By John Stone

This is a commentary to one of the oddest events in modern British politics which occurred in the House of Commons last week when MP Andrew Bridgen got up to give a speech on the Covid shot fallout and the entire chamber emptied - involving the unusual behaviour of veteran Foreign Office minister and long time Bill Gates familiar Andrew Mitchell. In only a few seconds there were only seven MPs left out of a potential 643: these included four government representatives, the deputy Speaker and just one person supporting Andrew Bridgen, Christopher Chope. No one was present from any of the opposition parties to hear Bridgen’s meticulously documented speech.

While it is hard determine exactly what Mitchell was up to he certainly provides an interesting thread to tug at, since as well as being Minister for International Development and Africa he is also a ‘Polio Eradication Gender Champion’, an honour bestowed by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, a project of the WHO, Rotary International, the US CDC, UNICEF, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and GAVI. Of course, as we have seen these things can go wrong. Despite this interest in vaccination Mitchell did not stop to listen to what Andrew Bridgen had to say, and consider it on its merits.

When it comes to African polio vaccines the British state is peculiarly conflicted: it is not only that as Andrew Bridgen and many others have pointed out the MHRA (the UK licensing authority) is largely paid for by the industry and therefore not remotely independent from it, it is actually through its subsidiary National Institute for Biological Standards and Control part of a partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the WHO manufacturing the products. Last year I transcribed some passages from an MHRA meeting (courtesy of UK Column)  involving the interim director of NIBSC Mark Bailey and the Chairman of the MHRA  Stephen Lightfoot:

Bailey:

Significant investment by NIBSC and also its partners the Gates foundation and of course its part of   the WHO lab in (indecipherable) and of course basically premiere eradication. There are three strains of polio and the team at NIBSC developed three different vaccines. It happens that strain two is the one that has been deployed most in clinical trials in Africa and it's listed product by the WHO which mean it can be used in emergency situations even though it is not proved. We are now moving to clinical trials with the other two strains as well, so it's very exciting: it's a huge huge combination: its effect is that this vaccine cannot revert. So the Salk vaccine which was used with most of us as kids there was always a low chance of it reverting back to wild type which means things like polio begins to appear in the population. This is a great leap forward here because it can't revert so basically its much safer.

Lightfoot:

By John Stone

The British Government Digital ID consultation closes tomorrow March 1 - please don’t miss your final opportunity to comment. In addition to filling out a questionnaire as I did a few days ago and published my answers (see below), it is also possible to send an email comment (this address). I have sent a  further general comment:

This is about data enslavement, not convenience. A philosophically and humanly obnoxious idea in itself, but what happens when it  is used by the global bureaucracy to micro-control people: you can’t go here, you can’t talk about x, must not talk to y, you must forthwith against your will be injected with z, you need a brain implant to monitor you and order you about, you can’t have access to your savings etc. This is not benign or incidental, it is all part of the published plans of the UN, the WEF, the World Bank and the WHO, and the government ought to come clean that they are not working for us but for remote corporate entities hiding behind these supposedly beautiful, august institutions, who want there to be fewer of us and to control those that are left. That these projects exist and the government is signed up to them is neither conspiracy or a theory but a matter of record.

On the Way to Total Globalist Control: My Response to the British Government Digital ID Consultation

British citizens should take every opportunity to respond the British government’s proposals to control them through Digital ID in a consultation which closes on Wednesday March 1. What is most essential is to respond in numbers to this latest attempted power grab, which is of course being ignored by legacy media. In case it may be of help I reproduce the answers I gave to their questionnaire - on occasion repeating paragraphs in answer to only slightly different questions:-

While data sharing could possibly facilitate service or benefits in some circumstances it could equally obstruct them. Governments should not be that deeply involved in citizens’ affairs. Information should not be shared across departments which for instance could be misused for political or personal ends. Moreover, we  already know  how the digitalisation of the banking sector ends up (1) with a much less sensitive service (2) unemployment  (3) cumulative damage to the high street (public service) and (4) fear of important data going missing or being stolen.

Data sharing is a bad idea: data can be misused or stolen for personal/institutional gain or political ends. Without public consultation or regard for sovereignty the government has formed partnerships with global bodies/bureaucracies like the WEF and the WHO. The government also apparently hopes to institute Central Digital Online Banking. None of these global institutions are publicly accountable in any way. The WEF, which has trans-humanist policies such as universal cranial implants (which have never been debated), have also warned of imminent global cyber-attacks. To create such systems which could so easily be attacked with data destroyed and stolen would be crazily imprudent.

Digital ID will never be a safe way of ensuring someone’s actual ID on its own. It must be backed up by traditional forms of ID or it will become an opportunity for limitless abuse. It will lead to services being more impersonal, harder to over-ride in the event of mistakes. Harder to prove real identity, and a more indifferent bureaucracy. 

Although a consultation is notionally taking place as usual it is being flown in under the radar. A data grab of this kind ought to be hugely controversial, a threat to individual liberty and an invasion of private space but the government has not promoted duly serious public discussion of it. It is very likely in conflict with existing law.

John Stone is UK Editor for Age of Autism.

###

FREE on the Kindle app

Lies My Gov't Told Me: And the Better Future Coming (Children’s Health Defense) By Dr. Robert Malone

Governments intentionally weaponized fear to mold behavior. The media smeared anyone who objected to the narrative. FREE on the Kindle app



Cause Unknown 

By Edward Dowd

What is causing this historic spike in deaths among younger people? What is causing the shift from the elderly to younger people?

By John Stone

British citizens should take every opportunity to respond the British government’s proposals to control them through Digital ID in a consultation which closes on Tuesday March 1. What is most essential is to respond in numbers to this latest attempted power grab, which is of course being ignored by legacy media. In case it may be of help I reproduce the answers I gave to their questionnaire - on occasion repeating paragraphs in answer to only slightly different questions:-

While data sharing could possibly facilitate service or benefits in some circumstances it could equally obstruct them. Governments should not be that deeply involved in citizens’ affairs. Information should not be shared across departments which for instance could be misused for political or personal ends. Moreover, we  already know  how the digitalisation of the banking sector ends up (1) with a much less sensitive service (2) unemployment  (3) cumulative damage to the high street (public service) and (4) fear of important data going missing or being stolen.

Data sharing is a bad idea: data can be misused or stolen for personal/institutional gain or political ends. Without public consultation or regard for sovereignty the government has formed partnerships with global bodies/bureaucracies like the WEF and the WHO. The government also apparently hopes to institute Central Digital Online Banking. None of these global institutions are publicly accountable in any way. The WEF, which has trans-humanist policies such as universal cranial implants (which have never been debated), have also warned of imminent global cyber-attacks. To create such systems which could so easily be attacked with data destroyed and stolen would be crazily imprudent.

Digital ID will never be a safe way of ensuring someone’s actual ID on its own. It must be backed up by traditional forms of ID or it will become an opportunity for limitless abuse. It will lead to services being more impersonal, harder to over-ride in the event of mistakes. Harder to prove real identity, and a more indifferent bureaucracy. 

Although a consultation is notionally taking place as usual it is being flown in under the radar. A data grab of this kind ought to be hugely controversial, a threat to individual liberty and an invasion of private space but the government has not promoted duly serious public discussion of it. It is very likely in conflict with existing law.

###

Buy and share these books by Robert Kennedy Jr.. Dr. Fauci may be "gone" but we will not let his work fade into obscurity nor become enshrined on Mount Olympus. The Wuhan Cover Up will be important forever, not that history won't repeat itself for trying to educate, and ask.

The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health (Children’s Health Defense) by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

#1 on AMAZON, and a NEW YORK TIMES, WALL STREET JOURNAL, USA TODAY and PUBLISHERS WEEKLY NATIONAL BESTSELLER Over 1,000,000 copies sold despite censorship, boycotts from bookstores and libraries, and hit pieces against the author.

The Wuhan Cover-Up: How US Health Officials Conspired with the Chinese Military to Hide the Origins of COVID-19 (Children’s Health Defense)

From the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Publishers Weekly bestselling author of The Real Anthony Fauci comes an explosive exposé of the cover-up behind the true origins of COVID-19.

John Stone reviewed Turtles All The Way Down for Children's Health Defense's European site. See our post from August about the book Turtles All The Way Down: Vaccine Science and Myth    According to Professor of Philosophy Joel Richeimer, the phrase “turtles all the way down” stems from a story about the British philosopher Bertrand Russell. After giving a lecture on astronomy, Russell was refuted by a woman in the audience, who claimed that the earth was situated not in space, but on the back of a large turtle. When Russell asked what the turtle was standing on, the woman replied that it was “turtles all the way down.”  Remember the story of the tortoise and the hare. Our slow and steady pace continues, and we will win the race.

Purchase a copy here.

By John Stone

A welcome for this important book and paradoxical book. Although it has been edited for an English speaking audience by Mary Holland and Zoey O’Toole it was assembled by anonymous (Israeli) authors providing an anatomy of vaccine science, at least as it existed in 2019 before Covid. It may be considered critical to the understanding of the project that the authors chose to remain anonymous: while of course this meant that they could not be personally and professionally attacked it has also meant that anyone attacking the book has to attack the intellectual substance of the book and not the authors.

The central conceit of the book refers to the foundationlessness of vaccine science, in which a comparison is being made with pre-scientific conception of the position of the earth in the universe:  instead of a body in space it was held to be supported on the backs of elephants, in turn standing on the backs of turtles, apparently standing on the backs of larger turtles, but then what were those turtles standing on?

Update: Meloni has claimed victory. In 2018, measles were part of the global health campaign. in 2021, The Green Pass divided Italians. In summer 2021, Fratelli d'Italia party leader Georgia Meloni spoke out against the Green Pass. Yesterday, Italy voted, Meloni was on the ballot. John's 2018 post follows the CNN quote below. John Stone wrote "Smart Power": Reasons for Disaffection in Italy, and the Destruction of the Post-War Liberal Order.

Italians were voting Sunday in national elections in which the far-right Brothers of Italy party -- led by Giorgia Meloni -- appears poised to make big gains after the collapse of two governments since the last election. Source: CNN Italy expected to look right as voters head to polls in national election.

by John Stone

The term "smart power" was new to me when I encountered it recently in a British Medical Journal blog as part of the new-speak vocabulary of J Stephen Morrison 'senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and director of its Global Health Policy Center".  Morrison's article is interesting both because it discloses explicitly how 9/11 was made an opportunity  to draw health into the global security agenda of the United States while failing to understand how such a move might result in the shattering of "consensus" and the post war "Western post-war liberal order": "smart power" even if it is smart is not "liberal" and will not lead to consensus. But it also spells out that the global vaccine program has become a covert instrument of US power. If Morrison by any chance laments the passing of the centre-left government in Italy, then perhaps the White House putting Italy and its health minister, Beatrice Lorenzin, in charge of global vaccine strategy was an error

By John Stone

“Prayers for Elizabeth and her family and all concerned. Lets pray for wisdom and divine intelligence in the transition underway.” (Catherine Austin Fitts)

This is from a letter I wrote to BMJ on-line concerning informed  consent in October 2020:

…I have viewed with concern the idea floated in The Times by Heidi Larson of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine that the Queen could be called on to boost trust in coronavirus vaccine … Would such a promotional exercise really be an appropriate place to start in accepting any of the new products, either for her or for us?

Surely it is imperative that any individual choices are made on the basis of fully informed consent and not collective or political pressure, and this tolerance of individual autonomy is recognised for all vaccines. The recent Cumberlege review has recognised in principle where such pressures could lead… and it is hard to see why vaccines should be exempt. Nor should anyone be labelled an “anti-vaxxer”, least of all by the Prime Minister, because they do not jump into line…

Sadly, less than two years later with both the Queen and her consort - who were generally held to be devotees of homeopathy - are no longer with us, we can safely say we have witnessed one of the ugliest, most inappropriate and manipulative episodes in the history of humanity. In fact, nobody could ever have given informed consent because not only had the products not been adequately trialled, no one really knew what was in them.

Much concern must now focus on her successor King Charles: the United Kingdom is supposed to be a constitutional monarchy and the monarch above politics yet Charles has been a proponent of World Economic Forum policy and prominently helped launch the so-called Great Reset. This engages with policies which have never been democratically discussed or openly spoken about -  which pose a threat to the life, liberty and wealth of ordinary people -  and even if they had been they ought to lie outside a constitutional monarch’s remit. Notably, it involves the transference of wealth from ordinary people to a super-class encapsulated in the statement “You’ll own nothing and be happy”. Much of this transference has already happened with Covid lockdowns.

When neither mainstream politicians or media will talk about these matters it is time for the public at large to ask questions.

Early "Monday" publication for UK.  As ever, thank you to John Stone.

By John Stone

In March 2020 the British Government decided to impose lockdown on the determination of the WHO against the advice of its own medical experts including Sir Chris Whitty - the experts then followed the policy, subordinating their judgment to the outside agency. These events anticipated the WHO’s recent and continuing attempts to formalise global supremacy in health, and demonstrates the arbitrariness and chaos which will inevitably follow 

I am trying to understand the events of March 2020 in the light of an answer to a recent Freedom of Information Request. Why and how was it that four days before lockdown was imposed on March 23 the four Chief Medical Officers of the United Kingdom posted a notice on-line announcing that COVID-19 had been downgraded from the status of High Consequence Infectious Disease (HCID).

This peculiar event has not gone entirely un-noticed but has never really been explained. Before this point the disease named in the document  as COVID-19 (rather than  identified as virus SARS-CoV-2) - was a “high consequence infectious disease”, while almost at the very instant our lives, and everyone’s,  were to be irrevocably pitched into turmoil with the denial of civil liberties and most basic human rights, untold economic destruction and chaos, it was no longer so designated.

If the disease was no longer “high consequence” there could be absolutely no reason for this high level and prolonged disruption, and yet it was at this precise moment that the inevitability of lockdown started to be promoted, only to be confirmed four days later. But according to the CMOs’ reckoning at no point in the past two and a quarter years, whatever actions they took to restrict our lives or coerce us to accept injections of novel products, has the disease been “high consequence”. 

This anomaly cannot I believe be stressed enough: my FOI request produced no new documents but the Department of Health and Social Care drew my attention to a Parliamentary answer by Jo Churchill on November 6,  2020 to Conservative MP John Redwood (submitted fully 5 and a half weeks before on September 28):

The four nations public health high consequence infectious disease (HCID) group made an interim recommendation in January 2020 to classify COVID-19 as an HCID, based on the information that was available during the very early stages of the outbreak.

Once more was known about COVID-19, United Kingdom public health bodies reviewed the available information against the HCID criteria and noted certain changes. These changes included the increase in information available about mortality rates, which are low overall amongst the general population; greater clinical awareness; and the availability of a specific and sensitive laboratory test for the virus.

COVID-19 has not been considered a HCID in the UK since 19 March 2020, but this reclassification has not affected the Government’s response to COVID-19, which remains a comprehensive national effort.

So, the junior minister, Jo Churchill, confirmed that decision was made with due consideration and not because of some expedience: this remained the case on November 6, 2020, and remains the case today because whatever the CMOs have said subsequently to the public, notably government Chief Medical Officer Sir Chris Whitty they have not updated this statement.

With this in mind let us go back and look at what was said in the statement of March 19, 2020 :it may be one of those occasions when British government documents are more revealing than most.

As of 19 March 2020, COVID-19 is no longer considered to be a high consequence infectious disease (HCID) in the UK. There are many diseases which can cause serious illness which are not classified as HCIDs.

The 4 nations public health HCID group made an interim recommendation in January 2020 to classify COVID-19 as an HCID. This was based on consideration of the UK HCID criteria about the virus and the disease with information available during the early stages of the outbreak. Now that more is known about COVID-19, the public health bodies in the UK have reviewed the most up to date information about COVID-19 against the UK HCID criteria. They have determined that several features have now changed; in particular, more information is available about mortality rates (low overall), and there is now greater clinical awareness and a specific and sensitive laboratory test, the availability of which continues to increase.

The Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens (ACDP) is also of the opinion that COVID-19 should no longer be classified as an HCID.

The ACDP were quite clear and in their letter of 13 March emphasised in capital letters that it was not high consequence.

By John Stone

(UPDATE) It is disturbing to have confirmed by Megan Redshaw’s article in The Defender  yesterday  (June 27) that it will be the Gates/WHO/MHRA polio vaccine which is being rolled out in the UK which according to Dr Mark Bailey is not “proved” or in layman’s language “experimental”. Obviously, the Salk oral polio vaccine has not been in use for many years and his comparison is misleading and inappropriate , and we do not know why this product is preferred to the standard inactivated product (IPV).

This is a follow on to a UK Column Report last week with excellent analysis by retired nurse Debi Evans and News anchor Brian Gerrish which focused on the board meeting of the MHRA of Tuesday June 21. There were many disturbing features in the report which runs from 1.06.50 on the link, but one really surprising fact which emerged - and I have been following the MHRA closely since at least 2004 - is that they combine purported role as a regulator of the biologics industry with developing its own biological products and trading with the industry: this happens through its subsidiary since 2013 the National Institute of Biological Standards and Control (NIBSC) though it’s  not immediately clear how long NIBSC has traded its own biological products.

Of particular relevance is that coincidentally with this meeting a new polio scare was being launched in the UK - no one as of this present time has been diagnosed with polio but polio has been detected in a North East London sewer. It is therefore fascinating to follow the conversation (which I have transcribed as best I can) between to the interim director of NIBSC, Mark Bailey, and Stephen Lightfoot, Chairman of MHRA (at 1.22.18):

Bailey:

Significant investment by NIBSC and also its partners the Gates foundation and of course its part of   the WHO lab in (indecipherable) and of course basically premiere eradication. There are three strains of polio and the team at NIBSC developed three different vaccines. It happens that strain two is the one that has been deployed most in clinical trials in Africa and it's listed product by the WHO which mean it can be used in emergency situations even though it is not proved. We are now moving to clinical trials with the other two strains as well, so it's very exciting: it's a huge huge combination: its effect is that this vaccine cannot revert. So the Salk vaccine which was used with most of us as kids there was always a low chance of it reverting back to wild type which means things like polio begins to appear in the population. This is a great leap forward here because it can't revert so basically its much safer.

Lightfoot:

Again I think this is a great example of how the MHRA is different from other regulators around the world because we have NIBSC or National Institute for Biological Standards and Control where do some basic looking at fundamental research and this is a good example of the work that we are doing in that area and the public health benefit it can have internationally and not just in the UK  so I think actually as regulator we've got some really important you know constituent parts that actually make us a very strong and capable organisation.

The reality of this is if the MHRA ever was functionally a “regulator” it has abandoned this role to facilitate business, it even trades with industry in Coronavirus spike-protein. This was emphasised in an earlier UK Column report when MHRA CEO June Raine excruciatingly discussed transforming the MHRA in 2020 from being “a regulator to an enabler” (at 47.30). And of course it is a whole different level of concern if the MHRA not only received research funding from the Gates Foundation as has previously been identified but is actually in business with them (and the WHO). Of course, the pretext was that there was an emergency and this was in the most formal bureaucratic terms an outright lie.

By John Stone

In March 2020 the British Government decided to impose lockdown on the determination of the WHO against the advice of its own medical experts including Sir Chris Whitty - the experts then followed the policy, subordinating their judgment to the outside agency. These events anticipated the WHO’s recent and continuing attempts to formalise global supremacy in health, and demonstrates the arbitrariness and chaos which will inevitably follow 

I am trying to understand the events of March 2020 in the light of an answer to a recent Freedom of Information Request. Why and how was it that four days before lockdown was imposed on March 23 the four Chief Medical Officers of the United Kingdom posted a notice on-line announcing that COVID-19 had been downgraded from the status of High Consequence Infectious Disease (HCID).

This peculiar event has not gone entirely un-noticed but has never really been explained. Before this point the disease named in the document  as COVID-19 (rather than  identified as virus SARS-CoV-2) - was a “high consequence infectious disease”, while almost at the very instant our lives, and everyone’s,  were to be irrevocably pitched into turmoil with the denial of civil liberties and most basic human rights, untold economic destruction and chaos, it was no longer so designated.

If the disease was no longer “high consequence” there could be absolutely no reason for this high level and prolonged disruption, and yet it was at this precise moment that the inevitability of lockdown started to be promoted, only to be confirmed four days later. But according to the CMOs’ reckoning at no point in the past two and a quarter years, whatever actions they took to restrict our lives or coerce us to accept injections of novel products, has the disease been “high consequence”. 

This anomaly cannot I believe be stressed enough: my FOI request produced no new documents but the Department of Health and Social Care drew my attention to a Parliamentary answer by Jo Churchill on November 6,  2020 to Conservative MP John Redwood (submitted fully 5 and a half weeks before on September 28):

The four nations public health high consequence infectious disease (HCID) group made an interim recommendation in January 2020 to classify COVID-19 as an HCID, based on the information that was available during the very early stages of the outbreak.

Once more was known about COVID-19, United Kingdom public health bodies reviewed the available information against the HCID criteria and noted certain changes. These changes included the increase in information available about mortality rates, which are low overall amongst the general population; greater clinical awareness; and the availability of a specific and sensitive laboratory test for the virus.

COVID-19 has not been considered a HCID in the UK since 19 March 2020, but this reclassification has not affected the Government’s response to COVID-19, which remains a comprehensive national effort.

So, the junior minister, Jo Churchill, confirmed that decision was made with due consideration and not because of some expedience: this remained the case on November 6, 2020, and remains the case today because whatever the CMOs have said subsequently to the public, notably government Chief Medical Officer Sir Chris Whitty they have not updated this statement.

With this in mind let us go back and look at what was said in the statement of March 19, 2020 :it may be one of those occasions when British government documents are more revealing than most.

As of 19 March 2020, COVID-19 is no longer considered to be a high consequence infectious disease (HCID) in the UK. There are many diseases which can cause serious illness which are not classified as HCIDs.

The 4 nations public health HCID group made an interim recommendation in January 2020 to classify COVID-19 as an HCID. This was based on consideration of the UK HCID criteria about the virus and the disease with information available during the early stages of the outbreak. Now that more is known about COVID-19, the public health bodies in the UK have reviewed the most up to date information about COVID-19 against the UK HCID criteria. They have determined that several features have now changed; in particular, more information is available about mortality rates (low overall), and there is now greater clinical awareness and a specific and sensitive laboratory test, the availability of which continues to increase.

The Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens (ACDP) is also of the opinion that COVID-19 should no longer be classified as an HCID.

Why were ingredients known to be associated with clots permitted in Covid injections?: the British regulator stonewalls

By John Stone

This is a matter I first wrote about a year ago: as reports began to accumulate of clotting in recipients of the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid injection a well-known biochemist pointed out to me that adenovirus component present in this product (as well as the Johnson & Johnson and Sputnik) had been a known risk for thrombocytopenia for two decades before these products were assembled at breakneck speed in February 2020. This presented a simpler issue than the mRNA products of Pfizer and Moderna where many of  the potential risks - though not all - were relatively speculative, since our governments had apparently authorised these products either knowing exactly what was likely to occur, or with alarming incompetence having failed to spot it. Back in April last year was the first time I asked had the MHRA (the British regulator) done due diligence.

Ultimately, in November 2021 I wrote to the CEO of the MHRA, June Raine, asking her point blank:

‘Can you explain why the MHRA permitted the use of adenovirus in Covid vaccines bearing in mind that it was known to be associated with clots?’

I did not hear back for a long while, and then on  22 February 2022 I received the following acknowledgement from someone signing himself “Peter”:

Our Reference: CSC 89455

Dear Mr John Stone,

Thank you for your email.

We have reviewed your enquiry and this has been passed on to our Licensing colleagues for further input.

It was an interesting day for this to occur because it was the day the Metropolitan Police announced that they would not be pursuing further criminal investigations into the Covid affair. I thanked “Peter” and waited a month and in place of an answer re-submitted my enquiry as a Freedom of Information request (which received an automatic acknowledgement). Then when the statutory 20 days for answering such a request had elapsed, earlier this week, I enquired again and received neither answer or acknowledgement. We have perhaps to conclude that we have reached the end of the line and the MHRA  cannot explain in any shape of form why they allowed so many people to be hurt, injured or even killed. 

The MHRA’s first assessed the connection between between the AZ product and thrombocytopenia as likely on 7 April 2021 but what they failed to acknowledge was that they were only geared to receiving a small fraction of reports as stated in a notice of 2018:

It is estimated that only 10% of serious reactions and between 2 and 4% of non-serious reactions are reported.

They knew therefore the risk to patients on which they continued to roll out the product was likely in the region of ten times worse than stated in their published reports, while fatalities were also reported at a much higher rate than for Pfizer and again might be ten times worse according to their own rule of thumb.

The issue of how far the British regulator which is an agency of UK Department of Health and Social Care and  is 100% funded by the industry, works for the public rather than the industry is more than ever moot, and this instance is complicated by the fact that the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care - at the time the controversial World Economic Forum advocate Matt Hancock  - was also a sponsor of the development of the product.

As long ago as 2005 the  House of Commons Health Committee remarked:

The Department of Health has for too long optimistically assumed that the interests of health and of the industry are as one. This may reflect the fact that the Department sponsors the industry as well as looking after health. The result is that the industry has been left to its own devices for too long.... The industry is by no means solely to blame for the difficulties we describe. The regulators and prescribers are also open to criticism. The regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), has failed to adequately scrutinise licensing data and its post-marketing surveillance is inadequate. The MHRA Chairman stated that trust was integral to effective regulation, but trust, while convenient, may mean that the regulatory process is not strict enough.  

And in 2020 I wrote in BMJ on-line:

Two years ago officers of the MHRA were defensive of their inability to detect the narcolepsy risk with the Pandemrix vaccine in the swine flu scare of 2009 nine years before…, despite heavy criticism..In 2020 they face a much more daunting task of assessing for licensure and monitoring a plethora COVID-19 vaccines, each of apparently novel design. I hope they are now able to give the public assurances that important lessons have been learned, and not just that they always get it right…

Yet nothing which has gone before seems to compare with the present recklessness over human life, and it is urgent government and regulator are held to account. There are many complex questions that the Covid episode has thrown up, but this one is as simple as it gets. Asked the most basic question they cannot, will not answer and manifestly there is something to hide.

By John Stone

The British government consultation for the revision of the 1998 Human Rights Act grandiosely re-entitled the Bill of Rights closes at 11.59 pm GMT Tuesday 8 March. It is a somewhat elusive document to encompass and after months of indecision I decided on brevity. Unsurprisingly the Johnson government seems more interested in its own rights than the rights of citizens, but it is not always clear where law comes into it. Anyone wishing to comment can write to the email address [email protected] 

Dear Justice Secretary

 

Until it can recognise its own failings the government will have no useful contribution to make in the field of human rights, not least because it has itself abandoned humility and common sense.  

 

The government should bear in mind the old legal adage “hard cases make bad law”. In order to remove the inevitable hard cases the danger is that government restricts the public’s access to the courts even further, bearing in mind that for the ordinary citizen justice is prohibitively expensive anyway, and generally unavailable - for a long time and increasingly governments have considered justice for the citizen an expensive luxury while continuing to liberally fund its favoured enterprises from the public purse. 

 

Beyond that one can certainly see that the old Human Rights Act has been woefully inadequate at protecting citizens’ rights, notably in the last two years when it turned out time after time that the government advisors who were limiting our lives over what we were supposed to do or not do mostly got things momentously wrong, whether by design or accident. A stock taking of the last two years would suggest objectively that any protection against the use of arbitrary executive power has largely failed. The government scarcely inhabits the moral high ground in trying to extend its rights over citizens, not least because it has performed so poorly in the recent past, and does not seem to realise it.

The government’s claim to support freedom of speech is particularly moot given its moves in the past two years to swamp mainstream media with cash in pursuit of state health propaganda, while leaning on social media to limit or stop legitimate comment - it is not a desirable position when people may not  talk about their health predicaments or criticise government policy in public, being often subject also to foul abuse if they do from government funded sources. It is equally horrifying to see the same machine move into action over Ukraine. The government’s position, both in terms public policy and science, has been the opposite of “open” leading to autocratic behaviour, divisive social policies, economic catastrophe and the compounding of error at human expense. Please allow the public to speak.

Last Friday while speaking on Sky News and urging members of the public to get their third Covid vaccination the British Prime Minister let go a remarkable admission:

“…the double vaccination provides a lot of protection against serious illness and death but it doesn’t protect you against catching the disease, and it doesn’t protect you against passing it on.”

This does not explain why the government are taking a wrecking ball to the care-home sector by insisting all its employees are vaccinated, and are placing a National Health Service - already on it knees - under similar threat. Our original Covid lockdown in March 2020 was touted by the government as “Six weeks to save the NHS”  our hospital staff and care home staff hailed as heroes - they were indeed, and many  or most will have by now immunity by exposure to the disease: none of which goes to explain why they are being hung out to dry or trampled under foot by an opportunist political class. Equally, the rationale behind vaccine passports is negated.

On Johnson’s admission there is no scientific basis on which these actions are protecting the public: so who or what are they for? In the words of the excellent former BBC historian/journalist, Neil Oliver, “We are not stupid”.

Good morning: Typepad ate this morning's post. Apologies for the late start. John Stone wrote this post about Francis Collins in February of 2020.  Collins' leaves autism in far worse shape than he found it. The mark of a very poor leader, unless he was simply following orders. We'll share our posts about him over the weekend to help readers fully understand the depth of his impotence.

By John Stone

In a short article in Southern Maryland Chronicle a few days ago the Head of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, hailed the latest autism gene study under the title 'Largest-Ever Genetic Study of Autism Yields New Insights'. Perhaps the message here is that in order to fight crime the government has decided to investigate the victims not the perpetrators (actually it has been doing this for three decades). In 2006 as Head of the Human Genome Project Collins told Congress:

"But genes alone do not tell the whole story. Recent increases in chronic diseases like diabetes, childhood asthma, obesity or autism cannot be due to major shifts in the human gene pool as those changes take much more time to occur. They must be due to changes in the environment, including diet and physical activity, which may produce disease in genetically predisposed persons. Therefore, GEI (the Genes and Environment Initiative) will also invest in innovative new technologies/sensors to measure environmental toxins, dietary intake and physical activity, and using new tools of genomics, proteomics, and understanding metabolism rates to determine an individual's biological response to those influences."

References on-line to GEI seem to peter out round about 2008 (perhaps they were in danger of finding something). So, 14 years ago Collins warned that there would be no material result from this kind of research and it is what the government have been doing ever since, more or less as an employment scheme (typically, the new study boasts nearly two hundred authors). As Eisenhower said to no avail in his farewell speech six decades ago:

"Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity....

"The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

"Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific/ technological elite."

Now - with whatever insights their may be into gene risk association or even patterns of damage - is that all the NIH have really succeeded in doing is  generating  a lot more data: the new study is not only "the largest ever" it is "the largest-ever" in NIH speak (and with a huge cast), but in terms of government approved science we are not an inch nearer discovering what is driving the autism epidemic, just as Collins told Congress it would not all those years ago: it is all one giant step for mankind to nowhere. Meanwhile, the autism rate in schools is perhaps 4 or 5 times higher than it was then: it is rather hard to tell because NIH and CDC have failed to monitor it in any systematic way.

When I started out on this trail I recall a meeting at a freezing local church hall in early 1997 addressed by Paul Shattock, now of the ESPA Autism Research Unit, Sunderland. One of the many and terrible things Paul told us was that 90% off the funding into the causes of autism was being swallowed by useless gene research, meanwhile the problem was ten times as bad as ten years before. He foretold exactly was going to play out. How appalling and cynical this charade has been.

If you want to turn a disaster into a catastrophe and catastrophe into a cataclysm send for Collins!!!

John Stone is UK and European Editor, Age of Autism

42% of reports and 60% of fatal reports to VAERS (started in 1990) are for Covid products since December: fatal vaccine reports to Yellow Cards are more than 20,000% up on the year

By John Stone

This is a brief investigation into the public data as it stands in mid August 2021. I would add that the point is not that this is the highest quality data but that it is the only data there is - we are being deliberately deprived of real data through negligence at best, as the FDA confessed to the New York Times early on. They had not got the machinery running - or more likely  they had it running and were just were not telling us about it. And so we get back  to VAERS which was diagnosed in 2010 as being so deficient it was picking up less than 1% of events (at which point US government agencies evidently realised that they were on to a good thing and decided not to streamline it). So here are two relative measurements.

42% of all reports to VAERS from 1990 to August 13, 2021 are for Covid vaccines (595,662/1,409,664)

60% of all reports to VAERS “where patient died” from 1990 to August 13, 2021 are for Covid vaccines (13,068/21,936)

I am not saying that we should just multiply these figures simplistically by 100 but they are indicative that there is something drastically amiss.

Meanwhile, we have a different collection of data from the United Kingdom to August 11. Here we should bear in mind that the population of the UK is one fifth of the US and the licensing body, the MHRA, generally reckons that reports represent about 10% of cases.

To date there have been 347,032 Yellow Cards, 1,151,768 Adverse Events, 1,596 Fatal 

This breaks down as follows:

Pfizer 36.6m doses 104,446 (1 Yellow Card in 350) 293,779 Adverse Events (2.8 per card) 501 Fatalites (1 in 73,054)

Astra Zeneca 48.6m doses 228,239 Yellow Cards  (1 in 213) 813,622 Adverse Events (3.6 per card) 1,053 Fatalities (1 in 46,154)

Moderna 2m doses 13,325 Yellow Cards (1 in 150) 41,274 Adverse Events (3 per card) 14 Fatalities (1 in 142,857)

Brand unspecified 1,022  Yellow Cards 3,093 Adverse Events 28 Fatalities

The fact that three brands have such distinct adverse event profiles argues strongly against this being background noise, however there are overwhelming reasons why most reports would never get made: people will not report because they don’t know to, because they don’t know how to, because the ethos is overwhelmingly hostile and they think it is the wrong thing to do or they are scared, or because they are too sick or even dead. By comparison the average number of vaccine reports for the previous ten years was 3,039 with 8 fatalities: 200 times the fatalities and we are not a year in: off the scale and the world is run by madmen.

By John Stone

This is a mathematical follow up to Anne Dachel’s report about autism in Northern Irish schools. Northern Ireland may not be completely representative of the United Kingdom but one valuable way in which it is not is that it systematically collects autism data for its children, whereas in the rest of the kingdom we increasingly just have unaccounted special needs chaos. However, the new data leaves us with a clear conclusion that the present autism rate is likely around 6%. The given figure is 4.5% which is based on 13,401 children: the other figure of those on the waiting list for diagnosis is 4,495, and it is clear where we get when the two are added together. We have no means of calculating closely the numbers for the other three nations (England, Scotland and Wales) but perhaps we ought to look at this as the ball-park figure.

How did we get here? In 1999 according to a carefully conducted survey for the geographical region ‘Great Britain’ the figure was just one twentieth at 0.3%. As many of us realised at the time there was already a dynamic increase: there were twice as many cases (0.4%) in primary school (4-11) as secondary (12-18)  (0.2%) although secondary students had a longer time to gain a diagnosis and were monitored by the same services (p.33 Table 4.1, listed as ‘a less common disorder, Pervasive Development Disorder). By 2004, unsurprisingly, this amounted to about 1% in both divisions (p.35 Table 4.1, listed as “a less common disorder, Autistic Spectrum Disorder), and now here we are a further 17 years on and it is times 6 that figure. 

Of course, all the time governments around the world did their best to adjust the data to make it appear as if nothing was happening but when the last British government Chief Medical Officer produced a successor survey to that of 2004 in November 2018 (now limited to England) with a figure of 1.2% it was so off-beam and so low powered it was laughable. Should anyone think this present 6% is illusory the new Northern Ireland census reports that two-thirds of  diagnosed cases (66%) are at the highest level of educational need (Stage 5). We have a bureaucratic class that will do anything to cover its tracks, but it was bad luck for the people back in Whitehall that the very earnest Northern Ireland Assembly took autism sufficiently seriously to determine that there should be an annual school census.

Of course, among other things the Covid debacle is a very good camouflage for the meltdown in our schools. With autism at 6% surely some people would notice that there is something up.

By John Stone

This document is couched in up-side down language which some might term Orwellian:

1) It is actually about the deregulation of genetic technologies

2) It represents this as a “green” policy when it is patently an opportunistic attack by an industrial lobby on our natural environment, and upon bio-diversity. It could not be more anti-green in any way that could normally or traditionally be understood

3) Previous moves of this kind globally have left small and medium landholders at the mercy of grasping, unscrupulous manufacturers

4) If part of the argument is that the putative advances could also be achieved without GM technology, why do we need GM at all? This is not a credible explanation for changing the law

5) If GM is deregulated the only people the manufacturers will be answerable to is their shareholders, so how is the public interest represented?

6) I tried taking the survey but found it full of leading questions

It is shocking that this matter is not being raised in an openly democratic manner. While the British public have always rejected GM produce to the extent that it is presently unsaleable in our country, deregulating it was never conspicuously brought up as a reason for leaving the European Union at the time of Referendum in 2016 or at the December 2019 General Election: the only time I recall this project being mentioned was the Prime Minister’s speech on entering Downing Street in July 2019. This is a radical departure for the UK but the public are being cynically kept out of the picture - although there is the present consultation you will not read or hear about it in the mainstream media. One can deduce that the reason for this is that if it was adequately reported it would be overwhelmingly unpopular.

The slogan ‘Building back greener’ used in the document derives from the World Economic Forum who are also putting it out that in ten years-time no one but a tiny global elite will own anything but “will be happy”. If the government is dancing to the tune of the Great Reset perhaps it should tell the public who elected it where it is heading because no one could have imagined little more than a year ago what they were voting for. So much for Margaret Thatcher's “property-owning democracy” recently reiterated by the Prime Minister while apparently hooked into an alternative, techno-feudalist, ideology. What now are we to believe either about the environment, safe food, property or democracy?

John Stone, UK Editor, Age of Autism

The following excerpt is from John Stone at The Defender:

UK Data Show 402 Reports of Deaths Following COVID Vaccines

Government data show that, compared with the Pfizer vaccine, there have been 43% more reports of injuries related to the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine in the UK, including 77% more adverse events and 25% more deaths — but no red flags from UK regulators.

Between Dec. 9, 2020 (when the first COVID vaccine was administered in the UK) and Feb. 14, 2021, 402 deaths following COVID vaccines have been reported to YellowCard, the UK government’s system for reporting side effects to COVID-related medicines, vaccines, devices, and defective or falsified products.

Britain’s regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), runs YellowCard, which is the nearest British equivalent to the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System or VAERS in the U.S.

So far, only the Pfizer-BioNTech and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines have been administered in the UK. The Pfizer vaccine was deployed during the second week of December 2020, and Oxford-AstraZeneca at the beginning of January. (Moderna’s COVID vaccine is approved for emergency use in the UK, but the country has not as of yet obtained any vaccines from the company).

The MHRA has expressed no concern about the number of reports of adverse events connected with these new products, even failing to note how much worse the Oxford product has performed in comparison to the Pfizer vaccine.

Similarly, the accumulation of hundreds of deaths has failed to register a flicker of concern from them.

In January, the deaths of 23 frail elderly in Norway made international news — and raised questions about whether we should even be vaccinating people who are already near death. While it’s true that thousands of frail elderly people inevitably die every week, the lack of evidence of an active attempt to find out what is going on in individual cases is troubling.

The MHRA responded to the Norwegian report by saying “it did not currently anticipate any specific concerns,” a highly prejudicial statement. At the time The BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) permitted a short on-line response from me under the title “Is the MHRA up to it?”:  Read more at The Defender.

Excerpted from Children's Health Defense's The Defender with permission:

By John Stone and Dr. Meryl Nass, MD

On Jan. 13, California health officials issued a hold on 330,000 doses of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine after “fewer than 10” people at San Diego’s Petco Park stadium vaccine clinic suffered allergic reactions to the vaccine. Santa Clara County officials lifted the hold on the vaccine lot in question on Jan. 21.

One day later, on Jan. 22, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a Morbidity Mortality Weekly “early release” report on Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine. For the report, the CDC used data reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) between Dec. 21, 2020  – Jan. 10, 2021 to investigate cases of anaphylaxis, a life-threatening allergic reaction, following injections of Moderna’s vaccine.

The CDC’s choice to use VAERS data to calculate the rate of anaphylaxis associated with Moderna’s vaccine is idiosyncratic and troubling. Why?

First, VAERS is a “passive” reporting system, which results in a high degree of underreporting. In fact, a 2010 study (Lazarus et al, 2010) commissioned by the CDC, concluded that “fewer than 1% of vaccine injuries” are reported to VAERS. A 2015 study (Shimabukuro et al, 2015) similarly concluded that vaccine adverse events are underreported.

The other problem with VAERS? Reports often get filed only weeks or months after the event, which means the data is not current.

There are other reporting systems that the CDC could have used to calculate anaphylactic reactions to Moderna’s vaccine.

For example, the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) data, which the CDC used to calculate its overall rate of 1.3 events per million doses, updates in real time. So does the V-safe database, which was created specifically to assess the safety of COVID-19 vaccines. V-safe sends text message prompts to vaccine recipients on a daily basis for a week after a person is vaccinated, and occasionally thereafter. The prompts urge vaccine recipients to report any side effects directly using a cell phone app.

CDC notified the public of six cases of anaphylaxis following Pfizer’s COVID vaccine during the first week of the vaccination program. Its information came from the V-safe active surveillance data.

Both the Vaccine Safety Datalink and V-safe are considered “active” surveillance systems, sensitive for identifying events and fit for calculating event rates in a vaccinated population. However, unlike VAERS, neither systems’ contents are available for public scrutiny.

CDC’s Jan. 22 report on the Moderna reactions surprisingly asserted that “reporting efficiency to VAERS … is believed to be high,” and “VAERS is likely sensitive at capturing anaphylaxis cases occurring after COVID-19 vaccinations.”

Read more at The Defender.

From John Stone

On January 2, 2021, Ecuador's highest court ruled the new state of emergency decree of December 21 2020 unconstitutional. HERE The Constitutional Court held that the reasons for the invocation of emergency powers - the allegation of increased "contagion" of Covid 19 and the future possibility of a new UK virus strain - were not sufficiently compelling to justify a one month state of emergency applying to the entire country. 

The court ruled that narrower measures tailored toward protecting public health are available using non-emergency governmental procedures, and furthermore that a new state of emergency cannot be declared based upon future not current conditions nor can it be based on the same set of facts used to justifiy the earlier states of Covid-related emergency last year, the last of which expired in August.  Although called a state of "exception," that is Ecuador's particular language for a state of national disaster which gives the President extraordinary powers to curtail citizens' constitutional rights including freedom of assembly and freedom of movement both of which had been restricted until yesterday's ruling. The Court's decision which was reported to have been signed six days ago, was not released until the evening of January 2.The front page article and the text of the full decision is in the Ecuadorian newspaper of record El Comercio today, January 3, 2021. The following link may or may not work anymore but the newspaper's website (below) should bring up this morning's article or at least a follow up. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1A_VDK9aHV1cS1XTepwsXFw-fmuvZkOGP/vie General link: www.elcomercio.com

 By John Stone

European countries have been shutting down their borders with the United Kingdom following advice that it harbours a 70% more contagious version of the Covid virus, which has already led to the new Tier 4 lockdown arrangements in Southern England and the effective cancellation of Christmas. Whether the mutation is actually more contagious is a matter for dispute between two Oxford professors. The case that the “strain” is more contagious has been hypothesised by the Nervtag advisory committee led by Prof Peter Horby. According to the Daily Mail Prof Horby, who is Professor of Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Centre for Tropical Medicine and Global Health, said the figure of 70 per cent was based on 'converging data'.

“He said: 'This is including, but not limited to, the rate of change in the frequency of detection of the variant (the growth rate) and the correlation between R values and the frequency of detection of the new variant.'”

This, however, is disputed by Prof Carl Heneghan of the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine. He told the Mail:

'I've been doing this job for 25 years and I can tell you can't establish a quantifiable number in such a short time frame.' 

He added 'every expert is saying it's too early to draw such an inference'.

Professor Heneghan said there was no doubt this time of the year, the 'height of the viral season', was a difficult time for the NHS. But he said failure to put out the basis of the figures was undermining public trust.

But while the mutation is already circulating in other European countries it has led to them shutting down food supplies to the UK coincidentally or not on the very verge of Brexit. Prof Horby had previously been embroiled in controversy earlier this year over the Hydroxychloroquine trial in which inappropriately high quantities of HCQ  were given to Covid patients already in a serious condition (the trial was funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation). Also on the Nervtag Committee is Prof Ferguson of Imperial College whose controversial modelling led to the UK’s first lockdown in the spring. Ferguson was forced to resign from the more prominent SAGE committee after breaking lockdown rules pursuing a romantic liaison, but not apparently from Nervtag. Ferguson’s Vaccine Impact Modelling Consortium at Imperial College is also funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as well as the global vaccine alliance, GAVI. Ferguson's group was said to have received $185 million from the Bill and Melinda Gate Foundation between 2006 and 2018.

Converging data or converging interest?

By John Stone

Today AoA revives my article from 2016. Monday’s epic launch of the Pfizer vaccine in the UK featured the fact that the second person to be vaccinated was someone called William Shakespeare. The release of this culturally resonant information cannot have been accidental since it would otherwise have breached confidentiality. I was also put in mind of Prime Minister Johnson’s talk the other week of the “scientific cavalry” arriving: nothing could point more to the danger of politicising either science or sickness for the benefit of an elite.

The theme of my 2016 article was that Shakespeare’s play Henry V represented the opposite of a national triumph. The invasion (perhaps “the rape”) of France by England (with representatives of our other three nations in tow) is based on political expedience and vanity, rather than any convincing claim: a false narrative is created. If the war is superficially successful it is not based on the rightfulness of the claim, the will of God, or even superior tactics. The battle of Agincourt is pure chaos and when the French surrender King Henry actually thinks he’s losing, and is engaged in cutting the throats of his prisoners. Meanwhile, the disgusted figure of the infantryman Williams rages across the battlefield, posing the questions which undermine the entire moral basis of the enterprise, or so many other political enterprises, including how they distort and destroy the lives of ordinary people. Even today the play is usually cut to hide its fundamental ironies. I am sure I have not done the play justice  - it needs a much longer and more careful essay - but it tells the inner truth of the bad politics of every age, including our own... 

Incognito at Agincourt: Shakespeare Accuses the King

‘…the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all 'We died at such a place’...

This article is intended as a piece of literary criticism, however it also poses questions about the legitimacy of the political order which resonate today. It is an interesting question how - in what is now called the early modern period - an ordinary subject could challenge a monarch (and by implication the order for which the monarch stood).  But supposing two men were in disguise, they might briefly exchange ideas on a level playing field. The confrontation between Henry V before Agincourt and the common soldier, Williams, in the play Henry V has occasionally been recognised as a crux, notably by leading Shakespeare scholar Frank Kermode in his brief discussion of the play in his late book The Age of Shakespeare (2004 p.81):

Here is one of the moments when Shakespeare can make us feel out of our depth: the part of surly the Williams is so strongly written, his arguments so persuasive compared with Henry’s, that we are left querying our assent to the royal cause, however warmly solicited.

It was unusual feature of Shakespeare’s career as a playwright of the Elizabethan and Jacobean age that he was also an actor within the company he was writing for. Scholars generally believed he took smaller roles, and it is against this background that the following suggestion is made.

The night before the battle of Agincourt, in the play, King Henry borrows the cloak of company commander Sir Thomas Erpingham indicating that he seeks anonymity and solitude, but perhaps with the real intention (as it follows in the action) of eavesdropping unrecognised on his men. He first runs into his former low-life acquaintance Pistol who fails to recognise the king even when Henry all but identifies himself as “Harry Le Roy”, and is presumably gratified that Pistol speaks well of him:

I love the lovely bully.*

They also exchange banter about the garrulous and absurd Welsh captain, Fluellen. Fluellen has been first encountered in the play at the siege of Harfleur driving the soldiers “into the breach” and trying to engage the infuriated and irascible  Irish captain MacMorris - who is busy digging tunnels to lay explosive – in a conversation on “the disciplines of war”. MacMorris gives him a piece of his mind:

by John Stone

Two days ago I received at breakfast a magazine article from an outfit called BBC Future entitled Immune Respose: The Strange Ingredients Found in Vaccines by Zaria Gorvett (pictured left).That the BBC should supply such a bland and poorly informed article for the popular market is no surprise, but nevertheless my annoyance did rise at her account of the DPT affair, and I wrote to her:

Dear Ms Gorvett,

Re: Your article “Immune Response” this morning

Despite the opprobrium heaped on John Wilson the government discreetly paid out on 600 DPT cases within three years of the vaccine damage payment act of 1979. In a letter last year to BMJ (which I append)  I also pointed out the paper by Mogensen which found that mortality in DPT vaccinated infants in Guinea-Bissau (1981) was 5 times vaccinated. This is not a small matter.

I also point out that size comparison makes no sense when talking (about)  an active ingredient of a product and I forward the link to the recent article by Prof Exley “An aluminium adjuvant in a vaccine is an acute exposure to aluminium”.

It is not correct to say that there is no evidence when there is evidence and I think you ought to reconsider.

Yours sincerely,

 John Stone, UK Editor, Age of Autism

The Benefits of DPT

(BMJ Rapid Response)

Mara Kardas-Nelson [1] should also note that as result of DPT controversy and the UK Vaccine Damage Payment Act of 1979 there were 600 payments in the period 1978-81 (1978/9: 36, 1979/80: 317, 1980/1: 256) [2,3]. The rhetoric behind the legislation was that injuries were rare but this was not borne out by the record [2,3]. The act enabled the government to retrieve the reputation of the programme amid adverse publicity by acknowledging the principle of harm but no one knew how many awards there had actually been - and initially there were a lot. This would also not take account of any deaths.

According to Mogensen et al, the introduction of DPT to Guinea-Bissau in 1981 was associated with a 5 fold increase in the rate of death [4]:

"Among 3–5-month-old children, having received DTP (±OPV) was associated with a mortality hazard ratio (HR) of 5.00 (95% CI 1.53–16.3) compared with not-yet-DTP-vaccinated children. Differences in background factors did not explain the effect. The negative effect was particularly strong for children who had received DTP-only and no OPV (HR = 10.0 (2.61–38.6)). All-cause infant mortality after 3 months of age increased after the introduction of these vaccines (HR = 2.12 (1.07–4.19))."

[1] Kardas- Nelson, 'Despite high rates of vaccination, pertussis cases are on the rise. Is a new vaccination strategy needed?', BMJ 2019; 366 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.l4460 (Published 09 July 2019)

[2] Gareth Millward, 'A Disability Act? The Vaccine Damage Payments Act 1979 and the British Government’s Response to the Pertussis Vaccine Scare', Social History of Medicine, Volume 30, Issue 2, May 2017, Pages 429–447, https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkv140

[3] 'Annex A - Vaccine Damage Payments claims received and award statistics', https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/242813/response/599844/attach/3/A...

[4] Mogensen et al, 'The Introduction of Diphtheria-Tetanus-Pertussis and Oral Polio Vaccine Among Young Infants in an Urban African Community: A Natural Experiment', Ebiomedicine March 2017, https://www.ebiomedicine.com/article/S2352-3964(17)30046-4/abstract

I forgot to mention that the old DPT contained 50 micrograms of life-enhancing ethyl mercury but not receiving  an answer I decided to forward it to her editor Amanda Ruggeri (below), who describes herself on her website as  “Journalist, Photographer, Traveler,  Historian,  Adventurer”, and obviously a very exciting person. She also has not replied.

What I did not know at the time that I wrote to Zaria was that before writing her amusing vaccine fairy story she had interviewed Prof Exley at length on the phone. Yesterday, he wrote to her furiously:

Dear Zaria,

This not about whether one 'likes' something or not. It is about your integrity as a journalist.

You contacted me by email to ask my advice. I was happy to help and even gave you my home telephone number since you wished to talk to me personally and not simply correspond by email.

We talked for about forty minutes. I shared with you a great deal of scientific, published, information on our expertise in aluminium adjuvants used in vaccines. I made sure that you had access to all the primary published research that we talked about. I also gave you some background on adjuvants generally. You gave the impression of both being very interested in the information I gave you and also of being grateful for my time and expertise. Afterall we are, arguably, the world's leading group researching the efficacy and safety of aluminium adjuvants used in vaccines.

When we finished our conversation, you promised to send me a link to your article. You did not do this and reading your article, I can understand why.

Not only did you not mention my contribution to your article once but when opportunities arose you chose to write what can only be described as blatant lies.

For example, even though you knew that what you had written was untrue you still wrote;

There is as little as 0.2mg of aluminium in a typical vaccine dose, which is equivalent to less than the weight of a single poppy seed. There is no evidence that any of the adjuvants currently in use lead to side-effects.

Apart from being factually incorrect the comparison with a poppy seed is absurd at best.

What happened to your editor's mantra concerning BBC Future;

We believe in truth, facts, and science. We take the time to think. And we don't accept — we ask why.

I told you everything you needed to know about how much aluminium is used in vaccines. I even shared with you some of our new research in this field about to be published in the BMJ. I pointed out to you that there are serious adverse events caused by aluminium adjuvants and I also informed you as to where you could find this information, no lesser document than the patient information leaflet provided with every vaccine.

Your writing about DPT is completely false and while we did not discuss this you could have checked this information with me at any time. You clearly chose not to check your information.

I told you the story of Glenny and the 'discovery' of aluminium adjuvants.

I also made sure that you understood which aluminium salts were used as aluminium adjuvants. Instead you wrote lies again about this;

To this day, the aluminium in vaccines is always in the form of salts. These include aluminium hydroxide (commonly used as an antacid to relieve indigestion and heartburn), aluminium phosphate (often used in dental cement) and potassium aluminium sulphate, which is sometimes found in baking powder.

You decided instead to write complete scientific nonsense in your descriptions of aluminium salts used in vaccines, why is beyond me when you had access to the correct information. What were you trying to do, make the aluminium salts sound benign by comparing them wrongly to household products?

I told you that the main reason why aluminium adjuvants are effective is because they are toxic at the vaccine injection site. I spoke to you at length about this and I pointed you towards the relevant peer reviewed published scientific literature. Your reference to uric acid at this point did not come from me and has no relevance.

This article is very shoddy journalism. It seems to have been primarily informed by a Chinese scientist working on vaccines in China. As the world's leading researcher on aluminium, I have no knowledge of this scientist only that they have no expertise in aluminium adjuvants. Why you chose to only follow their advice is insulting.

If you and your editors do truly 'believe in truth, facts, and science', then I would expect a right of reply to this inaccurate and scientifically inept article. To not do so would suggest that the written lies therein have an alternative agenda.

Yours sincerely

Professor Christopher Exley PhD FRSB

So far, at the time of writing, Prof Exley assures me he has heard neither from Zaria Gorvett or her editor Amanda Ruggeri (which is I suppose what you would expect from the modern BBC). Perhaps as their next assignment these two geniuses can set themselves to working out why Autism Spectrum Disorders have reached 7% in Belfast schools (I have had an identical figure just quoted me by personal communication for the first year in-take of a Welsh comprehensive school). All brought to you by the BBC’s responsible journalism.

Post Script

Prof Exley has now received a succession of letters from the BBC which does not make their position any more satisfactory:

Dear Professor Exley,

Dear Prof. Exley,

by John Stone

A news story in the Sun newspaper suggests that coronavirus vaccines will be rolled out in the UK as early as next month: “VACCINE BOOST:NHS ready to roll out covid jab from next month with tens of thousands of people being vaccinated before Christmas”. While this runs against so many apparently informed reports that vaccines may not be available until way into next year it coincides with the consultation last month to suspend licensing regulations to allow roll out this year.The report states:

“The first mass vaccination centres are planned for sites in major cities including Leeds, Hull and London...They will be supported by hundreds of mobile vaccination units dotted nationwide, while roving teams will visit care homes and vulnerable Brits.”

This corroborates an earlier BBC report:

By John Stone

Following the TV broadcast of two civil servants, Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty, a Conservative member of Parliament, Desmond Swayne, has called from the chamber of the House of Commons for them to be sacked for spreading fear. He particularly refers to the use of a graph showing the infection rate doubling exponentially every seven days. Swayne is appalled by the authoritarian route the Johnson government has taken. View the 1 min 42 second video.

It was also disturbing to watch them broadcasting from the Prime Minister’s residence as I noted in a letter to British Medical Journal Rapid Responses:

“Not least was it dismaying to see two civil servants - Patrick Vallance and Christopher Whitty - on Monday address the public from Downing Street as if they were the government. We have got used to No 10 briefings, and even the absence of the Prime Minister at such briefings when he became ill in the spring, but this time we had Civil Servants unmediated by elected government politicians. The sheer oddity of it rings alarm bells - we seem to be entering some parallel and perhaps menacing universe. Where is the country we once knew?”

Now the government politicians and their advisors take it in turns to hide behind one another. 

John Stone is UK Editor of Age of Autism

By John Stone

British readers should write to their MP’s today to express their doubts about the Coronavirus Act first passed in March which has expedited the Conservative government in the exercise of arbitrary measures against citizens, while Parliament turned a blind eye.

Now a Conservative rebellion by in the region of 40 members threatens the act when it comes up for renewal on Wednesday - this could lead to the act not bei ng renewed or being modified if opposition MPs decide to vote against the act in its present form. Opposition parties should not sit by week after week, month after month allowing the government to make a mess of things, while rubbing their hands. It may have suited them till now but it simply does not look very responsible: if they do renew the act without conditions it will certainly look opportunist and highly unprincipled. Two excellent articles have appeared in the Mail on Sunday this weekend by Peter Hitchens and retired Supreme Court judge Jonathan Sumption. 

If the act is renewed unmodified there will, for instance, be no mechanism to rein the government in over Boris Johnson’s lunatic scheme to test 10 million citizens for the SARS-CoV-2 virus a day, using technology which has not yet been invented at the estimated cost of £100billion (about 130billion USD). A suppressed government report predicts there will have been 75,000 non-COVID deaths over the next 5 years as a result of the government strategy including 16,000 who have already died in the hospital chaos of the spring, and 26,000 expected to die in the first years through not seeking medical treatment. These matters need closest political scrutiny.

John Stone is UK Editor, Age of Autism

Britain is facing six months of lockdown following a morning broadcast from No 10 Downing Street by Chief Government Scientist Patrick Vallance and Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty. The lockdown will be imposed on the much disputed theory that there are still only low levels of immunity to the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the community, which can only be rectified by vaccination campaigns now deferred to next year.

In recent weeks the government have been ramping up fear of the virus by mass testing (~250 thousand tests a day) leading to what are most likely largely false positive results, while hospitalisation and death statistics remained static. Though it is true that hospitalisations and deaths have begun to increase (perhaps seasonally) there is little basis that COVID-19 deaths will reach near the same levels as in the spring (as Whitty is claiming), even supposing that data is reliable. More likely many will die because normal medical services are vastly reduced (they never recovered after the spring lockdown), and because many thousands people will be made jobless, homeless and destitute this winter, while the nation is plunged into ever greater everlasting debt with the complicity of all the main political parties.

Futhermore, even with contemptible acquiescence of most elected members of Parliament the government is acting illegally in imposing these measures on society as has been stated by retired senior judges Lord Sumption and Baroness Hale. The case against the government is now likely to reach the Court of Appeal towards the end of next month.

John Stone is UK Editor of Age of Autism

by John Stone

The British government (Prime Minister Boris Johnson pictured) are running a public consultation with a view to cutting every corner and safe-guard in order to roll out a COVID vaccine campaign before Christmas (the British “warp-speed”). presumably with the Oxford/Astra-Zeneca product in mind. For anyone who wants to respond it ends this Friday (18 September). This is how I have responded to the on-line form.

Temporary authorisation of the supply of unlicensed products

The urgency of the situation in which such a decision needs to be taken is heavily in doubt. While the government has taken it upon itself to place restrictions on the public from which it would gladly be alleviated the hospitalisation and fatality rates for the virus have been in continuous decline since the spring - if indeed there is a continuing infection rate this presumably confers more certain immunity than any putative vaccine. None of the initial candidate products purports to offer strong immunity so it is hard to see even if there were any good reasons for the present restrictions that the introduction of these products would offer sufficient grounds for their removal. It is more likely that they would simply contribute to public confusion.

As I understand it the decision to distribute unlicensed vaccines (or licensed ones) will be taken by the JCVI. The JCVI is described as an “independent” body, but of what? The chair of the JCVI, Andrew Pollard, is lead developer of the Oxford/Astra Zeneca COVID-19 vaccine, which has been backed by the government to the tune of at least £100 million. In February 2014 Pollard chaired a meeting of the JCVI which recommended the Bexsero Men B vaccine to the schedule of which he was also lead developer, which became part of Conservative window-dressing at the 2015 election. Even if Pollard recuses himself the “independence” of any decision will be in doubt - apart from anything else at its February 2016 meeting the JCVI enjoyed the hospitality of Pollard’s research institution, the Martin School, and his Oxford College, St Cross. It is not reported that any members protested. Dissent at JCVI meetings had never been reported, indeed no votes ever seem to be recorded.

Should a decision be delayed beyond the end of the year it will come under the remit of the licensing authority, the MHRA. The MHRA is entirely funded by the industry for the licensing of medicines and biologicals, and also advised by Prof Pollard. In 2009 the MHRA - at the time of the swine flu scare - failed to detect an association between the GSK vaccine Pandemrix and the condition of narcolepsy, and remained uncontrite in BMJ correspondence as late as 2018. It is illusory at the present time to suppose the licensure in itself provides grounds for confidence. The government in fact has no existing processes to ensure confidence. The government also assumes that anything “authorised” will subsequently be “licensed” which further calls the independence of the process into question. What if it turned out to be not just “temporary”

Civil liability and immunity

The document maintains that it would be unfair to manufacturers to have to sustain liability, but it is not clear why it would be fair to the public who have already had incredible costs loaded on to them, whether any suit was against the manufacturer (to be reimbursed by the government) or against the government itself, the cost of which would then be passed to the public, if successful. Admittedly, in almost any circumstances the Legal Aid Agency will fail to support such litigation (a dramatic instance would be Vioxx), so it is somewhat theoretical: whatever happens the manufacturer makes a killing and there is little sanction on them to ensure safety, let alone that you will not catch the disease.

Ultimately, the government shelters legally behind the principle of informed consent which leaves the onus on the patient or their guardian, but needs to entail that it is genuinely informed (including all the risks and shortcomings of the product as is provided in the Montgomery ruling). It is further prejudicial if scorn and loathing are heaped on anyone who is not sure whether to comply (for instance the several derogatory comments made the Prime Minister about “anti-vaxxers”, or pronouncements by the WHO about the “vaccine hesitant” being a threat to global health) which is devoid of intellectual merit, quite outside the spirit of freedom of choice or the recommendations of the recent Cumberlege review, which considered instances where injured patients were subjected to bullying tactics. This fails to recognise the rights of the patient. It also undermines the rights of the patient if they are expected to be vaccinated to protect someone other than themselves. It is not only a dubious principle it may well be that it is in the interests of children, for example, to acquire natural immunity, particularly if the virulence of the disease retreats to the level of the common cold (which seems entirely likely).

Note: Below is a BMJ rapid response by John Stone.  Thank you, John!

###

Is the government suffering from Munchausen Syndome by Proxy?
Re: Covid-19: Less haste, more safety Fiona Godlee. 370:doi 10.1136/bmj.m3258

Dear Editor

Eight days ago I wrote here [1]:

“To limp along like this in the hope that we will all be rescued by a vaccine (supposing we any longer need rescuing) is not realistic, and not the basis on which policy should be directed - quite apart from the harm that it is doing to every other aspect of civil life and of health policy itself.”

I now note the publication of an article by Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson in The Spectator questioning whether the present rise in cases is an artefact of PCR testing, as hospitalisations and deaths continue to decline [2]. Bearing this in mind perhaps it is time the British Medical Journal itself began to move the narrative on.

[1] John Stone, ‘ Less haste, more safety, certainly, but we could do with an end to the vaccine rescue narrative as well’, 25 August 2020, https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3258/rr-0

[2] Carl Heneghan & Tom Jefferson, ‘ Coronavirus cases are mounting but deaths remain stable. Why?’, The Spectator, 1 September 2020, https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/coronavirus-cases-are-mounting-but-d...

Competing interests: AgeofAutism.com, an on-line daily journal, concerns itself with the potential environmental sources for the proliferation of autism, neurological impairment, immune dysfunction and chronic disease. I receive no payment as UK Editor

Source: BBC

By John Stone co-published at Children's Health Defense

The Black Lives Matter protests which followed the killing of George Floyd in the United States spilt over the Atlantic and sent shock waves through British society as well. One of the most prominent targets of discontent has been the statue of the late 19th century diamond mining magnate, Cecil Rhodes, which stands above the entrance to Oriel College in Oxford, which the college has voted to remove. But, manifestly, what the university is actively doing now in Africa poses more serious questions than Rhodes’s largesse to the university in a much earlier time.  

In the past days reports have been appearing about protests across Africa over vaccine trials. Seth Berkley, the director of the vaccine industry cartel organization GAVI is quoted as saying that anti-vaccine sentiment is “the worst” he has “ever seen”. If so, discontent has been boiling up for a long time and may be now finding a focus round the trials of the Oxford Vaccine Group/Jenner Institute/Astra Zeneca coronavirus vaccine. The Oxford based Jenner Institute also receives funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The organizer of a demonstration at the University of Witwatersrand, Phapano Phasha, told Associated Press:

“The people chosen as volunteers for the vaccination, they look as if they’re from poor backgrounds, not qualified enough to understand…We believe they are manipulating the vulnerable.”

Oxford University are said to have recruited 2000 volunteers for trials in South Africa which have gone ahead despite a complaint by the African Centre for Biodiversity (further trial to be held in Kenya, Brazil and the united States). ACB categorize five areas of inadequacy in the Oxford application to conduct trials:

-Non-disclosure of vital safety data and information, which have been redacted as ‘confidential business information’

-Lack of literature references throughout to substantiate health and ecosystem safety claims, making it difficult to evaluate some of the claims being made as to safety

-Lack of evidence of efficacy of the trials

-Lack of information on the test procedures being used

-Concerns regarding the safety claims made

The authors Dr  Eva Sirinathsinghji and Dr Maryam Mayet (executive director of the centre) note that key information has been redacted in the application as “confidential business information” making it impossible for the public to assess risk, although important information has been disclosed in other places, for instance in the BioRxiv pre-print: van Doremalen et al ‘ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccination prevents SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia in rhesus macaques’ which was not disclosed in the application i.e. in animal testing the Oxford vaccine may have helped prevent pneumonia but did not stop the monkeys from catching the virus or reduce transmission.

Our John Stone asked a simple, but critical question of Danish Professor Dr. Christine Stabell Benn on Twitter. "Do you have data for neurological impairment" from pediatric vaccines. In other words,  "At what cost?" And the answer was, “No, the focus is on the overall effect of vaccines on mortality and morbidity."  Or, " We don't know and we haven't bothered to look." I looked up the definition of the two terms:  Mortality is death. Morbidity is sickness or illness, but apparently only from the virus IN the syringe, not caused by it. 

Having systematically screwed up the hydoxychloroquine (HCQ) trials for the treatment of the Covid virus and otherwise prevented its general use, all of which likely ended up in countless unnecessary deaths (see Dr Meryl Nass's despairing assessment) the WHO are now turning their attention to the first crop of vaccines, created at reckless speed with new technologies. The WHO's chief scientist told Reuters on Friday:

GENEVA (Reuters) - AstraZeneca's <AZN.L> experimental COVID-19 vaccine is probably the world's leading candidate and most advanced in terms of development, the World Health Organization's (WHO) chief scientist said on Friday.

The British drugmaker has already begun large-scale, mid-stage human trials of the vaccine, which was developed by researchers at University of Oxford.

This week, AstraZeneca signed its tenth supply-and-manufacturing deal.

"Certainly in terms of how advanced they are, the stage at which they are, they are I think probably the leading candidate," WHO chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan told a news conference.

The Oxford vaccine has a shaky history, funded to the tune of £90m million by the British government and taxpayer, and already in manufacture in billions of doses, the human trials began in April amid false reports that the animal trials had been successful: the product is arguably commercially too big to be allowed to fail. It also has the advantage that its lead developer Andrew Pollard heads the committee that will advise the British government on its use. Admittedly, last week he was in an apparently non-committal mood in conversation with Prince William:

Prof Pollard highlighted HIV, a virus for which no vaccine has been found because it mutates, saying scientists' great fear was that coronavirus could be the same. In that case, he said 'there is nothing we could do apart from social distancing forever' - a prospect William described as 'frightening'.

We are pleased to excerpt this article by John Stone as published on Children's Health Defense in a collaborative effort.

###

By John Stone

These comments follow on the disappointing failure of Prof Kaye ‘UN Special Rapporteur for the Promotion and Protection of Freedom of Opinion and Freedom of Expression’  to respond to two respectful letters complaining about the arbitrary use of terms like “misinformation” and “disinformation” for information which is likely just inconvenient for corporate global interests, global agencies and the policies of governments. I also protested at the use the of term “anti-vaccinationist” as catch-all hate speech for anyone who criticises vaccine products, programs or the lobby.

I was moved to write to Prof Kaye because he seemed to be displaying signs of intellectual fastidiousness last year when he asked Mark Zuckerberg to be more precise about how he defined “vaccine misinformation”. In my second letter I expanded this to include public and expert concern about 5G radiation – also coming to be classified expediently as “misinformation”, as with a recent communique by the Council of Europe (which I understand to be the committee of the 27 heads of government of the European Union). I wrote, it will be recalled:

“It seems now that at “warp-speed” global citizens are having their rights to discuss their future stripped away from them by politicians using Orwellian strategies. Now, every time that global corporate interests are called into question, governments only have to wheel out terms like “misinformation” or “disinformation” and they are safe from public scrutiny or accountability. This bodes ill both for democracy and the safety of citizens.“

It may be said that I was genuinely surprised when he did not reply to me the first time, and that a United Nations office did not even have the courtesy to provide an acknowledgment, even when repeatedly requested. It should also be obvious that this is just the sort of sensitive issue which his office should be attending to:  even if Kaye thinks I am absolutely wrong it ought to be within his grasp to explain why. The idea that there are increasing areas where governments should never have to be called to account is both absurd and menacing.

In the absence of a reply I went to Kaye’s 2019 book ‘Secret Police: The Global Struggle to Govern the Internet’ for illumination. The critical passage is found on page 91 where he writes favourably of the work of the Oxford Internet Institute (OII):

“OII has shown how all sorts of actors try to manipulate public opinion, from whether to vaccinate your children to whom to vote for in contested elections”

It is interesting to note here how once legitimate subjects of free speech have now fall under the heading of “manipulation”. In particular, he mentions OII’s Samantha Bradshaw, with whom I took issue at the House of Commons’ Digital, Culture, Media & Sports Committee Inquiry into FAKE News in 2017-18. I wrote to the Committee following her evidence:

Read more here.

Note: Growing up, my parents were big fans of BritComs - British sitcoms that ran on our Boston PBS station from the BBC. Are You Being Served? Fawlty Towers. And our very favorite, "Keeping Up Appearances."  To borrow from their dialog, I'm so pleased to announce that "our John" John Stone, is now also featured on the Children's Health Defense site.    It is alliances like this that will educate a broader swath of readers. Please join me in congratulating him.

###

For the Attention of David Kaye, on Freedom of Opinion and Expression

By John Stone

On May 1, 2019, David Kaye Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression for the United Nations wrote a letter to Facebook’s co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. He wrote to provide preliminary reactions to Facebook’s initiative to create an Oversight Board for Content Decisions (“the Board”).

In his letter he used as examples “anti-vaccination disinformation campaigns” and “vaccine misinformation:

Measures Facebook has adopted, for instance in the face of anti-vaccination disinformation campaigns, are often understandable responses to unfolding crises, but their ad-hoc development may be susceptible to criticisms of bias and arbitrariness. Aligning these measures with human rights standards, however, can place them on a more principled footing. Under Article 19(3), restrictions on expression may be validly imposed if they are “provided by law” and “necessary” to serve a legitimate objective, such as the protection of public health. The Human Rights Committee has found that “law” must be “formulated with sufficient precision to enable an individual to regulate his or her conduct accordingly.” Even though Facebook does not make laws, the general principles of legality should nevertheless guide Facebook’s development of its rules and policies. In the context of its response to vaccine misinformation, for example, these principles would at least require Facebook to provide more information about how it defines “vaccine misinformation,” the processes it has developed for flagging such content, and the types of consultations it conducted in developing these measures and with whom it consulted. These are also the kinds of considerations that the Board, to provide genuine oversight, should be equipped to assess in reviewing appeals of content decisions.

Article 19(3) also provides concrete metrics for assessing the impact of particular forms of expression on its platform, and calibrating a proportionate response to address such impacts. Under the requirement of legitimacy of objectives, it is incumbent on those advocating for restrictions to explain the “precise nature of the threat” and assess whether there is a “direct and immediate connection between the expression and the threat.” (CCPR/C/GC/34) In this example, these principles should lead Facebook to assess and explain how the spread of vaccine misinformation on its platforms raises public health concerns. Under the requirement of necessity, restrictions on expression must be “appropriate to achieve their protective function,” the “least intrusive instrument amongst those which might achieve their protective function” and “proportionate to the interest to be protected.” (Id.) Considerations of proportionality provide Facebook with a principled and internationally recognized framework for evaluating its decision to demote and de-emphasize anti-vaccination content rather than categorically ban such content on its platforms. Again, these are also the kinds of questions that the Board could be authorized to address in its review of content decisions.

On May 29, 2020 I wrote the a letter to David Kaye

To: David Kaye, ‘UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right freedom of opinion and expression

RE: Your letter to Mark Zuckerberg

Dear Mr. Kaye,

Read the full letter at Children's Health Defense For the Attention of David Kaye, on Freedom of Opinion and Expression

by John Stone

This is the moment of national humiliation that we somehow did not see on our television sets last night: British Prime Minister Boris Johnson surrendering to Bill Gates and the vaccine cartel, GAVI, hailed by him as the new NATO - while he speaks from a nation on its knees like Vichy France. While British news after months of wall to wall Coronavirus suddenly, mysteriously became obsessed with the 13 year old saga of Madeleine McCann almost no one saw Johnson's insipid, but rhetorically overblown speech at the end of the global summit he hosted in London yesterday and chaired with Gates. No one knew when they were electing Johnson that they were electing Gates and putting the vaccine industry at the heart of the British nation's future. It was particularly galling to see him extol the already failed Oxford COVID vaccine as an example of British innovation. This is presumably where we were headed from the moment lockdown was announced. The meeting elicited a short mention at the end of the BBC 10 o'clock news and was not mentioned on the front pages of any of the national newspapers this morning. If GAVI is the new NATO, and the focus of British national destiny perhaps the moment should not have been news managed out of existence. Now everything that our lives were worth has to be surrendered in an endless war against disease long ago devised by Mr Gates. In Gates's brave new world everyone will have to have vaccines like computer patches every five minutes, and when they don't work - if we are still standing - we will have to have another.

John Stone is UK Editor of Age of Autism

The UK government will host Gavi’s third donor pledging conference to mobilise at least US$ 7.4 billion in additional resources to protect the next generation with vaccines, reduce disease inequality and create a healthier, safer and more prosperous world. https://www.gavi.org/investing-gavihttps://www.gavi.org/investing-gavi

Below is a post from May, 2019 by John Stone. Remember, Prevent. Protect. Prosper. And they forgot one - Profit.

By John Stone

Seth Berkley, the director of Gavi, who led the call for a clamp down on vaccine criticism in social media two years ago in the British mainstream journal the Spectator had a few months before been named in the Mail on Sunday as the worst charity fat cat. Ian Birrell had written  an article entitled 'The fattest charity fat cat of them all: Foreign aid boss made Millions out £1.5  billion handed to his charity by British taxpayers' (actually nearly £2.5 million, heading for $4million). He reports:

"Seth Berkley has taken home more than £2 million over the past four years as chief executive officer of Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (Gavi), which has been given £1.5 billion by Britain...Another official at the Geneva-based group collects a pay package of more than £500,000 a year...Incredibly, Dr Berkley was given a housing allowance on top of his £623,370 pay package... Like others at Gavi, he is also offered help with school fees and is exempt from paying Swiss income taxes under a deal struck by the organisation."

In November 2017 I wrote in evidence to the UK House of Commons media committee (DCMS) inquiry into Fake News: 

"In this regard it is disquieting to look at the global campaign by vaccine lobbyists which reached these shores this summer advocating compulsory vaccination, having scored recent successes in Australia, Italy, France and parts of the United States. The British Medical Association jettisoned its traditional opposition to compulsory vaccination... – dismissed only a few years ago by a former chairman, Hamish Meldrum, as “Stalinist” ... -   and called for the matter to be discussed. Just a few days before an article appeared in the on-line Spectator by the CEO of GAVI, a global agency promoting vaccination, calling for “anti-vaxxers” to be excluded from “social media”... It must be emphasised that anyone remotely critical or informed about the vaccine lobby and its products, is placed under the general pejorative label “anti-vaxxer”: it is the vaccine/pharmaceutical lobby that polarises the debate – anyone who is not in favour of their entire open-ended agenda is subject to opprobrium and ad hominem attack. Complex health issues are being reduced in the mainstream arena to “Four legs good, two legs bad” type arguments."

Gavi's partners include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, UNICEF, the WHO, the World Bank and the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations (notably Johnson & Johnson, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck & Co., Novartis, Sanofi Pasteur, the vaccines division of Sanofi-Aventis and Pfizer), a network which surely leads back to the Global Health Security Agenda launched in the White House by Barack Obama in September 2014 in the wake of the William Thompson affair.

We have to ask whether it was ever the welfare of humanity which was at stake, or just the welfare of a certain class?

John Stone is UK Editor for Age of Autism.

by John Stone

On 27 April a New York Times article reported excitedly the result animal trials of the Oxford Coronavirus vaccine:

"Scientists at the National Institutes of Health’s Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Montana last month inoculated six rhesus macaque monkeys with single doses of the Oxford vaccine. The animals were then exposed to heavy quantities of the virus that is causing the pandemic... But more than 28 days later all six were healthy, said Vincent Munster, the researcher who conducted the test.."

This would have been just as well because just four days earlier on 23 April Oxford Vaccine Group under the leadership of Andrew Pollard amid immense publicity had begun experimenting on human subjects. On 30 April a contract was announced with AstraZeneca to manufacutre the vaccine, promising to deliver an entirely new vaccine to the market at unprecedented speed by September. The only trouble was that when the results of the animal trial came to light in mid-May it was disclosed that on the contrary all the monkeys had  become ill. The Daily Mail reported:

"In the latest animal trials of the vaccine carried out on rhesus macaques, all six of the participating monkeys went on to catch the coronavirus.

"Dr William Haseltine, a former Harvard Medical School professor, revealed the monkeys who received the vaccine had the same amount of virus in their noses as the three non-vaccinated monkeys in the trial.

This suggests the treatment, which has already received in the region of £90 million in government investment, may not halt the spread of the deadly disease."

Haseltine also commented in Forbes:

"There is a second troubling result of the Oxford paper. The titer of neutralizing antibody, as judged by inhibition of virus replication by successive serum dilutions as reported is extremely low. Typically, neutralizing antibodies in effective vaccines can be diluted by more than a thousand fold and retain activity. In these experiments the serum could be diluted only by 4 to 40 fold before neutralizing activity was lost."

Manifestly, human testing proceeded both against an entirely misleading background, and prematurely - which poses the most serious ethical questions. And now that we know that though the product was defective everything ploughs on regardless - Oxford/AstraZeneca now have contracts for hundreds of millions of rounds of the vaccine from both the British and the United States government.The British government has both a huge financial investment in the product and a reputational one, but it may help that Prof Pollard is both an adviser to the British regulator and chair of the committee recommends vaccine for public use.

John Stone is UK Editor for Age of Autism.

Note: We're pleased to share our own John Stone's work as it appeared on the Children's Health Defense site this week. We need to cross-pollinate  at every opportunity, share each other's work and support the greater community outside direct autism. Now is the time to expand our thinking, not retreat into a shell of narrow thought. The Age of Autism, and I mean the age, not just this site, the actual era and age of autism has produced and influenced thinkers far outside the autism community because of the bravery of those of us who have been sounding alarms for now close to 20 years. I think Dan Olmsted would be quite proud of this legacy.

###

By John Stone, UK Editor, Age of Autism

Recently, the somewhat notorious Oxford bio-ethicist, Alberto Giubilini, posted a blog on the Oxford University web-journal Practical Ethics. Giubilini, was advocating in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic, both for the compulsory tracking of global citizens and their compulsory vaccination (which was already a favourite theme of his before the advent of COVID-19). To the credit of the journal and Dr. Giubilini, I was able to post comments on the blog. Perhaps, less to their credit I have yet to receive an answer. This was my first comment:

Alberto

I have never understood with you bio-ethicists what it is you are doing except privileging your own opinions, often as not licensing the powerful to do what they want to the less powerful. And while there may be some conceivable benefit to licensing – as it were – this or that medical intervention you always seem over-optimistic about how it is monitored. Frankly, a scientist engaged in developing a product is going to be naturally dismissive of harms. As far as I can see you are playing a game in which the scientists are heroes and anyone who protests they have been hurt (or someone close to them) is trash almost by virtue of opening their mouths. But in fact there are myriads of ways that a product can go wrong, often quite frequently and admitted by the manufacturer (if not always disclosed by those administering). For instance, I have recently been referring to the Bexsero PIL which according to the U.K. schedule could give 3 in 1000 children Kawasaki Disease.

Let’s say with this present project that by the autumn, or even the end of next year, we will have little idea how to balance the danger of COVID-19 against the manifold products and simply professions of good intent will scarcely be enough. These products may well have the potential even to do immutable harm to human stock. Meanwhile, you are demanding that the population surrender rights over their bodies in perpetuity to inherently fallible bureaucracies and powerful industrial interests. I don’t see how you have knowledge to do that (or the reasoned acumen) and I don’t see where traditional checks and balances are engaged which could offer reasonable reassurance – frankly the agencies have been captured.
… in the event of a bad reaction the parents will probably just receive advice from the GP to give acetaminophen and go away and stop making a fuss – but they may have to deal with the consequences for the rest of their lives.

The second addresses Giubilini’s response to the challenge of another commenter. Giubilini had written as follows:

Thanks for the link. For the UK, that amounts to about 900 claims in over 40 years. Some of those vaccines are no longer in use and 40 years ago we knew less about risk groups. Today vaccines are not administered to groups at risk. Safety is basically 100%. If you look at the same document, you will see that the risks of non-vaccination are vastly larger. 20 million of cases of measles and thousands of deaths have been prevented in the UK alone thanks to the vaccine for instance.

Read more at Children's Health Defense.

by John Stone

This is  the letter I sent to my Member of of Parliament yesterday forwarding the excellent  letter to the UK's Secretary of Health and Social Care, Matt Hancock (pictured with Bill Gates),  by Robert Verkerk and Damien Downing:

Dear ------,

by John Stone

Next week Over Vaccine Group begin human testing for a COVID-19 vaccine with a with a view to marketing by the autumn. The speed of the process may be accelerated by the fact that Professor Pollard who heads the OVG is also advisor to the the UK's licensing body, the MHRA, and chair of the JCVI, the body which recommends vaccines to the British schedule. He very likely also sits on the British government’s mysterious Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies.  Age of Autism has been higlighting the manifold and apparently contradictory roles of Prof Pollard for more than four years. In 2014 as recently appointed chair of the JCVI he recommended Bexsero meningitis B vaccine of which he was lead developer to the UK infant schedule, leading to a sudden leap in its commercial prospects. Even the package insert discloses serious dangers for Bexsero including a 3 in 1000 risk of Kawasaki Disease for an infant having three doses. 

While Pollard and likely the British government's plans rush forward many scientists have questioned either the wisdom of the COVID-19 vaccine or how fast one could be brought to the market. On the present time scale we will know nothing of the long term effects. Tests will be carried on healthy people 18-55 but rolled out for children, the sick and the elderly. It will be trialled against "a control injection" not genuine placebo, (in fact a Men ACWY vaccine). At present we do not even know if the disease itself results in long term immunity or any immunity against all the other mutations which are beginning to proliferate. Meanwhile, the OVG promotes discussion about whether vaccination should be made compulsory. Indeed, if it were it would be Prof Pollard's committee which would decide what every man, woman and child in the United Kingdom would receive, and would not be able to refuse.

This is Pollard’s most recent disclosure in the JCVI minutes:

Professor Pollard receives no personal payments from the manufacturers of vaccinesHe is Director of the Oxford Vaccine Group in the Department of Paediatrics, University of Oxford and has current research funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Institute for Health Research, the European Commission, Medical Research Council, Wellcome Trust, InnovateUK, Meningitis Research Foundation, and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation. Hechairs the scientific advisory group on vaccines for the European Medicines Agency and is a memberof WHO’s SAGE.Other investigators in the Department conduct research funded by vaccine manufacturers and theDepartment has received unrestricted educational grant funding for a three-day course on paediatricinfectious disease from Gilead, and GSK in June 2019.

While it is inevitable that any scientist is going to be an enthusiast for is or her own research the long term indifference of the British government to traditional checks and balances is deeply concerning, and no less so at this difficult time. 

Recruitment begins for a clinical trial of a COVID-19 vaccine led by Andy Pollard

Professor Andrew Pollard, Vice Master of St Cross College, is the Chief Investigator on a new study developing a possible vaccine for COVID-19. The 'ChAdOx1 nCoV-19' vaccine, as it is called, was developed by a team of University of Oxford researchers based on an adenovirus vaccine vector. A collaborative team from the Jenner Group and the Oxford Vaccine Group is now recruiting over 500 healthy volunteers for clinical trials of the vaccine. While applications for volunteers have closed, those interested in volunteering for future COVID-19 studies can register interest here.

Pollard is one of a team of academics, which includes himself, Professor Sarah Gilbert, Professor Teresa Lambe, Dr Sandy Douglas and Professor Adrian Hill, who began the project on Friday 10 January 2020. Pollard said, ‘Starting the clinical trials is the first step in the efforts to find out whether the new vaccine being developed at Oxford University works and could safely play a central role in controlling the pandemic coronavirus that is sweeping the globe.’

You can read more about the study here.

Riley Lewis

7 April 2020

by John Stone

This is part of evidence I presented to  the United Kingdom House of Commons Science and Technology Committee Inquiry into Research Integrity in 2017. It was never published by the Committee but after much argument they were forced to amend their discussion document, known as POSTnote 544, so that it did not directly allege that Andrew Wakefield committed fraud by only attributing the claim to British Medical Journal. It is dismaying that we are still having to rebut so many false claims so many years after the events. The publication of Brian Deer's book is now only a couple of months away, but it has also been sad to see distinguished Danish scientist, Peter Gøtzsche, recycling these allegations in a book of his own. Prof Gøtzsche is in many respects a hero because of his stand against SSRI antidepressants (which are also implicated in autism) and on the safety HPV vaccines, but when he sides with Deer on the subject of Andrew Wakefield we wonder whether he has on this occasion done due diligence.

Brian Deer

An Extract From Evidence to House of Commons Science and Technology Inquiry into Research Integrity 2017 by John Stone on Behalf of Age of Autism

I am grateful to the committee for the invitation to submit evidence on behalf of Age of Autism. This evidence has been shaped by statements made in the Committee’s prior publication POSTnote 544 singling out the Wakefield “Lancet paper” as an example of fraud, and particularly in relation to the defence of a public health programme and policy [1]. If these statements had not been made I might have presented somewhat different evidence, but in the circumstances it is necessary to address these claims and their underlying assumptions.  It becomes particularly relevant in the light the latest campaign, led by Times Newspapers, to further discredit Andrew Wakefield.

This submission is not motivated by indifference to the control of infectious disease. What I am saying is that even though the control of disease is important it is not a good enough reason to stand the rules of research integrity or public discussion on their head. For this reason I have things to say not only about the Wakefield paper but the problematic nature of vaccine science, and also the general exclusion of the subject from contemporary mainstream public debate. Even the reasons for going to war at times of national peril are debated, but here it is as if everything has been conceded in advance to an industry and its public advocates. In these circumstances reasonable comment is driven to the margins with unreasonable, even to the extent of being buried by search engines such as google.

It is also problematic that virtually every public defence of the vaccine programme begins with an attack on the integrity of Dr Andrew Wakefield, as if the public humiliation of one man could provide scientific justification in perpetuity for an entire class of products. Wakefield has been globally transformed into the Emmanuel Goldstein of public health (to reference Orwell’s 1984) but we should not mistake that this is actually occurring at the level of propaganda and not of scientific (or historic) fact: indeed when people cite Wakefield as an example few have the remotest idea what body of facts they are citing, and this has reduced to zero the quality of informed public discussion. Meanwhile Wakefield’s fate serves as a warning to anyone else who might professionally step out of line. In this context I pose the question in what other field of human activity would this means of controlling public discussion and opinion be considered politically tolerable? I also pose the question how we can possibly know the vaccine programme is safe if we control opinion in this way?

By John Stone

In a short article in Southern Maryland Chronicle a few days ago the Head of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, hailed the latest autism gene study under the title 'Largest-Ever Genetic Study of Autism Yields New Insights'. Perhaps the message here is that in order to fight crime the government has decided to investigate the victims not the perpetrators (actually it has been doing this for three decades). In 2006 as Head of the Human Genome Project Collins told Congress:

"But genes alone do not tell the whole story. Recent increases in chronic diseases like diabetes, childhood asthma, obesity or autism cannot be due to major shifts in the human gene pool as those changes take much more time to occur. They must be due to changes in the environment, including diet and physical activity, which may produce disease in genetically predisposed persons. Therefore, GEI (the Genes and Environment Initiative) will also invest in innovative new technologies/sensors to measure environmental toxins, dietary intake and physical activity, and using new tools of genomics, proteomics, and understanding metabolism rates to determine an individual's biological response to those influences."

References on-line to GEI seem to peter out round about 2008 (perhaps they were in danger of finding something). So, 14 years ago Collins warned that there would be no material result from this kind of research and it is what the government have been doing ever since, more or less as an employment scheme (typically, the new study boasts nearly two hundred authors). As Eisenhower said to no avail in his farewell speech six decades ago:

"Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity....

"The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

"Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific/ technological elite."

Now - with whatever insights their may be into gene risk association or even patterns of damage - is that all the NIH have really succeeded in doing is  generating  a lot more data: the new study is not only "the largest ever" it is "the largest-ever" in NIH speak (and with a huge cast), but in terms of government approved science we are not an inch nearer discovering what is driving the autism epidemic, just as Collins told Congress it would not all those years ago: it is all one giant step for mankind to nowhere. Meanwhile, the autism rate in schools is perhaps 4 or 5 times higher than it was then: it is rather hard to tell because NIH and CDC have failed to monitor it in any systematic way.

When I started out on this trail I recall a meeting at a freezing local church hall in early 1997 addressed by Paul Shattock, now of the ESPA Autism Research Unit, Sunderland. One of the many and terrible things Paul told us was that 90% off the funding into the causes of autism was being swallowed by useless gene research, meanwhile the problem was ten times as bad as ten years before. He foretold exactly was going to play out. How appalling and cynical this charade has been.

If you want to turn a disaster into a catastrophe and catastrophe into a cataclysm send for Collins!!!

John Stone is UK and European Editor, Age of Autism

Editor of Age of Autism

by John Stone

According to  a Sunday Telegraph report a newly appointed UK law commissioner, Prof Penney Lewis,  is considering whether the government should criminalize  posting vaccine critical information on Social Media. Lewis, who is of US origin, was appointed last August soon after the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, spoke of clamping down on vaccine criticism on social media. The report states:

"In her first interview since taking up the role, Prof Penney Lewis revealed she is considering whether laws should be amended to “lower the threshold” for posting false information online that endangers lives."

The issue is fraught with ambiguity because well-researched opinion can often conflict with government dogma. As I wrote in  a letter 'An appeal to authority is not the same  as an appeal to knowledge' to BMJ on-line last year:

"I read the article by Martin McKee and John Middleton... with dismay, and ask what sense there can be in the fundamental attitude that all opinion favorable to vaccine products is correct (apparently by virtue of being favorable) and all opinion unfavorable to vaccine products malicious. The world they describe is very far from one I am familiar with. In the world I see people share bona fide information on-line, obtained from official sources, scientific articles, Patient Information Leaflets etc. And by ordinary standards they have a right: these are materials which belong in the public domain. I have never encountered anything on the web which plausibly could be identified as state misinformation or espionage about vaccine (it may occur in some territory of cyberspace which I have never visited): what we are talking about by and large is material which is well sourced, but not necessarily favorable to the industry and its apologists. Most troubling is that it is impossible to verify McKee and Middleton's claims that people are spreading false information, let alone deliberately. As with anything there must be some level of error but I am very far from sure that this is the main problem: what I see is people pasting and linking to materials of genuine concern, and which is not being addressed by our governments or officials. However much they may want to marginalise such data under the rubric "the benefits greatly outweigh the risks" or even the grandiose "vaccines are safe" a lot of it is not trivial..."

I added in a subsequent letter: "One thing I would point out here is how slippery are such terms as “disinformation” and “misinformation”, shifting the issue of whether something is true or not (which is complex) to whether it is politically convenient". We are always being told that information is "misinformation", which is no better than Orwellian doublespeak. As Heidi Larson  of the vaccine Confidence Project argued at the WHO vaccine safety conference in December 2019 (last session around 1.35)

"There's nothing illegal about these questions but they see doubt...but the challenge for some of these tech companies and even for others who are trying to clean up the misinformation our problem is as we have heard in the last 48 hours that there's not anything a 100% and what actually legally without creating a censorship thing can we absolutely say this is misinformation because we have a lot of ambiguity in the safety field and we have to come to terms with that..."

Also relevant is the letter of a United Nations official David Kaye on the subject of censorship in his letter to David Zuckerberg (1 May 2019):

By John Stone

It was admittedly not surprising Sciblogs, New Zealand chose not to post my  irreverent comment on the post 'The WHO Vaccine  Safety Summit - from someone who was actually there' of Helen Petousis Harris, chair of the WHO's Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety:

Helen

Unfortunately you cannot do medical safety while putting your fingers in your ears and going “La-la-la”. You have to listen to people, whether they are ordinary citizens or other doctors and scientists who are critical. Vaccines can fail and vaccines can harm: it is not all clean and tidy, while both pre-market safety trialing and post market monitoring are largely inadequate.  I have been very critical of Heidi Larson but to do her justice I believe  she ventured rather more at the conference than you are acknowledging here. It is not good enough to say in effect “I’m an expert so go away and shut-up”. I am sorry, but if you are not listening you are not an expert, and you certainly should not be in medicine.

John Stone, UK and European Editor, Age of Autism

Petousis Harris's blog is essentially circular and self-referential: science is only science if she says it is and evidence is only evidence if she say says it is, or if it has been agreed by a relevant committee: this is represented in her remarkable flow diagram which is not so much about science as people who disagree with her. One of her criteria for being an "expert" is belonging to certain societies or sitting on certain committees (which let us face it may be compromised by having responsibility for the policy). According to her to be an expert you have to "adhere to the scientific method" but we do not exactly know what that is. I perhaps adhere to the statement that "vaccines are unavoidably unsafe": a statement that "vaccines are safe" seems eminently falsifiable and whatever she says many people at the summit, which is entirely viewable on-line (whether you were there or not), had serious doubts: "relatively safe" is not the same as "safe" and is too vague a hypothesis to be testable. If you are actually hostile to reports of harm or discussion of mechanisms of harm there is a problem. Committees are no guarantee of science, and often an institutional method of blocking discussion of sensitive issues.

I doubt whether the tone of her intervention is helpful. It sounds like the nursery game of "I'm the king of the castle/And you're the dirty rascal!" 

Source: The High Wire Del Bigtree

By John Stone

Some readers may recall back in August following the pronouncements of British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, about clamping down on vaccine misinformation. I tried to help by reviewing our National Health Service webpage 'Vaccines are safe and important'. It may be said the web-managers were perfectly courteous but referred my comments to "Public Health England Immunology Team" who took no less than 106 days to reply. I was expecting something really good, considered expert replies to all my criticisms. What actually arrived was nothing but links to other web-pages committing similar solecisms and evasions. Reproducing the letter could apparently open me to draconian penalties but fundamentally the taunt about the "echo-chambers of social media" turns out to be nothing but projection: all they can do when challenged is repeat the propaganda. MISINFORMATION IS INFORMATION THE GOVERNMENT DOES NOT LIKE

Review of the United Kingdom National Health Service webpage ‘Why vaccination is safe and important’ (media reviewed 30 July 2019).

I am responding to claims or statements in this web-document ' Why vaccination is safe and important' [1] (not following the original order of presentation). 

I begin with the statement:

“(Vaccines) do not overload or weaken the immune system - it's safe to give children several vaccines at a time and this reduces the amount of injections they need”

It is not clear what the evidential basis is for this statement. Formerly, at least, British health officials were keen to cite a paper by Offit et al (2002) which suggested absurdly an infant could withstand 10,000 vaccines at a time. However far-fetched, this was based on a theoretical claim about routine exposure to environmental antigens. Evidently some environmental exposures are more dangerous than others, otherwise people would not be at risk from infectious diseases at all, but the basis of exposure through vaccination is different (injected), and involves adjuvants so it is perhaps not relevant at all to talk about the number of antigens (as in Offit). In August 2004 Dr Salisbury distinguished in an e-letter to me between the increased risk of adverse reactions in an extended schedule and “overload”, which begs the question what is meant by “overload” and what people are supposed to understand by such a statement. A paper by Aaby et al (2012) was entitled “Vaccine programmes must consider their effect on general resistance”, which is evidently a warning that there is no such blank cheque for expanding the schedule. I covered this ground in my published submission to the House of Commons Health and Social Care Committee inquiry into anti-microbial resistance last year [2]. The NHS need to clarify what they mean, but also state what the evidential basis is for this claim.

Another statement apparently contradicts the proposition that there is anything inherently safe about vaccinating:

“(Vaccines) get safety tested for years before being introduced - they're also monitored for any side effects”

By John Stone

These days history happens by stealth: the big shifts in power are often only incidentally reported in our mainstream news-media and can be hard to detect even by experienced watchers. Until a year ago almost no one had heard of the Global Health Security Agenda, although the project started in 2014 under the Obama administration and has already destabilised nations: something which is neither conjecture or “conspiracy theory” but easily established from public documents [1, 2] . Late last year I highlighted a column in electronic BMJ by J Stephen Morrison “senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and director of its Global Health Policy Center" [3]:

“The term "smart power" was new to me when I encountered it recently in a British Medical Journal blog as part of the new-speak vocabulary of J Stephen Morrison 'senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and director of its Global Health Policy Center".  Morrison's article is interesting both because it discloses explicitly how 9/11 was made an opportunity  to draw health into the global security agenda of the United States while failing to understand how such a move might result in the shattering of "consensus" and the post war "Western post-war liberal order": "smart power" even if it is smart is not "liberal" and will not lead to consensus. But it also spells out that the global vaccine program has become a covert instrument of US power. If Morrison by any chance laments the passing of the centre-left government in Italy, then perhaps the White House putting Italy and its health minister, Beatrice Lorenzin, in charge of global vaccine strategy was an error. 

“Morrison thinks it is a paradox but it is scarcely so if a government is seen to pursue coercive health measures over its citizens at the behest of a foreign power - even those who favor vaccination could be concerned at the state's new found powers over their bodies (which might also be indefinitely extended). If that was not so smart a political move perhaps the technology is not so smart either - as I remarked  to Steven Salzberg a few years ago: "The unwelcome news is that the “cruise missiles and drone helicopters” of the war on disease often hit the wrong target, and the more cruise missiles and drone helicopters you unleash the greater the risk".

“Frankly, no one knows what they are going to be injected with next. Smart bombs become too easily the agents of international chaos and mistrust: just so the smart bombs of the war on disease, both for what they can do to your body and what they can do to the political landscape, including destabilizing friendly governments. “Smart power” is also duplicitous: Italy is just the surrogate of the US. Why could the citizens of the world not have it directly from the mouth of Obama saying in effect ‘your bodies are not your own and we inject into them what we like?’.”

But the heat was turned up again at the beginning of 2019 when the World Health Organization declared “the vaccine hesitant” to be a threat to world health [2], and the Global health terror over measles was launched despite inadequate evidence either for the spread, or the casualties[1,4-6]. Also, of course, pinned to the tails of the largely artificial measles scare, was the demand for compliance with a host of other products to combat other diseases. Implausibly, health officials continue to stick to the baseless proposition that a two-month old infant can benefit from unlimited barrage of biological products without risk of harm, and never seem to have heard of the concept of “over-medication” [7].

This evening the BBC screens its documentary The Conspiracy Files: Vaccination Wars.  While vaccine program critics on both sides of the Atlantic have cooperated with this production do not expect any fair reporting: in fact the BBC long ago committed itself to the doctrine of false equivalence i.e. it does not matter how strong or rational the evidence is they will defer to the government-industry consensus. Even the use of the term "conspiracy" has slid into innuendo. Meanwhile, the documentary has been shared with the media but not the participants. Betrayal is their watchword.

Age of Autism's British editor, John Stone, writes:

Pre-publicity suggest the program makers will try to make out that commercial conflict is not an issue. Given such preposterous stance it is very hard to know where to begin or end.  Nevertheless, it might be instructive to post three submissions to UK Parliamentary bodies published by them.

PB 1584 John Stone’s response to letters from the Scottish Government and the JCVI

I hope it is in order for me individually to respond to the letters from the Scottish government and the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation as supporting witness in Angus File’s petition.

The JCVI Secretariat (1) have now responded with a defence of Prof Pollard’s appointment which I would like briefly to answer from public documents.

The code of practice of 2013 (cited by Mr Earnshaw as current in his letter) states in section 42 (2):

If a member has in the last 12 months received, or plans to receive a financial payment or other benefit from a business or representative body relating to vaccines or any other product or service that could be under consideration by JCVI...including... holding a directorship or other paid position...the member must declare this interest... If this interest is specific to an agenda item and the payment or other benefit is connected specifically with the product under consideration, the member will be required to absent him/herself from the discussion and any subsequent vote.