Vaccination: an idea so good we can’t talk about it

Background: there are huge numbers of very credible witnesses to a whole raft of problems with vaccines. And if as much official effort were spent checking out their testimony as keeping them out of the witness box, we might have a much healthier society.

Somewhere in my collection is a book called ‘Vaccination and Immunisation: Dangers, Delusions and Alternatives (What Every Parent Should Know)’, written by the prolific health writer Leon Chaitow at a time when there was open discussion about the pros and cons of vaccination. I recall this as healthy and respectful conversation, that recognised that the values and autonomy of the individual are central to good medical practice. It was also a time when most people seemed to understand that pharmaceuticals all have limited benefits and certain risks, and knew how to take care of themselves. Freedom of discussion can only help people to make the best healthcare decisions for themselves and their families. That is why choice and informed consent are core principles of medical practice that every good doctor upholds and defends; at least they were.

Around the time of Chaitow’s book, my life’s journey brought me into contact with healers of all kinds. A few years later and with one science degree already under my belt, my faith in medicine was completely dashed by personal experience. I needed solutions to problems in my own circle, that had defeated the best medical brains in their fields. And that led me to study health sciences.

Natural immunity is the only real immunity, and health is the only reliable solution to disease. But nobody is forcing anybody else to believe it.

To me it now seems like hocus-pocus to poison people in pursuit of health, and vaccination has come to signify junk immunity. Like junk food it may have a certain value, but it is not the real thing, and if relied upon too heavily it causes more harm that good.

As a student it was quite normal to explore and debate these issues, and examine them from every angle. In fact, it was encouraged. It became quite clear that, no matter what form of healing we choose, we cannot afford to ignore vaccinations, as they present important and occasionally catastrophic influences on the immune system and inflammatory functions, and in turn, can affect every system of the body. To fulfill our duty of care as practitioners we must be aware of all sources of potential harm to the patient. And anyone who thinks that medical products can never do harm is simply ignorant.

As therapists we might occasionally spot vaccine reactions masquerading as some kind of injury. We would often be asked our views on vaccinations by patients, wanting a balance of opinion and not just the standard advice, wanting to make the best decisions for themselves. And although they may still chose to vaccinate, they were typically grateful to know there was another side.

So it was no big deal to see Chaitow’s book sitting alongside books by homoeopaths, herbalists, chiropractors, nutritionists, psychologists, yogis, doctors etc, in the health sections of bookshops and libraries, therapists’ waiting rooms and even doctors’ offices. A generation later, such literature is called ‘anti-vaccination’ and is not so easy to see.

The pejorative term ‘anti-vaccination’ now catches almost any level of doubt, concern or discussion.

It has swept up parents who willingly got their children vaccinated, and who were then left high and dry after devastating adverse reactions. It has come to include doctors who help their patients exercise free informed choice. It includes scientists who document the fate of injected substances in the body. It includes lawyers who believe in the rights of people not to be harmed, deceived or pushed around, and politicians who believe that mandating medical treatment is not acceptable in a democracy.

The only people who can never be accused of anti-vaccination are those holding the extreme position that all vaccines are completely safe and completely beneficial, and should be mandated without exceptions to safeguard the human race from decimation by diseases that are only a sneeze away.

Any wavering on any element of this belief structure can now potentially be labelled as anti-vaccine. And because anti-vaccination has been dishonestly conflated with anti-science, a more nuanced view of scientific reality cannot be used to defend such positions.

In other words, because you question vaccines you are anti-science, and because you are anti-science your concerns about vaccines are invalid. So-called ‘science’ has become twisted into a matter of choosing sides.

The times they are a changin’…

Something has happened in the last twenty years. Such extremism does not get a foothold by accident. The reason many practitioners and doctors have dropped out of these discussions is not that the concerns have all been laid to rest, because they haven’t. Most avoid ‘going there’ to avoid the mark of the antivaxxer, and the risks to career that go with that. In this unhealthy climate of fear and denial doctors and other healers are self-censoring lest they get burned at the stake.

Suppression of dissent – an Emperor’s New Clothes situation.

When the King shows it all before the crowd, those nearest – the wise, the wealthy, and the well-connected – hold their tongues the longest. To believe what they are seeing is to admit to their own foolishness, and worse, to feel the King’s wrath. So they convince themselves it is they who have made a mistake.

The heckling begins not with the experts, but with the naughty children, so the Emperor and his supporters dismiss them fairly easily. And the longer this goes on, the more the laughter spreads through the crowd, the ones most loyal to the King fear his growing anger and their own exposure. The last ones to speak up will surely look the most ridiculous, so they hang on the most tightly to the official line.

Same paper, two headlines, ten years apart. Then:

…and now:

When public health policy is so at odds with medical science, why should the public have any confidence?

Whatever their position on this, those working in healthcare are only too aware of the growing clamour from the crowd and the reddening face of the King. Many simply go along to get along, but there are those who are uncomfortable living a lie, and some may simply quit. Doctors are unable to speak freely to their patients, as increasingly non-doctors are deciding for them what they can and can’t talk about.

In the UK we are lucky that we still have freedom of speech, sort of. The autonomy of the patient and informed consent are taken much more seriously than in some societies. But there are moves to criminalise expression of antivaccination views. And so the pressure is increasing. The catch-all phrase that has crept into professional codes; ‘must support public health’, can be used to admonish those who don’t parrot standard information, and it may not be long before some precedents are set.

Dissent is now actively suppressed in medicine: let’s be absolutely clear about this.

Elsewhere in the world, freedom to choose and freedom to discuss this are long gone. In Australia, doctors have already lost licences and careers, for expressing doubts about one-size-fits-all medicine, for offering individualised care, and for supporting their patients’ rights to choose; performing their duty, in other words. Clinical knowledge and informed consent are under siege. Good doctors working first and foremost for their patients can find themselves in a lot of trouble.

The public everywhere are being subjected to powerful social controls, and the bulk of the population simply sleepwalk through vaccination decisions, unaware of the questions they should be asking. For those who believe being responsible means reading, thinking, asking, and then deciding what is best for their own children, life is being made increasingly difficult. Ironically, they are accused of being irresponsible for making actual decisions.

There is the psychological pressure: fear of deadly plagues ravaging the world is now being used to overcome peoples critical faculties and divide them from their neighbours. How many times have we heard the cry of wolf? Ebola! SARS! Bird Flu! Swine Flu!

And of course, the current pandemic.

Well, when there is a crisis of such proportions, the last thing anybody should be allowed to do is think! Far better that we accept without question the one-dimensional view of the problem in the media, and the knee-jerk reactions of governments. One might think so.

But, if you really think that the sky is falling right now because of a new virus, remember that a year ago the sky was falling because of measles. Measles! There is a lot more to this situation than meets the eye, and a lot to be genuinely concerned about, of course. But for me, the least of the worries is a virus (more on the pandemic later).

And your daughter will die of cancer unless you give her this shot. And now so will your son. But if you dare mention the truth that this shot sees ten percent of girls in hospital within six weeks, you are a fear-mongering anti-vaxxer, putting innocent people at risk, damaging public health. Does such pernicious emotional blackmail really bolster confidence in public health? I think not.

In recent years Europe has been blindsided by sudden mandates, which is one very good reason for Brexit, while in Australia and the USA the approach towards parents is one of insidious manipulation. The claim that nobody is being forced seems hollow if childcare and welfare payments are removed in punishment for not ‘voluntarily’ vaccinating your children, and if politicians apply intentionally divisive labels. As long as you don’t mind financial hardship and social isolation, and as long as you don’t fear being placed on a ‘list’ next time you take your kids to a hospital for a cut on the knee, you are free to bring up your germy little ‘superspreaders’ exactly as you think best, Anti-vaxxer!

Doctors are still giving advice for the good of their patients; as long as everyone understands that what is good for them is decreed by the politicians and lawyers who write the medical advice.

And if you say “thanks but no thanks”, then there will always be somebody else unspecified, for whom it is even more important that you accept medical treatment you don’t need. Somewhere on the planet is no doubt some person – frail, immunocompromised, or something – to whom you are a danger if you don’t get your shots. Their rights are more important than yours, bad citizen! This is the logic of tyrants and psychopaths; since if everybody is less important than somebody else, then nobody actually matters and nobody has any rights.

To deny access to public resources, and even private resources, to make people social pariahs in their own communities, is not the product of reason, it is the design of fanatics. It goes against one of the central principles of medical ethics; informed consent, whereby no form of coercion or manipulation is acceptable.

Right now, all over the world, the ‘other person’s rights’ argument is being used to take away everybody’s rights, including all those ‘other people’.

There are people in care homes – who may have fought wars to protect our rights to self-determination – being forbidden to see their own families and terrified into helplessness. Any argument that this is all for their own good just adds to the nastiness.

“Only a fool cannot see the clothes”.

The irony of using poverty and social division as tools in public health is huge. It seems to be lost on all those public servants dreaming up such schemes, with the excuse that they have the support of experts. But, guess what: experts don’t make the law. They advise. And experts who disagree with policy often don’t get hired as government advisors. So it’s hard to imagine government getting a balance of expert opinion in Australia, say, where ministers have vowed publicly to punish ‘anti-vax doctors’ without mercy.

And under these toxic conditions both the regulated and unregulated professions are choosing to hide behind a veil of rules while they wait for something to change.

But who are the ‘experts’, the select few who may discuss royal high fashion?

This aspect alone would fill a book, but it’s fair to say the science that underpins all of this is now bent beyond belief, and has been for years. Many experts advising government on vaccines and other pharmaceuticals have major conflicts of interest. Alternatively, government advisors may have been chosen because their expertise is the kind that is wanted. The USA has a phenomenon known as ‘agency capture’, meaning the institutions that are supposed to protect the public are in fact working for the very organisations from which the public need protecting.

“It doesn’t take a weatherman to know which way the wind blows…”

When science is a matter of taking sides, those who disagree are not experts. So, surprise surprise, all the experts agree. And hence the illusion of policy underpinned by scientific consensus is created. But it isn’t consensus, it is intolerance of individual opinion and dissent.

When the sartorial insufficiency of the king can no longer be denied, then no doubt some tailors’ heads will roll. We seem to be reaching the point when the King’s red face may explode into rage at any second. “Silence! You are all fools!”. And who would dare say otherwise within the court?

So far I have said little about the vaccines themselves, but keep reading.

There is something deeply wrong with a public health programme that cannot be allowed to stand on its merits. Don’t solve this by telling yourself the experts are smarter than you so you should just go along. They are not necessarily smarter, they have spent careers making all the right noises, that is all. Many are fielding on public policy while batting for the corporations. It isn’t hard to imagine that an industry worth hundreds of billions would want to get its people involved in government decisions.

But it goes much, much further than that. We now have the extraordinary phenomenon of Bill Gates – fanatical about vaccines, no medical training, phenomenal wealth – who has bought unprecedented influence, and a controlling hand in much of worldwide government policy, the media, science, the arts, and of course the internet.

Gates has been pushing a very aggressive vaccine agenda for a decade now, and for him, a lot is riding on its success [success here = return on investment]. He desperately needs to control the vaccine narrative and the organisations that promulgate it, because from a public health point of view, his programme has been far from a success. It has in fact been an absolute disaster. It has harmed hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of people in the developing world, raised legal action over ethics violations, and got his foundation kicked out of India. Despite this monumental failure, he has become more determined than ever to fulfill this ambition, and he has acquired the means to follow through. His empire now threatens the future of whole nation states. How he has acquired such power without any discernible challenge is almost a mystery. He has no democratic mandate whatsoever for his influence, and I really hope our leaders are awake.

From Meet Bill Gates – The Corbett Report Episode 380

What if you are new to this conversation? How do you get informed?

An hour on the internet won’t make you an expert, but it will demonstrate beyond doubt that there is much more to vaccines than ‘safe-effective-necessary, no downside, everyone should do it, shut up if you disagree’.

That said, the internet is being very actively filtered for so-called ‘misinformation’, so one must be more thoughtful now to find the same information as even a year ago. But one glimpse of the Emperor’s bare behind is enough to know that all is not as we have been told.

And when your senses tell you there is something seriously wrong with the picture, that confusion, propaganda, censorship and misinfomation are everywhere, and the effect could be life-altering, what is the logical thing to do?

If your natural reaction is to trust the government and its experts, then you have just failed the most basic citizenship test.

In case you hadn’t noticed, governments get things wrong all the time, especially in matters of health. Sun avoidance, low fat diets and DDT are cases in point.

If you are still unsure, then the correct action is to keep checking a wide range of sources until you are clear.

Many years ago I began to do that, and after a few years I had collected many files, videos, informed articles and books, and a huge number of scientific papers. And I quickly realised the hard part is not finding the information but actually processing it, because there is so much of it.

It takes a lot of care and dedication to understand even a very small part of the science. A lot of inconvenient truth is hidden in plain sight, or completely obscured by impenetrable details. Interpretations of data can vary, authors do not always explain their reasoning. Assumptions abound, as do data-massaging, conflicts of interest and outright trickery. Vast swathes of science remain behind paywalls. Sometimes the problems need to be explained before they can be understood.

Unless a paper makes it clear that, say, the ‘placebo’ in a trial is not actually an inert substance, but a highly inflammatory chemical cocktail, or that the ‘unvaccinated group’ in a study had actually been vaccinated, but with fewer vaccines, it may be impossible to know what it really proves. Misdirection and defensive writing are both common, where a paper gives less prominence to a devastating finding than to unsupported declarations that vaccines have saved millions of lives.

For me the picture that emerged is this:

However simple and clear the decision to vaccinate is supposed to be, the science can no way be said to underpin such confidence. There are huge numbers of very credible witnesses to a whole raft of problems with vaccines. And if as much official effort were spent checking out their testimony as keeping them out of the witness box, we might have better science, better policy, and perhaps a much healthier society.

This much can be demonstrated in a very short time, no high expertise required. But it is probably not good enough for those giving specific medical advice.

When it comes to public health, professionals are supposed to work inside of what is called the ‘Best Available Evidence’, medicine’s glass house. Whole libraries could be written on what that phrase actually means. And I will sum it up by saying;

Which evidence is the ‘best’ evidence depends on the question being asked, who is asking, and the purpose for which the answers will be used. There is no one ‘best evidence’. To say that the best available evidence leads to one universal course of action for everybody at all times, is bogus.

For example, if you are asking whether a vaccine stimulates antibodies, that will take one kind of evidence. And if you are asking whether that means you should have it, that takes another kind of evidence, and must take into account who you are, your medical history, your social situation, your hopes, dreams, fears etc. There is no evidence anywhere that can say that a particular vaccine will save your life or hurt you. Therefore, ones own attitude to risk must also come into this.

And if you want to know whether people should have a choice, then that is a value-laden, ethical and philosophical question and hardly a matter of scientific evidence at all. However, ethics, values and transparency are what preserve a society’s trust in science, far more than the impressive findings science occasionally delivers.

In even the most scientific of matters, trust in a nation’s leadership and institutions cannot be maintained by disregarding the personal values of individuals. We cannot and must not leave the patient out of clinical decisions.

Therefore, whether to vaccinate or not, is a deeply personal decision that can only be taken properly by individual patients (and their advocates), in complete privacy, in conjunction with their chosen healthcare providers, without any form of pressure. It must take into account not just their medical history, but also their environment, their own world view, and their value system. The patient has the final call, since they are the one who must live with the results.

This is a far cry from the aggressive marketing of flu jabs based on threats, half-truths and selective provision of information. “Protect yourself and others, have the shot! Or else lose your job”. Where is the full picture and free choice that the individual deserves?

I suspect the number of clinicians with doubts about the official view – from mild uncertainty to outright opposition – is much larger than officially thought. Doctors are educated and reasonable people: many will have probed the issues privately, and been unsettled by what they have learned.

Concerned citizens are legion. And as fast as awareness is spreading, the silence at dinner parties is growing. The books have been taken out of the waiting rooms. My list of internet pages ‘not found’ grows and grows. That is why I also have a growing library of screenshots. Search-engine filtering is getting more and more aggressive. Wikipedia and Google are heavily distorted now. The media war on ‘misinformation’ is being applied not on the basis of verifiable truth, but on the basis of what is deemed politically acceptable. And on social media, shadow-banning and outright censorship are quite routine now. Somebody somewhere wants this conversation stopped.

At some point, when it is clear that the crowd is right, the Emperor has no clothes, that he can no longer demand silence, that there are too many doubts to sustain their prior beliefs, practitioners will come out of the closet in droves.

Once doctors’ own credibility is at stake, they will say “I’ve been saying it all along!”.

So can I make a watertight case that all vaccines are bad? Not exactly. And that isn’t really my position. Then why be against vaccination?

Well, I am not against it. You can do what you like with your body as far as I am concerned. And if you want to be a guinea pig for a fast-tracked coronavirus shot, be my guest, but you won’t find me at the front of the line! Having personally suffered a nasty reaction to a vaccine, I can’t pretend to anyone that the risks don’t matter. But that doesn’t mean I want to stop people doing what they think is best for them. What I am for is open discussion, ceaseless enquiry, and for personal informed choice. Vaccines concern me, and they certainly complicate my work as a therapist. But the hard-line on vaccines is what terrifies me. If anything were to make me become anti-vaccine it would be draconian laws, mandates and deception. So, it’s getting close.

There is considerable evidence that the authorities in various places have for decades been hiding vaccine damage to protect vaccination programmes. It’s a fact that the pharmaceutical industry has. Confidence in public health is being damaged beyond belief. It is this ambition to foist as many vaccinations as possible on the public, whilst covering up the problems, that will likely bring the whole vaccination programme crashing down, not mums and dads asking questions.

The ‘something must be done’ argument.

People’s thinking can contain some bizarre disconnects, like (recently heard): “I don’t believe in vaccines, but I don’t want to catch the flu”. Do they work this out for themselves, or has the thought somehow been planted?

And urgently vaccinating everybody seems to matter so much these days that nobody is checking the effects. You can see it in the way politicians talk about aggressive public health initiatives. They say “look, it is working, uptake has increased”.

In other words, sales are up! Woopdy-doo!

It is gross failure of reason, that believes doing something is so important, that we must not stop to think about effect of doing it. This is the logic of the person who jumps from the 10^th floor of a burning tower block.

The golden rule in public heath is: don’t spread fear and panic. So who is being irresponsible; those people saying “hold on a minute, have you seen what is happening to all those people jumping from the windows”, or the ones shouting “fire”?

What is not being checked is the outcome that actually matters; the effect on the health of the population.

Well I can tell you the health of our children is a disaster. When I was at school, nobody I knew had an inhaler. Epipens didn’t exist. If you mentioned autism, people would say “what’s that?”. The school shop sold peanuts, and we threw them at each other in class!

I don’t think we can blame vaccines alone for every sick kid, far from it. But more than half of American children now have some kind of chronic disease, and it needs explaining. This is the emergency about to tear society apart, not Chicken Pox.

And certainly not a so-called pandemic that already appears to be fading. For most of its course this so-called emergency didn’t even raise a bump in the all-cause mortality curve; until the authorities imposed predictably deadly knee-jerk responses, that is. The real emergency is the damage to society caused directly by the response. Forbes: 600 doctors call lockdowns ‘a mass casualty incident’. And we haven’t even started vaccinating yet.

Meanwhile, the labs developing the vaccines for the pandemic strain are worried the disease will burn itself out before they have a chance to produce a vaccine! I thought the crisis coming to an end by itself would be considered a good thing! Of course public health are worried it will come back next year, and want to make sure we are better prepared. Or are they setting us up to expect this mess to be an annual event? Unfortunately if they dare try and pull these same stunts or anything similar ever again, I do not expect the public will be so credulous and forgiving. Low virus rate leaves Oxford vaccine trial with ‘only 50% chance’

It seems that saving the world from disease is no longer the point of this fiasco; if it ever was the point.

Another thing that has changed is media reporting.

A decade ago the papers and TV channels were discussing the cons as well as the pros of vaccines, but not now. It seems as if journalism has been replaced by mindless parroting of any official press-release. There is little I can now say about the mainstream media that will surprise anybody, so I will say: the fourth estate is broken and bent, and is quite deservedly losing its reach; and leave it at that.

What are the holes in the science? Short answer: myriad.

But I am not sure if the holes in the science actually matter to anybody already interested in natural immunity. There are already plenty of good reasons to choose natural health, so why bother with questions about dubious pharmaceutical alternatives? However, the issues are not always obvious from the start, so for the benefit of the uninitiated we need to look at it. This is such a huge topic in itself, with so many branches, I’ll have to just stick to three or four of what I see as the big questions unanswered:

1) Is there such a thing as ‘peak vaccine’?

As in, maybe a certain number of vaccines will be helpful to some people, but perhaps at some point increasing numbers of vaccines will begin to do more harm than good. It is absolutely reasonable to expect this. It is also completely reasonable to suppose that those who are most reluctant to be vaccinated may be those with good reasons not to be.

What has happened is a mushrooming of the vaccine schedule without any research into the combined effects. There has been no attempt to check that the 10th or 10,000th vaccine will be as beneficial as the first. How many vaccines can the body tolerate before the immune system is completely overwhelmed? The famous claim that a baby can tolerate 10,000 vaccines at once is plainly ridiculous. ‘Peak vaccine’ will obviously be somewhat lower than 10,000 vaccines. For many individuals it could be zero, we simply don’t know. It has never been researched.

2) Placebo-controlled trials are generally missing from the science, because the control substances are typically anything but inert placebos.

Usually they use the entire cocktail of irritants that makes up a vaccine, minus the viral or bacterial antigen. This is like testing how fattening Fruit and Nut chocolate is, using Dairy Milk as the control. Alternatively they may compare against other vaccines, but without a completely unvaccinated group for comparison. They also tend to use surrogate end-points for immunity, such as antibody response. We can argue all day about how antibody response actually relates to clinical protection, but the fact is nobody knows.

Out of the many thousands of trials done, the only one I am aware of testing actual clinical outcomes, against an actual placebo, was a huge trial in India of the BCG against tuberculosis. It was found to have no protective effect whatsoever compared with placebo. The fact that BCG is still used at all misses the ‘best available evidence’ target by miles.

Vaccines are mainly medication for the healthy, who have a different set of risk considerations to sick people. A terminally ill person may have nothing to lose, but a healthy person has everything to lose potentially by an imperfect product. Society also has a lot to lose by harming the healthy. Therefore, only the most perfect standards of design, testing and manufacture can be justified in preventative therapy. Absence of placebos and surrogate end-points are major corners to cut in validating these products.

3) There are two very important pieces of research that, for reasons nobody can understand, have not been attempted.

One is a large, independent comparison of the overall health of vaccinated versus unvaccinated children and adults, in the long term. It is too easy to create an impression of benefit by taking only very narrow outcome measures; for instance recording instances of one single disease over a very short period of time, and ignoring problems that appear later on.

The other is a serious and open attempt to explain why autism – a syndrome almost unheard of two generations ago – is now exploding in countries with the most intense vaccine schedules. Considerable effort has been made to suppress the very strong circumstantial case that vaccines are involved, yet the concern just hasn’t gone away.

There are two more pieces of research I personally would like to see done also. One is a large scale survey of vaccination attitudes and knowledge among health professionals. The other is the extent to which their clinical judgment is affected by peer-pressure, finance, marketing tactics or fear of reprisals.

If by this stage you think my point is I am against vaccinations, then you haven’t really been following.

My point is that we need a reality check, and not talking about the problems hasn’t made them go away. And the juxtaposition of those two news headlines above clearly shows that there is still a conversation that needs to be had. And unless it can be had, trust in public health can only continue to disintegrate.

Trust in medicine is already declining, due to pharma fraud, fearful line-toeing by professionals, political interference in the doctor-patient relationship, selective attention to science and disregard for the individual patient; while at the same time there is increasing awareness of the dangers of medical practice. If there can be a better recipe for damaging confidence in public health, then I cannot think of it. Anti-vaxxers have nothing on this.

And while knee-jerk pandemic responses may be doing much more harm than good, widespread use of a pandemic vaccine rushed to market could kick the world while it is teetering and tip our civilisation right over the edge.

This is not about choosing sides, but about the ability to make informed decisions without being manipulated.

I am a patient too. And it is vitally important to me that when I visit the doctor, we both have each others’ trust. I want to be certain that he is working for me, that the treatment is solely for my best interests. The doctor needs to trust I am not – through fear of pressure to undergo treatment – holding back information that might be significant.

Are administrators, lawyers and politicians practicing medicine without a licence?

The situation we are in is that once-helpful guidelines are morphing into central control of clinical decision-making. And the healthcare professions are revealing they are not able to resist this interference. Whether it is because they lack the necessary political savvy, the strength, or something else, they are unfortunately selling out the trust on which they depend. Medicine, in particular, is tumbling rapidly into disrepute. Some parents are scared to take their children to the doctor. Privately they are questioning every assurance and every official statement.

Worldwide we are living in a new time, when the paranoia which governments are now openly displaying, the deep distrust in their own citizens and healthcare professionals, is matched only by the degree to which those same governments demand to be trusted. That doesn’t work.

Now, the principle whereby professionals are supposed to support public health is not completely unreasonable. But there is no public health without individual health. The doctor must work only for the patient in the room: they cannot ask that patient to sacrifice their own needs for some vaguely defined ‘collective’, or for other persons unknown. Doctors should be careful what they say of course, but not because they may rock the boat. A good boat can withstand rocking. If it is so overloaded and full of holes that a little rocking will sink it, then only a fool would put to sea anyway.

At what point does a situation become so twisted that it takes no qualifications whatosever to call it out?

Lately we have also seen ‘no jab no doctor’, where doctors are turning away patients who opt-out of vaccinating. It seems to me that insisting a healthy person receives medical treatment for a disease they do not have, then if they decline, refusing to provide the medical services they actually need and want, is deeply unethical. What sort of boat are we trying to float here?

When doctors are replaced by apps, they will only have themselves to blame.

It must be okay for opinions to differ, otherwise we will live in a world of bland standardisation, where every decision requires a flow chart and excellence is not allowed. The big irony of what is called ‘best practice’ is that it almost certainly leads to blandness and mediocrity. Professionals will preside over their own redundancy as they will have nothing left to offer. Ideology and dogma will take us away from science and towards darkness.

And lastly, if we must all say the same things, then we will all make the same mistakes. The current line of pandemic vaccines are based on new technology, and will be hastily rushed through with only a few months of testing at most. In other words, we have no idea what the long term effects will be. Were there to be some defect that only shows up after a few years, by then billions of people may have been injected. The effect on civilisation could be catastrophic. And the precedents are not reassuring. Our survival as a species may depend on the right to choose and refuse medical treatment, and that depends on our freedom to discuss.

For the experts, the lesson of the Emperor’s New Clothes is that the longer they wait to speak their minds, the more foolish they will appear in the end.

~

[Author’s note to practitioners: for those who want to understand better how natural and artificial immunity impact on their work, I am more than happy to take the time to run them through it. Drop me a line and we’ll work something out.]

~

What most people missed in Bill Gates’ most infamous speech…

And no, I’m not talking about the ‘using vaccines to lower populations’ bit! Everybody saw that, and it’s sort of a misdirection. The real juice is hiding in plain sight: this is not science.

I’ll get the populations/vaccines bit out of the way right now: conspiracy theorists do themselves no favours when they say he admitted his vaccines will lower populations. Yes they possibly will do that, because yes they may well do more harm than good, and all the rest, no question. But no, that wasn’t what he ‘admitted’. He may not even fully appreciate the magnitude of the problems his foundation is accused of causing: paralysing children in India, sterilising them in Africa, ethics violations heaped on ethics violations etc. I believe that, with all the sincerity that a blinkered megalomaniac could ever muster, what he meant is that healthy populations don’t have so many babies because their survival is assured. It’s an understandable sentiment I strongly disagree with, and a bogus justification for his programme, and the guy makes my skin crawl: but let’s not assume the absolute worst. He probably believes in what he is doing, and will cling to it in the face of huge evidence his programme ruins lives.

Here is that speech, where Bill Gates talks about using vaccines to lower populations:

Specious nonsense should not be allowed to pass as world-saving science.

What I really want to draw attention to is Gates’ equation [CO2 = PxSxExC] taken from his own lecture slides. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity it is not. It just looks like it was scribbled on a napkin the day before. He bolsters it with throwaway statements like “I asked the top scientists”, as if he – Bill Gates – happens to have hot-and-cold running access to all ‘the top scientists’, and that the entire range, complexity and nuance of their opinions can be summarised in a few unanimous soundbites. With my two science degrees, I don’t even know what ‘the top scientists’ means. What about the bottom ones, or the ones in the middle? Are they simply not as good? Or do they just not hold the right opinions to get the top jobs? Not sure.

But this juvenile pseudoscience is the reasoning he holds up to justify radical re-engineering of human society, at a monumental cost, whether we want it or not, whether this uncontrolled experiment even works or not. Since this proposal may include the destruction of countless traditions as well as aggressive depopulation of earth – it needs a whole lot more deconstruction than it has got. Frankly, it needs to be stopped.

Please note: Bill is selling this aggressively. He is not asking for our consent, since he would meet objections aplenty:

First, his premise is that there is no option but to reduce CO2 output to zero: that we do this, or we are dead. And if the people of the world are slow to catch on, well, self-appointed saviour of mankind, Saint Bill, will just have to push them along a bit.

Screech of brakes… I could say an awful lot about that house of cards, man-made climate change, just for starters. But despite Gates’ delusions of worldwide unity, the whole world and all its scientists – top, middle or bottom – are not on the same page as Bill, despite several decades of pushing very hard the catastrophic global warming hypothesis and all the ideology that comes with the package. But ANY wavering would undermine this fragile business model. And yes, the Gates Foundation, for all its presentation as a pure-as-the-driven-snow charity, is a business. So is climate change. And don’t think for a second that butter wouldn’t melt in Bill’s mouth – it would.

Second, since all the terms in that equation are multipliers, in his own words “probably one of these numbers is going to have to get pretty near to zero”.

Which number, Bill?

Where do you see the focus of such radical change? The way we live our lives, or the physical and energetic means to support that?

Did you mean the population itself, Bill? Are we going to have to depopulate the planet radically, starting now? Or just a teeny bit, because that would be okay?

Or do you mean to address ALL those numbers, in your crusade to get your precious answer to zero? Say what you mean, Bill, let’s leave no doubt over such matters.

But I’m just leading up to the real logical howler, which is this. In short, he’s forgotten some terms – MINUS terms.

Why only multiplication terms? One or two minus terms could zap this, couldn’t it? Did the worlds’ most successful computer engineer really forget to include some minus terms? He does mention carbon capture and storage (CCS) in the talk. That’s a minus term. So where is it in the formula? “Whoops, I just turned human life and society upside down, then I realised I overlooked something. Silly me…”

Since reducing ANY of those numbers to zero is not possible – and the results of such experimentation could be far more devastating than CO2 itself, and since Bill shows no sign that he is joking, or lacking in the influence and determination to pursue this – then his assumptions really need checking.

It doesn’t take a genius so see the holes in this ‘science’.

And given what he is proposing, that’s not good enough. Basically, he is turning a blind eye to the obvious flaws in his own thesis. To acknowledge them would be to zero one of his other goals, those not stated in the video, depopulation, technocratic power, huge pots of money for him and his industrial cronies; essentially, total control over human society and limitless opportunity for himself.

As things stand, it all leads to a needlessly complex practical approach. And clearly Bill likes it that way, this is the sort of thing that gets him out of bed. Teching the heck out of this is precisely what he goes on to say he intends.

And for him the means may be more important than the ends. In the current pandemic crisis, which he seems far too interested in apparently, he has made it clear that the consequences of total economic collapse are not a problem compared to ‘saving lives’. What sort of bogus dichotomy is that? And how does he get a platform for such rubbish?

In short, he is either less smart or less honest than he would like us all to think, while at the same time totally undeserving of the influence he has bought and bestowed upon himself. And to fix any of that would see poor Bill and his cronies as no longer the beneficiaries of this little-needed job creation scheme.

Where you see the word ‘Innovation’, read ‘Investment’

However, minus terms are not all the same. To the autistocrat brain, negative carbon output means an expensive industrial solution, such as carbon capture and storage (CCS); and since people can’t be trusted as much as machines to get with the programme, total technological monitoring and control of every aspect of our lives through the internet of things, social credit scoring, and so on. And of course, it means lots of innovation, as the title of his lecture suggests. He goes on to explain that CCS is not without problems, and no doubt Bill is happy to work on solutions for those as well. This all looks much less like Mother Theresa to me and more like a PR exercise for a mega-industrialist.

Innovation is grist to the mill for the likes of Bill Gates. Even if the innovations themselves are unneeded or doomed to fail, backing innovation is itself big business. The trick is not so much to get in on the ground floor, as to be the one building the elevator, and ideally get off before everybody else does.

Innovation means money up front, and a few billion in philanthropic donations (read venture-capital) doesn’t go very far in the terraforming business. Such ‘grands projets’ mean public debt heaped on already existing public debt for generations to come. Sustainability, my foot.

We don’t need Gates, we need trees.

Environmentally speaking, one great beauty of trees is that they address atmospheric carbon in the most natural way. But they also provide countless other services on which life depends. They do this without any downside I can think of. Even the most climate-sceptical right-wing petrol-head has to agree that reversing deforestation is a good thing.

Planting some trees would be just a bit too simple and boring for Bill, and most of all a bit too much like nature. And he seems to abhor nature! This is the man who opposes natural immunity in the current pandemic, who wants to solve all health problems with vaccines and drugs, and all food shortages with GMOs. These are basically unproven or dangerous sticking plasters to complex problems, which in turn are maintained largely by convenient blinkering to the obvious; that nature already has perfectly good solutions, and trashing it creates problems that we don’t need to have in the first place. He likes these solutions because they concentrate control and thereby create ownership, unlike the dispersed solutions that are more akin to the natural way of doing things, and which are therefore more democratic.

So, social and communal responsibility do not mean the same thing to technocrats as to the rest of us. For them, it all means power, freedom, opportunity: they get to go where they want and shape events to their own design – for the good of all mankind, apparently. But it only works if the ordinary people fit in precisely with the plans and give up on their own ambitions. Globalism is always two-tier. Since it involves greater distance between power and the people, to the man on the street it means less personal autonomy, and greater control, surveillance, confinement, imposed limits to our own ambition and increase; and continually having to demonstrate ones innocence or face harsh penalties for the crime of not doing so. So, just another form of fascism.

What about some carbon capture and storage?

Indeed, why is CCS not a minus in his equation? Well, he sort of fudges this, as a possible influence on some of the other terms, rather than a term in its own right. As a definite minus it would hole his own thesis below the waterline. So, as an innovation it has merits for Bill, but obviously it can’t be that good, or it would solve his problem, and spare us having to listen to the rest of his argument. And of course it is unproven at best. And once again, nature has already given us carbon capture and storage: trees already work, they fit in perfectly with nature, and there is plenty of scope – nay need – to plant many many more anyway. It is possible that they aren’t a complete solution: but what sort of machines would it take to compete with billions of acres of forest? And how much carbon dioxide will we have to generate to build the damned things?

What about renewable energy? Well, it has its place, and it has the sort of technocratic appeal I imagine he is pushing. A child can see the problems with covering every piece of land in solar panels and wind farms; or even a fraction of the land. We could start with the sheer amount of up-front energy that must be embedded in the technology itself before a single joule of useful energy is delivered. Once again, how much CO2 before we even start? Or the exotic materials that must be mined to make them, or the fact that they render the land useless for anything else? Wind farms have considerations for wildlife and military security, as well as aesthetics, and I am as disappointed as anyone else to find out they don’t really produce that much energy. In school they taught us thermodynamics. That means you don’t get something for nothing. The only solutions that work in nature are ones that give back as much as they get, or more. That is why the industrialist vision that has trashed the world simply cannot be relied upon to save the world: it will always lack the holism of a truly natural system. We may yet be very far from achieving divorce from fossil fuels, but forcing the issue could backfire horribly.

Which all leads back to trees.

Trees are still the number one fuel source for over two billion people, the world’s most popular building material; and a carbon-neutral resource at that, so long as they are replaced. Since the loss of our forests is one of the most persistent and pernicious environmental problems, turning mankind’s environmental effort towards replacing trees is an absolute no-brainer. The forests will eventually replace themselves, given a chance, but we can speed this up without negative consequence. There is currently enough vegetation in the world to offset the man-made CO2 anyway (but not much else), which means that even a partial restoration of forest would suffice to – at the very least – buy time, in terms of energy and pollution, and make the world better in so many other ways anyway. If anybody has an objection to that, hit me with it, please, and I will deconstruct that also. Don’t bother telling me we can’t afford to plant trees, then say we need money to pay for CCS or solar power instead, or a space-shield for the sun, or I will call you a moron.

Not that I am even convinced anymore that CO2 is remotely the problem it is made out to be. As a heartfelt eco-warrior for nearly 30 years, I have argued most of the arguments myself. And for all kinds of reasons I am just no longer convinced by them.

All the same, the trees are going, and if this continues we are screwed, and no invention of Bill Gates will save us.

But wait… I hear he has a seed bank in the arctic circle, for just such a scenario. Nice job! Or is it in fact to complement his work in GMOs? After all, nobody knows better than Bill Gates, that, before you install a new operating system, you make a back up. Think about that for a moment…

I certainly support simpler living as a way to a healthier, safer, more manageable life. And if it means less pollution as a result, that is a good thing. By pollution, I do not mean CO2 mainly. The real inconvenient truth for the globalists who have bet on carbon, as the means to guilt us all into submission to their control, is that CO2 is a natural part of a healthy atmosphere, and the natural world has thrived historically with far more CO2 in the atmosphere than there is now. It has done so without suffering higher temperatures and more unstable weather as a result. Until a generation or two ago it was considered completely harmless. All the same, I am not saying that messing with the chemistry of the atmosphere is a good idea. But, by pollution, what I mean is the truly harmful, toxic stuff; plastics, hydrocarbons, heavy metals, agrochemicals, drugs, electrosmog and so on.

And I still appreciate the fruits of an industrial world. The question is whether such industry is truly geared to making life better for all people; or whether it serves the big industrialists, with any claim for humanity’s salvation merely a sop. Speaking personally I am tired of my very existence being blamed for problems caused by the greed of corporations and sociopaths. I am not looking to those same people for solutions.

And as for population reduction, well, I don’t see any evidence that the world benefits from fewer of us. Just the reverse, in fact. A healthy planet is one with abundant life of every kind. Biomass is what we are, and considering the biomass that industrialists have destroyed, a few billion people is actually a tiny amount. It obviously isn’t ideal if we’re having to buy our food in plastic packets, from a distant supermarket, instead of from a small local supplier. It isn’t ideal if we have lost our locally needed skills, and are only skilled in white-collar administration for globalist systems.

I hope you see my point: the small person is not to blame for the ills of the world, and usually doesn’t need pushing to do his bit to put things right. Mostly people just need a chance to live a decent life – and to not be forced by pragmatics to compromise on that – in order to do the right thing. It is the big monopolies and oligopolies of the world that need to be confined and controlled; one of the few truly necessary functions of government.

Hence, I do not support the sort of living proposed by Bill and his kind, where every aspect of life is managed, monitored, prescribed and controlled, where our numbers are limited and our lifestyle designed for us; where nothing happens organically, and where every problem invokes a one-track search for a grand technological solution. I do not support their rejection of nature as the bench-mark for a healthy world, for a healthy society, and for healthy people. I don’t agree that most ordinary humans are feral and self-centred, and that only things that are designed can be trusted to work properly.

Humans can do some things that nature alone can’t: and the power of creation that has been placed in our hands is truly a gift to our species. But there are also the things that nature has always done, and only nature can do them without some kind of negative consequence. Thinking that we can improve upon god and nature, and even replace them, is the greatest folly of our species; a folly that has become, for the technocrats, both a fine art and a clever conjuring trick.

But where are the minus terms, Bill?

 

 

 

~

Was this really 11 years ago!?!? Re-reading this old article today, I was surprised how many boxes it ticks for today. It’s as if what is happening now is following the exact same script, amplified by social media and wall-to-wall media hype. So here is another flashback to the Swine Flu debacle of 2009.

For some important lessons from history, read on…

Anatomy of a nondemic

The history of pandemic flu is littered with false alarms. Fearful of a repeat of the great Spanish Flu of 1918, which was estimated to have killed upwards of 50 million people, the temptation to mobilise every resource and take every public emergency measure available is understandable.

Aren’t we lucky that we live in an age of the best medical technology ever to have existed, and that as a developed nation we are likely to be well supplied with the latest weapons against this new terror? Won’t this spare us from the worst ravages of swine flu?

Well, no: just the opposite seems to be the case.

Pandemic lessons from history

The Swine Flu outbreak of 1976 actually killed one person – yes one – a soldier in Fort Dix, whilst the vaccine that was launched against it killed 25 people and crippled thousands. It was only thanks to the scrapping of the plans for compulsory mass vaccination in light of this fiasco that many more were not harmed. Apparently the soldier had complained of feeling tired and weak, and the next day he died. One can only speculate that he was suffering acute fatigue or exhaustion as a result of his training, and in the military culture his vague symptoms may have been met with less than sympathetic care. Hence the existence of a novel invading organism might sit more comfortably with the military authorities, than a mistake in recognising a soldier who actually needed rest and care, and was not just malingering. But whatever did happen to this unfortunate recruit was a one-off, and the official explanation – dangerous contagion – is therefore not sufficient alone. The assumed ‘outbreak’ then spread outwards around this inadequate explanation by the mechanism of fear and word of mouth.

Then there was Bird Flu, found mainly amongst diseased battery poultry and their handlers, that was apparently going to spread around the whole world by healthy wild birds. Remember the news when it reached Germany, then Scotland? The ‘Dads Army’ arrows over maps of Asia and Europe seem laughable looking back. Again, attention was conveniently diverted away from the real source of the problem.

But what about all the deaths in 1918? Well, 1918 ‘Spanish Flu’ coincided with the discovery that aspirin could be used as an antipyretic, and they used it on as many people as possible showing symptoms. It is thought that this new wonder drug is what caused many of the fatalities.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19788357

Quoting from the JAOA of 1919:

“In the United States, more than 28% of the population succumbed to the disease overall. In US military hospitals, the mortality rate averaged 36%, while the mortality rate in US medical hospitals fell between 30% and 40%, with the exception of a rate of 68% in medical hospitals in New York City.”

Medicine’s greatest challenge, or its biggest failure?

In contrast the non-medical osteopathic and homoeopathic hospitals were claiming a death rate nearer 0.25% for non-drug treatment. The fact that this particular outbreak caused many times more death than any other plague in history deserves explanation, and misguided but well-meaning medical treatment seems to offer such an explanation. Understandably though, one of history’s greatest medical disasters is not widely publicised as such.

Which leads us onto SARS by extension of the same principle. One hypothesis is that SARS is normal seasonal flu modified by antivirals (more on that later). Symptoms are reduced, in effect it is a glorified antipyretic. The patient feels better, goes back to work, but is still exhausted and fundamentally diseased, and two weeks later dies of sudden bacterial pneumonia. This event is taken as evidence of the virulence of the strain, rather than as a flaw in the approach. Once word gets out of this virulence, every sniffle is hit with big guns immediately and the prophecy of a nasty and novel epidemic then fulfills itself very neatly.

Everything you need to know about Swine Flu

Firstly, H1N1 is the name for normal ‘flu’, and no pigs have been found sick with this strain of H1N1. At the time of writing, there have been 1000 deaths worldwide attributed to it, compare this to thousands every day dying of MRSA and C.Dif in hospitals, so it’s hard to imagine why the press got so excited about it, except that the press tend to bite, hook, line and sinker, onto everything that the CDC, WHO and DoH put out, without criticism. You could be forgiven for thinking the BBC is the marketing wing of Roche. Yet despite this excitement, confirmed sufferers of ‘Swine Flu’ seem to have only ‘very mild symptoms’. Apparently this is bad news because it means that it helps it spread easily, so we have to ask what would be good news? But early descriptions of ‘killer flu’ are just a wee a bit of an exaggeration really. Meanwhile the panic such news can create is huge. The pork industry worldwide has been badly hit, as has the economy of Mexico; Egypt launched a complete pig cull, involving obscene mass cruelty. People suffer from the spectre of epidemics alone, and we can only guess how many people will be harmed by fake flu drugs bought on the internet. Exaggeration of such matters is entirely irresponsible.

Why so much misinformation?

One explanation for crying wolf, as governments and health officials have time and again, is to draw attention away from other bad news, such as the economy, and when the crisis doesn’t materialise they can claim to have saved us: crisis is an opportunity to unpopular government. Remember how 9-11 became a ‘good day to bury bad news’? And they also don’t want to be seen to under-react – remember Hurricane Katrina. More sinister explanations are to create a self-fulfilling prophecy in order to spread disease by fear and knee-jerk medication of every sniffle going; with inappropriate measures that are themselves more harmful than the disease threat itself; to deal with stockpiles of medications that were vastly overestimated during previous false-alarms; to create new markets, products for industry (Baxter filed their H1N1 vaccine patent in 2008); to create a pretext for controlling movements of people, detention by quarantine of dissenters, and, at the outer reaches, even to reduce populations by a deliberately manufactured disease. Whatever the truth, there is a real risk that the official measures will do significantly more harm than good.

SARS, Avian Flu, Swine Flu – coincidence or design?

Next, a bit of history: on a global scale, SARS came to nothing. Marshall Smith: ‘In the last 20 years, in my research, articles and media interviews I have identified 12 fictitious medical problems which have resulted in massive billion dollar profits to a few pharmaceutical houses. All of the medical problems were either man-made or don’t exist, and were hyped and promoted by the CDC. All of them are characterized by including the words Disorder or Syndrome in their names. That’s because they are not legitimate diseases… Here we are only focusing on the latest hype, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, SARS, a classic case of CDC bio-terrorism.’

Bird flu came to very little, but did create massive contracts for certain well-connected corporations. While governments and media thought this was going to land here on a duck, they overlooked the obvious, which is that bird flu is not a disease of healthy wild birds: it afflicts diseased battery fowl, living in appalling conditions, malnourished, over-medicated, crammed in by thousands in sheds, fighting each other, living and dying among their own faeces and the corpses of their companions, so sick, overfed and pumped with growth-promoters their legs snap under their own body weight; and of course a disease of the workers who man these sheds, breathing in the shit.

Catch the flu? Evidence says ‘no’

Next, flu isn’t even contagious!!! Yes, read it again, we’re not making this up. The theory of person-to-person transmission by virus is just that – a theory, and not a very good one. It is not borne out by experiment, no specific disease has ever been proved to be spread – or even caused – directly by a virus. No, really, it hasn’t. When a disease appears it is assumed that a ‘disease agent’ is involved, and that is enough, the ‘solid starting point’ onto which all other inquiry is attached and around which all other knowledge must orbit. When science so inconveniently fails to support the contagion theory, it is ignored. Mathematicians Hoyle and Wickramasinghe showed how patterns of spread are not supported by person-to-person transmission at all.

So why do people get sick at around the same time? There are other possible mechanisms to explain it, and they deserve an airing. The big correlates for flu presence are geography and meteorology, in other words, where you live and what the weather’s doing – hence, seasonal flu in local clusters.

Whilst we may think we have caught a cold from a friend or neighbour, there’s nothing to say we wouldn’t have got it anyway – we can never prove who gave it to us, but we tend automatically to look for anybody with similar symptoms and blame them, starting from the unquestioned assumption that somebody must have given us the bug.

And it’s seldom hard to find somebody with similar symptoms. But flu does not spread faster in areas of high population density, and living in a house full of sufferers does not increase our likelihood of going down with flu, compared to, say, living in a rural area in relative isolation. Even the Government’s Chief Medical Advisor, Sir Liam Donaldson admitted on Radio 4’s World at One programme on July 14th, ‘…the disease became common amongst people who’d had absolutely no contact with a case…’. This is quite an extraordinary admission really, without any attempt to explain how this could be.

“…the disease became common amongst people who’d had absolutely no contact with a case…”

Sir Liam Donaldson

Trial of Spanish Flu fails to demonstrate transmission

But the contagion of flu has actually been put to the test, one of the only human trials of actual infection. In the Deer Island experiment of 1918, full pardons were offered to prisoners in exchange for being ‘infected’ experimentally with Spanish Flu. They injected, squirted, spluttered and swabbed for weeks, yet not a single subject caught so much as a sniffle – but then they wouldn’t of course, these people had everything to live for. The one person who got sick and died was the doctor in charge of the experimental facility! Could it be that a prerequisite for catching Spanish Flu is belief in its deadly properties and certainty that we are at risk if exposed? In other words, laughing at it really is the best medicine, as well as getting plenty of rest, good nourishment, clean water, positive outlook etc.

Every disease, every outbreak has its context

And just like the battery fowl in their sheds in the Far East, the human spirit worldwide was at a very low ebb after the First World War, a nightmare of a ‘war to end all wars’, where persons of working and fighting age were collectively exhausted. Like the chicken shed, this is the necessary terrain for disease to exist, it’s the big link that medical science seems to overlook, painting us all as helpless victims of any tiny malevolence that gets past our thin defences. For over a century we have chosen to look to factors beyond our control for the causes of disease, in order to avoid facing up to the responsibility we have to supply ourselves with the basic necessities of a healthy life; sometimes against considerable social and economic pressure to do otherwise. Rudolph Virchow, the father of pathology, eventually declared at the end of his life, that germs seek out their natural habitat as do mosquitoes, “inhabiting the stagnant pond but not themselves making it stagnant”. This explains why we are not all dead – despite being exposed daily to practically every germ known to man – because the healthy human organism is not suitable terrain for disease. So while we may be partly victims of things beyond our control, we are also very much victims of our own actions and inactions, collective and individual, living in near permanent toxic circumstances: we must already be diseased in order to ‘get’ a disease.

So where better a terrain for disease than Mexico City, with a vast and rapidly growing population, squalid living conditions for many, and terrible problems with air and water pollution? And again, the world is at a low ebb, this time economically: bread-winners there will be overstretched, exhausted, and more poorly nourished, as they were in Europe following WW1. It’s no surprise that at any time a few thousand people in a city of 20 million might feel unwell, and a few hundred might even die through being unable to take the basic measures for ordinary flu – time to rest without worry, hydration with clean water, a safe and sanitary environment to recover.

So what is so different now? Is there in fact any kind of outbreak to speak of?

How many people really are suffering from some kind of novel disease? At this time it seems there is very little firm evidence of much happening at all. Even the definition of swine flu is incredibly vague. Prior to ‘pandemic’ status, fever, lower respiratory tract infection, and a recent visit to Mexico – or even contact with another sufferer – were enough; no science needed. Hence sufferers of quite normal seasonal events were diagnosed simply because someone they know had a cold while on holiday. What I had in May would have been diagnosed as Swine Flu had I coincidentally been to Mexico. This is because it is simply not practicable to test everybody. For the first few months only one lab in the world was able to confirm infection – the lab of the CDC, which was also the sole authority and the main source of information on swine flu.

This casual approach to diagnosis has meant more serious problems have been missed, actually leading to death.

But here’s where it gets more sinister; a GP now tells us that her surgery has a stock of Swine Flu swab kits – but they are not allowed to use them. It’s as if the official strategy is to assume the worst in every case. So we have a switch from confirmed diagnosis, to clinical diagnosis, and now to self-diagnosis: everyone we know who has actually phoned up the new National Pandemic Flu Service has been offered Tamiflu after describing vague flu-like symptoms. At times the call centre is staffed by 16-year olds – schoolchildren are responsible for diagnosis!

And the range of known symptoms covers so many normal events, that practically everybody will ‘have it’ some time this year on this basis. Changing these criteria has coincided with both a drop in the seasonal temperature and the start of the summer holidays, both times when colds and flu are likely to occur as normal physiological processes, and, Hey Presto! A massive surge in cases in a few short weeks. The latest is that the surge has ‘plateaued’ – well it’s no surprise: redefining the diagnostic criteria will only create so many more new cases.

Diagnosis by assumption, and outbreak by policy, pandemic by semantic jiggling.

But what does confirmation of infection really mean anyway? It means that somebody showing symptoms has produced a positive test. We would think from the media that rows of clever people are peering down microscopes at little viruses and going “yes, that one’s definitely Swine Flu, it has H1N1 stamped on it, and now I can see it pushing the fever switch”, or perhaps a drop of blood is put in the analyser and up comes a report with the name of the virus, its photo, next-of-kin details, address of the hotel where it’s staying etc. The reality is that there is a lot of guesswork, deduction, assumption, and, quite frankly, mythology involved in the process of identifying any causative organism. Chemical markers, DNA sequences, cellular debris, bits of protein, antibodies, that have become associated with certain symptom pictures, are all seen as signposts pointing towards the suspect infection, yet these are very tenuous and indirect associations with little firm basis. And tracking them down is not straightforward by any means, sometimes markers for other infections are seen on the way, but discarded because they are not of interest.

Germs and diseases, chickens and eggs

In fact we are filled with all kinds of germs all the time, most causing us no harm whatsoever. Around 90 percent by number of cells in our bodies are bacteria, and we’d cope poorly without them. So if we have all the symptoms of swine flu and the germ is detected, we are deemed to have swine flu. If the germ is not detected, we have something else, don’t we? If we have the germ but don’t get symptoms, we must be ‘carriers’, right? And of course it mutates, doesn’t it, always staying one step ahead, so we might be looking for a different thing instead.

So…

We can have: the germ and not the disease; the disease and not the germ; both; neither; or another germ altogether. And all these situations can be called Swine Flu!

Does this not seem to be really stretching a theory? It does to me. It’s hard to see where there is any consistent relationship between the germ and the disease. We’re just classifying and reclassifying findings according to beliefs: epidemic – no epidemic! It’s magic!

But wait a minute, we know that the disease must be caused by a virus… and that the virus causes disease. Actually, we don’t – we’ve just seen that we don’t. The only proof of this exists in self-referential arguments: assumptions are the starting point for a process that proves those same assumptions. Louis Pasteur gave us germ theory, and every piece of standard microbiology is constructed upon it, in turn showing the truth of Pasteur’s germ theory! As soon as we allow ourselves to question this almighty great white holy cow, the whole thing falls apart.

In fact, Pasteur was a terrible self-publicist, who launched a poorly researched theory onto the world which happened to sit quite well with a public largely ignorant of biology. His ideas became a goldmine for pharmaceutical companies, and a refuge for the state; quick-fixes to the complex problems of disease are a very attractive package, and the politically very thorny issues of a fundamentally toxic society can be put off for as long as we all have faith in Pasteur. Except for the small matter that disease remains, and that the ‘solutions’ are not saving us, they are killing us.

It’s all very well quoting numbers of ‘confirmed cases’; first, the presence of virus is deduced by indirect means. Patients with certain markers are seen as having something distinct from other people with exactly the same manifestations. But there is no baseline measure of the existence of the same markers in healthy people; we can’t go back to 2008 and see if those markers are normal prior to the outbreak. In short, we’re finding a virus we haven’t seen before because we’re looking for a virus we haven’t looked for before! There is no epidemic, spread by a virus or otherwise! None. Zilch. Zip. It’s fabricated. Baloney. Made up. It’s hysteria or conspiracy – you decide.

Flu is a solution, not a problem

But what of the people who have died? Well this is very tragic, but let that not make us forget the fearful phrase, uttered around nearly every case, almost as an afterthought – ‘underlying health problems’. Whatever this means is never discussed in the news, but really this must be key to understanding why these people died. Policy is to give the most aggressive treatment to people with ‘underlying health problems’, yet these are the people most at risk of unpredictable reactions to treatment. From a natural healer’s viewpoint flu is a solution, not a problem, and every problem has a context, and context is everything. Germs are the result of the process, not the cause. It has been known for years that suppression of flu processes (fever) can lead to other problems; eg. eczema and asthma. What we call flu is the body’s repair mechanism; it is no more the cause of death than the AA man is the cause of breakdowns. But it would be churlish to speculate on specific deaths at this time.

The mind is the first organ to be infected

Space doesn’t permit a detailed alternative explanation of contagion here, except to point out that it seems to be mostly a mixture of illusion, psychology, and common environmental influence. Ethel D Hume describes the cases of two men bitten by the same mad dog. One of the men died of Rabies within days, the other left on a sea voyage unaware of the death of the first. He returned home fifteen years later, and was told of the fate of the first man, whereupon he too developed Rabies and died. Anecdotally, if you tell a tribesman he’s going to die, he will die. My own experience is that since I stopped believing in the germ theory of disease, I haven’t caught a single cold from another person: I still get colds, but in my own time, according to other patterns of which I am becoming aware.

Hoyle and Wickramasinghe’s study rightly points out the role of the environment, but they then spoil it by inferring that this means flu comes from outer space. Basing a speculative hypothesis on sound findings is acceptable, depending on how such hypotheses are then treated. Importantly, we should be mindful not to lose their essential message, that other explanations for outbreaks are possible besides person-to-person spread. What their inferences do show, however, is that just like the rest of us, they too are under the influence of Pasteur. They fail to flag-up as potentially false the assumption that, wherever ‘influenza’ does come from, it must be an attack, an external ‘influence’. In fact they cling so strongly to this idea they do not even realise they are doing it. Germ theory is the solid starting point of the modern philosophy of medicine, except that the time has come for it to be poked and prodded and tested to see if it really is so solid.

Jumping on the Pand-Waggon

So much for outlandish theories and conspiracies… but they’re not! According to CDC, tamiflu doesn’t work for normal ‘seasonal flu’ (read ‘H1N1’), and according to doctors at bird flu ‘ground zero’ in Vietnam, it’s useless against H5N1. So if it is useless, why sell it? Well, it’s not remotely unlike pharmaceuticals companies to keep marketing useless products. Despite a steady stream of data showing that seasonal flu vaccination achieves very little and risks a lot, there is also always a spokesperson willing to say something illogical in response, like ‘but old people are vulnerable, so we have to continue vaccinating’. They might as well say ‘two plus two equals banana’.

Whilst the call for mass vaccination is coming from the WHO, in the USA the National Vaccine Information Centre is quite reasonably warning against launching a hastily developed vaccine. So aside from the fact that flu vaccines are useless, if there really is a crisis looming it is a massively dangerous experiment to launch a new vaccine so rapidly – as Dr Mercola puts it, one that is ‘turbocharged’ with novel adjuvants (read ‘poisons’) – and to test it first on the world’s doctors and nurses, shortly followed by those with existing health problems, pregnant women, and children. I’m not alone in thinking this is bona fide madness. Where is the rationale for prioritising pregnant women? The lack of vaccine safety and efficacy is a huge subject, it can only be touched upon here. Suffice to say that in any case it is entirely antithetical to any real understanding of health; the route to robust health does not lie in beating up the immune system.

But beyond that, the entire premise of medicating and vaccinating is wrong: we are not germs’ helpless victims; germs show up when the conditions are right for them. Bacteria appear when tissue is diseased (toxic, deregulated, or disorganised), or when we are expelling waste, they feed on the rubbish. Antibiotics in effect kill off the clean-up squad. So we reabsorb, our bodies electing for mild general toxic problems instead. It is not healing, it is just another homeostatic response to our attack on an earlier homoeostatic response.

Viruses are not living things at all, there is little evidence that they consist of anything more than cellular debris – the broken up cell membrane is identifiable as our own, pieces of DNA from the chopped-up nuclei of our cells become packaged within to prevent it from causing havoc in the body. Waste DNA on the loose inside us would cause mayhem, hence it must be bundled up for safe transport to the outside. Antivirals work by stopping pieces of our cell membranes breaking off this way: we are told viruses use this mechanism to ‘disguise themselves’.

Don’t shoot the dustman!

So targeting the virus is like solving the problem of domestic waste by banning the sale of bin bags, targeting bacteria is like shooting the dustmen. It wouldn’t be at all surprising if a vaccine disaster actually became labeled as a success; people who have been vaccinated against an illness, but later go on to develop that illness nevertheless, do not show up in the statistics for that illness. They may present to their doctor with symptoms of Swine Flu, but be told that it is unlikely to be Swine Flu because they have been vaccinated against it. Their case is not notified to the authorities, and an incorrect picture emerges. This happens with Typhoid, which becomes ‘Paratyphoid’ or Dysentery if it occurs after vaccination, and Polio, which becomes ‘Aseptic Meningitis’ in the same way. Indeed, it does need explaining why vaccines are exempt from the usual gold-standards of evidence for safety and efficacy. The only placebo-controlled RCT conducted on a vaccine was for BGC, and not only was no protective effect found whatsoever, vaccinated individuals were more likely to develop TB. According to Tom Jefferson, coordinator of the Cochrane Vaccines Field, ”There’s a huge gap between policy and evidence” [with influenza].

Trials of antivirals are not independent, and are geared at testing the short-term effects only – to the point where symptoms are abated – or prophylactic effect in healthy subjects, like most trials they deliberately remove as much context as possible. Tamiflu is not even a very good palliative; half of all children given Tamiflu suffer unpleasant side-effects, and now deaths from adverse reactions are beginning to come to light. Viral resistance to Tamiflu is now reported, which is another way of saying ‘we’re beginning to notice it doesn’t work’. In time unnecessary antivirals could cause untold death and misery, as aspirin did before, not to mention the rubbish people might panic-buy from the internet. And in a ‘mild illness’, what is this supposed to achieve anyway?

Now it appears that massive stockpiles of drugs left over from bird-flu are on the point of expiry, read ‘lose billions in value if not used immediately’. So how mysterious that this spring H5N1 appeared contaminating flu vaccine destined for Europe. Surely that couldn’t be deliberate? Oh no? In the 1980s Bayer dumped blood products in Europe and Japan that it knew to be contaminated with HIV. I wouldn’t say that the pharmaceutical industry is completely rotten, but its history is such that every single concern should be subject to the closest of scrutiny.

It’s not even clear what swine flu is, if anybody really has anything novel at all – even pigs haven’t got it. It’s supposed to be mild in most people, so if there’s something deadly going around… well, there simply isn’t. The way to spread ‘it’ is to tell everybody it is highly contagious, to protect themselves, and suppress any fever at the first sign. It is even suggested that this is a deliberately manufactured disease. But it seems more likely that this is a non-event, fed by too much incomplete and conflicting information, watered by vested interests and germinated in the soil of ignorance and fear. Marshall Smith interestingly describes 1918 as a pandemic spread by telephone! So, how much worse could a fear-based disease be when spread by the internet?

You can’t fight physiology and win

So, far from being saved by medicine, the dangers of pandemic flu are likely to be increased or even created by it, from the lack of understanding of illness, to the combative methods employed. Flu is a normal process, medicine has nothing to offer which really changes it for the better. Fear and panic are the biggest risk. History shows that the less we interfere with flu the better. Our understanding as natural healers tells us it is a healing process, it is a necessary stage of recovering from difficult times – war, recession, domestic difficulty… The ancient advice is still the best; during times of wellness to nurture an adequate reserve of rest, good nutrition, strength of spirit and moderate exercise; when flu strikes to heed the message it sends, trust our symptoms, call in sick, keep warm, rested and hydrated, fast under guidance if we are able, rest up until fully recovered, and value the changes it portends.

As healers then, we need to be aware of how to make our patients more comfortable during a bout of flu, and how much we have to offer in the recovery of our patients. We need to know when they require urgent medical care, but also when it is best to help them stay out of hospital and leave nature alone to run its course.

[Reworked]

(opinion)

It all seems like a heist movie. Somebody sets off the fire alarm, then, when all the people are out of the building, in come the thieves, dressed as firefighters. And by the time the smoke clears, the thieves are long gone, and so are all the jewels.

In this case it is not jewels that are disappearing, but something much more precious; our freedom and autonomy as human beings, to travel, associate, work, speak according to our best judgment, our personal privacy, and to make our own decisions about keeping well; to be free adults, in other words. These are things we would never normally just give away (you wouldn’t, would you?), but for the fact that we have been caught unawares, and fear (of one thing or another) is stopping us from thinking clearly.

In this current med-panic situation, there are many possibilities for what is really going on behind the smokescreen of emergency reaction. But the one thing in all this that I am not afraid of is a virus. There is considerable evidence that the fear and alarm of the current pandemic are way out of proportion to the actual threat, have been hyped by a click-hungry media and exploited by various political and commercial interests, keen to ‘never waste a good crisis’. And it is certain that the risks to our health from over-reacting are real. The first rule of public health is surely do not spread panic and fear.

One solid correlation in public health is that poverty increases the risk of disease and decreases life expectancy. That being so, bringing the economy to its knees is a terrible mistake to make at any time.

When it comes to health and disease, there is one major bottom-line – all-cause mortality. And when we look at all-cause mortality, and don’t simply corale into a new category, cases that last year would have been typical of the season, we find at the time of writing that so far 2020 has been an unremarkable year in terms of premature deaths anywhere. We therefore don’t need 5G or bio-weapons, or even an exotic virus, to explain what is going on; all we need is careless manipulation of statistics without a sense of broader context.

In every heist movie, there are the characters. There is the jaded but honest cop, who knows in his gut that something doesn’t quite add up. And while others are looking at videotape and fingerprints, our hero is usually trying to understand the other characters in the play, to find out what makes them tick, understand their backgrounds, and to fathom their motivations and insecurities. Why does a certain charismatic player always seem to hang around the scene of the crime? Why does this person always seem a little too interested in what is going on, or perhaps overly keen to offer a helping hand to the police? Why does their name come up too often to be mere coincidence? Did they in fact have some kind of advance knowledge of what was about to happen? And most of all, in what way do they benefit from the events? Are they in fact manipulating the situation in some way?

In this real world story, there certainly are those who seem to benefit from the situation, who are only too eager to ‘help’. Think; people who were running pandemic war-games just before these events took place. Think; those pushing enthusiastically for highly technical solutions which they can control. Think; those who seem to have the ears of the powerful. Think; people who own patents on medical products or genetic material. Think; people who wish to get new draconian laws past inconvenient constitutional obstacles. Think; people with large sums of money tied up in pandemic bonds. There may be many such characters in this global story.

But, back to our cop. There are in fact many cops in this particular story. Eager for the truth, determined to solve the crime and see justice done. Millions of them, all over the world, all with time on their hands now, with fantastically powerful investigative tools right at their fingertips, and all connected directly or indirectly to each other in order to collaborate, communicate, and share their theories to thrash out this problem. And for each and every one of them this is not just about solving a puzzle, it is now deeply personal.

Still it is not exactly clear yet what has been taken or why, whether some of it will be found again or returned, or who precisely is responsible. Was it the Rembrandt or the diamonds? Or was it something of seemingly little value but priceless to one of the characters? Or something we will only miss once we need it and go looking for it later? But there are suspects.

I believe in a yin for every yang, in Karma, in an equal and opposite reaction to every action. Those who plant the wind will harvest the whirlwind.

Most heist stories don’t have many innocent victims. This one unfortunately does. But the cops are on the case. I expect twists in the plot, and nail-biting tension before this is all over. But in the end, they will get their man (or woman) and the punishment will be fitting.

Who remembers the 1980s, and how hard it was to convince anybody to take global warming seriously? Well now it is virtually impossible to pursuade anybody that we might have got this wrong, and that we must never stop considering other possibilities

As in the vaccine debate, there are powerful interests that think certain arguments must be suppressed at all costs, lest the certainty on which social stability rests be demolished. In other words, policy and commerce can too easily take precedence over the truth. Within every area of science, there is an unavoidable dose of dogma, assumption, lobbying, and control, aka bias. And ‘big science’ can suffer ‘big bias’.

Brian Cox’s ‘absolute consensus’ is maintained by systematic exclusion of anything that does not support the prevailing view. Anyone researching areas of climate science that do not imply global warming, can find it very difficult to get funding or peer review. They can be automatically dismissed as ‘not credible climate scientists’. That is not consensus, it is suppression of dissent. I do not think Malcolm Roberts put up a very good fight in the clip, but his demolition by Cox was pure showmanship. I urge the public to choose better reasons for making up their minds.

Environmental sciences were pretty big where I studied my first degree. My father was a high-ranking research director in the publicly-owned gas industry of the 1960s and 1970s, and we heard of the greenhouse concept back then. Prof Cox pulling out graphs is a shoddy example of how science is supposed to be approached.

Putting it on the BBC News website is media support at its finest for an establishment view. Why an establishment view? Because when they realised the level of popular awareness of climate change in the 1980s, some parts of the establishment decided not to fight but to make money out of it. And thus began carbon-trading and carbon quotas on Bill Clinton’s watch, and a war of messages. So no message can be trusted uncritically. And any sincere scientist could in fact be an unwitting disseminator of any agenda.

Those familiar with the vaccine debate will recognise ‘The Graph Trick’. Produce a graph that shows the section of data supporting your hypothesis, and compel others to acknowledge the trend. Give them less than 3 seconds to come back with a complex and detailed rebuttal. But in the case of vaccines, if you go back in time far enough, the graphs actually show that major diseases were well on the way to eradication before their vaccines were introduced, thanks to public health measures that are far more important than immunisation.

How many of us have a better graph in our pockets, just when needed to challenge a point? In fact we don’t actually know what Prof Cox’s graph shows – it could be the inflation-adjusted price of baked beans in Kwachas for all I can tell, yet it raised an instant cheer from the audience.

Take a long view with the atmospheric carbon trends and you see that a similar sleight-of-hand is at play in the media. Because, barring a mere blip since the industrial revolution, atmospheric carbon is at its lowest in geological history. Why? because so much of it has been lost to fossil sinks, in other words oil, gas and coal deep underground.

Some say atmospheric levels are in fact dangerously low, near to the point where plant life can no longer thrive and life on earth could die out if it gets any worse. There is propaganda on all sides, and so the honest position for the layman is to not know what to believe. The savvy layman keeps openly sceptical, and isn’t pursuaded just because it is the trendy Brian Cox and a graph.

The more CO2 there is in the atmosphere, the more ‘food’ for plant growth. Plants capture CO2 as they grow, and so there is this kind of homoeostatic mechanism in place (as long as we don’t keep cutting down our forests). In support of the idea that levels are in fact currently low, sceptics point out that horticulturalists actually install CO2 generators in greenhouses to feed their plants.

And when plants die, the carbon they contain is recycled into new life, either directly or by release into the atmosphere and later absorbtion into other plants. But a small amount gets more permanently fixed into fossil sinks. And as the amount of fossil carbon increases in geological time, that leads to a gradual long-term loss of atmospheric CO2. By burning fossil fuels we are merely putting some of it back. There are other mechanisms at play, and the whole picture is unavoidably complicated, meaning certainty here is not the domain of the wise.

Now, I am not here saying unfettered burning of fossil fuel has been a good thing. Dumping hundreds of millions of years’ worth of sunk carbon back into the atmosphere in a few centuries is not a very ‘organic’ approach. And I realise this opens the door to some huge conversations, such as the fate of the coral reefs and so on.

But nor is it a good thing constructing a false-narrative, calling it science, and then using it as a pretext for massive control measures against whole societies. Make no mistake: climate change is big business and power. And that can turn any good intention bad.

Yes earth’s temperatures MAY appear to be rising in parallel with the recent rise in CO2. But we are all aware that statistics can be used to create any picture. Assuming there is overall evidence of a rise, there are other hypotheses worth exploring that can explain it, fully or partly. Admitedly some of them are very complicated and hard to grasp, but that alone should not make them less likely. And it is bad practice scientifically to say these ideas are invalidated by a lack of consensus. The ‘absolute consensus’ was once that the earth was the centre of the solar system, as astrophysicist Brian Cox of all people should know.

And yes, altering the chemistry of the earth’s atmosphere on a grand scale may be dangerous. And yes, pollution from fossil hydrocarbons and their many byproducts is one of our worst problems. And yes, clean air, clean water, a sustainable energy future and economic independence from finite resources would not be such a terrible mistake to make: in fact I totally support it. I don’t want to see climate action filibustered.

None of that means that we should allow fair debate and exploration of all ideas to be stifled by mainstream thinking. So it is the official message I always take with a pinch of salt. If the message is that we need to shut down all industry, cover every spare acre in solar panels (with huge up-front energy costs), dump heavy metals into the atmosphere or build giant space-shields to block out the sun, then our mindset is going to kill us just as surely either way. Lying about the reasons does the cause no good whatsoever.

But my main point is that every ‘mainstream’ idea was once a minority idea, and if we shout down current minority ideas we could be suppressing the next sustainable energy solution, or cure for cancer, or the invention that will get us to the next habitable planet. So I admit being a bit of a supporter of scientific underdogs, not because I think all weird ideas are right, just because we risk losing some great ideas if we keep saying certain things are ‘settled’ or beyond debate. Being ahead of ones time is even more a disadvantage than being behind, and sometimes ideas need to be kept alive until mankind is ready for them.

Having for a time myself become very disillusioned by science, I eventually had my faith restored by realising it was the abuse of science by scientists in the name of science I so deplored. Science is always right, but scientists are often wrong. Part of this return to science now compels me to respect ANY hypothesis, no matter how outlandish it may at first seem. And to be especially wary of herd mentality, consensus and science wrapped in public policy: but to realise that good science requires constant vigillance over details, constant awareness of the interests it serves, and most of all, a realisation that at any moment one new piece of information can turn everything on its head.

Meantime, there is one thing humans can do right now that is virtually free of negative consequences, that will reverse our dependence on fossil fuels, moderate or even reduce atmospheric carbon, and reverse many of the harmful environmental problems of the post-industrial age. And that is to PLANT TREES. More than any other project, restoring the earth’s forests is arguably mankind’s most urgent duty right now.

That’s all…