Resource Document: COVID Vaccine Worries and Alternative Treatments
Updated August 8, 2021
Note from the author: I am a social scientist, and am in no way competent to assess the hard science behind the short- and long-term effects of the COVID vaccines. All I attempt to do here is give a brief overview of the main critiques of the new vaccines and their rollout. The emotional charge and political censorship surrounding this issue has made it difficult for us as a society to objectively and compassionately consider the claims of COVID vaccine critics. I’m hoping that this document can facilitate discussion and provide a space for personal reflection.
“Aware of the suffering caused by unmindful speech and the inability to listen to others, I am committed to cultivating loving speech and compassionate listening in order to relieve suffering and to promote reconciliation and peace in myself and among other people.”
— Thich Nhat Hanh on the Buddhist principle of Right Speech
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Please see index for article outline and brief summary of each section. More in-depth analysis and resources can be found in the main body of the article. Depending on what browser you’re using, you can click the links in the index to jump down to a specific section of the article.
Index:
1. Scientific, political, and ethical concerns about COVID vaccination
A. Hasty vaccine testing | Medical experts convened by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) express concern over the design flaws of the COVID vaccine trials.
B. Concerns over vaccine side effects and efficacy | Statistics from the US government’s self-reporting system show that COVID vaccines have generated more adverse reports in the first six months of its rollout than all 70 vaccines over the past three decades.
C. Political censorship and misinformation | Governments, media outlets, and scientific journals have worked to censor critics of the vaccination policy, even when these critics are well-respected scientists and doctors.
D. Issues with vaccinating young people | Doctors have questioned the policy of vaccinating young people, arguing that informed consent is regularly being violated, and that the risks of vaccination may outweigh the benefits.
E. Issues with vaccinating the previously-infected | “Real possibility that vaccinating persons with pre-existing SARS-CoV-2 viral antigens in their tissues could cause that subset of people grave immunological harm.”
F. The theories of Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche and Dr. Luc Montagnier | The mass vaccination policy will foster the breeding of more serious variants and compromise the ability of healthy immune systems to combat the virus.
2. Alternative treatments
A. Ivermectin (scientific analysis) | “Meta-analyses based on 18 randomized controlled treatment trials of Ivermectin in COVID-19 have found large, statistically significant reductions in mortality, time to clinical recovery, and time to viral clearance.”
B. Ivermectin (political analysis) | “It’s a dangerous world when corporate marketing determines public health policy.”
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1. Scientific, political, and ethical concerns about COVID vaccination
A good starting point may be the doubts that many scientists and doctors have expressed over whether the vaccine’s clinical trials were sufficient to prove their short- and long-term safety. Rather than the standard multiple-year trials required for vaccine authorization, the COVID vaccines were given emergency authorization after trials that lasted only a few months.
In October 2020, two dozen medical experts were convened by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to discuss protocols for vaccine authorization. Dr. Diana Zuckerman, president of the National Center for Health Research, was one of several who spoke out about the “serious design flaws” of the vaccine trials. She suggested that the two-month follow up the FDA suggested was too short to make definitive conclusions, and the trials are “too geared to preventing mild infections, and may not show whether they prevent severe infections and hospitalizations.”
— “I’m especially concerned that Pfizer’s vaccine trials included only five people aged 75 and older who were diagnosed with COVID-19,” Zuckerman said. “That makes it impossible to determine how effective the vaccine is for frail elderly patients.”
— “They haven’t gone far enough” with their safety protocols, suggested panelist Dr. Hayley Altman-Gans, a pediatrics professor at the Stanford University Medical Center.
— Amanda Cohn, chief medical officer at the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, also worried that the trials were too narrow to come to any definitive conclusions: “Very rarely do we look at [vaccine efficacy] so shortly after completing a series.”
— In the apprehensive words of Dr. Archana Chatterjee, dean of the Chicago Medical School: “What we’re being asked to do is to build this plane as we fly it.”
— In their coverage of this expert panel, MSN reported that “many vaccines, along with drugs and medical devices, look ‘miraculous’ at first — only to turn out to be less so as more data comes in. Most of these ‘medical reversals’ occur because the product is less effective than it first appeared. But some products wind up being far more dangerous — like the pain medicine Vioxx, which killed 55,000 Americans before it was finally pulled from the market, and the Sprint Fidelis pacemaker, a device with faulty wires that caused hundreds of deaths and put another 150,000 people at risk of sudden death.”
— The fact that several of the COVID vaccines use novel mRNA technology added to doubts about whether the amended safety protocols were sufficient.
Given the recent history of the pharmaceutical companies who produced the vaccine, skeptics have questioned the wisdom of giving these corporations legal immunmity — “People who take the COVID vaccines and experience side effects won’t be able to sue Pfizer or Moderna, and likely the U.S. government will not compensate you for damages. Under the PREP Act, pharma giants like Pfizer and Moderna have total immunity from liability in the case if something unintentionally goes wrong with their approved vaccines.”
— A few notes on the “dismal record” of the pharma giants involved in the vaccines:
- Johnson & Johnson: “On July 21, 2021 J&J and three other smaller drug makers agreed to pay a staggering $26 billion damages to a group of US states for their role in causing America’s opioid epidemic. Of that J&J will pay $5 billion. The CDC estimates that use of the highly-addictive opioids as painkillers caused at least 500,000 deaths between 1999 and 2019. Johnson & Johnson is accused of pushing the deadly painkillers for excessive use and downplaying their addiction risks. They knew better…. The same J&J is in a huge legal battle for knowingly using a carcinogen in its famous baby powder. A 2018 Reuters investigation found J&J knew for decades that asbestos, a known carcinogen, lurked in its baby powder and other cosmetic talc products. The company is reportedly considering legally splitting its baby powder division into a small separate company that would then declare bankruptcy to avoid large payouts. The J&J covid vaccine, unlike that from Pfizer and Moderna, does not use mRNA genetic alteration.
- Pfizer: “A 2010 Canadian study noted, “Pfizer has been a “habitual offender,” persistently engaging in illegal and corrupt marketing practices, bribing physicians and suppressing adverse trial results.” That’s serious. Note that Pfizer has yet to make fully public details of its covid vaccine studies for external examination. The list of Pfizer crimes has gotten longer since 2010. It is currently engaged in lawsuits related to charges its Zantac heartburn medication is contaminated with a cancer-causing substance. As well, Pfizer received the biggest drug-related fine in US history in 2009 as part of a $2.3 Billion plea deal for mis-promoting medicines Bextra and Celebrex and paying kickbacks to compliant doctors. Pfizer pleaded guilty to the felony of marketing four drugs including Bextra “with the intent to defraud or mislead.” They were forced to withdraw their arthritis painkiller Bextra in the USA and EU for causing heart attacks, strokes, and serious skin disease.”
- Moderna: “It has yet to be sued for illegal practices unlike J&J or Pfizer. But that fact is likely only because before its EUA for its mRNA experimental vaccine, in its ten years existence since 2010 it had failed to get FDA approval to market a single medicine, despite repeated failed attempts. However Moderna has a red neon sign that reads “conflict of interest” that should give pause. Moderna and Fauci’s NIAID have collaborated on development of vaccines using Moderna’s mRNA platform and NIAID of Fauci on coronaviruses including MERS, since at least November, 2015. On January 13, 2020, before the first case of a supposed Wuhan, China “novel coronavirus” was even detected in the United States, Fauci’s NIAID [The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] and Moderna signed an updated cooperation agreement which described them as co-owners of a mRNA based coronavirus and that they had finalized a sequence for mRNA-1273, the vaccine now being given to millions for supposedly averting the novel coronavirus. That means that Fauci’s NIAID and perhaps Fauci personally (it’s allowed in the US) stood to reap huge financial benefits from emergency approval of the Moderna jab, yet Fauci has never admitted to the conflict publicly when he was Trump corona adviser, nor as Biden’s. Ten days later on January 23, 2020 Moderna announced it was granted funding by CEPI, a vaccine fund created by Bill Gates’ foundation along with Davos WEF among others, to develop an mRNA vaccine for the Wuhan virus.”
Other critics have suggested that longer, more careful trials should be required to ensure that we do not repeat the mistakes of recent large-scale vaccine campaigns, such as The Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI), a collaboration between the WHO, UNICEF, the U.S. government, the CDC, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Rotary International.
— In India, the campaign helped to dramatically reduce cases of polio, but it also resulted in a dramatic increase in vaccine-induced polio. As Dr. Neetu Vashisht and Dr. Jacob Puliye have written in an article published in the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics in 2012: “India has been polio-free for a year, there has been a huge increase in non-polio acute flaccid paralysis (NPAFP). In 2011, there were an extra 47,500 new cases of NPAFP. Clinically indistinguishable from polio paralysis but twice as deadly, the incidence of NPAFP was directly proportional to doses of oral polio received. Though this data was collected within the polio surveillance system, it was not investigated. The principle of primum-non-nocere was violated.”
— Throughout Africa, there is a similar recent history of vaccine-derived polio outbreaks. As Science Magazine has reported, “vaccine-derived outbreaks have been more frequent and much harder to stop than the models projected; they are now smoldering in seven countries…‘We have now created more new emergences of the virus than we have stopped,’ virologist Mark Pallansch of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention admitted.”
Ultimately, as the pandemic continued its deadly spread and pharmaceutical companies and politicians exerted significant pressure for vaccine authorization, these sorts of concerns were dismissed, and the FDA granted emergency authorization for the COVID vaccines after much foreshortened vaccine trials. [1]
B. Concerns over vaccine side effects and efficacy
Vaccine Side Effects:
Here are some key takeaways from an analysis of the VAERS database, the US government’s official system for reporting adverse effects to the vaccine:
— In the US, COVID vaccines have already generated significantly more adverse reports than all 70 vaccines over the past 30 years combined.
— Between December 14, 2020— July 30, 2021 there were 545,338 adverse events reported, including 12,366 U.S. deaths:
- — 13% of thes deaths reported to VAERS occurred within 24 hours of vaccination, 19% occurred within 48 hours of vaccination and 34% occurred in people who experienced an onset of symptoms within 48 hours of being vaccinated. 21% of deaths were related to cardiac disorders. The average age of death was 73.2.
- — As of July 30, 2,636 pregnant women reported adverse events related to COVID vaccines, including 912 reports of miscarriage or premature birth.
- — 2,018 cases of myocarditis and pericarditis with 1,275 cases attributed to Pfizer: “The CDC [The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] released new data on June 23 that the risk of myocarditis [heart inflammation] after the Pfizer vaccine is at least 10 times the expected rate in 12–17 year old males and females.”
- — Pfizer’s internal analysis of CDC data has suggested that people aged 12–17 may be 3–5 times more likely to need hospitalization from the vaccine than from the actual virus.
- Of the 2,533 cases of Bell’s Palsy reported, 50% were attributed to Pfizer vaccinations, 43% to Moderna and 6% to J&J. According to a recent study in the leading scientific publication, The Lancet: “Bell’s palsy in the vaccine arms is between 3.5-times and 7-times higher than would be expected in the general population. This finding signals a potential safety phenomenon and suggests inaccurate reporting of basic epidemiological context to the public.”
- 483 reports of Guillain-Barré Syndrome.
- 121,452 reports of anaphylaxis.
- 8,048 reports of blood clotting disorders. [3]
— On the CDC website, there is a page called “Possible Side Effects After Getting COVID-19” — none of the above issues are mentioned. The only effects listed are: Pain, Redness, Swelling, Tiredness, Headache, Muscle pain, Chills, Fever, and Nausea.
— When evaluating this data, it is important to keep in mind that the data we do have on the vaccine’s side effects almost certainly downplays the true extent of negative effects. As the CDC suggests, “It is important to note that reported vaccine breakthrough cases will represent an undercount. This surveillance system is passive and relies on voluntary reporting from state health departments which may not be complete. Also, not all real-world breakthrough cases will be identified because of lack of testing.” One study indicates that, less than 1% of vaccine side effects are reported to VAERS.
The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision.
A minority of scientists have linked some of the more severe side effects of the vaccine to the spike protein, which they argue is toxic and, unlike what the vaccine’s manufacturers’ expected, enters the bloodstream and enters worrisome areas like the heart, brain, lungs and ovaries. While many scientists have suggested that this is not a cause for concern, a minority of experts have spoken out with alarm.
Vaccine Efficacy:
The scientific consensus seems to be that, even when taking into consideration these adverse effects, the benefits of the vaccine still far outweigh the costs, especially when considering the millions of deaths reportedly caused by the virus itself.
— However, critics have countered that we need to update our cost-benefit analysis to keep in mind new concerns about the vaccine’s efficacy. For one, the CDC has now admitted that the COVID vaccines do not prevent people from being infected with or transmitting the virus. Furthermore, as MSN has reported:
- “A preprint study published Wednesday found that the [Pfizer] vaccine at its peak was 96.2% effective at preventing COVID-19 two months after the second dose. However, that protection “declined gradually” to 83.7% within six months. Despite that, the data indicates that the vaccine continues to offer protection six months later. Additionally, the vaccine remained highly effective at preventing hospitalizations, at 97%. The study found the efficacy decreased an average of 6% every two months, meaning if the efficacy continued to decline at the current rate, it could fall below 50% within 18 months, suggesting that booster shots could be needed.”
—It should be noted that in mid-July, even as the delta variant spread, 99.5% of COVID deaths in the US occurred among unvaccinated populations. However, data emerging from countries with relatively high vaccination rates forces us to question Dr. Fauci’s repeated claims that the vaccines are effective against the virus’s variants.
— We can also consider Israel, where 2/3 of the population is fully vaccinated.
- A report from mid-July found that 60% of those hospitalized with COVID were fully vaccinated. “Health Ministry figures released in early July indicated that the Pfizer COVID vaccine is only 64% effective in preventing infection, but it remains 93% effective at preventing hospitalization and serious symptoms.”
— In a recent article published in The Lancet, Dr. Piero Olliaro of the University of Oxford and his collegues have suggested that, when we are measuring the efficacy of of the COVID vaccines, we are often using the wrong metric:
Vaccine efficacy is generally reported as a relative risk reduction (RRR). It uses the relative risk (RR) — ie, the ratio of attack rates with and without a vaccine — which is expressed as 1–RR. Ranking by reported efficacy gives relative risk reductions of 95% for the Pfizer–BioNTech, 94% for the Moderna–NIH, 91% for the Gamaleya, 67% for the J&J, and 67% for the AstraZeneca–Oxford vaccines. However, RRR should be seen against the background risk of being infected and becoming ill with COVID-19, which varies between populations and over time. Although the RRR considers only participants who could benefit from the vaccine, the absolute risk reduction (ARR), which is the difference between attack rates with and without a vaccine, considers the whole population. ARRs tend to be ignored because they give a much less impressive effect size than RRRs: 1·3% for the AstraZeneca–Oxford, 1·2% for the Moderna–NIH, 1·2% for the J&J, 0·93% for the Gamaleya, and 0·84% for the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccines.
—Critics have presented another reason to doubt the official cost-benefit ratio of the vaccines: COVID-related deaths have likely been inflated from the beginning of the pandemic.
- In April 2020, Dr. Deborah Birx, coordinator of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, “said this when asked about people who have COVID-19 but die from preexisting conditions: ‘If someone dies with COVID-19, we are counting that as a COVID-19 death.’” The federal and state governments eventually amended their policy so that the virus had to have played a role in order for a fatality to be counted as a COVID death — but murky issues remain as to how this causation is being determined.
- Similar concerns have been expressed about the validity of the PCR tests which are used to determine the rate of COVID infections.
C. Political censorship and misinformation
But the disposition of a sovereign ruler who favors freedom in the arts and sciences goes even further: he knows that there is no danger in permitting his subjects to make public use of their reason and to publish their ideas concerning a better constitution, as well as candid criticism of existing basic laws.
— Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment?”
Before moving onto other concerns with the vaccine rollout, it is important to take stock of the severe extent to which vaccine critics have been censored. Over the past year websites like Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Youtube have systematically flagged, removed, or obscured content that is critical of vaccines or supportive of alternative solutions. Major news outlets like the BBC and the Associated Press have also joined with social media websites in the “Trusted News Iniative”, the aim of which is “combatting the spread of harmful vaccine disinformation.” Adding to concerns about coordinated censorship, the Biden administration recently acknowledged that it is working directly with Facebook to censor the discussion about the COVID vaccines. Here are a few examples of the ongoing censorship. [4]
— According to the NY Post, “Facebook is reportedly trying to silence COVID-19 vaccine skeptics by using an algorithm that targets and demotes their comments on the site, the latest in Big Tech’s woke censorship push. Two anonymous Facebook employees leaked internal memos to Project Veritas that purport to show that the social media giant has tested a beta version of its algorithm to track down vaccine-hesitant users.”
— Two large Facebook groups for people suffering from vaccine side-effects (190,000 total people) were recently removed from the website.
— Facebook uses “fact-checkers” to identify information to censor, and these fact-checkers sometimes have conflicts of interest. For example: “A Facebook fact checker who has ‘debunked’ articles suggesting that COVID-19 may have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) has a giant conflict of interest; she worked at the institute…. Danielle Anderson, who works at Duke University’s NUS Medical School lab in Singapore, also contributes to Science Feedback — which Facebook has been using to slap “False Information” labels on articles claiming that COVID-19 may have originated at the Wuhan institute — where Anderson worked with bat coronavirus. A quick search of Anderson’s publications reveals no fewer than nine collaborations with Dr. Peng Zhou — a Wuhan scientist experimenting on bat coronavirus (the mention of whom may result in a Twitter ban).”
- RT has also reported that Facebook fact-checkers have been funded by the companies producing the COVID vaccines.
The Biden administration is telling Facebook which posts it regards as “problematic” so that Facebook can remove them. This is the union of corporate and state power — one of the classic hallmarks of fascism — that the people who spent 5 years babbling about fascism support.
— Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist, Glenn Greenwald
— On August 2, Twitter announced that they are now collaborating with major news outlets to weed out vaccine “misinformation.” But what qualifies as “misinformation”? Even leading medical experts have been flagged for their opinions about the vaccine rollout.
- To take just one example, when Harvard’s Dr. Martin Kulldorff, one of the world’s most-cited epidemioligists, tweeted that not everyone needs a vaccine against COVID, Twitter posted a warning, and users were prevented from liking or retweeting the post. As we will see in section 1D below, Kulldorff has emerged as a leading critic of the push to vaccinate young people.
— Youtube has also systematically removed videos by medical professionals who are speaking out contrary to the government’s official line.
- For example, Youtube has taken down several videos feating Dr. Hooman Noorchasm, a retired immunologist from the Harvard Medical School. As we will see below in section 1E, Dr. Noorchasm has expressed worries that vaccinating people who have been already with infected with COVID is unnecessary — because they are largely immune — and potentially dangerous, because some of these people will be susceptible to “grave immunological harm.”
- To take another example, Youtube has removed multiple videos featuring Dr. Pierre Kory, a leading proponent of Ivermectin and other alternative treatments for COVID (even his testimonial in front of the US senate from last march was taken off the site). In the words of journalist Matt Taibbi, Dr. Kory became “a ghost who floated through the Internet, leaving suspensions and blackened warning screens everywhere he went.” For much of the pandemic, Youtube’s community guidelines specifically forbade critical discussion of Ivermectin (more on this in section 2 below).
To get a deeper idea of how this censorship has played out during the pandemic, let’s consider the media’s coverage of the vaccine’s origins. Consider, for example CNN’s about-face on the origins of COVID. From the outset, CNN ridiculed the theory that COVID was leaked from a lab in Wuhan, describing the theory as “like something out of a comic book.” Fastforward to this summer, and now CNN is reporting that “the lab-leak theory — once dismissed as a fringe conspiracy” has gained “credence.” No introspection followed about the fact that CNN itself was one of the organizations that had dismissed the theory as a “fringe conspiracy.”
The New York Times’ coverage has followed a similar trajectory. So has Facebook’s. The website originally banned anyone from claiming the virus leaked from a lab, but has now shifted its stance: “In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.”
Very little new information emerged in the interim that can account for this abrupt shift. The main causes seem to be political. For example:
MIT and Harvard genetic engineering scientist Alina Chan has come clean as to why she and several scientists downplayed the Wuhan lab leak theory surrounding the origins of COVID-19 in 2020…Chan admitted in a conversation with NBC News that scientists were reluctant to back the Wuhan lab leak theory for fear that they would be accused of “supporting racist rhetoric about how the coronavirus emerged.” Former President Donald Trump, who pushed for the Wuhan lab leak theory, called COVID-19 “Wuhan virus” to refer to the city where it first came from, or “kung flu,” referring to how the virus came from the Chinese.
“At the time, it was scarier to be associated with Trump and to become a tool for racists, so people didn’t want to publicly call for an investigation into lab origins,” Chan, who co-signed the letter published in the journal Science admitted.
Another political component that explains why the scientific establishment encouraged a misleading Covid narrative; as Ian Herd has written:
Only now is acceptance emerging that the science establishment colluded to dismiss the lab leak hypothesis as a conspiracy theory, assisted by prominent experts with clear conflicts of interest, patsy politicians and a pathetic media that mostly failed to do its job. And yet, at the heart of this scandal lie some of the world’s most influential science journals. These should provide a forum for pulsating debate as experts explore and test theories, especially on something as contentious and fascinating as the possible origins of a global pandemic. Instead, some have played a central role in shutting down discussion and discrediting alternative views on the origins, with disastrous consequences for our understanding of events.
Nature and The Lancet played important roles in enabling, encouraging, and enforcing the false narrative that science evidence indicates Sars-CoV-2 had a natural-spillover origin points and the false narrative that this was the scientific consensus.
But why would they do this? This is where things become even murkier. Allegations swirl that it was not down to editorial misjudgement, but something more sinister: a desire to appease China for commercial reasons. The Financial Times revealed four years ago that debt-laden Springer Nature, the German group that publishes Nature, was blocking access in China to hundreds of academic articles mentioning subjects deemed sensitive by Beijing such as Hong Kong, Taiwan or Tibet. China is also spending lavishly around the world to win supremacy in science — which includes becoming the biggest national sponsor of open access journals published by both Springer Nature and Elsevier, owner of The Lancet.
One source estimated that 49 sponsorship agreements between Springer Nature and Chinese institutions were worth at least $10m last year. These deals cover the publishing fees authors would normally pay in such journals, so they smooth the path for Chinese authors while creating a dependency culture. They have worked well for both sides: they offer the publishers access to the surging Chinese market and its well-resourced universities, while offering international recognition and status in return. But we know President Xi Jinping demands compliance with his world view, even from foreign-owned companies — and especially on an issue as sensitive as his nation’s possible role in unleashing a global catastrophe.
Critics fear these corporate links to China compromise output and distort agendas. ‘Scientific publishing has become a highly politicised business,’ argues Petrovksy. ‘Clearly there needs to be an international investigation launched into the role of scientific publishers, their increasingly powerful influence as the major publishing houses buy out many of the smaller independent journals, together with their growing politicisation and susceptibility to overt influence. We need to examine what impact this may have had in the pandemic and what impact it could have on science in the future.’
Alongside their misleading coverage of the virus’s origins, Nature was calling for higher levels of censorship of “scientific misinformation”: “Engaging with misinformation online spreads it further: if we scratch the itch, we spread the disease.”
Ashley Rindsberg has raised similar concerns about the New York Times’s propagandistic reporting on the virus’s origins:
At the start of the pandemic, the Times set the news and policy agenda on the lab leak hypothesis, discrediting it and anyone who explored it. The Times did so while taking money from Chinese state-owned propaganda outlets, such as China Daily, and while pursuing long-term investments in China that may have made the paper susceptible to the CCP’s strong-arm propaganda tactics in the first months of the pandemic.
More evidence of the covert politicization of the scientific debate surrounding the handling of the pandemic has emerged now that Buzzfeed has published a large number of leaked emails of President Biden’s Chief Medical Adviser Dr. Fauci; these emails indicate that Fauci intentionally misled the public about the origins and danger of the COVID virus.
— It is worth noting that the health officials and institutions which have systematically misled the public time and again have remained in power, their authority undiminished. Despite the government’s recent $3 billion publicity campaign to combat vaccine hesitatancy, the spread of distrust and paranoia seems inevitable in this context.
If we take a step back, we can see that there are two potential explanations for the intensity of the censorship and propaganda: both are authoritarian and manipulative, but one suggests an ostensibly well-intentioned authority, the other a sinister authority.
— Well-intentioned authority: Authorities believe that these vaccines represent the only meaningful chance we have to combat COVID, and do not want to allow any negative discussions about the vaccine which may scare people away from something that will be broadly beneficial. An example of this “benevolent dictator” approach is when Dr. Fauci said in February 2020 that people should not wear masks. Fauci’s goal was ostensibly to ensure that there was not widespread panic and a run on masks; he did not trust the American people to act responsibly, so he decided to lie to them.
— Sinister authority: Authorities are engaged in a cover-up meant to protect the profits of pharmaceutical companies and to justify the emergence of new forms of social control.
Either way, what is clear is that government higher-ups have decided that people are not capable of acting reasonably when provided with the totality of information about the pandemic and the vaccines.
The extent of the ongoing censorship has an important bearing on the above discussion about the adverse effects of vaccination. Governments could, for example, promote a public debate between scientists wary of the vaccine rollout and those that believe it is the best course of public action, and trust that by educating people, they will have the capacity to choose the best course of action. But, as we’ve already seen and will examine more below, a radically different approach is being taken: government officials, social media websites, mainstream media outlets, and even academic journals are collectively suppressing discussion about the negatives of the vaccine and the potential merits of alternative treatments. As a result, an increasing number of concerned people are compelled to receive their news from fringe sources: in other words, the suppression is itself facilitating the “conspiracy theories” which it attempts to negate, thus intensifying political polarization. In turn, there are less and less bridges for communciation between skeptics and proponents. People are pushed into one camp or the other, and they tend to get stuck in their respective online echo chambers, where they can safely imagine that people in the other camp are gullible fools.
Laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man may present his views without penalty, there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population. — Albert Einstein
This issue of censorship has an array of troubling philosophical and political ramifications that extend well beyond the question of the vaccines’ positive and negative health effects. For example, in previous years, the appeal to the “war on terror” has justified the government’s implementation of intrusive new forms of new social control. In the present situation, critics have worried that the injunction to “trust the science” is being used to justify levels of censorship and political control that would normally be deemed unacceptable.
Leaving its side effects to one side, the experimental vaccines do not stop the spread of the virus, do not prevent infection, and do not even always prevent hospitalization and death: critics have questioned whether their track record really justifies the division we are now seeing in society — Vaccinated vs. Unvaccinated — with the latter group increasingly barred from participation in important aspects of civil society?
— An interesting element of the discourse surrounding the vaccine rollout is that many left-leaning, “counter-cultural” which have in the past expressed concern about free speech issues and surveillance have, tacitly or explicitly, supported the government’s official line. Generally speaking, leading leftist outlets have been resolute in dismissing vaccine hesitancy as irrational: as the Jacobin argues, “The Left should brook no vaccine skepticism in its ranks.” But while leftist outlets like Jacobin have been critical of the spreaders of medical “misinformation”, they have been decidedly less willing to actually evaluate the concerns voiced by critics of the vaccine rollout.
— Many critics of government
D. Issues with vaccinating young people
Many doctors from around the world have questioned the logic of vaccinating young people, and as one might expect from the preceding section, these critics have been subject to intense lashback.
— To take just one example, Dr. Francis Christian, Clinical Professor of General Surgery at the University of Saskatchewan, and a practising surgeon in Saskatoon, was recently fired by his university after publishing a statement to the medical community which questioned the logic of the mass vaccination of children.
- “Covid-19 does not pose a threat to our kids,” he wrote. “The risk of them dying of covid is less than 0.003% — this is even less than the risk of them dying of the flu…The principle of informed consent is being consistently violated in this province for the m-RNA vaccine for our kids. I have not met a single vaccinated child or parent who has been adequately informed and who then understand the risks of this vaccine or its benefits.”
- As mentioned above, the rate of hospitilization for people aged 12–17 appears to be higher for those who received the COVID vaccines than for those who were infected by the virus.
Quoting at length from Harvard Professor Martin Kulldorff and Stanford University’s Jay Bhattacharya’s recent article: “The ill-advised push to vaccinate the young”:
There is intense pressure on young adults and children to be vaccinated. Universities such as Colombia, Cornell, Harvard and Stanford require all students to get the shot as a condition of attending college normally. Young people looking for work are discriminated against if they are not vaccinated. It makes public health sense to require some vaccinations in some settings. However, in the case of COVID vaccines for young people, such mandates harm public health.
First, all medical interventions should pass the test of providing more benefits than risks. For the COVID vaccine, this is decidedly true for older populations but it is not yet clear for younger people. While we know that COVID vaccines have common but mild adverse reactions, we will not know enough about rare but serious adverse reactions until a few years after vaccine approval. For older people, this does not cause a dilemma. Even if there is a small risk of a serious adverse reaction, that is still better than the much higher risk of dying from COVID. Hence, we should do everything we can to encourage vaccination for older people, including less affluent people whom our health care system often has difficulty reaching. For younger adults and children, it is a different story, as their mortality risk is extremely low. Even a slight risk of a serious vaccine adverse reaction could tip the benefit-risk calculation, making the vaccine more harmful than beneficial. We have already observed rare problems with blood clots (J&J vaccine) and myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle, Pfizer and Moderna) in younger people, and additional equally serious issues might still be found. Under such uncertainty, vaccine mandates are unethical. University presidents or business leaders should not mandate a medical intervention that could have dire consequences for the health of even a few of the people in their charge.
Second, recovered COVID patients have strong long-lasting protection against severe disease if reinfected, and evidence about protective immunity after natural infection is at least as good as from the vaccines. Hence, it makes no sense to require vaccines for recovered patients. For them, it simply adds a risk, however small, without any benefit.
During the pandemic, the professional laptop class protected themselves by working from home while exposing the working class that brought them food and other goods. It is now the height of hypocrisy to recognize immunity from vaccinations but not immunity from those exposed while serving the laptop class.
Third, the pandemic is global. In most countries, older high-risk people have not yet been vaccinated. With a global vaccine shortage, every dose given to a low-risk young adult in the United States means one fewer dose available for high-risk older people in Brazil, Congo, India or Mexico. When American universities and companies mandate vaccinations, they are not only failing the young in this country, they are also indirectly responsible for the death of older people in the developing world.
To understand this last claim, we need to consider the full extent of what has been termed the “global vaccine apartheid.” According to an Oxfam press release, in May 2021 “Of the 1.77 billion doses of COVID vaccines given globally, 28 per cent have been in G7 countries. In contrast just 0.3 per cent of COVID jabs have been given in low-income countries, despite the fact G7 and low-income countries have a fairly similar population size.”
— It seems that we are in a tragic situation: the US government is spending billions of dollars on a propaganda campaign to convince vaccine-hesitant people to be vaccinated, while impoverished people around the world are being denied access to vaccines.
For a defense of the policy of vaccinating the young, see this article in CNN, which argues that vaccinating young people is essential in the US’s attempt to reach herd immunity and restore the economy. Other defenders of the official policy have cited data which indicates that the Delta variant is increasingly harmful to young people, and the COVID death rate for unvaccinated children is increasing around the world.
E. Issues with vaccinating the already-infected
Dr. Hooman Noorchasm, a retired immunologist and professor at the Harvard Medical School, is another medical expert whose public criticisms of the vaccine rollout have been censored from Youtube. Dr. Noorchasm has written to the FDA and Pfizer to express his worries about potential immunological dangers associated with the COVID vaccines, and to suggest that all people are screened before being vaccinated.
As an immunologist with a good understanding of how antigen specific immune responses could cause organ and tissue specific damage, I am recommending to you, as our lead FDA regulators, not to gloss over the real possibility that vaccinating persons with pre-existing SARS-CoV-2 viral antigens in their tissues could cause that subset of people grave immunological harm — and especially the frail with cardiovascular disease.
The aim of benefiting the majority of our public and saving the nation from this pandemic by quick and aggressive vaccination is an ethically sound one — but where we know of real or likely risks of harm and mortality, we ought to robustly mitigate the risks to those in potential harms way. So doing is the only reasonable, ethical, and likely legal option you can pursue as public health regulators — for in America, we no longer sacrifice the lives of minority subsets of people for the benefit of the majority.
Dr. Marty Makary, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine has also emerged as a leading critic of attempts to vaccinate all citizens, regardless of their specific health risk:
Also: Some people already have ‘natural immunity’ — that is, immunity from prior COVID infection. During every month of this pandemic, I’ve had debates with other public researchers about the effectiveness and durability of natural immunity. I’ve been told that natural immunity could fall off a cliff, rendering people susceptible to infection. But here we are now, over a year and a half into the clinical experience of observing patients who were infected, and natural immunity is effective and going strong. And that’s because with natural immunity, the body develops antibodies to the entire surface of the virus, not just a spike protein constructed from a vaccine. The power of natural immunity was recently affirmed in an Israeli study, which found a 6.7 times greater level of protection among those with natural immunity vs. those with vaccinated immunity.
Requiring the vaccine in people who are already immune with natural immunity has no scientific support. While vaccinating those people may be beneficial — and it’s a reasonable hypothesis that vaccination may bolster the longevity of their immunity — to argue dogmatically that they must get vaccinated has zero clinical outcome data to back it. As a matter of fact, we have data to the contrary: A Cleveland Clinic study found that vaccinating people with natural immunity did not add to their level of protection.
Seemingly out of step with the emerging evidence, the CDC’s website still claims that people already infected should get vaccinated, as vaccination provides better protection.
F. The theories of Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche and Dr. Luc Montagnier
Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche, a former professor of Virology and Senior Ebola Manager with the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), has argued for many months now that the vaccination rollout will likely cause variants to emerge, and that by receiving a vaccine, people are potentially compromising their immune system’s capability to counter these variants. [6]
The French virologist and Nobel Prize winner Luc Montagnier has come to similar conclusions: “[Mass vaccination] is an enormous mistake, isn’t it? A scientific error as well as a medical error. It is an unacceptable mistake… The history books will show that, because it is the vaccination that is creating the variants…You see it in each country, it’s the same: in every country deaths follow vaccination.”
As one might expect, Bossche and Montagnier have become controversial figures in the scientific community, and there are strong refutations of their claims, even from some doctors and scientists who are critical of the vaccine rollout on other fronts. Critiques of their work can be found, respectively, here and here.
There does, however, appear to be some evidence supporting Bossche/Montagnier’s claims.
The Alpha variant emerged in the UK in October, which was when Oxford-AstraZeneca was holding vaccine trials there.
The Beta variant emerged in South Africa, and was first detected in December, 2020, at the tail end of trial periods for both Oxford-AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines. This variant carries three mutations in the spike protein.
The Gamma variant was first detected in Japan, but soon after in Brazil, making the origin a little harder to determine. But since Japan has had far lower viral spread than Brazil, it makes the most sense that Brazil was the source. Both Oxford-AstraZeneca and Pfizer trialed their vaccines in Brazil.
The Delta variant was first detected in India in October, 2020. India hosted numerous vaccine trials including one for Oxford-AstraZeneca and one for Covishield.
The article, “Informed consent disclosure to vaccine trial subjects of risk of COVID-19 vaccines worsening clinical disease” condcludes with similar concerns:
COVID-19 vaccines designed to elicit neutralising antibodies may sensitise vaccine recipients to more severe disease than if they were not vaccinated. Vaccines for SARS, MERS and RSV have never been approved, and the data generated in the development and testing of these vaccines suggest a serious mechanistic concern: that vaccines designed empirically using the traditional approach (consisting of the unmodified or minimally modified coronavirus viral spike to elicit neutralising antibodies), be they composed of protein, viral vector, DNA or RNA and irrespective of delivery method, may worsen COVID-19 disease via antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE). This risk is sufficiently obscured in clinical trial protocols and consent forms for ongoing COVID-19 vaccine trials that adequate patient comprehension of this risk is unlikely to occur, obviating truly informed consent by subjects in these trials.
A recent article, by Andrew Read, a biologist at Pennsylvania State University, adds theoretical support to the worries that vaccines can lead to the creation of more virulent strands of viruses: “Our data show that anti-disease vaccines that do not prevent transmission can create conditions that promote the emergence of pathogen strains that cause more severe disease in unvaccinated hosts.”
— “We are entering the era of leaky vaccines in humans,” Read suggests. “We need to have a responsible discussion about this.”
The issue as to whether vaccinated or unvaccinated people are faciliating the spread of virus variants has important ramifications for our health policy. In CNN’s article, “10 reasons why young, healthy people need to get vaccinated against Covid-19,” it is argued that, because unvaccinated people are responsible for the emergence of variants, “by not getting vaccinated, young adults could make vaccines less effective for their friends, family and everyone else.” This reason, in addition to “helping the economy” are listed by CNN as reasons why young people should be vaccinated for the greater benefit, even if they are unlikely to become sick from a COVID infection.
2. Alternative Treatments
What happens to confidence in public health and USG if Ivermectin turns out to be safe and effective for COVID, and the genetic vaccines turn out to have signficant safety issues? This looks like a very plausible scenario from where I sit.
— Dr. Robert Malone, inventor of the mRNA technology used in the COVID vaccines
A. Ivermectin (Scientific Analysis)
The Front Line COVID-19 Critical Alliance (FLCCC), a group of highly renowned doctors and scientists, has advocated for the use of Ivermectin both as a preventative and treatment against COVID since late 2020. The FLCCC’s official protocol suggests that ivermectin, taken in conjunction with medicines like vitamin D, vitamin C, and zinc can work to effectively combat COVID. Despite heavy censorship, the FLCCC’s advocacy is largely responsible for Ivermectin’s entry into the public consciousness as a potential treatment for COVID, and Ivermectin has now been widely used in the battle against COVID in at least 28 countries around the world.
From a peer-reviewed article recently published in the American Journal of Therepeutics, which deployed the conservative Cochrane meta-analysis standards, a “gold standard” in science:
Meta-analyses based on 18 randomized controlled treatment trials of Ivermectin in COVID-19 have found large, statistically significant reductions in mortality, time to clinical recovery, and time to viral clearance. Furthermore, results from numerous controlled prophylaxis trials report significantly reduced risks of contracting COVID-19 with the regular use of Ivermectin. Finally, the many examples of Ivermectin distribution campaigns leading to rapid population-wide decreases in morbidity and mortality indicate that an oral agent effective in all phases of COVID-19 has been identified.
— The article concludes that “‘ivermectin prophylaxis [=preventative] reduced covid-19 infection by an average 86%.”
A review article written by a team of medical experts and published in New Microbes and Infections this August comes to similar conclusions:
“In 2015, the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, in its only award for treatments of infectious diseases since six decades prior, honored the discovery of ivermectin (IVM), a multifaceted drug deployed against some of the world’s most devastating tropical diseases. Since March 2020, when IVM was first used against a new global scourge, COVID-19, more than 20 randomized clinical trials (RCTs) have tracked such inpatient and outpatient treatments. Six of seven meta-analyses of IVM treatment RCTs reporting in 2021 found notable reductions in COVID-19 fatalities, with a mean 31% relative risk of mortality vs. controls. The RCT using the highest IVM dose achieved a 92% reduction in mortality vs. controls (400 total subjects, p<0.001). During mass IVM treatments in Peru, excess deaths fell by a mean of 74% over 30 days in its ten states with the most extensive treatments. Reductions in deaths correlated with extent of IVM distributions in all 25 states with p<0.002. Sharp reductions in morbidity using IVM were also observed in two animal models, of SARS-CoV-2 and a related betacoronavirus. The indicated biological mechanism of IVM, competitive binding with SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, is likely non-epitope specific, possibly yielding full efficacy against emerging viral mutant strains.”
In addition to its efficacy, prominent scientific publications have concluded that ivermectin is safe as well. A recent study by renowned toxicologist Dr. Jacques Descotes found that:
Ivermectin has been administered orally to hundreds of millions of people throughout the world in the past three decades. The assessment of reported adverse events temporally associated with ivermectin exposure shows that ivermectin-induced adverse effects have so far been infrequent and usually mild to moderate. It is noteworthy that no deaths have seemingly ever been reported after an accidental or suicidal overdose of ivermectin.
Despite the evidence supporting ivermectin, critics have doubted whether the medicine should be used to treat COVID patients. Some have argued that there are design flaws in several of the studies that support Ivermectin. Their basic argument is that ivermectin advocates are relying on suspect data, then erroneously crying “conspiracy” when ivermectin is not widely adopted.
— As David Gorski concludes in his highly critical article, “The few existing higher quality clinical trials testing ivermectin against the disease uniformly have failed to find a positive result. It’s only the smaller, lower-quality trials that have been positive. This is a good indication that the drug probably doesn’t work.”
— Proponents of ivermectin have countered that the poor results don’t indicate problems with Ivermectin; they are rather symptoms of poor clinical design, with problems such as incorrect dosage.
Much of the debate on Ivermectin hinges on this question: which studies are poorly designed, the studies that indicate that Ivermectin works, or the studies that indicate it doesn’t work?
This debate is ongoing, as more and more studies about ivermectin are being published each month. I won’t be able to continuously update this page, but as I was editing this document, results were publicized from a recent randomized, double-blind study by the Sheba Medical Center in Tel Hashomer, Israel, led by Dr. Eli Schwartz: “Our study shows first and foremost that ivermectin has antiviral activity … It also shows that there is almost a 100% chance that a person will be noninfectious in four to six days, which could lead to shortening isolation time for these people. This could have a huge economic and social impact.”
- A final point to consider: the FLCCC and other doctors have stressed for over a year now the importance of early treatment in the prevention of the spread of COVID. Treating “early and aggressively” gives the best chance of fighting the virus, they argue, and so the lack of early treatment protocols has been and remains the main cause for the deadly spread of COVID. In the the US, throughout the pandemic when people were infected with COVID, they were given minimal treatment and told to quarantime at home and not come back to the hospital unless they are seriously ill. The WHO still has no early treatment protocols. The FLCCC and others have suggested that the government’s failure to enact sensible medical policy based upon the large body of evidence about the benefits of various early treatment methods —not limited to ivermectin — has caused the unecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people. [8]
- This point is very controversial and deserves further consideration. For more context, see these talks, featuring doctors who have engaged in successful early treatment of their patients.
In the US, it has become the norm to blame vaccine-hesitant people for the ongoing devastation of the pandemic. However, if doctors like those in the FLCCC are correct, the campaign to blame anti-vaxxers all too conveniently exonerates the government officials who have for many months ignored and obscured a substantial body of evidence that alternative treatment methods work in the treatment of COVID. According to this line of argument, corrupt, negligent government authorities are to blame, not the people who are now understandably distrustful of their medical advice.
B. Ivermectin (Political Analysis)
As was the case in the public discourse on the virus’s origins, mainstream outlets in the US have stayed close to the government’s official stance that ivermectin is unsafe and ineffective. As journalist Matt Taibbi has written,
the ivermectin question have ended up in the same public bucket as debates over foreign misinformation, hate speech, and even incitement… As a result, doctors and organizations that may have little to do with politics but have advocated for ivermectin…have been shut down online with the same unilateral abruptness platforms apply to hate speech or threats…The suspensions and bans have triggered a dystopian chase game, in which ivermectin backers rush to take their case to media figures before the media figures themselves end up sitting next to them in the same Facebook or YouTube ‘jail.’”
Pulitzer-Prize nominated journalist Michael Capuzzo has written a public appeal calling for the government to end the censorship and for fellow journalists to “open their minds to legitimate, unreported doctors and therapies and write about all sides of the Ivermectin story” and end the “news blackout from the main world media [which] has come down on Ivermectin like an iron curtain.”
- An exception to the mass media “blackout” was the Wall Street Journal’s July 28 article “Why Is the FDA Attacking a Safe, Effective Drug?”, which concluded that “Ivermectin is a promising Covid treatment and prophylaxis.”
In the limited public discourse on ivermectin, it is often ignored that there are clear conflicts of interest in the official governmental position. Consider the position of Merck, the company that initially developed ivernectin and distributed millions of doses around the world, leading the drug to become one of the WHO’s essential medicines. As Andrew Bannister points out in his article, “Don’t mention Ivermectin; it’ll upset the vaccine rollout”:
Merck’s patent on Ivermectin expired in 1996 and they produce less than 5% of global supply…In 2021 Merck released a statement claiming that Ivermectin was not an effective treatment against Covid-19 and bizarrely claimed, ‘A concerning lack of safety data in the majority of studies’ of the a drug they donated to be distributed in mass rollouts, by primary care workers, in mass campaigns, to millions in developing countries. The media reported the Merck statement as a blinding truth without looking at the conflict of interests when days later, Merck received $356 million from the US government to develop an investigational therapeutic. The WHO even quoted Merck, as evidence, that it didn’t work, in their recommendation against the use of Ivermectin. It’s a dangerous world when corporate marketing determines public health policy. Global vaccine rollout, to everyone, is the policy.
The vaccine rollout is worth about $100bn in 2021, and there may well be annual updates to deal with new variants of COVID. The WHO answers to nobody but its funders. Less than 20% of its budget comes member states, the bulk coming from other sources. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the second largest sponsor of the organisation. GAVI, a vaccine alliance, founded by Gates and WHO Director General Tedros Ghebreyesus, served on its board prior to his current position, is the fifth largest contributor.
In March 2021, WHO said that Ivermectin was not recommended for the treatment of COVID outside of trials. They did this by ignoring their own months long, in-depth investigation by Dr Andrew Hill, that found Ivermectin was associated with 74% reduction in fatalities, and replaced it with a hastily done analysis that cherry picked from five, seven or sixteen trials (the report contradicts itself) but only cite 5 trails. The figures, the WHO report supplies, show a reduction of death by 81%, but with a ‘very low certainty of evidence’. The WHO report didn’t even mention prophylaxis [prevention], where Ivermectin’s most effective, saying that fell outside its mandate. The WHO will not approve Ivermectin’s use, without it first proving itself in a large RCT. These trials cost millions and nobody, except those with a financial interest in vaccines, have offered to fund. The WHO are best placed to run large RCT’s on existing drugs, but haven’t done so with Ivermectin, despite it being over a year, since Ivermectin was proved to kill COVID in a lab. As only big pharma can afford the large RCT, the only drugs that go through the large RCT’s, are the new ones developed by big pharma, and become the only ones approved by WHO.”
There is a conflict of interest involving some of the organizations that are now stepping forward to conduct RCTs with Ivermectin, such as Oxford University, which has announced a forthcoming trial:
- — “Oxford is profiting from the sales of the AstraZeneca vaccine and questions have been raised about the proposed trial possibly sabotaging the result by admitting elderly people already sick for 14 days but limiting the Ivermectin dose to three treatments.”
- —More signs that the Oxford trial is “designed to fail.”
- — There have already been suggestions that a prior study which concluded that vitamin C was an ineffective treatment for COVID was also designed to fail.
More conflicts of interest that has led critics to question the the official dismissal of ivermectim:
“Gates as well as the pharmaceutical companies his foundation is invested in and whose products he is pushing globally are making billions from their endeavors. Morgan Stanley believes that Pfizer, for example, could earn $100 billion from vaccines developed with public tax money from the US, Germany and other places in the next five years. Pfizer is partnered with BioNTech. The Gates Foundation has investments in both companies, putting $ 55 million into BioNTech alone in September 2019. The Gates Foundation also owns shares in Merck which is positioning the drug molnupiravir on the market hoping to make billions from it.” (The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is also one of the primary funders of the UK’s Medicine & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, the agency which gave the COVID vaccines emergency authorization in the UK….
The WHO’s guideline document is ‘based on a living systematic review and network meta-analysis from investigators at McMaster University’. McMaster University (including any of its direct affiliates) should have excused itself from conducting the guideline, given it has several objective conflicts of interest when it comes to ivermectin. For one, McMaster itself is designing and producing second generation COVID-19 vaccines. It intends to produce hundreds of thousands of doses. It is likely that these experimental products would receive greater scrutiny if there is a viable safe prophylactic and treatment option for COVID-19. Secondly, McMaster University, like the WHO itself, receives millions in funding from the Gates Foundation. Additionally, McMaster, again like the WHO, shares personnel with the Gates Foundation.”
Following the trail of money and power is helpful in understanding why so many critics believe that the government’s dismissal of Ivermectin reeks of conspiracy. Ivermectin, a repurposed drug that is out of patent and costs relatively little to procure and to administer, doesn’t generate the kinds of profits that pharmaceutical companies are looking for — especially now that these companies have invested billions of dollars in vaccines with the expectation of a highly profitable return. Studies show that the cost of ivermectin for other treatments in Bangladesh is around $0.60 to $1.80 for a five-day course, and about $10 a day in Israel.
Perhaps most importantly, COVID vaccines have not yet been fully approved — they have only been given Emergency Authorization — and in order for governments to grant this authorization, pharmaceutical companies must first prove that there are no safe and effective alternative treatments currently available on the market — such as Ivermectin. This doesn’t necesarily mean that there is a conspiracy to block Ivermectin from entering the market, but it also doesn’t suggest we should rule out a possible conspiracy as “anti-vaxx nonense.”
My sincere hope is that this scientific and political debate will be honestly engaged and resolved, so that, ultimately, people around the world can feel confident that they are receiving the most humane and effective treatments available to them.
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This is the end of the article: thank you so much for your time and consideration!
For anyone interested, here is a list of charity groups working to assist people who are suffering during this pandemic.
Endnotes:
[1] Interestingly, a poll from Sept. 2020 asked doctors if they would take the vaccine before all appropriate clinical trials were completed: 17% of doctors said they would order or use the vaccine; 63% said no; and 20% said they were unsure. That said, a recent poll from the American Medical Association shows that 96% of US doctors have received COVID vaccines.
[2] Anecdotal evidence of the vaccine’s adverse effects has been provided by Dr. Charles Hoffe, a Canadian doctor, has administered the vaccine to many First Nation indigenous patients who are now suffering from severe and troubling neurological effects. He has written an open letter to Canadian health officials which concludes: “It is now clearly apparent with medical evidence from around the world, that the side-effect profiles of the various gene modification therapies against COVID-19, have been vastly understated by their manufacturers, who were eager to prove their safety.”
— Michael Kinch, professor of radiation oncology in the school of medicine at Washington University in St. Louis, and author of a book about the history of vaccination, told CNN in early 2021 that rushing out a vaccine before a comprehensive clinical review would be a “nightmare” for four reasons: “One, the vaccine may not be safe. Two, if it is not safe, people will lose faith in vaccines. Three, if a vaccine doesn’t offer complete protection, people will have a false sense of security and increase their risk. Four, if a substandard vaccine gets an EUA, a better vaccine may never get approval, because people would be reluctant to enroll in trials and risk getting a placebo instead of a vaccine.”
[3] A group of doctors and scientists — including specialists in immunology and a former Vice President of Pfizer — issued an open letter on February 28, 2021, calling on the European Medicines Agency (EMA) to answer urgent safety questions regarding COVID-19 vaccines. “We are supportive in principle of the use of new medical interventions, [but] there are serious concerns, including but not confined to those outlined above, that the approval of the COVID-19 vaccines by the EMA was premature and reckless, and that the administration of the vaccines constituted and still does constitute ‘human experimentation’, which was and still is in violation of the Nuremberg Code.”
[4] To get a sense of how search engine algorithms work to censor the discussion, try researching critiques of the vaccine and support for alternative treatments on Google, and compare your results with less censored search engines like Duck Duck Go. I personally found it nearly impossible to use Google while researching this article.
[5] On the origins of the virus, these two sources are a good starting point: https://harvardtothebighouse.com/2020/01/31/logistical-and-technical-analysis-of-the-origins-of-the-wuhan-coronavirus-2019-ncov/
[6] Bossche has engaged in several debates with other scientists about the merits of his research; these debates can be found here.
Additionally, here is a link to a biologist who has expressed similar concerns about the vaccine being a breeding ground for variants.
[7] Update July 17: On July 16, the Guardian published an article calling into question one of the main studies in support of Ivermectin. The following day, Dr. Tess Lawrie discussed how this news affected her team’s meta-analysis of Ivermectin’s efficacy as a preventative and treatment for COVID: in short, the meta-analysis still indicates that Ivermectin is an effective preventative and treatment.
[8] Massimmo Mazzucco has recently produced a documentary, COVID — The Forbidden Cure, which essentially makes the same argument: the pharmaceutical industry is blocking a panopoly of effective treatments against COVID so as to push their highly profitable vaccines as the only feasible treatment method. Mazzucco has discussed his film on the English-language podcast, the Ripple Effect.
Thanks again for your consideration!
