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Indeed; as soon as you see “died of or with – stats being distorted” argument, it can be dismissed as either conspiracy theory, political, or both.
You can clearly see the humps of the pre-vaccination covid waves in the ‘deaths from all causes’ graphs – something was clearly killing far more people than usual. The rise in positive tests was followed by a rise in hospital admissions a week later, followed by a rise in deaths a week after that, and these rises all had the same overall shape.
The flaw in the “everyone who died within 28 days of a positive test was recorded as a covid death, therefore stats were being distorted” argument is that you’re very unlikely to die in any given 28 days, so even if someone does get run over by a truck just after being tested, counting them as a covid death makes no notable difference to the national statistics.
E.T.
I was indeed not part of this discussion.
The only reason for me to appear in this space were the Robert-Koch-Files leaks in Germany which I wanted to relay beyond Germany by posting a few materials here. The quality of which is not always living up to certain standards. On the other hand I had no time to post other sources which might have been better. (May be it would have been wiser to not post anything too scientific in the first place and reduce it to the policy-making issues.) Since it is these political implications that are not to be underestimated and most worrying.
In fact it´s less about the illness but how it was instrumentalised. In how far the specific science goes I am not going to argue with experts. I can read certain studies and try to understand and keep an open mind. What still puzzles me is dispute after 4 years over the nature and the understimation or exaggeration of its threat. At least as far as this discussion reaches the public.AG, the policy issues are indeed atrocious, especially those concerning deals between governments and pharmaceutical companies. I sometimes wonder if false arguments are deliberately deployed to act as a distraction from real issues – I expect that happens a bit, but I suppose that mostly, it’s just me being paranoid 😀
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hkBp6a5RCDNedo6Wy/the-9-11-meta-truther-conspiracy-theory
Down is just easier, and every degradation of thought degrades a lot of other thinking. Neoliberalism capitalises on every problem, every crisis creates more opportunities to market solutions, each of which creates more problems in a self reinforcing cycle.
We’ve had a similar issue in Britain. The AstraZenica vaccine turned out to be slightly less effective and slightly more dangerous than the mRNA vaccines so it was withdrawn, but that doesn’t make what the Bill Gates Foundation did right:
The Great Bill Gates Scam Explained – by The Hated One, YouTube, twenty minutes.
And that’s without even considering that covid may well have been the result of an outsourcing accident. The following two articles, both by science correspondent Nicholas Wade in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (who keep the Doomsday Clock), are essential background for understanding the various “lab leak” debates and hearings in the US government:
The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?
How COVID-19’s origins were obscured, by the East and the West
This site’s forums already have a lengthy discussion on this topic, including counter-arguments and many links to scientific papers. Further discussion about the origin of the virus should be posted there, of course:
German court rules vaccination mandate for medical personnel as unconstitutional after the minutes over the Covid crisis have been published in 2024.
“Osnabrück Administrative Court submits decision on institution- and company-related proof requirement to Federal Constitutional Court
Press Release No. 19-2024”“(…)
According to the justification for the law, the protection of vulnerable people from infection by unvaccinated staff was a key motive for introducing the facility- and company-related vaccination requirement. This assessment, based on the recommendations of the Robert Koch Institute, is shaken by the institute’s minutes that have now been published. The legislature has not fulfilled its duty to observe the norm. Since Section 20a IfSG has grown into unconstitutionality in the course of 2022
(…)”Clark
sorry I don´t have time to look closely into the fine responses you have given in recent weeks.
I will try to in the future.
But I have read and processed those posts of your at least.On the origin of Covid: I have always dismissed the articifical origin story since day one (I think it was Trump blaming the Chinese already in early 2020, but I would have to go back to the original comments since I have since learned that whatever the guy said it most likely has been quoted in distorted forms, whatever the topic.)
However on a purely theoretical level and I am sceptical because it strikes me as odd that in today´s media environment EVERYTHING has to be spun and framed as a “narrative”, i.e. as somehting that follows man-made rules, concepts – stories:
Stories with a – to quote French movie director Jean-Luc Goard – beginning, a mid-point and an end. And a psychology.Phenomena whether by mother nature or not have to make sense. Simply becaus WE SAY SO.
Because we are masters of the planet – or so we think – and as such it is inconceivable that anything of such impact could happen beyond our control. So we spin reality in a way that we can explain it, we can make it part of our narrative realm, part of our world, subjugate it to our control.
I don´t doubt it if there is undisputable evidence.
And I often find myself flip-flopping on topics where I have no independet expertise that could stand up.But it all strikes me as odd and not necessarily 100% scientific, but polluted by political, even anthropologic and psychologic interests.
The evidence for a lab leak is not conclusive, but:
1) there is is highly indicative evidence, including genetic evidence and contracts.
2) The genetic evidence couldn’t be conclusive without access to lab data that has been concealed – both US and Chinese agencies have concealed relevant technical information, and
3) there is extensive, highly suggestive evidence of a cover-up. For instance, upon seeing the genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2, various top virologists immediately proclaimed it to be lab manipulated. A meeting was hurriedly convened behind the scenes, after which they all said it was natural, despite presenting no new scientific evidence.I’m 95% convinced it was a lab leak. If it’s true, two profound ironies arise:
1) The US and China have been loudly blaming each other because both were to blame; the US had sponsored the dangerous research – at the Chinese lab from which it leaked. That’s why I called it an “outsourcing accident”.
2) What might be the reason to potentiate some archived bat virus and make it highly infective in humans?
Wait for it, wait for it…
To serve as a target to develop new vaccines against!!!
…using genetically modified (‘humanised’) laboratory mice, of course, not in the population at large. At least, not intentionally :-/
Honestly AG, I’m not making this up; this is all from the actual story that the lab leak arguments revolve around; the arguments in US government chambers and the reason Fauci resigned. The vaccine companies have indeed comprehensively fleeced governments, but probably it’s just a minor side-show, relatively speaking. How much compensation might be due for however many million deaths, billions of person-hours of confinement at home, and shutting down most of the world economy for six months?
If someone is wrongly arrested, the precedent for compensation for wrongful depravation of liberty is around a thousand pounds per hour. So if the lab leak was generally acknowledged, the appropriate legal remedy might amount to communism – the US and China would go bust, their wealth redistributed to the entire global population!
– “The vaccine companies have indeed comprehensively fleeced governments…”
Come to think of it, lab leak may be why the world’s most powerful governments so comprehensively surrendered to Big Pharma and have never fought back. Can you imagine better blackmail material?
Clark
You of all people writing about all this in such serious ways is not calming me down at all.
Of course I did read about these matters. But I did not dive into them also due to lack of time.Still, it´s there so at some point one has to deal with it.
On the other hand, I have done enough professional reasearch on conspiracies in the pharmaceutical industry. But those usually concerned a limited number of publicly unknown players.
If too many big names are involved in any one single affair causing crises too big for one perpetrator, oversimplifying international relations I am reluctant. But I certainly hear you…have to make up my mind.
Too many other topics since 2020 where I had to change my position on. So its not a new challenge…
AG, indeed, as our world accelerates towards disaster, there is simply insufficient time to keep oneself informed; I myself can’t keep up with the incoming ‘Russiagate’, Twitter Files and UndeadFOIA info.
Re: covid, humanity was actually lucky; the virus that escaped wasn’t too lethal. But according to further revelations about similar contracts at the same lab, back in 2016ish similar potentiation was being performed on the MERS virus – Middle East Respiratory Syndrome – a coronavirus similar to the SARS viruses, but transmitted primarily through camels. Typically it causes a 30% death rate.
Lab leaks are not rare. A type of flu once escaped a Russian lab, one of the UK Foot and Mouth livestock outbreaks is known to have been caused by inappropriate disposal and faulty drainage at an agricultural diseases lab, and of the six original SARS outbreaks, four escaped labs. These are just examples.
For your guidance should you wish to delve, the following two paragraphs include suitably specific search terms.
The lab leak story of SARS-CoV-2 centres around EcoHealth Alliance of New York, a US non-profit under the direction of Peter Daszak. Daszak also gathered the signatories and organised the letter to the Lancet early in 2020, which attempted to discredit lab leak allegations as a “conspiracy theory”, dishonestly claiming that he had no conflict of interest. EcoHealth received US National Institute of Health (NIH) funding – i.e. US taxpayers’ money – to commission “gain of function” research (i.e. potentiation) at Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
The original, natural bat virus collected and archived by WIV was called RA 4991, later renamed to RATG 13. It seems it was made more infectious by adding a “furin cleavage site” at the “S1/S2 junction” of its spike protein, and then trained up against human immune systems by using “serial passage” in “humanised mice”; that is, speeding up adaptation by repeatedly reintroducing successive generations of the virus into laboratory mice that had been genetically modified to have human ACE2 receptors. ACE2 is the receptor that SARS-CoV-2 spike protein binds to, so that the virus can get into cells. ACE2 is expressed by many human tissue types, which is why COVID-19 can damage so many different human organs.
Despite widespread official obfuscation and denial of the lab leak story, US regulations have been quietly tightened up – slightly. Sorry for the paywall:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/15/health/ecohealth-alliance-peter-daszak-nih-grants.html
Clark
Much appreciated, thank you.
And for the other readers too:
the NYT –
“U.S. Suspends Funding for Group at Center of Covid Origins Fight
The decision came after a scorching hearing in which lawmakers barraged EcoHealth Alliance’s president with claims of misrepresenting work with Chinese virologists.”
https://archive.is/gKaNsThis is all difficult to penetrate stuff. The wiki on RATG 13 states:
“RaTG13 has not been confirmed to exist in nature, to have been cultured or isolated in any laboratory,[12] or to be a viable human pathogen…”I have seen this stated elsewhere. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t “artificially” sequenced/manufactured for experiment.
The sequence of RaTG13 was reconstructed from metagenomic sampling, a description of which is linked within the text of the wiki link above. Modern technologies based on synthetic genetics platforms allow the reconstruction of viruses based on their genomic sequence, without the need of a natural isolate. So, to serialise a virus through generations using a live host such as humanised mice they’d first have to manufacture the virus artificially. All very weird and dangerous.The genetic structure of SARS‐CoV‐2 does not rule out a laboratory origin
ET – “This is all difficult to penetrate stuff.”
The (probable) “damage limitation” exercise at Wikipedia is a sight to behold. The lab leak hypothesis page mentions “conspiracy theory” about three times as much as the Conspiracy Theory page itself, and even its Talk page gets archived so frequently that understanding the arguments there would require daily monitoring. Readers would never guess the rough outline I gave above from Wikipedia’s lab leak hypothesis page, yet it is quite consistent once you know what you’re looking for.
I thought RaTG13 was the sequence that Shi Zhengli (“Bat Lady” of WIV) published part of in her Nature article, as the natural sequence closest to that of SARS-CoV-2, but I could well have got confused. My main objective on this page is to include the most important search terms for AG; I’m too busy with Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians.
But if we’re going to debate this further, we should take it to the Covid Origins thread.
ET – “RaTG13 has not been confirmed to exist in nature, to have been cultured or isolated in any laboratory,[12] or to be a viable human pathogen…”
Here’s a link to my reply:
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/forums/topic/origins-of-sars-cov2/page/6/#post-100371
AG, thanks for the archive link, and I’ll post a reply to you too on the Origins thread.
Two German/Austrian scientists who were involved in 2022 in some groups handling the crisis with a piece in BERLINER ZEITUNG yesterday:
“Corona vaccines: “It is mainly immunological amateurs who have commented on the protection of others”
As health experts from the fields of public health and immunology, our authors criticize the vaccination debates in retrospect. The accusation: emotion often took precedence over evidence.by Martin Sprenger,
Andreas RadbruchDr. med. Martin Sprenger MPH is a doctor and public health expert and has headed the university course in public health at the Medical University of Graz since 2010. In March 2020, he was a member of the Corona task force of the Austrian Ministry of Health.
Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Andreas Radbruch is an immunologist. He is director emeritus of the German Rheumatism Research Center in Berlin, a Leibniz Institute, and a member of the Leopoldina. From 2019 to 2021 he was president of the European Federation of Immunologists EFIS.
Germany: BERLINER ZEITUNG
Criticism of WHO study: Has the corona vaccination really saved millions of lives?
The study states that the corona vaccines have saved millions of lives and reduced Covid mortality. After reading it, our author has serious doubts.
by Boris Kotchoubey
https://archive.is/UpmFpintro:
“(…)
At the beginning of August 2024, the journal Lancet Respiratory Medicine published an article by a group of WHO employees (M. Meslé and co-authors) claiming that between December 2020 and March 2023, vaccines against Covid-19 reduced Covid mortality by 59 percent in the 54 countries of the WHO European area alone and saved about 1.6 million lives, almost one million of them during the Omicron phase. These data were adopted and disseminated by the German mass media.However, a careful reading of the article reveals a whole host of serious methodological errors that immediately disqualify the study results.
Let’s start with the most important thing. A major shortcoming of the study is that it only focuses on Covid mortality, not overall mortality. It doesn’t really matter to a person who dies whether they die of Covid-19 or another disease. A drug that would prevent 1,000 deaths from pneumonia but at the same time cause 1,000 additional deaths from heart attacks would not have saved any lives in net terms. In addition, the figures for Covid mortality depend on the criteria for a Covid diagnosis, and in practice these criteria are open to a great deal of interpretation and can vary greatly from country to country.
(…)”Boris Kotchoubey was Professor of Medical Psychology at the University of Tübingen, now retired. He is the author of several books (the most recent of which: “Insanity of Euthanasia”, TUL, 2018; and “The Downfall of an Institution: Science Between Early and Postmodernism”, Deutscher Wissenschaftsverlag, 2023) and over 150 publications in international journals. The author would like to thank Prof. K. Kroy (Leipzig) and Prof. L. Harzheim (Darmstadt) for valuable comments when writing this article.
Clark
re: Barrington Decl.
May be of interest:
50 min. Engl. interview with Jay Bhattacharya by German investigative reporter Aya Velazquez (from the RKI-Files team)
https://www.velazquez.press/p/covid-regime-exposed-interview-with
(I find it insufferable when Germans roll over as soon as some Ivy League bloke comes along. But thats of no importance for the content.)
“(…)
Here comes part 2 of my interview with epidemiologist and Stanford professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. In this second half, we swap roles and I interview him. In part 1 of the interview, Professor Bhattacharya asked me questions about the RKI leak – it was the first episode of his brand new podcast format “Science from the Fringe” on the X platform. Next weekend, Dr. Bhattacharya’s podcast colleague Bryce Nickels will also host a live English-language space on the RKI files on X, where my esteemed colleague Bastian Barucker and I will tell the English audience something about the RKI files, which are still little known in the English-speaking world. Next sunday, Sept. 29 11 AM Pacific, 2 PM Eastern, 8 PM in German, on X.In my interview, I ask Dr. Jay Bhattacharya all the questions about corona that were on my mind:
Has Sweden gone the right way in his eyes, according to the ‘Great Barrington Declaration’ written by colleagues and him – or has Sweden also made mistakes in his eyes? As a Stanford professor, did he experience similar pressure from his university as his colleague Dr. Martin Kulldorff who was even dismissed from Harvard this year (!) for his expert opinions on corona? Is a corona investigation taking place in the USA, and at what stage is it? Why is he so well informed about the events surrounding the coronavirus investigation in Germany? In his eyes, could something like the Corona regime happen again? What does he think about the origin of SARS-CoV-2: natural zoonosis or laboratory origin? How does he feel about the WHO, what needs to happen to it in his eyes? What does he say to people, including those from the community of critics of the measures, who say that corona was “just like the flu”? And what actually happened to the flu during the coronavirus years? We talk about these and many other questions in part 2 of our interview. I hope you enjoy the conversation! 🙂
Note: A “cut” in the middle of the interview was due to the fact that our conversation was briefly interrupted by a knock on the office door – as a professor at a top university, you rarely really get any peace and quiet. I am all the more pleased that Dr. Bhattacharya took the time for this interview!
(…)”Ex-UK PM reveals planned ‘raid’ on NATO ally
Boris Johnson says he had defense officials devise a plan to steal AstraZeneca vaccines from a Dutch plant during the Covid-19 pandemic
https://swentr.site/news/604888-johnson-planned-vacine-raid/
What a complete buffoon.
AG, I do not have time to watch the interview at present. It will not be high on my priority list because I encountered the name of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya before the covid vaccination programme. He’s a co-author of the hopelessly misguided Great Barrington Declaration, along with Oxford University epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta, who predicted that there could not be a great second wave of deaths, immediately before the second great wave of deaths.
The Great Barrington Declaration is a political document disguised as epidemiology, pure and simple. It was the work of a libertarian free market think tank set up for the purpose.
A name I didn’t remember was that of Dr. Martin Kulldorff. Looking into him lead me to the following two links. The first doesn’t mention Kulldorff, but I recommend reading it for background:
sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-consequences-of-a-medical-myth/
sciencebasedmedicine.org/covid-theater-urgency-of-normal-gbd/
Jack, does that article cite any evidential sources? If so please post links because the swentr site seems to be blocked by my ISP, and the claim seems unlikely.
AG, an excerpt from my second link above:
If you don’t believe how impractical “focused protection” always was, listen to a Councillor in Local Government in the UK named Adrian Cooke, who noted just how utterly impractical the GBD was:– Accordingly, “Focused protection” (which, reading through, consisted of 17 initiatives that were already routine, one that could be useful (free N95 masks), and one that was barking mad (split “vulnerable” people away from families and house them in hotel rooms for however-many-months-or-years)) would need to somehow isolate around 50% of the country (the JCVI Categories 1-9 (available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/priority-groups-for-coronavir… as priorities for vaccination) would make this very clear to everyone, published in early January 2021). Of the 50% left, more than half would be children.
– We would need to run the country (of 67 million people) with about 15 million adults. Including the health system, which would still certainly collapse with the number of people (of the “less vulnerable”) who would need treatment, unless spread out (somehow, without NPIs) over 2 years or more.
– Notwithstanding that protection was voluntary, and even a small fraction of the more vulnerable would further swamp the system.
This again from BERLINER ZEITUNG and thereof again by
Dr. rer. nat. Marc-Denis Weitze
Dr. med. Martin Sprenger MPHwho appear there repeatedly – as such it is not representative for the entire German legacy media – which are not homogeneous on this topic.
But it is representative for a certain spectrum of the discourse which I assume is still regarded by many as off.Since we are still without a national committee to be set up by parliament to probe into the Covid years.
Neglect of anything remains the official majority view.
So far.
Risk communication during the Corona crisis: Drosten speaks of “reinterpretation” – is that true?
There are actually guidelines for public communication in times of crisis. Why did politicians and experts not follow them during the pandemic?This video comprehensively covers much of the claims about COVID science, then presents the actual science. An extremely valuable resource.
https://rumble.com/v5iviyh-covid-19-following-the-real-science-day-1.html
