Category Archives: Science

Excess Deaths in Finland and Norway in 2022 Were Higher Than in Sweden in 2020

A condemnation of lockdown policies

Writes Nick Rendell in The Daily Sceptic:

Remember back in 2020 when Sweden was the bad boy of the Covid world? Placed firmly on the naughty step by the WHO, the EU and many national leaders, the Swedes bravely, or stubbornly, ploughed their own furrow. However, by the end of 2020, with the excess death rate in Sweden at 758 per million compared to the minuscule or negative rates in the ‘pin-up’ Nordic countries of Finland, Denmark and Norway (each of which followed WHO and EU orthodoxy) Sweden, and their Chief Epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, were firmly on the defensive.

How times change! Here we are in 2023, the pandemic rapidly disappearing in the rear-view mirror. But what’s this? The excess date rate in 2022 in both Finland and Norway was higher than Sweden’s in 2020. How can that be, isn’t the pandemic over?

Continue reading here.

Remember “the hospitals are overwhelmed”?

They are, now. Because of the lockdowns.

Writes Tom Woods in his latest newsletter (my emphases):

I’ve been reading an article in the Telegraph (U.K.), called “Lockdown’s cancer bomb may soon be worse than Covid itself.”

You will recall that people did try to warn about this, only to be ridiculed or ignored.

Professor Karol Sikora, who has spent over 40 years in Britain’s National Health Service, describes the situation as very grim. “I can honestly say that the situation is more depressing than it has ever been,” he says. “I’m appalled by the spin and sheer refusal to accept how dire the situation is. Meaningless word salad, created by highly paid PR managers, is spouted out at the taxpayer’s expense simply to protect reputations rather than benefit patients.”

He explains that dealing with stage one cancer is much easier to handle and absorbs far fewer resources than stage three and four cancers. But because of the lockdowns, the “entire system is now clogged up with more advanced conditions, not just cancer, missed over the pandemic, leading to more delays and more suffering.”

This clogging, he adds, is “all a desperately predictable outcome to a pandemic response guided by opinion polling and incompetent modelling. The big unspoken truth in British politics is that an almost two-year long lockdown experiment was the greatest policy mistake in my lifetime.”

[I’ll add at this point: The polled opinions were crucially formed by media ventilating the “incompetent modelling” as the gospel truth, not distinguishing between dying “with” and “of” or “from” Covid, not questioning the validity of the PCR tests and suppressing any good news around the issue, such as alternative treatments that were working. And by people who did know better remaining silent. (PwG)]

This is reason #739 why we can’t just throw up our hands, say mistakes were made, and move on.

At the documentary screening last week that I’d been mentioning in this newsletter for some time, I met someone who said that her family, when she would mention one of the many outrageous lockdown crimes, responds with, “You’re still on this?”

Yes, you’re darn right we are.

Vaccine injuries become the dominant theme of German reporting on the mRNA jabs

as the Covid vaccinations face unacknowledged yet ever wider cultural and social repudiation

Writes the blogger eugyppius:

The number of unflattering press stories has been growing since the bivalents flopped last Fall.

[…]

It’s been a serious shift, the likes of which I’m not sure has unfolded in any other country. To give you a taste of it, I’ve assembled a representative selection of stories from the last eight weeks or so, in roughly reverse chronological order. 

[You can read them on the page linked above.]

The trend is so dominant that it colours all other reporting on Covid and the vaccines. It’s hard to miss the subtle anxiety at work in pieces like this one from the Vienna-based Standard, asking whether we’ll have to vaccinate ourselves against Corona every year from here on out, or the not-so-veiled notes of hope in ZDF reporting on successful Phase 1 trials of the German nasal vaccine. What’s the big deal about regular vaccination and why should we care about new live attenuated vaccines, if the mRNA jabs were God’s gift to man?

[Links in above paragraph are on the original page linked above].

There are clear, encouraging patterns here. The reporting originally surrounded lawsuits brought against the vaccine manufacturers, but has steadily assumed a more general focus. Regional and local papers are carrying a big share of these stories, with major state media playing a supporting role. The publications most popular with German biens pensants, meanwhile, like Süddeutsche Zeitung and Die Zeit and even Frankfurter Allgemeine, are pointedly underrepresented. This is a trend driven from the bottom up by popular interest, and in that it is the opposite of much Covid reporting since 2020.

Of course, these stories have always been out there, but until the last few months, enthusiasm for the vaccines was sufficient to suppress them. As with all pandemic policies, mass vaccination exhibits qualities of inertia. Obsession steadily grew through the summer months of 2021, as the jab failed to eradicate Covid, and achieved a frenzied peak around December 2021. There was nothing to do about the insane mania and its manifold irrationality back then, and the steady disenchantment with these products will prove just as inexorable.

[…]

The pharmaceuticals have made a lot of money, but their mRNA vaccines have failed. The Robert Koch Institut have stopped updating their vaccine dashboard, after almost four months of totally flatlined uptake; one of the foremost mRNA promoters, Bill Gates, has called the jabs a disappointment and compared them unfavourably to masks, of all things; and BioNTech, facing a revenue decline of 70 percent, have announced an impending return to mRNA-based cancer therapies – their original focus upon their founding in 2008, where they’ve never enjoyed particular success. Perhaps if the vaccinators had proceeded cautiously, limiting their promises and jabbing only the most vulnerable on a strictly voluntary basis, they could’ve preserved some future for their doubtful products. Instead, they oversold and over-administered their snake oil, and two years later most people have decided they don’t like it very much.

Earth Day at 53

A reminder of the utterly preposterous predictions from the past

Net Zero Watch has issued a newsletter regarding “Earth Day”, the original one having been 22nd April 1970, which interestingly was the 100th anniversary of Lenin’s birthday.

In 2015, Gary North had something to say about this non-event:

Forty-five years ago today, the Left celebrated their first Earth Day. Nothing has come of it. But they still celebrate it. They take their anniversaries seriously.

Nevertheless, in an editorial in TIME magazine, two New York professors urge “religious observance for the planet and its self-appointed watchkeepers under the headline: The Case For Making Earth Day a Religious Holiday.“, as Breitbart writes about this piece.

Here’s what Net Zero Watch writes this year:

Happy Earth Day!

Never trust the prophets of doom


22 April 2023

Earth Day at 53


None of the eco-doomsday predictions have come true 

From predicting ecological collapse and the end of civilisation to warnings that the world is running out of oil, all environmental doomsday predictions of the first Earth Day in 1970 have turned out to be flat out wrong.
 
More than three decades before Greta Thunberg was born — the Swedish environmental activist on climate change — more than 20 million Americans participated in the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970.

We now look back at quotes from Earth Day, Then and Now,” by Ronald Bailey of the spectacularly wrong apocalyptic predictions from Earth Day 1970.

Considering the current doomsday predictions scaremonger activists are verbalising about global warming that will result in the demise of civilisation within the next decade, many of those unscientific 1970 predictions are being reincarnated on today’s social and news media outlets.

Many of the same are being regurgitated today, but the best prediction from the first earth day five decades ago, yes 50 years ago, was that the “the pending ice age as earth had been cooling since 1950 and that the temperature would be 11 degrees cooler by the year 2000”.

The 1970’s were a lousy decade. Embarrassing movies and dreadful music reflected the national doomsday mood following an unpopular war, endless political scandals, and a faltering economy.

The first Earth Day was celebrated in 1970 — okay, “celebrated” doesn’t capture the funereal tone of the event. The events (organized in part by then hippie and now convicted murderer Ira Einhorn) predicted death, destruction and disease unless we did exactly as progressives commanded.data.

Behold the coming apocalypse as predicted on and around Earth Day, 1970:

1. “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”  — Harvard biologist George Wald

2. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.” — Washington University biologist Barry Commoner

3. “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.” — New York Times editorial

4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” — Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich

5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born… [By 1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.” — Paul Ehrlich

6. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” — Denis Hayes, Chief organizer for Earth Day

7. “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions…. By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.” — North Texas State University professor Peter Gunter

8. “In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution… by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.” — Life magazine

9. “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.” — Ecologist Kenneth Watt

10. “Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” — Paul Ehrlich

11. “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate… that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, ‘Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, ‘I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’” — Ecologist Kenneth Watt

12. “[One] theory assumes that the earth’s cloud cover will continue to thicken as more dust, fumes, and water vapor are belched into the atmosphere by industrial smokestacks and jet planes. Screened from the sun’s heat, the planet will cool, the water vapor will fall and freeze, and a new Ice Age will be born.” — Newsweek magazine

13. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.” — Kenneth Watt

History seems to repeat itself as there will be a disproportionately influential group of doomsters predicting that the future–and the present–never looked so bleak. I guess we’ll need to critique the 2020 doomsday predictions in the year 2050 and see if they were any better than those from the first Earth Day 50 years ago.

The World’s dumbest Harvard graduate

Donates $300 million to the prestigious university

Writes Tom Woods in his newsletter of 11/04/2023:

As a Harvard alum, I’m on the university’s mailing list. Here’s an excerpt from an email we all received yesterday:

Today, we are delighted to announce that Ken Griffin AB ’89 has made an unrestricted gift of $300 million to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences….

In recognition of Ken’s commitment to our mission, Harvard will rename its Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) in his honor. For the past 150 years, GSAS has nurtured and expanded the ambitions of students who have changed the world through their vast and varied scholarly pursuits. Now, the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences will do the same.

Now here’s an interesting fact about ol’ Ken Griffin: he’s a backer of Ron DeSantis for president.

Try to get inside the brain of someone like that.

He wants a GOP president, and not just any GOP president: specifically one who ostentatiously resisted the public health establishment, and much of the political establishment.

And at the same time, he gives $300 million to that very establishment.

Maybe — maybe — there was a time when we might have thought: Harvard has its problems, but it is still a world-class institution full of smart people doing important work.

That time is long over, if indeed it ever existed.

Imagine having $300 million to throw around, looking at the state of America, and thinking: the best place for this money is in academia, and particularly in an institution that has been at war with people like me for as long as I can remember.

One thing we can credit the left for: they’re not politically stupid. They know what they want, and they devote their time and resources to getting it.

The right, by contrast, has been full of people like Ken Griffin: they don’t have the guts to withstand being hated, so they delude themselves into thinking that if they just ingratiate themselves with the establishment by doing X or Y, maybe they can yet be liked.

Dear reader, if you have $300 million and are tempted to — of all things! — donate it to Harvard blankety-blank University, please write to me first and I’ll help devise a strategy to use that money more wisely — like lining animal cages with it.

US Presidential Candidate RFK jr. Denounces Lockdowns

Writes Tom Woods in his newsletter today:

Yesterday Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., officially announced his bid for president.

And his speech had some great bits in it.

Have I gone soft, and love politicians now?

Don’t worry about that.

What I do genuinely respect is a disruptor. Because if anything deserves to be disrupted, it’s the way what we laughingly call our national conversation is carried on.

RFK spent a chunk of time denouncing the lockdown regime — and of course it’s important to make minds explode by having a prominent Democrat do that.

He said:

Lockdown was the biggest shift in wealth in human history. And I blame President Trump for the lockdown…. President Trump gets blamed for a lot of things and he didn’t do and he gets blamed for some things that he did do. But the worst thing that he did to this country, to our civil rights, to our economy, to the middle class in this country, was the lockdown.

Now, President Trump, in fairness, let me just make this point. He’ll tell people, well, lockdown wasn’t my idea. My bureaucrats sold me on it. I was saying we shouldn’t do it. But that’s not a good enough excuse. He was the president of the United States. As Harry Truman said, the buck stops here.

On May 2nd, 2020, 600 doctors wrote a signed a letter to President Trump begging him not to allow the lockdowns. Because at that time, all of the pandemic protocols anywhere in the world, the WHO, CDC, everywhere, the European Health Agency, all say you never do mass lockdowns. It causes much worse havoc and deaths and injuries. You do the standard protocol, which is you lock down the sick, you protect the vulnerable, and you let everybody else go back to work. Otherwise, you are going to wreak havoc.

I wrote about it on Instagram. I was writing every day. I was citing these economic studies that showed that with every point in unemployment, you get you get 37,000 excess deaths: from heart attack, suicides, plus imprisonment. And they dumped me from Instagram. They said that’s misinformation. But it was not. But people were saying it. People knew it. It wasn’t just me.

And we now know, of course, that it’s true. There’s now study after study and every comparison between the states and nations that locked down compared to those who didn’t…. The more you locked down, the worse you got. Worse COVID deaths. Worse excess deaths.

Sweden’s numbers came out this week. Sweden was the only country in Europe that didn’t lock down. It had the lowest excess deaths in Europe….

The the IMF and Harvard study by Larry Summers says the cost of the lockdown to the United States was $16 trillion. 16 trillion for nothing. $16 trillion. We shifted $4 trillion from the middle class in this country to the super rich….

These lockdowns were a war on the poor and they were a war on American children. According to a Brown University study, toddlers lost 22 IQ points. A third of children throughout  their school careers are going to need remedial education. Children all over the country have missed their milestones.

What is CDC’s response? Here’s CDC’s response. The CDC five months ago revised its milestones so that now a child no longer is expected to walk at one year. They have it at 18 months. And a child now does not have to have 50 words at 24 months. It’s 30 months. So instead of fixing the problem, they are trying to cover it up….

As soon as they knew they could censor us they then went after the other part of the First Amendment, freedom of worship. They closed every church in this country, without any scientific citation, for a year….

They told us we had to social distance. They went after our property rights, the Fifth Amendment. They closed 3.3 million businesses with no due process, no just compensation.

He went on to talk about chronic disease and the strange conditions, including all the food allergies, that nobody his age remembers anyone having when they were growing up.

And then Ukraine: the authorities are lying about their intentions, he said, and the current policy is not in our interest.

There were some traditional Democratic talking points, too, particularly with regard to the environment. He spent a great deal of time on that.

I think the opinions of RFK, Jr., are fundamentally wrongheaded on a lot of things. But at this particular moment in history, the issues on which RFK is right are more critical than the ones on which he’s wrong, and they’re issues that no other prominent figure in the Democratic Party will raise.

He is saying things that need to be said, and I hope he keeps on doing it.

If you missed it, here is my interview with RFK, Jr., in which among other things I asked if he would describe Anthony Fauci as a sinister person.

(Hint: the answer wasn’t no.)

Link

They take us for fools

Unfortunately, they're probably right

Writes the BBC:

(see here [remove space between co and .uk]: https://www.bbc.co .uk/news/uk-england-london-65321937

The death of a doctor after his Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 jab was due to “unintended complications of the vaccine”, an inquest has ruled.

Stephen Wright, an NHS psychologist in south-east London, died 10 days after his first dose in January 2021, senior coroner Andrew Harris found.

Of course, they emphasize this kind of event is rare:

At London Inner South Coroner’s Court, Mr Harris described it as a “very unusual and deeply tragic case”. AstraZeneca (AZ) has been approached for comment.

How unlucky for the victim to have been killed by such a “very unusual” case, when he was one of the first people to receive the vaccine.

Strange, is it not?

They take us for fools. And unfortunately, they are probably right.

Tyranny Through Weaponized Bureaucracy

Jordan Peterson interviews Dr. Scott Jensen

Another example of the development described by James Burnham in his 1941 book “The Managerial Revolution”, which I mention in this post.

From the video description:

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and Dr. Scott Jensen walk through his accomplished professional life in family medicine, as well as his successful run as a Minnesota senator, all before having his reputation in both fields dismantled for what may be purely political reasons. Six investigations across nearly five years and numerous allegations without cohesion, proof, or relation have amounted to nothing, save for the clarification of Dr. Jensen’s newest goal: to take on the medical board that had no justification for its actions. Given the parallels between Dr. Jensen and Dr. Peterson’s experiences, this interview was not only inevitable but paramount.

Dr. Scott Jensen has practiced family medicine in Carver County, Minnesota, for 35 years. Jensen then served in the Minnesota Senate (2017-2021) and was vice-chair of the Health and Human Services Committee, as well as the Republican Governor candidate in the 2022 election.

He has served many organizations as a board member or chair including the Waconia School Board, numerous Rotary and Lions clubs, several Chambers of Commerce, and bank boards. He is an avid pilot and writer, publishing his first book in 2015, “Relationship Matters” and his second book, “We’ve Been Played” in 2022. In 2001, he founded Catalyst Medical Clinic which now has offices located in Watertown and Chaska.

The video is here (prompted at the actual beginning).

Near the beginning, Jensen says: His medical supervisory board told him in April 2020, as a physician: If you believe that Covid-19 “contributed” to a death, you can put it down as cause of death.