Nearly seven years ago now, two brothers burst into the editorial offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, where they killed twelve people and injured eleven others.
Charlie’s crime was to support the idea that it was reasonable to portray the Prophet in Cartoon form. This touched a raw nerve for some French people.
Nearly four million other French people, however, came out on streets across France with Je Suis Charlie banners, to show solidarity with the murdered journalists.
This attack was just the most lethal of a series of attacks on or threats to Charlie Hebdo since it began following the lead of a Danish periodical a few years before in publishing cartoons like this.
One of these previous attacks brought Nikolas Sarkozy out on the steps of the Élysée Palace to say that the right to publish cartoons like this was a value central to the Enlightenment and Western Civilization.
Charlie and Hitler
Charlie’s signature theme is widely portrayed as mocking Establishment power – whether the Catholic Church, or the French State.
More recently far from mocking the powers that be, Charlie seems to be doubling down on anyone who might think the Establishment had gone a bit too far with Vaccine Mandates for instance.
Its July 28 front cover this year features Hitler. Even he, who was anti-vaxx, according to Charlie would disown today’s antivaxxers.
Headlined: Hitler overwhelmed by antivax – Says “It’s hard to be quoted by idiots.”
This led Jean-Paul Bourdinard to write a letter to Charlie entitled Its hard to be vaccinated by idiots.
Charlie (aka Antonio Fischetti) offered a relatively good response to this heavily science oriented article.
Ariane Denoyel, a media studies academic, and I thought a slightly different letter might be more effective. An early English draft of this is below. The final French version is Here.
Dear Charlie
We note with interest your debate with Jean-Paul Bourdinard about the science of Covid and its vaccinations. Science by its very nature embraces uncertainty rather than deals with certainties making it difficult for anyone who is anti-vaxx to claim they know for sure where the truth lies. At best we can attest to the integrity of our processes.
One of us is a journalist and one a doctor. Rather than journalists stepping back and reporting on the science, we think the journalistic and scientific missions share a lot in common.
This is especially true when it comes to clinical trials of treatments like vaccines and drugs and the harms of treatment. In both cases, people rather than spike proteins are the object of science and journalism in these instances. Establishing what has happened is a judicial process, not something an algorithm can contribute to.
Every randomized controlled trial (RCT) typically leads to 50 (ghost-written) publications in medical journals. In one of Pfizer’s trials of their antipsychotic ziprasidone (Geodon), a man died. His death was coded as ‘burns’. If it appeared in any of the 50 publications, it will have featured as burns, an apparent accident not ordinarily associated with a drug like ziprasidone.
With a little digging, both journalists and doctors could have gotten hold of the adverse event report companies are obliged to lodge in the case of a death or hospitalization. This reveals the man poured gasoline on himself and set fire to it in an effort to kill himself – something closely linked to drugs like ziprasidone. He took 5 days to die from his burns and was coded as death by burns.
Around the same time GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) began Study 329, a trial of paroxetine in depressed children. In the 1990s unlike now there were very few depressed children even in the USA. Recruitment from 6 famous university hospitals was slow and GSK added 6 more centres. As it turned out, the suicide event rate on paroxetine was very high from the first 6 hospitals, all coded as emotional lability, with very few on placebo. There were no paroxetine suicidal events from the second set of hospitals.
The second set, however, had 4 children who dropped out because of ‘intercurrent illness’. All were taking paroxetine. If someone drops out of a trial for intercurrent illness reasons and is not coded as having an adverse event, doesn’t die, or isn’t hospitalized, companies don’t have to write up a narrative about what happened.
One 15-year-old boy, we accidentally found out, had been arrested by the police and brought to hospital because he was out on the street waving a gun around and threatening to kill people. This behaviour is more likely to stem from an adverse response to paroxetine than anything else but in order to come to a valid scientific or journalistic judgment, about these events and the overall meaning of the trial, we would need to access the scientific data – the 15-year-old boy and the other three children and question them about the events and their subsequent medical history.
Establishing causality in medicine and journalism is a judicial process. The Study 329 stories, that led New York State to take a fraud action against GSK and the Department of Justice to take an action that was resolved for $3 billion, were broken open by investigative journalism.
Somewhat later, it became common in vaccine trials – Pandemrix and HPV – for patients to drop out with variations on the intercurrent illness theme. One must assume that something similar likely applies to current Covid vaccine trials. Unless we can see the data, interview the people, we don’t know what has happened. We have two people from two different Covid vaccine trials with significant neurological problems who have likely been coded as intercurrent illness, anxiety, or functional neurological disorder (hysteria).
Both of us have been writing about post-SSRI sexual dysfunction (PSSD) for several years. In the hope lives could be saved, one of us decided to lodge a petition with EMA and FDA asking them to require companies to alert people to this hazard in antidepressant labels. People with this devastating condition commit suicide or seek euthanasia because of the condition, or because they become acutely aware there is no research being done on the condition and no hope or a cure, or because of the ridicule they receive from doctors who deny having ever heard about it and say there is no mention of it in the close to entirely ghostwritten medical literature.
Nobody who has this condition wants to go public. EMA and FDA have likely tens of thousands of reports of the condition but have never acknowledged that treatment causes it because their processes strip people’s names off reports making it impossible to assess causality which requires interviewing people. We were able to get over 80 people with the condition to put their names in the public domain and over 30 of their doctors to write a letter saying they can see no other cause for the problem. This package was sent to EMA and FDA with a letter stating that people’s names were being made available in order that the regulator could make contact with them for the purposes of assessing causality.
Three years later we have had no reply from FDA. Three weeks later we had an email from EMA saying that in line with standard procedures all identifying materials had been removed from the material sent.
In the case of drugs like Accutane, isotretinoin, given to teenagers for acne, it is FDA’s proud boast they have not made a causal link between the drug and the over 1500 deaths reported to them. They couldn’t make a link because they don’t follow people up.
No regulator has ever linked a Covid vaccine to a death for similar reasons. The politicians and others tell us CDC in the US and EMA here are working night and day to find causal needles in haystacks when everyone can see they are faced with a haystack of needles.
This is where good journalism and good science should coincide.
Most journalists, if able to interview someone, are better able to decide if a vaccine or a drug is likely to have caused a problem than regulators dealing with paperwork.
What we are proposing is not an exercise in contesting the science but rather investigative journalists helping everyone else to do the science properly.
There is no question Covid is real, and no question it has killed a lot of people, and the majority of those dying of Covid in Intensive Care Units are unvaccinated. But for us to orient ourselves and our children in the face of this, we need to know what the original trial data look like and, unfortunately, we cannot leave it to companies or regulators to tell us. There are no issues of clinical confidentiality here that can be used to block access.
We need journalists who will find the injured and help us all gauge how often these injuries are happening.
Clinical trials do not give rise to commandments and vaccines are not sacraments – something that can only benefit and cannot harm. Even the Catholic Church these days recognizes a need for gluten free Eucharists. We need to resist the semi-medieval mindsets that plagues can give rise to and rather than engage in debates about how many spike proteins can fit on the head of a pin both journalists and doctors need to ensure that the stories of real people are heard no matter who is inconvenienced by that.
This was sent a month ago. To date there has been no response from Charlie or Antonio.
We sent Charlie and Antonio a copy of the Thacker article about Pfizer’s vaccine trials that shows what good investigative journalism can do. No reply.
For more on the horrors that are the vaccine trials see Albert’s Algorithm.
Cartuniverse or Metaverse?
Meanwhile in another part of the Cartooniverse what might be a meta-commentary on Charlie was playing out.
Michael Leunig, one of the world’s truly great cartoonists, who specializes in pricking pomposity and tackling Establishments had done exactly what Charlie is supposedly famous for and produced a cartoon that caused shock and horror and led to an assassination attempt (or at least a professional assassination attempt – he lost his job) – Chronicle of a Tyranny Foretold.
Exactly the kind of cartoon you might have expected Charlie to produce about vaxx-zealots – vaxx-jihadists.
Maybe Michael’s problem was the setting this cartoon appeared in was owned by the Chinese – who seem capable of censoring prestigious academic medical journals like the Lancet as well as other Western media outlets – and who may not have gotten the message about the Enlightenment or if they did they are even less bothered about it than ISIS are.
Whether taking on vaxx-zealotry, or the Chinese, or both, Michael’s cartoon is just the kind of creation that French Presidents from Nicolas Sarkozy to Emmanuel Macron would once have said is critical to the continuing amour propre of Western Civilization. You’d expect the staff of Charlie Hebdo to be out there with banners or to be preparing banner headlines reproducing this cartoon, and proudly proclaiming: Je Suis Michael (or maybe Michel).
Maybe the Kouachi brothers really did kill Charlie.
What Charlie is now doing is a semi-Islamic fundamentalist inciting of vaxx-vigilantes to seek out unbelievers and kill or injure them if they can get away with it or at the very least shun them.
It is rapidly becoming more difficult to decide if it would be better to live in Xi Jinping’s China, some Caliphate, or Albert’s Empire – where Joe Biden is currently front of house.
Perhaps nearly four million French people a few years ago missed what was going on in the cartooniverse or metaverse or whatever it is we live in these days.
Je Suis Charlie translated into British slang comes out as I am a Fool.
Prenez le Michel translated from Irish/British slang is I’m Mocking You.
To Brianne Dressen if you read this
The actively suicidal patients you speak of – if they contact you again – please pass this on:
https://rxisk.org/akathisia/
They will get the drugs mentioned in the link if they go to a GP or psychiatrist with suicide ideation for sure. If they get akathisia it will push them to attempt suicide. Akathisia is utterly horrific and avoidable. The above information tell you the truth.
What is going on is total Evil, but there are some very wise and experienced people here that can certainly help with suicide ideation.
Ariane and David Thank you for spelling it out to them – yet again.
re
‘….. no question it has killed a lot of people, and the majority of those dying of Covid in Intensive Care Units are unvaccinated’.
Is there any checkable publicly accessible reliable data published on this?
Je Suis: You Are…
Je Suis David
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ev3VbZMfCOg&t=1s
Explains how GlaxoSmithKline was able to hide the severe psychotic side effects of their antidepressant Paxil that caused David Carmichael to kill his 11-year-old son Ian on July 31, 2004.
Je Suis Martin
Je Suis Charlie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrGfEZlVbUA&t=2s
Je Suis Andrew
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CY7yD6-_9YE
Je Suis David
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nr1IR0oEU30&t=1s
David Healy VS Pfizer & GSK – PSSD Memes …
Je Suis Patrick
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10180851/Patrick-Vallance-warns-climate-change-bigger-threat-Covid.html
The wealthiest mandarin in Whitehall: How Sir Patrick Vallance took a £600,000 pay cut to join government – before becoming a household name
Sir Patrick is the richest mandarin in Whitehall, worth £10million – and has led the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.
He became regular fixture during the pandemic, appearing alongside Boris Johnson at Downing Street Covid briefings.
Until March 2021 he held a deferred bonus of 43,111 shares in GlaxoSmithKline, worth £600,000 from his time as president of the multinational drug company.
In a rare interview in 2015 he shot down critics who suggested he took the corporate role for the money after an academic early career at University College London.
He insisted to Radio 4’s The Life Scientific: ‘There’ll be people that carp and say you’ve gone to the dark side, you’ve done it for money, whatever.
‘There’s nothing you can do about that. That’s why the personal reputation bit you need to be comfortable with, before you make a decision like that.’
Currently he and his family live in a substantial semi-detached Victorian house worth £1.8million, which they bought in 2018 with cash.
They had to complete extensive renovations after it had been left completely gutted by a fire before they were involved in the property.
Sir Patrick was born in Essex in 1960 and educated at Truro school in Cornwall, which costs nearly £30,000 to board now.
He had considered being a chef but then began a life in science and medicine at university before going to GSK.
It would be the role that catapulted him to the prominence he holds today, so well-known he has own entry in Who’s Who, which lists his hobbies as ‘mushrooming, cooking, gardening’ and ‘playing tennis badly’.
Just 12 days into the job he was rubbing shoulders with royalty, pictured with Prince Andrew at an event.
After six years at GSK his base salary as Executive Director was £780,000 a year.
When he left he cashed in £5 million worth of shares he got from them from his time working there until March 2018.
And in 2017 when he took his current role as Government Chief Scientific Adviser Nature, the international weekly science journal, said his salary was up to £180,000 a year – more than the Prime Minister.
2013-06-14 — The RIAT team sends an email to GSK, Sir Andrew Witty (CEO) and Patrick Vallance (President of Pharmaceutical R&D), notifying them of the RIAT article publication and requesting that if they plan to restore any old GSK trials, they respond as soon as possible.
‘There’s nothing you can do about that. That’s why the personal reputation bit you need to be comfortable with, before you make a decision like that.’
https://study329.org/
The Dark Side ‘foraging for mushrooms’ …
Je Suis Luke
Why I resigned over the failure to help prescription pill victims: Campaigner who helped draw up official draft guidelines on battling drug dependency reveals why he took a stand
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-10179195/Why-resigned-failure-help-prescription-pill-victims.html
By LUKE MONTAGU FOR THE DAILY MAIL
PUBLISHED: 00:30, 9 November 2021 | UPDATED: 00:49, 9 November 2021
After eight years of campaigning for patients who’ve become dependent on their medicines, I was pleased to be asked to join a committee drawing up new official guidelines to tackle the problem in 2019.
The committee was supposed to produce evidence-based recommendations for doctors and prescribers covering the safe prescribing and withdrawal of medicines that can cause dependence.
These include widely prescribed drugs such as sleeping pills, painkillers and antidepressants, taken by millions of people in this country.
But earlier this year I resigned from the committee because I believe it has ignored key evidence and, as a result, many patients won’t be able to come off their drugs safely.
It’s an issue that matters to me personally, as I spent more than three years unable to function after withdrawing from sleeping pills and antidepressants.
When I was 19, I was admitted to hospital for a sinus operation and suffered from post-operative headaches and other side-effects, likely caused by the anaesthetic.
However, this was incorrectly diagnosed, and I was prescribed a series of antidepressants and sleeping pills. I remained on these for years with very little monitoring, until I eventually went cold turkey in 2009 on the advice of my doctor at the time.
I experienced devastating withdrawal symptoms and was unable to work or leave the house for years.
The suffering was indescribable: symptoms included severe memory and cognitive problems, sensory distortions, extreme anxiety, insomnia, tinnitus and nerve pain.
Somehow I dragged myself through each day until things improved, though the nerve pain and tinnitus continued more than ten years later. I sued my doctor as he should never have withdrawn the drugs so quickly — you must always taper off these medicines very slowly.
During this time, I discovered online forums and Facebook groups where thousands of others were suffering in a similar way, invisible to the health system and without any NHS-funded services to help.
The only life-saving support they received was from others in these online communities.
But for some people the suffering is so severe it leads to suicide.
Yet this was supposed to change after Public Health England (PHE) published
a review in 2019 showing that around 25 per cent of adults had been prescribed one or more of these drugs in the previous year, with huge numbers taking them for years, often contrary to the prescribing guidelines.
The review was undertaken in response to pressure from the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Prescribed Drug Dependence (which I helped to establish), patient groups and the Daily Mail.
The review made various recommendations, including the provision of a national 24-hour helpline as well as local withdrawal support services. But so far none of these has materialised.
It also recommended improved clinical guidance for doctors. This is a task for the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), and specifically the committee I joined in 2019.
Six months after I resigned, NICE has just published draft guidelines for public consultation. And as I feared, they are missing essential information to help doctors and patients withdraw from these drugs safely.
I should stress that there are many good things to say about the new guidelines. For example, they recommend that patients should always be offered alternatives to these drugs.
The guidelines state that doctors should not write a prescription at the first appointment; highlight the importance of shared decision-making; and make clear the risks of the medicines must be discussed.
Most importantly, they recommend that a written management plan is given to the patient, to include their diagnosis, the proposed duration of treatment, the risks of overdose and the next review date.
Too often, patients have been given these medicines for too long without being told about the risks; it is a very positive step that prescribers will now be told to document all of this.
But this guideline is also supposed to support safe withdrawal from these drugs to avoid the crippling symptoms that thousands of patients like me have experienced. They can be entirely avoided with a slow, safe taper.
And withdrawal symptoms are not just devastating in terms of the suffering caused — they can be misinterpreted as a new condition for which additional dependency-forming medicines are prescribed, or misdiagnosed as a return of the old problem.
The new withdrawal guidelines were expected to provide clear instructions to help avoid this, but unfortunately fail to do so.
NICE guidelines are developed using a hierarchy of evidence. At the top is the gold standard of systematic reviews of randomised controlled trials, which compare two groups of patients — where one receives the treatment while the other does not.
Below randomised controlled trials are other acceptable forms of evidence. As NICE says on its website: ‘This can include qualitative and quantitative evidence, from the literature or submitted by stakeholders. It can also include observational data and testimonies from experts.’
In other words, it can include reports from patient groups and experts themselves.
It was clear from the beginning that there were very few randomised controlled trials that would be relevant. Drug companies have little incentive to study safe ways to take patients off their drugs — they profit when more people consume them.
Yet the NICE researchers wasted months trawling through the evidence, hauling up long-forgotten randomised controlled trials from the murky depths of largely industry-sponsored research. More than 1,500 pages of evidence review were written up, most of which widely missed the mark.
That’s because none of these studies covered slow, hyperbolic tapering, the most important intervention for safe withdrawal. It has been developed over many years based on the experience of thousands of people and is backed by articles published in journals.
Hyperbolic tapering means reducing the dose by a small percentage of the previous dose rather than the same fixed amount each time. It is the basis of recent guidance on withdrawal from antidepressants issued by the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and features in the current edition of the Maudsley Prescribing Guidelines (the UK’s bible for psychiatric prescribing).
And yet — perhaps because this method has not been subject to a randomised controlled trial — the draft of the new NICE guidelines fails to include any details, such as how to taper, how frequently to reduce and by how much.
These are supposed to be guidelines on safe withdrawal, and yet they fail to cover the most basic principles. It’s like publishing a recipe for roast chicken without giving either the oven temperature or the cooking time.
On its website NICE claims it takes ‘a comprehensive approach to assessing the best evidence that is available’. Yet for the draft of these guidelines it has not done so. It failed to review the many articles on hyperbolic tapering. It has not invited withdrawal experts to give testimony, nor reviewed submissions from patient groups and withdrawal charities.
It is shocking that these guidelines and the original PHE review only happened because of the campaigning of patients — and yet now, at the critical moment, their experience is being ignored.
As a result, these guidelines will not provide doctors and patients with the simple recipe they desperately need for people to withdraw from these drugs safely.
I raised these issues with the NICE committee and unfortunately the other members did not agree with my concerns. I therefore decided to resign as I could not support the guidelines.
We must ensure these new guidelines include all the best evidence — including patient-developed evidence — in order to reduce the terrible harms of prescribed drug dependence.
Info with actual numbers could help people who are undecided make a decision one way or another. Never seen them on media .There’s detailed statistics /charts lower down the document Info for USA also available re google search by region . Also less detailed summaries on google search re comparisons of deaths between vaxed -unvaxed
Office for National Statistics (states deaths in England so presumably doens’t include whole of UK )
Deaths involving COVID-19 by vaccination status, England: deaths occurring between 2 January and 24 September 2021
Weekly age-standardised mortality rates and age-specific rates for deaths involving COVID-19 by vaccination status; deaths occurring between 2 January and 24 September 2021 in England.
This is the latest release. View previous releases
Contact:
EmailCharlotte Bermingham, Jasper Morgan and Vahé NafilyanRelease date:
1 November 2021
Age-standardised mortality rates by vaccination status
Weekly mortality rates for deaths involving coronavirus (COVID-19) by vaccination status
Use and interpretation of age-standardised mortality rates
Comparison to other studies
Deaths by vaccination status, England data
Glossary
Measuring the data
Strengths and limitations
Related links
View all data used in this statistical bulletin
1.Main points
Between 2 January and 24 September 2021, the age-adjusted risk of deaths involving coronavirus (COVID-19) was 32 times greater in unvaccinated people than in fully vaccinated individuals.
The weekly age-standardised mortality rates (ASMRs) for deaths involving COVID-19 were consistently lower for people who had received two vaccinations compared with one or no vaccinations.
ASMRs take into account differences in age structure and population size to allow comparisons between vaccination status groups; however some differences between the groups such as health status may remain and partly explain the differences in ASMRs.
!
This bulletin is an update to our previous article “Deaths involving COVID-19 by vaccination status, England: deaths occurring between 2 January and 2 July 2021”.
Back to table of contents
2.Age-standardised mortality rates by vaccination status
Because vaccinations were being offered according to priority groups set out by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), the characteristics of the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations are changing over time. To account for differences in population size and age structure of the vaccination status groups over time, we calculated age-standardised mortality rates (ASMRs) for deaths involving coronavirus (COVID-19) (Figure 1) using the Public Health Data Asset (PHDA) dataset (see Measuring the data). This is a dataset containing people who reside in England who could be linked to the 2011 Census and the GP Patient Register 2019, which covers approximately 79% of people aged 10 years and over living in England. ASMRs for all-cause deaths and age-specific rates for deaths involving COVID-19 are also included in the accompanying dataset.
The vaccination status is split by dose and time since vaccination, to allow for the increase in protection in the first few weeks after vaccination. The vaccination status is one of:
unvaccinated
received only the first dose, less than 21 days ago
received only the first dose, at least 21 days ago
received the second dose, less than 21 days ago
received the second dose, at least 21 days ago
The ASMRs for deaths involving COVID-19 and all causes for vaccination status groups over the period 2 January to 24 September 2021 (Week 1 to Week 38) are shown in Table 1. These ASMRs are calculated in person-years at risk to account for the different time people spent in each vaccination state in the period.
Table 1: The age-standardised mortality rate for deaths involving COVID-19 is 32 times higher for unvaccinated people than for those who received the second dose
Age-standardised mortality rates for all deaths and deaths involving COVID-19, England, deaths occurring between 2 January and 24 September 2021
If the vaccines kill – see below – and most deaths happen hours or days or a week or two after the first or second shot then including these people in the unvaccinated group appears fraudulent. Where death is concerned, if you’re jabbed once 5 minutes ago you’re jabbed if we are looking at all cause mortality.
Motion for a European Parliament resolution on creating a European compensation fund for victims of the ‘COVID-19 vaccines’
The European Parliament,
– having regard to Rule 143 of its Rules of Procedure,
A. whereas the European Medicines Agency (EMA) has already recorded around a million cases of people experiencing adverse reactions from the COVID-19 vaccines:
– 435 779 due to the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine,
– 373 285 due to the AstraZeneca vaccine,
– 117 243 due to the Moderna vaccine,
– 27 694 due to the Janssen vaccine[1];
B. whereas these adverse reactions are sometimes severe; whereas around 75 000 people suffered from serious neurological effects as a result of taking the Pfizer vaccine;
C. whereas the EMA states that around 5 000 people have died in the EU as a result of taking the COVID-19 vaccines:
– 4 198 due to the Pfizer vaccine[2],
– 1 053 due to the AstraZeneca vaccine,
– 392 due to the Moderna vaccine,
– 138 due to the Janssen vaccine;
David Healy
re above -The decision to vax or not should also be weighted by the info David has posted on David Healy blog
re compensation for potential harms and deaths David Healy says:
November 9, 2021 at 1:47 am
on Sept 23rd
The European Union debated
MOTION FOR A RESOLUTION
pursuant to Rule 143 of the Rules of Procedure
on creating a European compensation fund for victims of the ‘COVID-19 vaccines’
– Comirnaty (Pfizer, BioNTech)
– Janssen COVID-19 vaccine
– Spikevax (Moderna)
– Vaxzevria (AstraZeneca)
more to follow
DH
Virginie Joron
response to my pointing out that the numbers are hidden behind woolly phrases such as eg ‘high or low or many or increasing ‘
Dear Editor
Susanne wonders if she might find “ the numbers of deaths of people who were not vaccinated ”, following Godlee’s emphasis on the need for reliable and accessible data.
Is it not even more strange that the numbers of deaths and adverse reactions after covid vaccinations in the UK, available on the MHRA website (1), are never disclosed nor discussed in the professional nor the public media ?
11 November 2021
Noel Thomas
retired/part time doc
Bronygarn, Maesteg, Wales, CF34 9AL
Re From health to climate there is disrespect at the heart of every crisis
BMJ 2021; 375 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.n2735 Kamran Abbassi
Dear Editor
It’s encouraging to see this being spelt out without obfuscation.
To mention masking – this is a legal requirement in Wales, yet huge numbers of people are now ignoring it and some with a reference to that politicians can’t believe that it’s necessary and are just fooling the population. But, as stupid as their behaviour is, what happens to previously perfectly ordinary individuals when they are promoted to a position of power? The way we are talked to via the media especially by health ministers is too often ugly, bombastic and disrespectful. It mirrors the attitude of petty tryants towards citizens in countries in other parts of the world which we, in a rapidly failing democracy, castigate and find obhorrent.
It has not exactly become a shrug of the shoulder because most of us behave in a decent manner towards our fellows but disrespect in all areas, misuse of power, has become expected. We as citizens need to be able to respect them by calling them to account openly as in this article and elsewhere. Why couldn’t a bunch of adult managers and clinicians even call them to account as they swanned around places where severely ill people watch in horror as they go unmasked, shake hands, pat each other on the back. It all gets noticed but they seem to have so much hubris and perhaps even contempt that our condemnation makes no difference.
11 November 2021
Susanne
Patrick D Hahn
@PatrickDHahn
There are thousands of nurses who courageously worked on the front lines of the pandemic & are facing the loss of their jobs due to refusing the shot. I pledge to pay you one thousand dollars if you will call any of them a “spineless pussy” to her face.
#VaxxHoles #COVIDIOTS
Patrick D Hahn
@PatrickDHahn
·
Stephanie De Garay volunteered her 13-yo daughter for the #Pfizer trial. She ended up in a wheelchair and on a feeding tube. I pledge to pay you one thousand dollars if you will call either of them a “spineless pussy” to her face.
Piers Morgan
@piersmorgan
Imagine being scared of having a safe, well-regulated, 4-second vaccine shot, when previous generations braved gun shots for years on end to save us all from tyranny?
Anti-vaxxers really are a bunch of spineless pussies.
Austria to put millions of unvaccinated people in Covid lockdown
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/12/austria-province-to-place-millions-of-unvaccinated-people-in-covid-lockdown?mc_cid=b1e40bba5d&mc_eid=466ee5f8be
Austria is to introduce a lockdown for unvaccinated people in two of Europe’s worst-hit coronavirus regions from Monday and could extend it across the country, the chancellor, Alexander Schallenberg, has said.
Millions of people not fully vaccinated against Covid in the regions of Upper Austria and Salzburg will be allowed to leave their homes only for reasons considered essential to life, such as going to work, grocery shopping or visiting the doctor, Schallenberg said – measures believed to be unprecedented in Europe.
The restrictions are in line with recommendations from medical experts and will be monitored through random checks that the health minister, Wolfgang Mückstein, compared to traffic controls.
Many Austrians are sceptical about vaccinations, a view encouraged by the far-right Freedom party, the third biggest in parliament. Schallenberg said on Thursday: “I don’t see why two-thirds should lose their freedom because one-third is dithering. For me it is clear that there should be no lockdown for the vaccinated out of solidarity for the unvaccinated.”
“We don’t live in a police state …
15 November 2021
Rebecca Coombes
Head of Journalism, The BMJ
Read all responses to this article
Re: Covid-19: Researcher blows the whistle on data integrity issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial Paul D Thacker. 375:doi 10.1136/bmj.n2635
In September, Brook Jackson contacted The BMJ about problems she had encountered while employed at Ventavia Research Group. The BMJ commissioned freelance investigative reporter Paul Thacker to write up the story. The resulting article [1] was subject to The BMJ’s usual high level editorial oversight and review. After publication, The BMJ wrote to Ventavia, Pfizer and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to better clarify the scope and implications of the problems identified at Ventavia, as well as what corrective measures were taken.
To date, Ventavia has not responded to The BMJ’s repeated requests for information. However, in statements to other media outlets, Ventavia has claimed that its former employee Jackson did not work on Pfizer’s covid-19 vaccine clinical trial. This claim is not true. Jackson has contacted media organisations that have published these false allegations, sharing documentation that shows her work on the trial, and asking for corrections. At the time of writing, MedPage Today has updated its article.[2]
During the course of this investigation, Jackson has provided The BMJ with dozens of documents, photos, audio recordings, and emails. These include evidence of her involvement in the clinical trial, and communications in which senior Ventavia employees discuss concerns that the FDA might show up at their clinical sites. These records were reviewed by The BMJ’s editors, and the story was externally peer reviewed before publication.
At the time of Jackson’s complaint to the FDA, Ventavia had already enrolled more than 1000 participants across its three clinical trial sites and was still actively enrolling participants. Among the full trial’s 44,000 participants, the total number recruited by Ventavia is still unknown. Another former Ventavia employee has told The BMJ that Ventavia ultimately recruited many more participants to Pfizer’s clinical trial than those reported to the FDA by Jackson. However, neither Pfizer nor Ventavia will respond to questions from The BMJ to help clarify this matter.
Pfizer responded to The BMJ stating that it had received an anonymous complaint about Ventavia in September 2020. “Actions were taken to correct and remediate where necessary. Pfizer’s investigation did not identify any issues or concerns that would invalidate the data or jeopardize the integrity of the study.”
Pfizer added that the FDA and the study’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) were “proactively notified.” Pfizer did not clarify whether it was Pfizer or Ventavia that notified the FDA and the IRB.
Pfizer did not respond to our question of whether the data from the Ventavia sites were incorporated into the trial’s safety and efficacy analyses.
The BMJ also posed several questions to the FDA including why it had failed to inspect any of Ventavia’s sites following Jackson’s report, and whether the agency had received other complaints about the conduct of the Pfizer trial. An FDA spokesperson responded that the agency cannot comment further on this as it is an ongoing matter. “FDA has full confidence in the data that were used to support the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine authorization and the Comirnaty approval.”
Karen Kingston on PFIZER
https://rumble.com/vpdzot-proof-kids-will-die-pfizer-knew.html
That the guy’s name is Healy is a sign, right?
Víctor Amat
@victoramat01
·
Replying to @Espemartn7@Firefly_fanand @DrDavidHealy
Que el tipo se llame Healy es una señal, ¿no?
Esperanza Martín
@Espemartn7
“En lugar d asumir los riesgos q conlleva la toma d decisiones en condiciones d incertidumbre,quienes realizan atención médica se han deslizado hacia un aparato burocrático q evita riesgos y considera a las personas intercambiables
Enganchada a esto traducido por @Firefly_fan
“Instead of assuming the risks involved in making decisions under conditions of uncertainty, those who provide medical care have slipped into a bureaucratic apparatus that avoids risks and considers people interchangeable
Hooked on this translated by @Firefly_fan
https://twitter.com/Espemartn7/status/1459800612833579009/photo/1
Marc Casañas Escarré
@Firefly_fan
·
Replying to @Espemartn7and @DrDavidHealy
La distanca da ilusión de seguridad. La aproximación da la seguridad del miedo.
Liberticidal …
Austria rises up against “health dictatorship
https://frenchdailynews.com/politics/3592-austria-rises-up-against-health-dictatorship
The police and the army refuse to control the health passes in the name of “freedom and human dignity”. They will join a large demonstration against compulsory confinement on November 20, 2021 in Vienna.
Only a few days after Austrian Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg decided to confine unvaccinated people, politicians and trade unions are calling for a large-scale uprising against this uniquely liberticidal measure.
YouTube Temporarily Suspends Sen. Johnson’s Channel Over Vaccine Injury Panel
https://www.theepochtimes.com/youtube-temporarily-suspends-sen-johnsons-channel-over-vaccine-injury-panel_4102388.html?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=digitalsub
YouTube has again suspended Sen. Ron Johnson’s (R-Wis.) channel over a roundtable that featured people who say they were injured by COVID-19 vaccines and experts discussing the shots.
“For the 5th time this year, YouTube is censoring me from telling you the truth.
This time they don’t want you to hear 3.5 hours of stories from doctors, scientists, and the vaccine injured,” Johnson said in a statement.
A 34-minute portion from the roundtable, held on Nov. 2, is still available for viewing on YouTube. The full version is up on Rumble, a YouTube competitor.
The roundtable stretched for nearly four hours. It included multiple people who say they suffered severe side effects from COVID-19 vaccines, including Theresa Long, an Army lieutenant colonel, and several experts, including Dr. Peter Doshi, an associate professor of pharmaceutical health services research at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy.
A YouTube spokesperson told The Hill that the suspension stemmed from Johnson citing statistics from the Vaccine Adverse Effects Reporting System, a passive system run by federal authorities. Public health officials have repeatedly encouraged Americans to submit possible adverse events to the system for review.
Johnson noted that there have been over 17,600 reports of post-COVID vaccination deaths submitted to the system, which is well above the number for every other type of vaccine combined.
“These vaccine injuries are real,” he said.
“We craft our policies to reduce the risk of real-world harm, updating them as official guidance evolves, and we consider the context of a video to make exceptions that balance open discussion of people’s experiences with preventing the spread of harmful misinformation,” the YouTube spokesperson said.
YouTube also took issue with a participant wondering whether COVID-19 vaccines prevent death. The company appeared to be talking about Bob Kaplan, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Public Health and Medicine, and a former National Institutes of Health official.
Kaplan told the roundtable that he supports vaccines and has gotten a COVID-19 vaccine himself but that he is concerned about “research integrity, and the process used to authorize, approve, and mandate vaccines during this emergency.”
Kaplan said he analyzed the data from the Pfizer and Moderna clinical trials and found the death rates were identical between those who got a jab and those who got a placebo. He also called for more transparency from vaccine makers and from federal health officials.
Multiple participants questioned COVID-19 vaccine mandates, noting that the protection from the shots against infection has dropped sharply as time goes on, and that it’s also slipping against severe disease and hospitalization.
Johnson invited the heads of the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other health agencies to the roundtable, but none accepted the offer.
Johnson attributed the ban to Big Tech censorship.
“Once again Big Tech is censoring the truth,” Johnson said in a statement discussing the ban.
https://newsbusters.org/blogs/free-speech/autumn-johnson/2021/11/12/youtube-temporarily-suspends-ron-johnsons-channel-again
“Why won’t they let the vaccine injured tell their stories and medical experts give a second opinion? Why can’t we discuss the harmful effects of mandates? Apparently, the Biden administration and federal health agencies must not be questioned. How many more lives will be needlessly destroyed?”
“dynamic, agile, and supported – nimbly responding to shifting” …
Promoting covid-19 vaccine acceptance: recommendations from the Lancet Commission on Vaccine Refusal, Acceptance, and Demand in the USA
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02507-1/fulltext?dgcid=raven_jbs_etoc_email
Another element that must be addressed are the programmes of so-called weaponised health communication against COVID-19 vaccines. As mentioned before, the sources of this weaponised health communication include dedicated anti-vaccine groups that promote COVID-19 conspiracies through social media and e-commerce platforms and systematic attempts to destabilise the USA in this space from some foreign governments, including Russia.
Countering such activities requires a multifaceted response, possibly including the de-platforming of the more egregious anti-COVID-19 vaccine disinformation and strengthening diplomatic channels with Russia. Since January, 2021, some US conservative news outlets, including cable news networks, have also pursued a path of weaponised health communication.
Counteracting these activities by amplifying accurate and timely vaccine information is essential, but there are concerns that this action by itself will not be sufficient.
Therefore, looking at levers outside the traditional health sector that previously have been successful in countering aggressive disinformation is urgently necessary.
Overall, a national campaign for COVID-19 vaccine education and communication must be dynamic, agile, and supported by adequate financial resources to help local and regional groups to improve vaccine uptake in their communities. Just as important as the development of these materials is their dissemination; the messaging means must be selected for maximum effect.
Public health leaders and contributors must use evidence to re-evaluate the campaign formally and continuously, nimbly responding to shifting circumstances and knowledge, and revising approaches accordingly. Public education and communication efforts outlined here provide the opportunity for COVID-19 vaccinations to gain widespread public confidence and maximise the effectiveness of implementation in shifting the trajectory of this ongoing public health crisis.
Second, science communication and knowledge translation outreach and partnership efforts should engage with local and national press and journalistic organisations to educate journalists, news editors and production staff, and social media staff to communicate accurate and non-sensational vaccine messaging; and offer technical advising (eg, regarding topics, issue framing, and graphics or visualisation) to news outlets and social media platforms to produce news content and public service announcements.
This content should be designed to effectively educate and reassure broad, diverse audiences regarding key vaccine-related topics. Ideally, these media engagement efforts to build public trust on vaccines should be formulated and implemented as soon as possible.
Therefore, a national communication and behavioural intervention campaign is essential to ensure a high enough COVID-19 vaccination coverage to effectively control the COVID-19 pandemic and thus allow a return to normal social and economic activity in the USA. Interagency government efforts must be simultaneously implemented to examine options to further defuse anti-vaccine disinformation.
Court Notice Over Biden’s Vaccine Mandate: Stop ‘Bullying Businesses to Comply’
BY TOM OZIMEK
November 20, 2021 Updated: November 21, 2021
https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/business-lobby-files-court-notice-over-bidens-vaccine-mandate-bullying-of-small-business-owners_4115102.html?utm_source=morningbriefnoe&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mb-2021-11-20&mktids=527f1ebc1a92390720b392ec41250b72&est=vCd%2Fa7NnSJL3vau5lfugng%2FFOdogvgwAGCoyy6iV8V0oIIEsRJqhzmQ1Myth0pCeGBU%3D
The Job Creators Network (JCN), a business advocacy group, has filed a notice with the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals—which is hearing all legal challenges to President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine requirement—and sent a letter to the president saying the group expects the White House to comply with a court decision to freeze the mandate.
“We expect the White House to respect and listen to the judiciary rather than barnstorming ahead and bullying businesses to comply with this rule whose legal fate is in serious jeopardy,” JCN wrote in the Nov. 19 letter to Biden (pdf).
“We expect the White House to respect the rule of law and observe the court’s temporary stay.”
It comes days after the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) said it would suspend enforcement of the mandate after an appeals court reaffirmed its decision to temporarily block the rule, which was published earlier this month. Affecting tens of millions of private-sector employees, the mandate triggered a barrage of lawsuits from Republican states, businesses, individuals, and other groups.
On Thursday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said businesses with 100 or more workers should move ahead and implement the federal governments’ rule requiring workers to get vaccinated or submit to regular testing, in spite of the temporary stay.
“Our message to businesses right now is to move forward with measures that will make their workplaces safer and protect their workforces from COVID-19,” she told reporters at the White House Thursday. “That was our message after the first stay issued by the Fifth Circuit. That remains our message and nothing has changed.”
Despite OSHA’s decision and the legal challenges, Psaki said the Biden administration is confident that it has the authority to implement the rule and confirmed the White House is still working under the guise that businesses will implement the mandate by Jan. 4.
“We are still heading towards the same timeline,” she said. “The Department of Justice is vigorously defending the emergency temporary standard in court and we are confident in OSHA’s authority.”
Earlier this week, the dispute over the OSHA rule, known as an emergency temporary standard, was transferred to the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which has a majority of its judges confirmed by Republican presidential administrations.
JCN also filed a notice (pdf) with the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, urging the court to promptly hear and resolve the legal challenges to the mandate. In the letter to the White House, the group argued that the Biden administration’s actions amount to “executive overreach,” a “vaccine mandate federal power grab,” and that it is “ignoring the courts” in urging businesses to proceed with implementation despite the stay.
“Today Job Creators Network officially notified the court of the White House’s inappropriate pressure and calls for a prompt final resolution of the mandate challenge,” Alfredo Ortiz, president and CEO of JCN, said in a statement. “Joe Biden and Jen Psaki must cease and desist from pushing small businesses into compliance with this illegal edict.”
The Epoch Times has reached out to the White House for comment.
Bit off topic but before it gets lost down the fob them off drain -I was told several times over a few months that I would be updated but heard nothing. E-mailed yet again told the administrator had left The new administrator who has a copy of all the e mails between us asked for more info as to what I was referring to – am now waiting for the copy I was promised – if it ever arrived will post but it should be on a website somewhere in the coll of psychs open and transparent inclusive consultations drawer.
RCPsych Curricula Review
Curricula Review Update – October 2021
In September 2021 we submitted our final curricula framework submission to the GMC for approval after a helpful and informative consultation exercise.
We are pleased to announce that our curricula framework has been approved by the GMC (subject to actions). We are working through the final actions at present, but can now move towards preparing for implementation. This represents a key milestone in the review programme, and we would like to thank you for your support in getting us to this stage.
We are in the process of developing an implementation hub which we hope to launch shortly. This will contain all relevant information for trainees and trainers, including:
Copies of final core, specialty and sub-specialty curricula
Psychiatry ‘Silver Guide’
ARCP Decision Aids
Guidance and support for trainees and trainers
Example placement-specific personal development plans (PDPs)
Frequently asked questions about the review
Transition timetable
To support trainees, trainers and other key stakeholders, we will also be launching curricula ‘drop-in’ sessions weekly on a Thursday from December 2021. Further information will be provided in due course.
If you have any queries about the review, please contact curricula@rcpsych.ac.uk.
Why are we reviewing our curricula?
We’re conducting an extensive revision of all psychiatric training curricula, to be implemented in August 2022.
This will meet the new standards set by the GMC, and make sure the training programme is in line with the principles of the Shape of Training review.
The aim of the new framework is to ensure a clear purpose for each curricula, including High Level Outcomes (HLOs) and Key Capabilities (KCs).
Curricula Framework
The new Austrian Chancellor declared ‘it is time to turn the thumbscrews’ on those unvaccinated. The brutality of that statement has been challenged by riots there and all across Europe . The countries which have taken a lead have a vile history regarding segregation, discrimination and eventual extermination which have been flagged up by the rioters as one reason to come out in solidarity with unvaccinated people So far the hatred with politicians attempted to generate against people who are excercising their human rights has not succeeded as well as they anticipated. Both thousands of vaccinated and non vaccinated people are linked in solidarity. The police have already used live bullets and waterguns . Whether setting fire to city centres is acceptable (as obviously the innocent get harmed )when no other option seems to be available against increasing tyranny is a moral question but too many people have been tipped over the edge of what is tolerable already.