensive Inquiry Needed by Michael P Senger
owing to the particular nature of corruption, calls for “personal responsibility” can even be used by corrupt officials or their agents to avoid scrutiny for their actions.
To collectively “blame ourselves” for decisions made by a small number of individuals is to be ruled by those individuals.
Those who call for us to “blame our own governments” may be overly-optimistic about the chance of seeing justice based solely on the policies themselves—or, alternatively, overly-pessimistic about the chance of getting any justice at all.
Because of the specific nature of corruption, the criminality of any given action by an official depends entirely on whether it was influenced by an outside interest.
the most important way we can take “personal responsibility” for the response to COVID is by making sure the officials who instigated these policies see a comprehensive inquiry into their decision-making.
Those who initially acted to impose lockdowns during COVID took bold steps that they knew would indelibly affect millions of lives. Given their confidence, they should be more than happy to reveal themselves and explain their motivations and reasoning to the public.
ONS Still Undercounting Unvaxxed by Martin Neil & Norman Fenton
There is still gross underestimation of the proportion of unvaccinated in the population. This artificially inflates mortality rates of unvaccinated and reduces rates of vaccinated.
the ‘headline’ figures are that the all-cause mortality rate - measured here by the age-standardised mortality rate (ASMR) - has been consistently lower among the vaccinated than the unvaccinated (although the difference is narrowing).
If the data were accurate and reliable then, as we have always argued, the all-cause mortality rate is, indeed, the most objective measure of vaccine safety and efficacy.
it is easily shown that there are systemic flaws and biases in this latest version which make the stated ASMR figures meaningless.
Avoiding “Early” Ventilation by Dr. Pierre Kory
the pulmonary phase of Covid presented as a relatively unique form of respiratory failure in that patients would come in with often quite low blood oxygen levels yet would appear fairly comfortable in terms of their work of breathing, a condition doctors started calling “happy hypoxia.”
the shocking and rapidly spreading obsessive practice by ER and ICU doctors with putting Covid patients on ventilators “early.”
mechanical ventilators are “double edged swords” in that they can absolutely be life-saving when truly indicated (benefits outweigh risks), but they also can injure the lungs when used inexpertly or prematurely because by placing someone on a mechanical ventilator, this automatically worsens their prognosis as well as their time to recovery.
I tried to give every patient as much time and treatment as I could until it was clear they were not improving enough or quickly enough to avoid it…So I would consider myself a “late intubator” by practice.
I simply refused to believe that an inflamed lung would lead to precipitous crashes and I knew this both intuitively but I also knew it from talking to my colleagues on the front lines in New York City.
the institution of mechanical ventilation should never be based on an oxygen level and instead must be almost solely based on an assessment of the patients “work of breathing” and their ability to sustain that work of breathing.
Did Unvaxxed Cohort Shrink by 10%? by el gato malo
using the “new census” somehow caused every age group apart from 80% to contain even fewer unvaxxed as a %.
the baseline risk rate for the unvaxxed appears massively exaggerated and not only was this not fixed in the new version, it was accentuated.
anyone who thinks that 1 in 10 people who made it to may 2022 unjabbed decided to go ahead and get the shot, please raise your hand.
i do not know a single person above college age in my entire social network who made that choice. does anyone?
this seems incredibly implausible and bears out literally nowhere in other UK data or in any sort of anecdotal report i have heard.
ONS’ “Ghost Population” by Dr. Clare Craig
the population who are not included in the ONS sample, which I am calling “the ghost population”.
If the ONS sample was not biased, then there would be a similar mortality rate in a) their sample, b) the whole population and c) the ghost sample.
Even for the measured vaccinated population this is not what we see.
The kinds of people most likely to end up as ghosts are those who did not complete the census forms, those with names where spelling can vary such that matching may not have been possible, and people using a different name on the census to the one on their medical record. You could be in all the datasets and still be a ghost because of matching problems.
The ONS methodology uses the cryptic phrase “We linked deidentified Census 2021 records to NHS numbers using the personal demographics service to obtain NHS numbers for census identification numbers.” How does one link a deidentified record i.e. one with no identifying information?
Pfizer’s Mysterious Pregnancy Trial by Maryanne Demasi, PhD
hundreds of thousands of pregnant women globally, rolled up their sleeves to receive the vaccine, despite the absence of any clinical trials.
a freedom of information (FOI) request to the Australian drug regulator in June 2021, shows the study was only carried out in 44 rats (22 injected with 30µg of mRNA vaccine, 22 injected with saline).
The study found the vaccine led to a statistically significant doubling in fetal loss (9.77% mRNA vs 4.09% saline), but Pfizer concluded that the difference between the two groups was “not biologically meaningful.”
Documents accessed by Judicial Watch, showed a “statistically significant” number of rats were born with skeletal variations after being injected with Moderna’s mRNA vaccine.
But Moderna concluded that the "Skeletal variations are structural changes that do not impact development or function of a developing embryo” and therefore “not considered adverse.”
The [human] trial, which began in Feb 2021, originally intended to enroll 4,000 women, but enrollment stopped in late 2021 with just 349 participants.
Pfizer said the trial’s “enrollment rate declined significantly” towards the end of 2021, because authorities had already widely recommended the vaccine to pregnant women.
Declining enrollments meant that there were insufficient numbers of participants in the trial to carry out the intended analysis.
Metformin To Treat Long Covid by Walter M Chestnut
Taking the approach of stopping the spread Spike Protein by filopodia (and the virus, if it is indeed hiding in reservoirs) and then destroying the Spike Protein may be able to resolve the condition of Long COVID and ameliorate damage done by the Spike Protein.
Metformin has been shown to be a promising therapeutic in the treatment of COVID. It treats the cytokine storm, yes, but moreover it PROTECTS THE MICROVASCULATURE AND PREVENTS SECONDARY FIBROSIS.
Metformin prevents the formation of filopodia. The Spike (and the virus and the Spike’s RNP) uses filopodia to travel, incognito, between cells.
Climate Change Skulduggeries by Douglas Brodie
The globally-coordinated lies and skulduggeries which the establishment inflicted on us during their Covid plandemic confirm the reality that “climate change” is also a Trojan Horse false agenda built on a similarly egregious pack of lies, exposed below, aimed not at “tackling climate change” but at repressing the global population and controlling global resources as per the unaccountable UN’s Agenda 2030 and its planned-for totalitarian One-World Government.
They have been blatantly lying to us about “climate change” for decades.
They have no moral authority to pursue this authoritarian climate change nonsense because it is all based on lies and false propaganda.
I urge everyone to challenge these and all the other misanthropic maniacs before they succeed in wrecking the economy.
All the political parties that support these destructive and pointless “climate change” policies urgently need to be challenged. They are collectively acting as an undemocratic UN/WEF poodle "Uniparty" to disenfranchise and abuse the electorate on this and other vital issues.
Bird Flu Good News by Alex Berenson
H5N1 is highly lethal… to birds, and to any humans who are unlucky enough to be infected with it. But it has never spread between humans - and the lack of human-to-human transmission is not a coincidence.
The genetic quirks that make H5N1 so effective at sickening birds mean that it is less than ideally adapted to infecting humans.
Ukraine: Is US Involvement Prudent? by Andrew Sullivan
My worry is that the West is committing itself to an end-goal — the full liberation of all of Ukraine — that no Russian government could accept, without regime change in Moscow itself. Which means, as Biden’s gaffes sometimes reveal, that this is ineluctably a war for regime change in a nuclear-armed country — which is an extremely hazardous enterprise. It’s righteous but dangerous. Putin is very much in the wrong, just as Saddam was. Evil men, vile regimes. But the one thing I learned from all that, is that focusing on morality rather than prudence, and letting the former eclipse the latter entirely, can be a righteous and well-intentioned road to hell.
Death Amongst The Healthiest by A Midwestern Doctor
A statistically impossible spike in sudden deaths has occurred in the healthiest segment of the population and has happened in tandem with a spike in disability (this is why we are now having labor shortages).
This spike correlated to the mRNA vaccines being deployed, particularly when Biden mandated it upon our workforce. Large economic costs are ensuing from this wave of death and disability
Typically the healthiest members of society are the least likely to die or experience disability. However, since the COVID-19 vaccines were pushed on America, the exact opposite has happened. The healthiest members of society (the employed that our economy depends upon) have suffered the greatest impact from the COVID-19 vaccines.
ACM By Sex & Age by USMortality
By gender and age group, unvaccinated mostly show lower mortality rates than vaccinated. That is, in contrast, to the aggregate rates analyzed earlier, which points towards fundamental issues in the provided ONS dataset.
Age groups with less vaccination saw a strong decrease in all-cause deaths, while, elderly with high vaccination levels, saw no change or even an increase, which might indicate, that the data is flawed as well, or the vaccine might not be beneficial.
Singapore Perinatal Deaths by Aussie17
I have been monitoring Singapore's data closely because it is a highly controlled environment. The data is extremely accurate and reliable, and there is no reason to believe any data has been fudged (like the recently released UK ONS data).
More than 85% of its population has been vaccinated (SOURCE), and it has one of the best Healthcare systems in the world. There are no strains in their healthcare and no shortage of workers. The country is geographically located near the equator; it is summer all year, so deaths due to climate change are not a significant factor.
recorded the highest number of perinatal deaths in 20 years. The perinatal mortality rate per thousand Live births and Stillbirths was 4.6, a 58.6% increase over 2021!!
Perinatal Death is "stillbirth and death of babies under seven days of age".
Jabs Went From Useless To Harmful by Okay Then News
The best scientific evidence, from the very beginning, and despite the shenanigans of the manufacturers, showed that the jabs never really offered a net benefit. As the pandemic has evolved, we should now expect that the jabs can only offer a net harm.
the concerning phenomenon of negative efficacy already enough to determine that, at least at present, the risks are not and cannot be outweighed by benefits.
There is also a mysterious rise in excess non-COVID deaths, which, while still officially unexplained, happen to coincide with the introduction of the jabs, and are largely-driven by the sort of problems the jab is known to cause.
Whatever the reasons, the unjabbed appear to be doing much better health-wise than the jabbed, with regards to COVID, and everything else. If only we could figure out what they were doing differently.
ONS Is Biased Sample Data by John Dee
I think we can see now why the ONS cohort should really be called a sample and a biased one at that (please read the reference materials provided at the outset). That great leap from just under 40 million individuals to just under 46 million individuals between March and April 2021 is going to have an effect, and that alone may well skew derivation of ASMR depending on who was included and how the ONS went about this.
Politicized Science by el gato malo
scientists become dependent on government to fund their work.
government becomes dependent on scientists to determine its technocratic policy and broad aims.
and this rapidly becomes a bias spiral.
there is nothing “independent” about a university system that is a dependency of federal grant money. they are not “fact checkers” they are bought and paid for narrative drones. their interests are so utterly conflicted by their funding sources that there is just no daylight between them and federal edict.
every kind of science you can name from biology to ecology to climate to epidemiology has become a ward of the state and as ike predicted:
not only has the employment of academics come to be dominated by public funding, but the government has become captive to a technocratic elite made up of them.
it’s not about “if government does not fund this no one will”
it’s “if government funds this, you will not get science, you’ll get politics.”
The Importance Of Roald Dahl’s Stereotypes by Ella Nixon
children and adults alike have enjoyed and understood the moral lessons embedded within Dahl’s tales and continued popularity attests to their quality. However, ‘sensitivity readers’ commissioned by Puffin Books have seemingly felt the need to adapt these stories for the modern day by making hundreds of changes to the original texts.
these adjustments suggest a profound misunderstanding of literature and an underestimation of the human capacity for critical thinking.
The sensitivity readers especially take issue with the stereotypical characters conveyed through Dahl’s exaggeration. For example, misogynistic depictions of shrew-like women – “those two ghastly hags” becomes “those two ghastly aunts”, and “she has a screeching voice” becomes “she had an annoying voice”
the ultimately fictive nature of Dahl’s stories provides an opportunity to figure out the complexities of life, providing a platform to recognise stereotypes as essentially unrealistic but with a shred of humorous truth.
the stereotypes invoked by Dahl are thousands of years old
we can always interpret them in new contexts, sharpening our minds to the fluidity of human nature with its continuously changing perspectives.
In fact, its historical idiosyncrasy is incredibly important to its artistic worth. Philip Pullman, arguing against the censorship, suggests: “If Dahl offends us, let him go out of print.”
Unfortunately for those disturbed by the original texts of Dahl, there is not much they can do – it is usually wiser to let the works fade away rather than bowdlerise or pick a fight with them. Or, failing that, they can exercise their own agency and avoid texts that so distress them.
If you like this, and have a tinfoil hat, you might like The Conspiracy Basket. Check it out!