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Anti-Vax Propaganda Costs Lives. Just Stop It.

June 24, 2021 / Augustus / 0 Comments

I continue to be frustrated by the sheer tidal wave of misinformation on social media about COVID19 and vaccination.

Not at all with people who have doubts or questions. Given the horror stories that floating around Facebook and Twitter, and the fact that we tend to be more influenced by what we see more often, it is natural that people have questions.

What I do not understand or have patience with is people who pass on dangerous misinformation without checking. This is not reasonable, or “just discussion,” or whatever other excuses they come up with to justify themselves.

If you are telling people there is a massive conspiracy that involves every world government, every medical research facility and university, and the vast majority of medical practitioners, and on that basis, also telling them that they should ignore potentially life-saving advice being given, then you have an absolute, and I mean absolute, no excuses, obligation to check every story you post which supports that point of view, and every piece of counter-advice you pass on.

Failing to do this is not just lazy. It is intellectually dishonest to the point of being malicious. People die when they are given incorrect medical advice.

Just a couple of examples:

COVID vaccines are magnetic. They put metal in them to force the chemicals throughout the body.

No, they are not. There is no metal in them at all. Lists of ingredients of all Western vaccines are publicly available. This is a claim, like most anti-vax claims, that simply does not stand up to a moment’s thought. The average dose is about 1ml. A fifth of a teaspoon. Even if it were as densely packed with magnetic material as a liquid can be, it would not be enough to make keys stick to your chest. That’s either showmanship, or sweat and dirt.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/06/21/fact-check-covid-19-vaccines-arent-magnetic/7698556002/

Hundreds of people have died after getting the vaccine.

This is either sheer stupidity, or deliberate, dangerous distortion in order to deceive and manipulate. As at today, about 7 million doses of Pfizer and Astrazeneca COVID19 vaccines have been administered in Australia. You would expect about 3,500 of those people to be dead within a month.

The anti-vaxxers immediately screech, gleefully misquoting information from Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration; Well that’s horrifying! All those people dead and they don’t care! It’s all about money! It’s a obviously a depopulation programme! What else are they hiding from us!

The answer is, Nothing. In any population of 7 million people in Australia, about 3,500 will die every month, vaccine or no vaccine. That’s just how many people die every month anyway. What the TGA figures show clearly is that there is no increase in death rate in any population group following vaccination.

Well, it’s still dangerous, and no sensible person would get it.

As I noted in a previous post, the chances of dying because of an adverse reaction to a vaccine are about the same as getting killed by lightening sometime this year. That is about one chance in two million. If you get COVID19, you have about a 3 in 100 hundred chance of dying. That is, 60,000 in two million. Not to mention the far more common serious long term negative effects of COVID19 on respiratory and circulatory systems, the brain and the kidneys. By contrast, getting any of the Western COVID19 vaccines is vastly safer than being on the pill, driving a car, or taking aspirin.

https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/getting-a-covid-jab-is-safer-than-taking-aspirin

But renowned scientists are saying that the spike protein produced by the vaccine is cytotoxic, and kills red blood cells and does heaps of other nasty stuff.

No, they are not. Any scientist, or anyone who appears to have any credentials whatever no matter how bogus, who makes an anti-vax claim, is touted by anti-vaxxers as a “renowned scientist” or “renowned researcher.”

This includes disgraced lab assistants like Judy Mikovits, the “Frontline Doctors,” a motley collection of loony conspiracy theorists, and outright scammers like Joseph Mercola and Sherri Tenpenny.

The most recent “renowned scientist” to join this sad parade is Byram Bridle, a vet. I have read some of his writing on alleged cyto-toxicity of the COVID19 vaccines. It seemed obvious to me, who has only a first year university understanding of chemistry and biology, that he was confusing or conflating the spike protein the vaccines prompt cells to produce, and the lipid envelope which carries the vaccine safely into the cells.

Bridle claims to have uncovered a secret report which outlines just how toxic the vaccine is, and how it spreads through the body and accumulates in key areas, like the brain and the ovaries. Oh no! Except that he didn’t uncover it. That report has been public knowledge for months. And it doesn’t say anything like what he says it does. Don’t take my word for it. Read these two articles.

https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-vaccine-cytotoxic-idUSL2N2O01XP

“COVID-19 vaccines are going to sterilize our womenfolk,” Take 2

Well there are plenty of things that cure COVID19, Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin, for example. But they are pretending they don’t work and hiding the research because they can’t make any money out them, and they are making billions out of vaccines.

Really? Like, really? Every doctor, nurse, university and government is hiding the truth and letting people die in order to make a few more bucks? If you honestly think that way, then I feel sorry for you.

The fact is, Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine were initially promising, but larger, better designed tests did not show any measurable benefit. A recent meta-study of Ivermectin which claims to show a benefit if administered in the early stages of the disease is worth following up, but at this stage that study is simply an amalgam of small, not particularly rigorous studies. Putting a bunch of bad data together does not equal good data.

Results from Peru and India, where Ivermectin has been widely used, are suggestive, but again, not clear. Further research continues. No one is hiding anything. In addition, the only drug widely approved for treatment of COVID19, and the only drug demonstrated to reduce mortality, Dexamethasone, is a cheap generic.

Anyway we know they are lying because Dr Fauci admitted that wearing masks makes no difference. It’s a con!

This claim is based on a video that dates from early 2020. At that time it was thought that infection was spread mostly by contact with infected surfaces, rather than being airborne. If that was the case, wearing masks would not make much difference. That was the CDC’s advice at that time.

When it became clear that the virus could be spread via airborne droplets, the advice changed. Viruses don’t float around the air by themselves. They float around in droplets from sneezing or exhaled breath, and these droplets are easily filtered out by a well-fitting close-weave mask. Wearing masks, distancing, and good hygiene all help reduce the spread.

That is the great thing about science. It is open to new information. When new evidence is received, theories and ideas, and the practical advice based on those theories, also change. People who claim they would have more confidence in science if it didn’t keep changing its mind, simply show that they know nothing about what science is or how it works.

The list could go on, and on, and on. It’s not a vaccine! It’s experimental gene therapy. My sister’s boyfriend told me that his uncle’s boss knows someone whose mother’s friend works in a hospital and says heaps of people are dying from the vaccine and they are not allowed to say anything about it. OK.

The problem is that antivaxxers are always happy to create new scare stories, with no regard for truth or the potential deadly effects of their tales, and to support these by references to obscure articles they misquote or don’t understand, knowing that most people won’t bother to read them.

Dangerous misinformation spreads like a plague. That misinformation causes unnecessary infections and deaths, and delays strategies to reduce the impact of COVID19 on society. The much happier truth, that the mortality rate is coming down as research continues, and clinical practice clarifies what works and what does not work, and that there are now multiple carefully researched, safe and effective vaccines, is slower to get around.

Let’s hope that changes.

Astrazeneca and Johnson and Johnson Vaccines Pose No Risk and Will Save Lives

April 15, 2021 / Augustus / 0 Comments

I am still astonished by people who claim COVID-19 is “just the flu” or even worse, “the whole thing is made up.”

To believe this, you have to believe that every government in the world, every university and medical research foundation, and almost every medical practitioner, are either stupid, or involved in a conspiracy to reduce and control the population.

Questions like “Why would anyone take a vaccine that is likely to kill them, to prevent a disease that 99.99% of people will survive anyway?” also still float around Facebook and Twitter. The question is based on two false claims. First, that the vaccine is dangerous, or even that it is actually designed to kill people. Second, that COVID-19 either doesn’t exist or is not dangerous.

COVID-19 is a serious, highly infectious illness. The global average mortality rate is 3%. The mortality rate in Australia is about the same. As of this morning, Australia has had 29,437 cases, for 909 deaths.

This means that out of every thousand people who contract it, about thirty will die. This is in Australia, where we have one of the best health care systems in the world. The mortality rate for seasonal influenza is about 0.1%. About one person in every thousand who catches it will die. The mortality rate for COVID-19 is thirty times higher.

The mortality rate is lower for healthy younger people. It is higher for older people, or people who are obese, have diabetes, have chronic renal failure or heart disease, have or have had some forms of cancer, and possibly, people who are seriously vitamin D deficient. Government policy quite rightly puts people in these groups, along with health and aged care workers, at the top of the list to receive the vaccination.

The rate of morbidity – long term serious negative health effects in recovered patients – is even higher. This can include chronic lung damage, inflammatory disease and neurological impairment. These effects have been noted in children and young adults as well as in older people.

But surely the change of mind by the Australian Federal government and, in the US, the CDC, about the Astrazeneca and Johnson and Johnson vaccines proves that they are dangerous, more dangerous than the disease itself?

The people who make this claim are often the same people as those who claim the disease is a ruse to force people to take an experimental gene therapy that is actually a slow-acting poison as a form of population control. And the government and medical authorities are pausing administration of some vaccines because concerns exist about their safety, which proves they are all dangerous. It is not possible reasonably to hold both of these opinions together.

I won’t engage with the population control/gene therapy delusion. That is sheer, baseless silliness.

But are the Astrazeneca and J&J vaccines really causing a large number of fatal blood clots?

Being vaccinated, no matter against what, does not make you immortal. People still die from heart disease, cancer, respiratory illness, accidents, etc.

169,301 people died in Australia in 2019. That is, 464 people die in Australia every day – eighteen people per million population. The figure is roughly similar in the US, and in most other developed nations.

It should be obvious, then, that if you vaccinate a million people in a day, eighteen of them will die the same day, because they would have died that day anyway. If you take another million people from a similar population group and don’t vaccinate them, eighteen of them will die that day too. In both groups, 126 will die in the following week, 525 in the following month, over 1500 after three months.

So when you see headlines blaring “125 People Dead a Week After COVID Jab,” stop and think. Out of a million people, 125 will die in an average week anyway. In fact, since the vaccine is being given first to people in high risk groups, you would expect the death rate to be slightly higher, because the death rate in those groups; the elderly, the obese, people with heart disease and chronic renal failure, for example, is significantly higher anyway.

So what is the truth about blood clots? Your blood needs to clot. For people who lack some blood clotting factor, people with haemophilia, for example, every cut or major bump can be a risk of death, because they do not stop bleeding. On the other hand, you do not want clots forming at random or floating around your bloodstream.

The media invariably describes the blood clots that have been reported days or weeks after someone has been vaccinated as “rare” as if that proves they can only have been caused by the vaccine. But how rare are such clots in the general population?

The CDC estimates that the overall incidence of deep vein thrombosis or pulmonary embolism is about one person per thousand population per year.

Clots you don’t want can be caused by a variety of factors; sitting for too long, as in long distance plane travel, smoking, pregnancy, heart attacks, oral contraception. The additional risk of developing a dangerous blood clot for a woman on the pill is between 0.3% and 1.0% every ten years. About one in every two hundred women will develop a dangerous blood clot over any ten year period on the pill. Most of the clots reported after vaccination were in women under sixty, the group most likely to be users of oral contraception.

Not every adverse effect reported after a vaccine is the fault of the vaccine. In the Pfizer trials, with over 70,000 people, 0.7% of those who received the vaccine reported a severe adverse reaction. Not good, you might think. But 0.8% of those who received a placebo, usually a tiny injection of normal saline, also reported a severe adverse reaction.

How many of the adverse reactions reported by people who received the placebo were caused by the vaccine? None, because they didn’t receive the vaccine. So how many of the lower number of adverse reactions reported by people who did receive the vaccine were caused by the vaccine? Probably also none. But all were investigated carefully and thoroughly for any possible causative effect, or any incidence over the average in the general population.

In the case of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, after six million doses administered, six women who had received the vaccine reported serious blood clots within two weeks. All were aged between 18 and 48. To be clear, the vaccine was called into question after 1 person per million, all of whom were in a high risk group for blood clots for other reasons, developed clots that normally occur at a rate of one per thousand people every year.

If that sounds ridiculous, it is.

Cutting supply of the Astrazeneca and Johnson and Johnson vaccines will not save lives. There is no evidence that either vaccine poses any additional risk to recipients. Both vaccines have proven 90% effective in preventing severe illness due to COVID. Both will save lives.

Hating Bill Gates

March 20, 2021 / Augustus / 0 Comments

Bill Gates has been the Emmanuel Goldstein of the anti-vaccination movement for years. But why are so many other people suddenly jumping in?

Boy that Bill Gates is an evil dude. Or so you might think if all you read is Facebook and Twitter. US commentator Candace Owens (whom I otherwise like and admire) has called him a “vaccine criminal,” while conspiracy theorist Alex Jones says he is “Satan’s benchwarmer,” the “placeholder for the anti-Christ.” Gates is hell-bent on depopulating the world so the elite can take over and live in unimaginable luxury while the common folk live as slaves. His chosen method for this depopulation is vaccines, and COVID-19 was created to trick or force everyone into getting the vaccine that will either kill them or track them using microchip implants.

What makes it even worse is that he has publicly announced his intentions, and has been carrying out this plan in plain view, if people would only look. He even owns patent WO (for World Order) 666 for implantable tracking technology, but people are sheeple, and refuse to believe what is right in front of them.

It’s a great plot for a movie. Tom Hanks has to uncover the secret and save the world in the nick of time.

You can’t get much more evil than all that. If all of this is true.

So let’s look at some of the claims being made about Bill Gates, and see how much truth is in them. But first, let’s consider another, related post that has recently done the rounds of Facebook and Twitter. This tells the story of Robert F Kennedy Jnr bravely facing down the CDC and showing that “The CDC is a subsidiary of the pharmaceutical industry. The agency owns more than 20 vaccine patents and purchases and sells $4.1 billion in vaccines annually.”

Hmm.. sounds worrying. Let’s check. First of all though, let’s understand what patents are.

Patents protect a creator’s design, product or process, so that the creator can invest in research and development, and be confident that some ratbag is not going to come along and steal their work and profit from it by using the process or manufacturing the product without having done the creative work and research. For example, there are over a thousand patents which protect the latest iPhone.

Vaccines are hugely expensive to create, and just as hugely expensive to test, then to package and bring to market. In the same way many patents may protect a product like an iPhone, many patents may be needed to protect a single vaccine. These may cover the antigen itself, adjuvants, packaging, manufacturing processes, method of delivery, etc. Patents can be licensed to other companies or individuals. iPhones include technology licensed from other companies, as well as technology developed by Apple itself.

The CDC owns a large number of patents related to medical technology. This is because the CDC does a huge amount of medical research. Some of these relate to vaccines. This is because from time to time a researcher will discover, for example, an antigen that provokes an immune response to a particular pathogen, or a method of inactivating a virus for use in a vaccine, or a new adjuvant.

The CDC lists all of its patented technology which is available to be licensed. https://www.cdc.gov/os/technology/techtransfer/industry/licensing/technologies.htm Given it is a publicly funded organisation, why would the CDC patent these things? Why not just let people use them? There are three reasons. Firstly, it stops anyone else from patenting the CDC’s research, profiting from it, and stopping others using it. Secondly, licensing this technology protects the integrity of the manufacturing process, assuring end users of the quality of the product. And thirdly, licensing royalties provide a small return to tax-payers for their investment in the CDC’s research.

The CDC owns patents, not on vaccines, but on vaccine technology (amongst many other things), which it licenses to manufacturers and to other research bodies. There are fifty-seven such patents currently listed. So far, Robert Kennedy Jnr is roughly, sort of right. The CDC does own more than 20 vaccine-related patents. Everything else he said in the interview in which he made that claim, and everything else in the Facebook post in which these claims appear, is false. As we go on to consider the Bill Gates conspiracy theories, we will see that this is a very common anti-vax tactic: Make one true, or near true, claim, then by exaggerating, missing context, or simply making data up, proceed to make claims which are completely false, and because false, dangerous. Dangerous because they are an attempt to dissuade people from receiving life-saving treatments and preventatives.

The CDC does not sell vaccines. In fact it spends nearly half its annual budget (in 2017 $4.1 billion out of a total $11.9 billion budget) on buying vaccines. Which it then sells at a profit, right? No. Which it then gives away:

“CDC buys vaccines at a discount and distributes them to grantees—i.e., state health departments and certain local and territorial public health agencies—which in turn distribute them at no charge to those private physicians’ offices and public health clinics registered as VFC providers.” https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/programs/vfc/about/index.html#glance

But it still makes money from its vaccine technology patents? Yes, although it does not manage the licensing of those patents directly. This is handled by National Institutes of Health Office of Technology Transfer (OTT), which is responsible for licensing all of the patents generated from the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the CDC. If we want to be picky, we should note it is the Department, specifically the Secretary of the Department, which owns the patents, not the CDC itself.

Last year the OTT reported income of $78.2 million for all patent licensing from the NIH, CDC and FDA. Let’s say that half of this was licensing of CDC patents, and half of that was generated by vaccine technology patents. The CDC has another six research areas in which patents are available to license, so this is a very generous estimate. That means the CDC’s income from vaccine-related patent licensing was no more than $19.55 million, and probably less.

There are three things to note about this. Firstly, the CDC does not make $4.1 billion selling vaccines. It doesn’t sell vaccines. It SPENT $4.1 billion on vaccines, which it gave away. Second, the maximum of $19.55 million which the CDC made from royalties on vaccine-related payments is less than one fifth of one percent of its budget. Thirdly, all of those royalties went back into further medical services and research. If you think less than one fifth of one percent of the CDC’s budget is enough to corrupt an entire organisation whose purpose is improving health, whose personnel are there and are recruited because they want to make world a better and healthier place, many of whom put themselves at considerable risk in order to do so, then allow me to suggest politely that you have rocks in your head.

This does not mean the CDC is above criticism. It is sometimes slow to react, and sometimes gives contradictory advice. Like all very large government organisations it has become top heavy and bureaucratic. It has lost focus on its original mandate to research and assist with infectious diseases, and broadened into other medical fields. But there is no evidence to suggest it is corrupt or in cahoots with pharmaceutical companies.

Considering these claims by Kennedy has given us some useful background to the conspiracy theories about Bill Gates, and the venomous rage those stories generate.

Let’s start with patent WO666. Microsoft Technology does own patent WO2020060606A1. That is the little bit of truth in this story. It isn’t owned by Bill Gates. Bill Gates hasn’t worked day-to-day at Microsoft since 2008, and retired from his position as Chairman of the Board in 2014. The WO doesn’t stand for World Order, it is an abbreviation for World Intellectual Property Organization, the largest international patent issuing organisation, and is the preface to all patents issued by that body. The A1 at the end indicates that the patent has not yet been granted; it has been applied for and published so other patent holders can review it before the patent is granted. The 2020 indicates the year in which it was published. The patent number is 060606. These are issued sequentially and have no meaning other than being an index/reference. The number does include three sixes, but you have to ignore the other eight letters and numbers to get “patent 666.”

What is the patent application for? Microchipping humans, right, so they can be tracked? No. There is nothing in the application which suggests any kind of implant or any sort of geo-location or tracking. It is an application for digital technology which could be included in a watch or fit-bit type device, which would reward users with crytpto-currency for physical activity.

Most crypto-currency, bitcoin is an example, is “mined” using computer GPUs. This process uses considerable electricity, estimated at over 60 terawatt hours per year; more than the entire country of Switzerland. https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2019/07/08/bitcoin-devours-more-electricity-than-switzerland-infographic/

The Microsoft proposal would reward people with crypto-currency for keeping fit. It is that simple. It is also worth noting that the patent hasn’t been granted yet, and that while Microsoft had a fitness band, released in 2014, it stopped producing them in 2016, and has announced no plans to produce another. If granted, the technology patented in WO2020060606A1 would likely be licensed to other companies like Fitbit, rather than in a new product made by Microsoft itself. A company which in any case, as noted above, Bill Gates is no longer involved in running.

“But Bill Gates and Dr Anthony Fauci sent $7.5 million to the Wuhan lab to research altering bat viruses so they would infect people, and Bill Gates owns the patent for Coronavirus!”

The little bit of truth in this is that since 2014 the National Institutes of Health has granted $3.7 million to a well-respected research organisation called Ecohealth Alliance to fund research into coronaviruses. Since 1984 Dr Anthony Fauci has been director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, one of twenty-seven bodies which make up the NIH. Dr Fauci has never been in Wuhan, and it is not clear whether he had any role in the grant to Ecohealth Alliance. He certainly had no role in The Ecohealth Alliance’s decisions about where that grant money was directed. Bill Gates, incidentally, has nothing to do with the NIH. The Gates Foundation has made one grant of $1.5 million to Ecohealth Alliance, but that was in 2020 and was for agricultural development.

Funds from the NIH grant were divided between the Wuhan lab, and institutes in Shanghai, Beijing, and Singapore. This is a list of published papers based on research partially funded by that grant.

https://projectreporter.nih.gov/project_info_results.cfm?aid=9819304&icde=49588715

Most of the recent virus scares have come from zoonotic infections, that is, infections which have jumped from animal hosts to humans. Examples include Zika, Ebola, Plague, and West Nile Fever. Research into coronaviruses is important because of their ability to jump from animal to human hosts, often with deadly results. Many ordinary colds result from one of the four common coronaviruses: 229E, NL63, OC43, HKU1. Most people will suffer from one these at least once, with nothing more than a mild fever, a cough and sniffly nose.

However, coronaviruses can also be killers. SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), and MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) are both examples. Because these diseases are highly infectious and have high mortality rates, many health authorities were concerned that the next major pandemic could be a coronavirus, and offered grants for study into their genome and infection pathways. If a new, deadly coronavirus appeared (and it has – that is what COVID-19 is), this research would help us be better prepared.

China’s behaviour in deleting records of the genome, denying the outbreak, and then denying the risk of infection, were reprehensible. China should be held to account. It is possible that the virus escaped from the Wuhan lab. This needs to be carefully and independently investigated. But the research itself was worthwhile and deserved to be funded. There was nothing nefarious about the funding at all. Also, Bill Gates had nothing whatever to do with it.

But then how does he happen to have a patent for coronavirus that dates from 2014? Surely that proves this pandemic was all planned in advance?

The normal anti-vax conspiracy practice, as we have seen above, is to take a little truth, and then add several large lies. In this case, there is no truth at all, just several wild assumptions.

There are many coronaviruses. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funds many medical services and research organisations. One of these is the Pirbright Institute in England. The Pirbright Institute has received two grants from the Gates Foundation, one in 2013 for research into diseases affecting livestock, and one in 2016 for research into a more effective flu vaccine.

In 2018 Pirbright was granted a patent which covers the development of an attenuated (weakened) form of a coronavirus that causes respiratory diseases in poultry, which they hope might be used be used as a vaccine to prevent respiratory diseases in birds, including avian infectious bronchitis. The vaccine is not owned by Bill Gates, the funding his foundation provided was for completely different purposes, and the weakened avian coronavirus for which Pirbright holds a patent is a completely different pathogen from SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus which causes COVID-19.

In the last couple of months the Pirbright Institute, which has considerable experience with zoonotic and respiratory infections, has collaborated with researchers at the University of Oxford and Public Health England, to try to develop a vaccine for COVID-19. Bill Gates has nothing to with that either.

https://www.pirbright.ac.uk/news/2020/03/pirbright-begins-testing-new-coronavirus-vaccines-animals-help-combat-covid-19

“But still, everyone knows Bill Gates experimented on African children with untested vaccines.”

The trouble with claims like these is that they are easily made, and easily passed on. Just create a meme with a happy looking picture of Bill Gates juxtaposed with a dying black child, and another child being poked with what looks like a horse needle, and you are guaranteed a viral response. People are less inclined to read referenced articles, or to look carefully for facts in government or local medical reports. It is easier and more fun to repost that story about the horrible Bill Gates, because, like, it’s probably true, and even it isn’t he deserves it because everyone knows he has done so many other horrible things. Then you can feel indignantly self-righteous for a few minutes, be pleased with the number of likes you get, and go back to cat videos and complaining about the government.

Except that Bill Gates Bill Gates doesn’t own any vaccine patents, he doesn’t sell vaccines, and he doesn’t conduct any research into vaccines. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funds health services and research including sanitation, vaccines, clean water, anti-biotics, birth services, and diagnostic and treatment centres. Mr Gates has no role in the day-today determination of which bodies receive grant funding, and no role at all in determining how grant recipients spend that money.

This experiments on black children story seems to have started with a 2017 non-peer reviewed article on international law and the accountability of NGOs, (non-government organisations).

https://digitalcommons.law.ggu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1205&context=annlsurvey

In that article, the author, Sharmeen Ahmed, claims that several programmes funded by the Gates Foundation resulted in “numerous deaths and injuries, with accounts of forced vaccinations and uninformed consent.” She offered no references to support these claims.

If true, this would show that some organisations which have been part-funded by the Gates Foundation need to operate more carefully and openly, and perhaps that the Foundation needs to vet grant-receiving organisations more carefully. But Ahmed’s claims are not true. They were known not to be true six years before they were published. Sadly, like most anti-vaxxers, Ahmed has no interest in what is true.

Her story related a mishmash of distortions about a trial of HPV vaccination that was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which ran in India, Peru, Uganda and Vietnam. Let’s note first off that it was not a trial of an untested or experimental vaccine, as is often claimed in various Farcebook references. Gardasil had been approved for use in the USA in 2006, following many years of research and clinical trials, and Cervarix in 2009. They have been hugely success in reducing the incidence of cervical cancer. By 2010, when large numbers of girls began to be vaccinated through the trial programme, both vaccines had solid research support, had been approved for use in most Western countries, and had been proven in the field to be both safe and effective. The purpose of the trial funded by the Gates Foundation was not to assess the vaccine itself, but the practicalities and costs of widespread vaccination in very poor rural and densely populated urban areas.

All went well, until a small number of girls in India, seven out of 23,428, died within four months of receiving the vaccine. This story was picked up by local, then national media. A furore was created, and the trial halted. A government review was undertaken. Sharper readers may already be wondering whether seven girls out of 23,428 in impoverished areas of India dying in any four month period was anything out of the ordinary. Sadly, they would be right to do so.

To quote from the official government report:

“There were a total of 7 deaths, 5 from the AP and 2 from Gujarat. A detailed review of death cases were undertaken from the available records in the form of FIR, Clinic/hospital prescriptions/records and the autopsy. Out of the five deaths reported from Andhra Pradesh, two died due to consumption of organo-phosphorus poisoning (autopsy proven) and one died due to drowning in a well.

These three girls died after 45, 97 and 49 days after the last HPV vaccine dose respectively. The fourth case developed symptoms 96 days after receiving the third dose of the vaccine and had died of unrelated disease which cannot be linked possibly to HPV. The fifth case had started symptoms 23 days after the last dose and possibly died of severe malaria after eight days of treatment in health facilities. Similarly at Gujarat, one case died of snake bite and the other case died of severe malaria.

… The background death rates among girls 10-14 years of age in both Vadodora and Khammam districts did not show any increase rate. In fact in Vadodora district the death rate has significantly decreased in 2009 compared to the past years.”

https://web.archive.org/web/20180106062830/https://www.icmr.nic.in/final/HPV%20PATH%20final%20report.pdf

None of the deaths of any of the seven girls was related in any way to the Gardasil or Cervarix vaccines they received as part of the trial. We have seen the same kind of irrational panic over the last month in relation to the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine. “It causes blood clots!” No it doesn’t. The rate of dangerous thromboembolism is no greater in vaccine recipients than unvaccinated populations. See the WHO review here:

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/03/who-review-finds-no-blood-clot-link-astrazeneca-covid-vaccine

And my own earlier comments about relative risk and COVID-19 vaccination here:

https://qohel.com/2021/02/01/covid-19-health-matters-life-matters/

Just as an aside, another of the programmes funded by the Gates Foundation was MenAfriVac. This programme, which cost $70 million, was one of the most successful African health initiatives ever. Between 2010 and 2019, 315 million people in Africa’s meningitis belt, an area extending across the width of sub-Saharan Africa, received the vaccine. Cases of meningitis A have dropped almost to zero. According to the WHO, the vaccine is “expected to eliminate meningococcal A epidemics from this region of Africa,” Meningitis regularly killed thousands of people during outbreaks. Not any more. Without MenAfriVac, hundreds of millions of Africans would be vulnerable to a disease that can kill within hours and leave survivors paralysed, blind, and intellectually disabled.

If anti-vaxxers cared about the truth, they would be gasping for breath right now. Sadly for their victims, they don’t. They only care about ammunition. Here is the last gasp.

“But Bill Gates has publicly said he intends to use vaccines for population control! He is lulling people into a false sense of security before forcing everyone to be vaccinated with a vaccine that isn’t a vaccine, will permanently alter their DNA, and will kill half of those who receive it.”

To paraphrase Theoden of Rohan, “What can people do against such reckless stupidity?” Is it even worth trying to answer such manifest irrationality? Well, perhaps briefly.

Firstly, just because a vaccine operates in a different way from previous vaccines does not mean it is not a vaccine. The mRNA (messenger RNA) vaccines developed against COVID-19, are designed to provoke an immune response just like other vaccines. They just shortcut a couple of steps in doing so, and this has the potential to make them faster and more reliable. Neither mRNA vaccines, or any other proposed COVID-19 treatment or preventative does or even can alter human DNA.

“Yeah, well, Bill Gates still said he was going to use vaccines to eliminate half the population.”

No, he didn’t. So where the heck did that come from? In 2010 Bill Gates said “The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s heading up to about nine billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.”

Does this mean he intends to poison vaccines, or implant tracking devices in them, or slow release killers to be activated by the 5G signal? I am not going to link to any of the fantastically dishonest or relentlessly stupid and baseless videos which make this claim. You can find them, or friends will send them to you.

Instead, here is a link to Bill Gates explaining exactly what he meant, which is pretty much exactly what it was obvious to me and every rational person on the planet he meant. As infant and youth mortality improves, families have fewer children, so over time the rate of population growth declines, and even becomes negative. This is true of every developed country in the world. There is nothing remotely controversial about this. What this means is that doing everything possible to improve infant mortality and health does not mean unsustainable population growth. The evidence shows exactly the opposite. The healthier we are, the more stable the population becomes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obRG-2jurz0

None of this means that Bill Gates is perfect. He is human. He gets things wrong. His Foundation will get things wrong. They fund some programmes I believe are inappropriate. But this does not make him a monster. Despite the occasional misallocation (in my view) of funds by the Gates Foundation, it is still a huge influence for good. See the MenAfriVac programme briefly described above for one example. What we should be concerned about, and doing everything we can to combat, is the repeated, lazy and vicious misrepresentations of anti-vax lobby groups. Anti-vaxxers kill children. If anyone deserves contempt, it is they.

More from the Anti-vax Tinfoil Hat Brigade

February 21, 2021 / Augustus / 0 Comments

It was interesting to see a few hundred tin foil hatters turn out to the million people anti-mandatory-vaccinations comedy sessions around the country.

Void of purpose from the start, since no COVID-19 vaccine in Australia is mandatory.

Bu of course, the “I’m not anti-vax, but…” crowd are not really about objections to mandatory vaccination, they want to scare people off vaccines altogether.

This in unmitigatedly, inexcusably evil.

It isn’t woke, or clever. People who are anti-vaxxers don’t know more than others. They haven’t “Done their research.” They are not concerned about your welfare, or that of your children.

But, they wail…

COVID-19 vaccines are experimental. No, they are not.

COVID-19 vaccines contain cells from aborted babies. No, they do not.

COVID-19 vaccines change your DNA. No, they do not.

COVID-19 vaccines contain tracking devices. No, they do not.

COVID-19 vaccines have terrible side effects the government and bug pharma are hiding from you. No, they do not.

COVID-19 vaccines are part of Bill Gates and the Cabal’s plot to reduce world population. No, they are not.

COVID-19 vaccines don’t stop you getting the disease. Yes, they do.

COVID-19 vaccines won’t save lives. Yes, they will, and already are.

None of the above complaints has any basis in science or reality. They originate with scumbags, scroungers and scammers like Andrew Wakefield, Joseph Mercola, Robert F Kenned Jnr, Sherri Tenpenny, etc.

I have said this before, and it is worth saying again, if you are telling people not to get a proven, life-saving medication or procedure because you don’t understand that post hoc ergo propter hoc (after, therefore must be because of) is a fallacy, or because you would rather pass on Facebook memes that agree with your prejudices, or you can’t be bothered checking your views with genuine science and medical authorities, then you are either astonishingly stupid, or simply evil. There is no other option.

You don’t get to try to talk people out of life-saving medical treatments on basis of unchecked dim-wittery from known shysters, and then claim to be concerned about others.

By all means don’t get the vaccine if you don’t want to. But this is not just a decision that affects you. You are in exactly the same position as those who refused to refused to follow Ignaz Semmelwiess’s guidelines on handwashing between examinations. “There’s no reason it should work!” “You can’t make me wash my hands!” “You can’t experiment on me!” “It’s just a conspiracy to sell carbolic acid!” They were the what anti-vaxxers are now – promoters of fear, disease and death, and for the same reasons.

There are limits to how much a society can tolerate deliberate, dangerous, dishonesty when it comes to health and safety. So again, don’t get the vaccine if you don’t want to. No one will make you. But understand if people need to put other precautions in place to protect themselves, their families, their workers, their clients and residents, and those who are genuinely unable to get the vaccine from the demented selfishness of the anti-vaxxers.

Google, Facebook, and Mainstream Media Madness

February 19, 2021 / Augustus / 0 Comments

I am no fan of either Google or Facebook. Google has a long history of distortion of news and of down-grading results from websites it disagrees with. Facebook does the same, while at the same time happily continuing to profit from the publication of anti-semitism and anti-vax paranoia, both are which are counter-factual and dangerous to the point of being evil.

But…

People now complaining about Facebook’s delisting Australian news sites, and Google’s suggestion it may do the same thing, or cease to operate to operate in Australia at all, have either not been paying attention, or are deliberately grandstanding.

For an example of the latter, take this exchange from Hansard: Economics Legislation Committee 22/01/2021

Treasury Laws Amendment (News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code) Bill 2020. (H/T Catallaxy Files)

… Senator BRAGG: Turning to your tax affairs, how much corporate tax did Google pay in Australia last year?

Ms Silva : Last year Google paid $59 million in tax, and we comply with the tax laws of the land. We restructured our business in 2016 in line with the government’s shift and the change to MAL, the multinational anti-avoidance law. We shifted to a reseller model from then, and last year’s tax was $59 million.

Senator BRAGG: $59 million in corporate tax?

Ms Silva : $59 million in corporate tax.

Senator BRAGG: What’s your revenue in Australia?

Ms Silva : The gross revenue was $4.8 billion, and the profit before tax was $134 million.

Senator BRAGG: $4.8 billion, and you paid $59 million in corporate tax. …

Senator Bragg was an accountant before he became a Liberal Party Senator. He knows very well that taxes are paid on profits, not revenue. Almost no commercial enterprise in Australia could survive if taxes were paid on revenue, that is income before any expenses. Our own business, for example, has revenue of about $1.5 million per year. Our profit, the money left over after expenses including wages, including ours, which are less on an hourly basis than our staffs’, is about $30,000 per year, almost all of which goes back into the business.

Google Australia’s profit before tax was $134 million. It paid $59 million in corporate tax. this is an effective tax rate of 44%. Not only is Google paying its share of tax in Australia, but by world standards, Australia is an extremely expensive place to do business.

Now to today’s stories about Facebook de-linking Australian news sites.

More than half of all traffic to Australian media sites is driven by Facebook and Google. Google does not publish full stories from news sites, it simply links to them. Australian media have spent months whining about this, and complaining to government that Facebook and Google should be forced to pay for sending traditional media media websites traffic.

In no rational world does this make sense. Everyone who has ever run a website knows that traffic is life. Most websites, at least from time to time, pay for advertising, which in web world, means paying for traffic. But here in Australia, media companies want Facebook and Google, which send them the vast majority of their traffic, to pay them for the privilege of doing so.

Sadly, and destructively, but unsurprisingly, they seem to have convinced a sufficient number of politicians that this was a good plan. Unsurprisingly, because most politicians have never run a business, and have no idea how real-world market forces work.

Also unsurprisingly, Facebook has simply said “No thanks. If we have to pay for linking to you, we won’t link to you.” A perfectly reasonable and foreseeable outcome. But now see how the media darlings explode with rage as their traffic, and consequently their advertising revenue, drops to a tiny proportion of previous figures. It’s so unfair! All my work has disappeared!

Tough. Play silly games, win silly prizes.

If the Treasury Laws Amendment (News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code) Bill 2020 is not defeated, something that seems unlikely at this stage, Australia’s traditional media groups could well find themselves pushed to the wall far faster than they expected. And it will be their own short-sighted, greedy fault.

COVID-19: Health Matters. Life Matters

February 1, 2021 / Augustus / 1 Comment

If one million people are vaccinated with the new COVID-19 vaccine over the next year, this is what we can expect:

4500 will develop an invasive cancer. 1600 will die from cancer.

About 250 will develop Bell’s Palsy (facial paralysis).

1,000 will be diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis.

About 500 will suffer from Encephalitis (brain inflammation).

1700 will have strokes.

Almost 5,000 will die from heart disease.

In total, of that million who were vaccinated, 15,000 will be dead a year later. More than 280 every week. 40 people every day.

Do you still want to take the risk?

You should, because that is how many people will contract and die of those illnesses in any case. Every year, of every million people in peaceful, prosperous nations, about 15,000 will die, about one third of them from some form of heart disease.

Given that the vaccine will be administered first to people in vulnerable groups; older people and people with pre-existing conditions, the death rate may be even higher in that group. As it would be for people in that group in any case.

Incidentally, over any given year, for every million people, about 120 will die in motor vehicle accidents, about 40 from drowning, about 200 from poisoning, accidental or otherwise, and about 50 will be murdered. Having the COVID-19 vaccine won’t change those figures either.

So when you see alarmist headlines about someone dying two weeks after getting the vaccine, remember you could have a headline every week screeching that another person who recently had the vaccine had been stabbed, shot, strangled or poisoned. Or one hundred headlines every week about someone who was recently vaccinated getting divorced.

For every million people, about 6,000 get divorced each year. So for every million people who receive the COVID-19 vaccine in any given year over one hundred will get divorced every week.

Anti-vaxxers see these headlines and ask “How many times does this have to happen before we realise it is not a coincidence?”

That is because they have no understanding of either health or mathematics. That is not so bad. Lots of people don’t. What is bad is that they don’t want to know, but pretend they do. They prefer to read Robert Kennedy Jnr, Sherri Tenpenny, Joseph Mercola, Andrew Wakefield and other scammers, and pass on the “information” they receive from those sources without stopping and thinking, and without checking with reputable science and evidence based sources.

Is dangerous and dishonest to the point of being evil to try to convince people not to be vaccinated against childhood diseases or a dangerous virus like COVID-19 on the basis of nonsense being passed around Facebook. Anti-vaxxers suggest to people that protective actions against disease are in fact some sort of plot to depopulate the world. People who make such claims and try to stop widespread vaccination are under an absolute moral obligation to check their facts, and to read and consider sources which challenge their assumptions.

They don’t. That is what makes them dangerous.

My suggestions: Don’t engage with people who post anti-vax propaganda. That just promotes them and their posts. Report false information. Look up quality evidence and research based websites like https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/ and https://stronger.org/ and repost interesting, and more importantly, truthful, evidence based articles from there. Swamp out the pro-disease, pro-childhood illness, pro-death activists with reality.

Because health matters, and life matters.

Christine Holgate and the Righteous Fury of the Mediocre

October 24, 2020 / Augustus / 0 Comments

Christine Holgate is the CEO of Australia Post. She has been in the news for the last couple of days after harsh criticism from Australian politicians and being told by the Prime Minister to stand down.

Christine is from the North of England. She is not from a privileged background. When she was fifteen she started a small business cleaning windows, and then purchased an ice cream van. She completed studies in business at the University of North London, working as a Christmas postie during her student years.

After various jobs in marketing and management, she became JP Morgan’s Managing Director of Marketing in Europe. She was the only female member of JP Morgan’s European executive team. She was head-hunted for Telstra in 2002, moved to Australia, and worked for Telstra as head of the mobile marketing team. Later her role was expanded to include leadership of business sales and marketing.

In 2008 she was appointed CEO of Blackmore’s, the Australian health and pharmaceutical company. This move was personal for her because her sister had recently died from cancer. While at Blackmore’s she focused on developing export markets, and among other achievements grew Blackmore’s sales in China from $1 million to $50 million per year.

She was one of only twenty world business leaders to be invited to the 2014 G20 summit. In 2015 she was listed as one of Australia’s top 100 most influential women by Australian Financial Review, and in 2015, she became the first woman to be awarded CEO of the year by CEO magazine.

In 2017 she was appointed CEO of Australia Post, on a salary half that of her predecessor. She immediately began visiting ordinary Post Offices and talking with staff. She focused on improving Australia Post’s relations in the community, and with staff and licensees. At the same time, she re-structured the entire logistical operations of APO, and introduced new technology and services. One of the key improvements, during her time, for both communities and licensees, has been the development of Bank@Post.

I have met Christine. She came to Kangaroo Island after the bushfires at the end of last year, and visited the Post Offices on the Island. She listened to concerns we had about service delivery, and talked about family, work, and plans for continued improvement in postal services and care for staff.

Australia Post faces some ongoing challenges in service delivery. It services a relatively small population in a very large and isolated country. Some of its communities are very widespread, and very remote. In many small rural communities, Australia Post is the only provider of banking and government services. Many of those smaller service centres are uneconomical, and would have disappeared under an “economic rationalist” regime. In spite of these issues, Australia Post is almost unique among national postal services in that instead of costing tax-payers money, it returns a dividend to the Federal government each year.

Then came Coronavirus. This impacted Australia Post in multiple ways. First, people stayed at home and ordered online. Within weeks of the first few cases in Australia, the volume of parcels began to grow, and continued to grow, until every day we received a similar number of parcels as had been normal only for a week or two at peak Christmas time. No system could have been prepared for such a massive, sustained increase in workload. New sorting facilities were rapidly developed, new staff employed, and others re-directed from letters to parcels.

At the same time as this massive increase in demand for parcel delivery, borders began to close, and planes stopped flying. This meant mail delivery to and from overseas countries became impossible in some cases, and difficult in others. Travel and transport within Australia was and is restricted. A farmer on the border of Victoria and New South Wales was told he couldn’t truck hay from a property on one side of the border to another, and he should just put it on a plane. Families were stopped from travelling for important occasions and even for medical emergencies.

Everyone has some sort of horror story about a failed or delayed mail delivery. I sent an express post letter from Adelaide to Sydney that should have taken wo days and took nearly three weeks. But those stories are the exception, not the rule.

Following high-speed re-organisation of resources and logistics, and recruiting and re-allocation of staff, Australia Post, again, unlike many other national postal services, has continued to provide reliable, cost-effective, and mostly timely delivery services around the country. This is an almost miraculous result in the face of both massively increased demand, and massively increased barriers to service.

There have been some plainly silly stories about Australia Post during this time. “They have told contractors they have to use their own vehicles!” Yes, that is how contracting works. “They have been calling for volunteers to work for free.” No, they have been advertising for new casual staff to meet increased demand.

The recent storm of self-righteous fury from some of our elected leaders is pure hypocrisy. It centres on gifts of Cartier watches from Australia Post to some of the key executives involved in negotiating and delivering Bank@Post services. This was a major accomplishment, and deserved to be recognised and rewarded. $20,000 for bonuses/gifts to executives who have achieved such an important goal, delivering massively improved services not only in cities but to some of our most remote communities, and improving Australia Post’s profitability at the same time (that profit is paid back to the government, saving taxpayers money) is nothing by comparison to other commercial gifts and bonuses.

You may think that the salaries paid to some CEOs and executives are ridiculous, even wrong. You are entitled to that view. But the reality is that there is a high and competitive demand for skilled, proven leaders like Christine. She could easily be earning more elsewhere. But she believes in Australia and in Australia Post, and in the services it and its thousands of staff and licensees provide to Australian communities.

Is it simply that someone is out to get her? She was not the recipient of one the watches. There was no personal benefit to her in those gifts. “But she has a nice watch!” was one of the media complaints. Yes. She has a nice watch that was a gift from her husband – so? “She has personalised number plates!” So do several people living in my mostly housing commission neighbourhood. Most of these complaints sound like spite and jealously. Some arise simply from a complete failure to understand how corporate remuneration works. All are petty.

Christine Holgate is a perfect role model. She is a decent, kind-hearted, intelligent woman, who through sheer hard work, insight and determination has gone from being a lower-class Northerner with the accent to match, to one of Australia’s most admired and formidable business leaders. We are lucky to have her.

Antivaccination Hysteria – Dangerous Evangelising Ignorance

August 29, 2020 / Augustus / 0 Comments

I have always regarded the anti-vax movement as either bafflingly stupid or deliberately malicious. Perhaps that is not entirely fair.

Some parents genuinely believe their children suffered serious adverse effects as a consequence of being vaccinated. In vanishingly rare instances they may be right. And some anti-vax propaganda is glossy and convincing. I remember the first time I encountered the argument that Japan had reduced its incidence of SIDS to zero by stopping early childhood vaccinations. It was well-presented and convincing, with carefully laid out photos, graphs and tables.

Of course it only took about ten minutes to confirm that the claim was completely false. During the couple of years in which Japan reduced its childhood vaccination programme, the number of children dying from SIDS increased, not decreased. What changed was that none of these deaths could be blamed on vaccines.

I understand parents whose children become ill a few hours, days, weeks or even years, after being vaccinated, wondering whether that illness was in some way connected. Some time ago I posted the story of a child taken to a paediatric practice in Perth for a routine vaccination. While the practice nurse was drawing the vaccine into the syringe, the child began to convulse. If this had happened a few minutes later, no one would have been able to convince the parents that the convulsions and the vaccine were not connected.

But children (and adults for that matter) get sick all the time, and sudden infant deaths occur during the period when most children receive their first batch of vaccinations, so it is natural that some parents will make a connection between the two. In the same way, no blame attaches to people who are initially taken in by glossy and apparently detailed anti-vax websites and publications. People are entitled to ask questions.

But it only takes a little effort to go to genuinely science-based websites or publications, or to talk to a paediatrician, and get factual answers. What people are not entitled to do is to pass on dangerously misleading and counter-factual propaganda.

I have a rule that I try to behave in online conversations as in real life conversations; to be careful and polite in all interactions. Anti-semites and anti-vaxxers are the two exceptions, both online and face to face. Both of those philosophies are so false, so dangerously false, and so easily checkably false, that anyone who contributes to their spread is either irretrievably stupid, lazy to the point of being maliciously careless with the well-being of others, or deliberately vicious.

If you have no medical or scientific expertise (and even if you do) you have an absolute moral obligation to check carefully, and ensure that you are not passing on falsehoods which will endanger the lives and health of other people. If you continue to forward information which is out of context, misleading, or deliberately false, as all anti-vax information is, then you forfeit any right to be considered a truthful or decent person.

One of the regulars in the anti-vax line-up is the argument that you can’t trust big pharma – just follow the money! But big pharma have been forced to admit their products are harmful in an insert to vaccine packaging. They just do it in a way that makes sure no-one reads it because it is in such tiny print. In fact, anti-vaxxers say, most doctors have never read a vaccine insert, or if they have and keep giving them, they are just in it for the money, so you can’t trust what they say either. Sometimes you will read a story of a brave mother who insisted on her rights, and demented, sorry demanded, the doctor read the vaccine insert before giving the vaccine to her child. At which point the astonished doctor realised the error of his ways, and vowed never to give another vaccine again. I’ll take things that never happened for $500, please Alex.

Another is the argument that vaccines are full of poisons. Anyone who makes this claim might as well put a big sign on their head saying “I know nothing about science and can’t be bothered learning.”

If you are interested in reality, as opposed to dark fantasies and conspiracy theories, here are a couple of science and research based web pages about vaccine inserts and “poisonous ingredients” to read through. Of course the anti-vaxxers won’t because 1. They don’t care, and 2. They prefer their loony Facebook posts to reality.

If you want the world to be a better place, reality is better.

http://www.skepticalraptor.com/skepticalraptorblog.php/vaccine-package-inserts-debunking-myths/

https://www.chop.edu/centers-programs/vaccine-education-center/vaccine-ingredients

And finally, I am pleased to be able to report that I have discovered the actual source of most Facebook anti-vax material. See photo below.

Black Lives Matter. Just not to BLM.

June 11, 2020 / Augustus / 0 Comments

Sometimes it is not only reasonable, but morally imperative, to point out that the lives of a particular group of people matter. It would have been right in Turkey in 1915 to shout as loudly as possible that Armenian lives mattered. In Germany in 1944 that Jewish lives mattered. Or today in South Africa that white farmers’ lives matter, or in Indonesia that Papuan lives matter.

Wherever a particular ethnic or cultural group is being treated as less than human, anyone with integrity should not hesitate to say “These people are human too. Their lives matter.”

That is the claim that is being made now in relation to black people in the USA, and aboriginal people in Australia. That the way they are treated by police and prison guards demonstrates that they are considered less than human. A cartoon panel circulating on Facebook makes this claim: Black people are considered expendable by police and the governments that employ them.

If this claim is true, then we all ought to be horrified. If people in the US are stopped and murdered by police simply because they are black, and the police involved routinely face no meaningful consequences, and if 434 aboriginal people have been killed by prison guards in Australia since 1991 with not a single criminal charge being laid against those responsible, then we should all be on the streets shouting “Black lives matter!” and demanding change right now.

If this claim is not true, however, then we should be almost as horrified, because it is a vicious and dangerous libel against our government, our society, and the prison and police officers who work to protect us, often at considerable risk to their own safety. Dangerous because repeating those claims, as much of the media and many politicians and celebrities have done, leads not to hope and healing, but to hatred and division. It creates a view that our police and prison guards behave exactly like Nazi concentration camp guards, and that if the government won’t take action, then perhaps a violent response is justified in order to bring about real change.

Are black lives endangered by police and prison guard brutality, and white people who are either complicit or simply don’t care?

In the USA, black men comprise less than 7% of the population, but they commit 52% of murders, 38% of other violent crime including bashings and rape, and 60% of all robberies. They are also more likely to resist arrest and to respond to police with violence. In any encounter between a police officer and a black suspect in a violent crime, the police officer is 18 times more likely to die during that event than the black perpetrator. You might think that this would make police more apprehensive, and more likely to respond with fatal force. Although regrettable, that might be understandable. But it is not the case.

In 2019 US police shot and killed 1004 people. All of these were armed or posed a threat to police or members of the public. 235 of those, about a quarter of the total, were black. This is a far lower proportion than would be expected based upon the number of police interactions with violent criminals or suspects. Black and hispanic police officers were more willing to use the same levels of force against black offenders as they would with white offenders than white police officers, suggesting white officers hesitate for fear of being denounced as racists.

On October 5 2019 a female police officer in Chicago was beaten unconscious by a suspect in a car crash, who repeatedly bashed her face into the concrete and tore out chunks of her hair. She survived and said later that she refrained from using her gun because she didn’t want to become the next viral video in the Black Lives Matter narrative. Police officers are at far greater risk from black offenders than black offenders are from the police.

If anything, this disparity is even greater in Australia. Although aboriginal males make up just over 1% of the Australian population, they account for 15.1% of homicide victims, and 15.7% of perpetrators. Black Americans commit seven times as many murders as might be expected from their numbers in the population. Aboriginal Australians commit more than 15 times as many. Aboriginal women are 25 times more likely than women of other races to need hospital treatment for domestic violence, and in some aboriginal communities, 90% of children are reported as victims of neglect, or of physical or sexual abuse.

In Australia, as in the US, the rate of lethal force used against aboriginal offenders is lower than would be expected from the number of interactions with police. The main cause of complaint in Australia, however, is the number of aboriginal deaths in custody. Since 1991, 434 aboriginal people have died in prison or in police custody. It is often assumed by protestors that this means 434 aboriginal people have been beaten to death by psychopathic racist police and prison guards, and they point to the fact that no one has ever been convicted in relation to any of these deaths as proof that there is systemic racism in Australia, from the government down.

Quite frankly, that claim is simply silly. People do not stop suffering from heart disease or diabetes or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease as soon as they get into prison. They are not suddenly immune to cancer or strokes. People in custody mostly die from the same things that would have killed them if they been outside. They just don’t die as much. The death rate in the general Australian population is about seven people per thousand per year. In the prison population it is 1.7 per thousand for aboriginal prisoners, and 1.8 per thousand for prisoners of other races.

The difference between 1.7 deaths in custody per year for aboriginal prisoners and 1.8 per thousand for other races is hardly significant. But when you take into account that aboriginal prisoners have lower general and mental health, are more likely to be suffering the effects of long-term drug and alcohol abuse, and are more likely to become involved in violent altercations with other prisoners, it is clear that far from carelessness or targeting aboriginal prisoners for racism and violence, prison officers take extra care to protect and support them.

Part of the explanation for the difference in mortality rates in prison and out is age. The older you are, the more likely you are to die, and there are few prisoners over seventy years of age. Also, far fewer prisoners die from road or sporting accidents or drowning than the outside population. But two more factors are required to explain the lower death rate for people in custody.

For members of some demographic groups, the mortality rate declines while in custody because in prison they have good nutrition and good medical care. Many in those same demographic groups are more likely to survive in prison because prison is far safer than their home communities.

In 1999 the Guinness Book of Records named Palm Island as the most violent place in the world, outside of actual war zones. Nothing much has changed in the last twenty years, despite vast expenditures of money, including, for example, the announcement last year by the Queensland government of expenditure of $893,000 (for a community of 3000 people) on new domestic violence support services.

Are black lives in the US and aboriginal lives in Australia in danger? Definitely. Everyone who cares about black lives wants that to change. Policies to bring about positive change are only effective to the extent they are based on reality. The empowering reality for black Americans and Australian aboriginals is that that danger comes from within their own communities, and consequently, that they have the power to stop it.

COVID19, Wuhan, Coronavirus, the Chinese Virus – the case for a Lockdown

April 1, 2020 / Augustus / 0 Comments

As at this morning, 1st April, there have been 855,941 cases of novel Coronavirus around the world. Of those, 636,964 are still active, and 218,977 have run their course either to recovery or death. Of these, 42,069 (19%) ended with the death of the patient.

The infectiousness of this disease, combined with this frighteningly high mortality rate for known cases, is what has convinced me that a tighter lock-down, though horrifying costly (more on that later), is the most responsible course of action.

However, there is a large and possibly growing body of thought that very restrictive government actions are not necessary, and even that those so far implemented are doing more harm than good to overall health and well-being.

For example, over the last few days:

Associate Professor of Medicine Eran Bendavid, and Professor Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University:

https://fsi.stanford.edu/news/coronavirus-deadly-they-say

Oxford Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology Sunetra Gupta:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.24.20042291v1

Professor Sucharit Bhakdi, infectious medicine specialist, former head of the Institute for Medical Microbiology at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz:

https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2020/03/an-expert-says-the-current-response-to-the-coronavirus-is-grotesque-absurd-and-very-dangerous.html

And just yesterday, a more cautious article in The Lancet:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(20)30257-7/fulltext

Those who claim immediate shutdowns are necessary need to acknowledge these variations of opinion, and the widely varying advice being given to politicians.

It is not good enough simply to snipe from Facebook, calling politicians names, or suggesting a lack of integrity, or repeating slogans. Doing so convinces no one, especially decision-makers, and begins to make it look like those in favour of a shutdown have no real case for their point of view. Otherwise, why not make that case instead of throwing insults?

There also needs to be acknowledgement of the horrific cost of restrictions implemented to this point, and a genuine accounting and balancing of the cost of further restrictions.

Simply repeating “Health not wealth” will not wash. The huge improvement in lifespan over the last century, and our amazing good health into much older age, are a product of our prosperity as a nation, and the benefits that flow from that; the ready availability of fresh food, easy access to good medical services, improved working conditions, etc, etc. Undermine the nation’s wealth, and you undermine the nation’s health.

To give just one example of how this works in practice, the latest astonishing cash splurge sees income support for a broad range of workers to the extent of $130 billion. This would be enough to build and staff 200 new regional hospitals in Australia, or to renew and re-equip 300.

It is not only the loss of massive amounts of cash for crucially important infrastructure which needs to be considered, but the impact on business. Again, to give just one example, two days ago the government decreed that no one, and no business, could be evicted for the next six months for non-payment of rent. For businesses, rent can be deferred. But the income from which that rent needs to be paid has not been deferred, it has been lost. It is not recoverable. Even large businesses like Westfield, with billions of dollars invested in shopping centres, do not have large cash reserves. If rent is not paid over an extended period, they will fail. Repeat this a few times, and superannuation funds will collapse, leaving another massive hole government will be expected to fill.

On a more personal level, retail rents are not trivial amounts. The rent on the business Kathy and I have purchased in Townsville is $84,000 per year. Rents in higher traffic shopping centres can be much higher. Businesses will go bankrupt. This ripples out causing further, sometimes breaking point, difficulties to other businesses. There will be massive unemployment and all the evils that go with it; reduced general health, increased domestic violence, family breakdowns and suicide. And of course, further demands on a now massively under-resourced government. Then there is the fact that much of our self-esteem and energy comes from feeling useful. The long term mental health impacts of an extended lockdown/extended period of unemployment are potentially disastrous even without considering other factors.

People in favour of a complete lock-down, which would be even more costly in all these ways than measures so far implemented, also need to recognise and factor into their explanations the fact that a lock-down is not a solution. The virus will not magically disappear. Infection will reoccur and spread, and further lock-downs and restrictions will need to be enforced.

If, on the other hand, if it can be demonstrated by reference to policies and outcomes elsewhere, and known data about infection rates and mortality, that this draconian course of action with no clear end in sight will result in significantly better outcomes for most people than less costly and less disruptive options, then it should be implemented.

Despite everything above, this is still the view I hold.

All of the four articles linked above have one key flaw. They assert mortality rates in some cases more than an order of magnitude lower than the figure for known cases so far. They do this on the assumption that for every one case that has been diagnosed, there are ten or more which have not been. But this is simply a guess, with modelling based on that guess. Just as it is not good enough for people in favour of a complete shutdown simply to assert that a shutdown is required and expect national leaders to fall in line, it is not good enough for researchers with a different view to ask leaders to base life and death policy suggestions on guesses with no discernible basis in reality.

There are no answers. We are in for a long, depressing haul no matter who is right, and no matter which course is decided upon. The best we can do is listen, put our views as clearly and with as much evidence as we can, and be respectful, caring and supportive of people around us, including our leaders.

On the Vilification of Prime Minister Scott Morrison

January 2, 2020 / Augustus / 0 Comments

There has always been an unpleasant edge to public discussion of politics. It is much easier to vilify people who see things differently from you, than to engage with them and to see this engagement as an opportunity to learn.

The rise of Facebook and Twitter have exacerbated this tendency to personal insult and hasty dismissal instead of reasoned discussion. It is not uncommon for posts on political issues to be met with one word responses: “Fascist!” “Racist!” “Redneck!” “x, y, or z Phobe!”

It is just as common to find these words used to describe politicians or other public figures, as if screeching names or slogans said anything about the person referred to or issues at stake.

One of the most obvious recent examples is the media’s calling down of a rain of fury on the Prime Minister, because he took a short break with his family.

Fire and emergency management are, of course, the responsibility of the states. Despite this, the Prime Minister met with state leaders to talk about strategies and resources, and offered them everything they said they needed. He has visited affected communities, and talked with families, farmers, and firefighters.

So why should he not take a break with his family, his first since becoming Prime Minister, during school holidays when he can spend time with his children? There is no reason at all.
“But it’s a bad look! He doesn’t care!”

Rubbish. It is only a bad look because the media says it is a bad look. The Premier of Victoria, Dan Andrews was on a longer holiday, while the Premier of Queensland, Anna Palaszczuk, decided to pack up and go on a cruise. But fire and emergency management are their responsibility, not Scott Morrison’s.

I couldn’t care less about Andrews or Palaszczuk having a holiday. What is alarming is the hypocrisy, and the extent to which people are willing to be outraged simply because the media tells them they should be.

Scott Morrison recognised that volunteers are not in it for money but because they care about their communities. He is also the first political leader to recognise that while small businesses want to support, they cannot pay wages indefinitely to people who are not working, and volunteers need to pay bills and buy food for their families. Consequently he has offered the states money to compensate fire-fighters and others who are off work for extended periods of time.

Again, it is worth noting that this is despite the fact emergency services are a state responsibility.

It is interesting to look back on the media reaction to former PM Tony Abbott’s actually being on the frontline of fire-fighting. See the article from The Guardian below. There is no pleasing some people. Because for some people the issues are not the issue, it is about the tribe.

The Guardian berates PM Tony Abbott

Should Tony have stopped volunteering and focussed on running the country? Should Scott never go on holidays, and stop eating and talking to people and focus on running the country?

He seems to be doing a pretty good job of that.

Australia faces economic challenges, including high energy prices, global trade tensions and a devastating drought. Yet Australia has maintained its AAA credit rating.

Australia has first current account surplus in 40 years, and the lowest welfare dependency in 30 years.

The budget is in balance for the first time in 11 years. Inherited debt is being paid off. Over four years, this will mean $13.5 billion that no longer needs to be spent on debt interest.
More than 1.4 million new jobs have been created in the last five years. Record amounts are being invested in schools, hospitals, aged care and disability support.

Following the biggest tax cuts in twenty years, household disposable incomes have had the fastest increase in a decade. This means more money can be put into building a strong future, and caring for Australians in need. This includes $4.2 billion in accelerated infrastructure projects, $1.3 billion in increased support for drought relief and 10,000 more home care packages for older Australians.

Is everything perfect? Of course not. I still have major issues with some government policies, including the absurd decision to buy slow, noisy submarines which are not only untested but will be out of date before the first one is delivered. Our defence forces deserve the best equipment we can afford, and for resources to be allocated according to an evidence-based, long term strategic plan.

But it is also important to recognise what is being done well, and to acknowledge that most politicians on all sides are decent, hard-working people, who want to make Australia and the world a better place.

Outer Worlds Review – Tips

November 10, 2019 / Augustus / 0 Comments

Woah, woah, woah! It’s Rizzo’s!

That is stuck in my brain now, along with “Fruity oaty bars, they make a man out of a mou-ouse!”

Never mind.

I started playing Outer Worlds on the day of its release. I finished it last night.

Outer Worlds

By “finished” I mean I got all the companions, completed all the companion quests, got all the science weapons, got warring factions talking to each other, rescued runaways (or reported back that they were dead), talked to the mad scientist (who wasn’t so mad after all), starred in a movie, killed Akande (she started it), and saved the galaxy. Or one little bit of it anyway.

I don’t have much time to play, and this took about thirty hours to complete. I got it on xbox gamepass. I would have been annoyed if I had paid full price (about $80) for it. It is fun, great, even, but just too short to justify that kind of price.

Character development is good, quests are not grindy, graphics are good if not dazzling (it uses the Unreal engine). The dialogue is very good, brilliant in places, and often funny or insightful.

The designers say you can develop your character and play any way you want. That is another way of saying that how you develop your character makes no real difference. Essentially you can put points anywhere and the game will still play out identically. The only exception is that to achieve the best outcome (getting different sides to talk to one another) in one particular scenario on Monarch, the second world you visit (not counting Groundbreaker), you must have a persuade skill of 55. Other than that, do what you want.

On the other hand, points into stealth/hack are pretty much wasted. There is always a way forward that does not require those skills. Put a few points into defence and whatever weapon group you prefer. Points in leadership raise your companions’ health and damage, but I think there is a better way to do this, and that is to raise science skills.

Science enables you to tinker with your and your companions’ armour and weapons, massively raising their damage and protection, and directly raising the damage of any science weapons you use. My weapons of choice were the prismatic hammer and the euthanasia kit, until I got Phin’s Phorce in Phineas Welles’ lab right at the end. That is one good gun.

The basic rule is, “Do the right thing.” Don’t steal, don’t kill anyone you don’t have to. Don’t kill anyone just because someone else tells you to. You can accept those quests, but talk to the intended victim first. In the case of Akande, when you get to her, just say no. She will attack you. Do what you need to do. Even though this is the right thing to do, this means you have no choice but to fight what is effectively the final boss, RAM, a well-amoured robot. This is the only fight in the game where you will need to think ahead.

Unless there was some reason not to (eg a companion quest that belonged to another companion) I used Sam and Felix for most missions. But when you get to Tartarus, take Parvati and Felix. This is because Parvati has a very useful knockdown effect which enables you to get past RAM’s armour. You can alternate her knockdown with using your own tactical time dilation to cripple him briefly, each time whacking at him with your plasma based weapon.

Equip Felix and Parvati with plasma weapons too. Kill the drones first if you can, so you can concentrate on RAM. Keep your companions alive for as long as you can. If you have taken one of the perks that enables you to revive them during a fight that will help, but the chances are you will have to finish the fight on your own.

You beat RAM by crippling him, whacking him, and then running away until your tactical time dilation has recharged. Using foods that boost health or health regeneration will help, but once I understood the mechanics, it was no problem at all.

Then you rescue Phineas Welles, he makes a speech about how wonderful you are, and there is a nice slide-show previewing a hope-filled future in which the remaining colonists on the colony ship Hope are revived and Halcyon moves ahead.

It is engaging and well-written, but is too short for the price, and has little (none, really) replay value. Don’t pay full price for it.

Australia, Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press

October 22, 2019 / Augustus / 0 Comments

The free flow of information is a vital characteristic of a free society. There is a strong correlation between freedom of speech and a free press, and individual freedom and prosperity.

But the “public’s right to know” has never been without limits.

For example, the public has no right to know the content of your private conversations with family and friends.

It may not be in the public interest for the public to be fully aware of matters relating to national security. Not every member of the public, nor every member of the press, has Australia’s best interests at heart.

Where there are sensitive negotiations with foreign powers over trade or border issues, it may seriously undermine those efforts, and the welfare of all Australians, if details of Australia’s strategies and bargaining positions are made known.

Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade routinely prepares reports on foreign leaders and governments, which may list personal interests and weaknesses, and potential risks. It is important that these reports be fact-based and forthright. But it may damage relationships if they were to be made public.

Matters which are commercial-in-confidence are also protected. Like governments, businesses must make assessments of competing interests, and develop acquisition and marketing strategies. It would undermine their future viability, their ability to provide employment to Australian men and women, and their returns to shareholders (in many cases superannuation funds providing support and security to ordinary working people) if those confidences were to be betrayed.

As one further example, it is well-established that the public’s right to know does not extend to personal details, names and addresses of victims and witnesses in some criminal trials.

Being a journalist does not mean an exemption from rules which protect Australia’s national security. Nor does it mean journalists are exempt from laws relating to defamation, trespass, contempt of court or border violations.

Cardinal Pell. The Appeal.

August 25, 2019 / Augustus / 0 Comments

I have so far refrained from any comment on the outcome of Cardinal Pell’s appeal. To say I was disappointed with the outcome would be an understatement.

I have written extensively about this case here:

and here:

The prosecution case was based entirely on the evidence of a single person, some twenty years after the events.

The fact that it was a single person, and the delay, do not in themselves mean the complaint has no foundation. But those factors make both prosecution and defense more difficult. That is part of the reason the Victorian DPP decided not to proceed with prosecution, leaving (highly usually) the Victorian Police to prosecute the matter.

It has been suggested that the existence of a single witness/complainant should not be a barrier to a finding of guilty, and that in some instances, murder and sexual assault, for example, there may be only one witness, or none.

That is correct. But in the case of murder, there is no doubt that a crime has occurred. There is a body, blood, at least a missing person with additional evidence of criminal activity.

In the case of allegations of rape or sexual abuse, the prosecution normally requires some additional evidence besides the word of a single complainant; bruising, semen, witnesses who can corroborate at least part of the complainant’s story.

It was unremarkable, though sad and disappointing for her, that Victorian Police did not prosecute Kathy Sherif’s long-standing allegation of rape against Bill Shorten, an assault she alleges occurred at a Labor Party function in 1986 when she was sixteen. Kathy was able to produce witnesses who corroborated many aspects of her story.

The case against Cardinal Pell was far weaker: A single complainant who came forward only in response to public requests for complaints, who offered changing and inconsistent evidence, no corroborating witnesses, no forensic evidence of any sort, and multiple witnesses who gave evidence that they were with the then Archbishop throughout Mass and while he greeted parishioners immediately after, when the offences were alleged to have occurred. For details and more information about the background of the case, read my two articles linked above.

The first trial ended in a mistrial, with jurors reportedly voting ten to two in favour of a not guilty finding. The second trial took place after months of inflammatory reporting, especially in the Guardian, on the ABC, and in Louise Milligan’s scurrilous book, Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of George Pell.

There was a carnival atmosphere in the press, a feeding frenzy of malice and bigotry, the like of which we have not seen since the Chamberlain case. John Bryson’s book on that case was titled “Evil Angels” the evil angels being the Australian media.

Some of the comment on social media has likewise been almost demonic in its hatred and disregard for truth. If people have not carefully examined the evidence and the background, then their comments say nothing about Cardinal Pell and his guilt or otherwise, but say a great deal about themselves.

Like the media-driven guilty findings in the Chamberlain case, the guilty finding in the Pell case is an indictment, not of Cardinal Pell, but of the Australian media, and to some extent, the Australian judiciary.

The dissenting judge in the Appeal, Justice Weinberg, was the only judge of the three with any history and significant experience of criminal cases. Part of his opinion can be found here:

Cardinal Pell – The Media and Judiciary’s Disgrace

August 11, 2019 / Augustus / 1 Comment

I have been frustrated by news stories today suggesting that “disgraced” Cardinal George Pell has broken the law by posting material to social media.

Firstly, Cardinal Pell is not “disgraced.” It is the media and the Australian judicial system which are disgraced by the verdict against him, which was based on the evidence of a single witness, a person of zero credibility, whose testimony was inconsistent, and in several places demonstrably false. I have written about this before and will not repeat those discussions here. If you are interested you can find the relevant articles and others by me at this link.

Secondly, and obviously, Cardinal Pell did not post anything to social media, because he has no access to social media. He wrote a letter to a group of people who have supported him in prayer and fellowship. They posted a scanned copy of his letter in on Twitter.

Is there a law against publicising correspondence received from prisoners?

I hope not, because I have transcribed it and copied it below. It does not reference his alleged offences, or the accuser, or anyone involved in that sorry excuse for a trial. It is simply a pastoral letter from a minister of the Gospel to a group of friends.
……………………………..
Melbourne Assessment Prison
1/8/19

Dear Kathy and brothers and sisters in Christ of the Support Cardinal Pell group.

First of all let me thank you for your prayers and messages of support, these being immense consolation, humanly and spiritually.

A word of explanation. I have received between 1500 – 2000 letters and all will be answered. So far I have only responded to letters from my fellow prisoners (to nearly all of those who wrote) and a few other special cases. Your kindness is not forgotten and will always be fondly remembered.

My faith in our Lord, like yours, is a source of strength. The knowledge that my small suffering can be used for good purposes through being joined to Jesus’s suffering gives me purpose and direction. Challenges and problems in Church life should be confronted in a similar spirit of faith.

We must always remember that the Catholic Church is one, not just in the sense that good families stick together whatever their differences, but because the Church of Christ is based in the Catholic Church, which constitutes the Body of Christ. One ancient saying teaches that there must be unity in essentials (Jesus’s essentials) but there can be diversity in non-essentials. But everywhere and in everything we must have charity.

I agree that we have reasons to be disturbed by the Instrumentum Laboris of the Amazonia Synod. This is not the first low quality document the Synod secretariat has produced. Cardinal G. Müller, formerly of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, has written an excellent critique. I am no expert in the region but I have been to Ecuador and Amazonian Peru, where a Sydney priest Fr John Anderson runs a parish of exemplary piety, pastoral activity and orthodoxy. As in the Amazon a lot of water has yet to run before the end of the Synod.

One point is fundamental. The Apostles’ Tradition, the teachings of Jesus and the Apostles, taken from the New Testament and taught by Popes and councils, by the magisterium, is the only criterion doctrinally for all teaching on doctrine and practice. Amazon or no Amazon, in every land, the Church cannot allow any confusion, much less any contrary teaching, to damage the Apostolic Tradition.

The Spirit continues to be with the Church. You have every right to make your voices heard, reasonably and in charity. We need not expect the worst.

Yours in the Lord,
Your grateful brother
+George Card. Pell
……………………………

Qohel