RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.thefp.com/p/how-twitter-rigged-the-covid-debate?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

By the time reporter David Zweig got to the 10th floor conference room at Twitter Headquarters on Market Street in San Francisco, the story of the Twitter Files was already international news. Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, Leighton Woodhouse, Abigail Shrier, Lee Fang and I had revealed evidence of hidden blacklists of Twitter users; the way Twitter acted as a kind of FBI subsidiary; and how company executives rewrote the platform’s policies on the fly to accommodate political bias and pressure.

What we had yet to crack was the story of Covid.

David has spent three years reporting on Covid—specifically the underlying science, or lack thereof, behind many of our nation’s policies. For years he had noticed and criticized a bias not only in the mainstream media’s coverage of the pandemic, but also in the way it was presented on platforms like Twitter. 

We couldn’t think of anyone better to tackle this story. — BW

I had always thought a primary job of the press was to be skeptical of power—especially the power of the government. But during the Covid-19 pandemic, I and so many others found that the legacy media had shown itself to largely operate as a messaging platform for our public health institutions. Those institutions operated in near total lockstep, in part by purging internal dissidents and discrediting outside experts.

Twitter became an essential alternative. It was a place where those with public health expertise and perspectives at odds with official policy could air their views—and where curious citizens could find such information. This often included other countries’ responses to Covid that differed dramatically from our own.

But it quickly became clear that Twitter also seemed to promote content that reinforced the establishment narrative, and to suppress views and even scientific evidence that ran to the contrary. 

Was I imagining things? Was the pattern I and others witnessed proof of purposeful intent? An algorithm gone rogue? Or something else? In other words: When it came to Covid, and the information shared on a service used by hundreds of millions of people, what exactly was being amplified? And what was being banned or censored?

So when The Free Press asked if I would go to Twitter to peek behind the curtain, I took the first flight out of New York. 

Here’s what I found.

The United States government pressured Twitter to elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19 and the pandemic. Internal emails that I viewed at Twitter showed that both the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s content according to their wishes.

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/health/study-shows-chances-contracting-covid-increase-each-vaccine-dose

A recently published study from the Cleveland Clinic has questioned COVID-19 vaccine efficacy and posited that additional doses may in fact increase one’s likeliness of contracting the disease.

Conducted between September and December of this year, the clinic examined 51,000 of its employees to test the “bivalent” vaccine, created to protect against the original COVID-19 strain and its Omicron variants. It also sought to determine the effectiveness of subsequent vaccine doses. The study has not yet been peer-reviewed.

The survey ultimately discovered an association between higher risk of COVID-19 and those individuals who had previously received a greater number of vaccine doses. The study further determined that the bivalent vaccines were only 30% effective in preventing infection against different variants of the Omicron strain of the virus.

“The association of increased risk of COVID-19 with higher numbers of prior vaccine doses in our study, was unexpected,” the study reads. “A simplistic explanation might be that those who received more doses were more likely to be individuals at higher risk of COVID-19. A small proportion of individuals may have fit this description. However, the majority of subjects in this study were generally young individuals and all were eligible to have received at least 3 doses of vaccine by the study start date, and which they had every opportunity to do.”

https://www.city-journal.org/ignore-the-tripledemic-hype

Winter is back, and so are warnings from “experts” for Americans to don masks. A resurgence of influenza (flu) and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV)—respiratory illnesses that took a holiday during the Covid-19 pandemic, when various measures limited person-to-person contact and spread of disease—is allegedly combining with new Covid cases into a so-called tripledemic, leading academics and public-health officials to advise masking. An advisory from the New York City health commissioner instructs that “everyone . . . should wear a mask” at all times when indoors and when in a crowded outdoor setting. While the advisory says that “higher-quality masks, such as KN95 and KF94 masks and N95 respirators, can offer an additional layer of protection,” it does not otherwise distinguish between types of masks or discourage cloth masks. And Los Angeles County is, again, encouraging people to wear masks in indoor public spaces.

Can mask mandates be far behind? Let’s hope not. The need for masks is far from clear, and mandates could be counterproductive.

Despite the hype, these three viral diseases are not surging simultaneously. RSV cases and hospitalization rates rose and peaked far earlier this year than normal but have been declining for the past month. Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths had been down for months, only rising recently to relatively low levels. And the flu season—which typically runs from October to April, peaking in February—is, like RSV, happening much earlier than usual.

While this flu season currently appears severe, it may not be out of the ordinary. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates of the flu burden so far show at least 15 million flu illnesses, 150,000 flu hospitalizations, and 9,300 flu deaths. To put that in context, in the ten full flu seasons between 2010–2011 and 2019–2020, flu illnesses ranged from 9 million to 41 million, flu hospitalizations ranged from 140,000 to 710,000, and flu deaths ranged from 12,000 to 52,000. Unless the season takes a severe turn, this year’s influenza metrics should fall within normal ranges.

Abstract

The mRNA SARS-CoV-2 vaccines were brought to market in response to the public health crises of Covid-19. The utilization of mRNA vaccines in the context of infectious disease has no precedent. The many alterations in the vaccine mRNA hide the mRNA from cellular defenses and promote a longer biological half-life and high production of spike protein. However, the immune response to the vaccine is very different from that to a SARS-CoV-2 infection. In this paper, we present evidence that vaccination induces a profound impairment in type I interferon signaling, which has diverse adverse consequences to human health. Immune cells that have taken up the vaccine nanoparticles release into circulation large numbers of exosomes containing spike protein along with critical microRNAs that induce a signaling response in recipient cells at distant sites. We also identify potential profound disturbances in regulatory control of protein synthesis and cancer surveillance. These disturbances potentially have a causal link to neurodegenerative disease, myocarditis, immune thrombocytopenia, Bell’s palsy, liver disease, impaired adaptive immunity, impaired DNA damage response and tumorigenesis. We show evidence from the VAERS database supporting our hypothesis. We believe a comprehensive risk/benefit assessment of the mRNA vaccines questions them as positive contributors to public health.

https://pjmedia.com/culture/robert-spencer/2022/12/21/american-journal-of-medicine-says-a-belief-in-freedom-could-be-hazardous-to-your-health-n1655403

One way to hoodwink the populace into accepting ever-increasing control by the omnibenevolent and all-seeing federal government is to convince them that freedom and autonomy are bad for you. But surely Leftists wouldn’t stoop that low, would they? Sure they would. PJM’s Ben Bartee had the story on Saturday: the American Journal of Medicine has published a preposterous new study warning that “distrust of the government” and “a belief in freedom” are liable to get you killed. Get back in line, sheep! Don’t put your lives on the line chasing after freedom! Slavery is so much safer!

This arrant nonsense was actually published this month in the American Journal of Medicine, proving yet again that academic study in the United States has become irremediably politicized and open to cultural and intellectual fads. Honest investigation of a controverted issue, leading to the acknowledgment of unwelcome truths, is vanishingly rare. The pretext for pushing slavery on Americans is, once again, the COVID-19 vaccine. According to Fortune magazine, this study claims to prove that “if you passed on getting the COVID vaccine, you might be a lot more likely to get into a car crash.”

The study asserts that “unvaccinated people were 72% more likely to be involved in a severe traffic crash — in which at least one person was transported to the hospital — than those who were vaccinated. That’s similar to the increased risk of car crashes for people with sleep apnea, though only about half that of people who abuse alcohol.”

Does the vaccine somehow improve your eyesight and coordination, so that you can more easily get out of scrapes while driving? Oh, nothing like that. Unvaccinated people are more likely to wreck their cars because they’re the sort of people who don’t obey the rules. The study speculates that people who are so headstrong and stubborn as to resist getting a vaccine that is causing young people in perfect health suddenly to drop dead might also “neglect basic road safety guidelines.”

Now, who in his right mind would get behind the wheel and neglect basic safety guidelines? Incorrigible lovers of freedom, of course: “Why would they ignore the rules of the road? Distrust of the government, a belief in freedom, misconceptions of daily risks, ‘faith in natural protection,’ ‘antipathy toward regulation,’ poverty, misinformation, a lack of resources, and personal beliefs are potential reasons proposed by the authors.”

So actually the study is all about why you should be a good conformist and do whatever the government tells you to do, no matter what the obvious risks may be.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/20/top-australian-doctor-who-previously-promoted-covid-shots-reveals-devastating-vaccine-injuries-warns-of-the-risks/

A former Australian health official who initially promoted the COVID “vaccines” emerged this week as the country’s most prominent public health figure to raise the alarm about the risks associated with the mRNA shots.

In a bombshell submission to the Australian Parliament’s Long COVID inquiry, Dr Kerryn Phelps, the former president of the Australian Medical Association, went public with the “devastating” injuries she and her wife suffered after receiving the shots, and argued that the true rate of adverse events is far higher than believed due to underreporting and “threats” from medical regulators.

“This is an issue that I have witnessed first-hand with my wife who suffered a severe neurological reaction to her first Pfizer vaccine within minutes, including burning face and gums, paraesethesiae, and numb hands and feet, while under observation by myself, another doctor and a registered nurse at the time of immunization,” the 65-year-old said in the 18-page statement.

Paraesethesiae is defined as a tingling or prickling, “pins-and-needles” sensation that often occurs in the arms, hands, legs, or feet.

Phelps said her wife, Jackie Stricker-Phelps, continues to suffer “devastating” adverse effects a year and a half later, “with the addition of fatigue and additional neurological symptoms including nerve pains, altered sense of smell, visual disturbance and musculoskeletal inflammation. The diagnosis and causation has been confirmed by several specialists who have told me that they have seen ‘a lot’ of patients in a similar situation.”

“We did a lot of homework before having the vaccine, particularly about choice of vaccine at the time. In asking about adverse side effects, we were told that ‘the worst thing that could happen would be anaphylaxis’ and that severe reactions such as myocarditis and pericarditis were ‘rare,’” she said.

Dr. Phelps also went public with the vaccine injury she suffered after her second dose of Pfizer in July 2021, “with the diagnosis and causation confirmed by specialist colleagues.”

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/12/19/the-truth-about-covid-mccarthyism/

There were two viruses that the authorities wanted to control in 2020 and 2021. The first was the virus of Covid-19. The second was the virus of dissent. Throughout the pandemic, experts referred to lockdown scepticism and Covid misinformation as their own kind of disease, as a contagious malady that might sicken the masses’ minds as surely as Covid sickened their bodies. British politicians referred to a ‘pandemic of misinformation’. We must protect people both from ‘physical disease and the “disease of misinformation”’, scientists insisted. ‘False information has plagued the Covid response’, said one academic. Plagued – what a striking choice of verb. And if contrary ideas are an infection in the body politic, then it’s clear what the cure must be: censorship.

Nearly three years on from the start of the pandemic, it’s apparent that censorship was central to lockdown. It wasn’t only our everyday lives that were forcibly put on hold – so was our right to say certain things and even think certain things. In the US, Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who was fawned over by the liberal media for his handling of Covid, has been deposed in a lawsuit that accuses him and the Biden administration more broadly of colluding with Big Tech to undermine the American people’s speech rights during the pandemic. The lawsuit is brought by the attorney general of Missouri, Eric Schmitt. The transcript of the questioning of Fauci was released earlier this month. It’s a frustrating read. Fauci continually says he doesn’t recall or doesn’t know in response to questions about his alleged role in suppressing speech in the Covid era. But it seems clear that, informally at least, he helped to devise and enforce the parameters of acceptable thought during the pandemic.

Consider the Great Barrington Declaration. Fauci had high-ranking discussions about how to counteract this open letter that raised ‘grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental-health impacts of the prevailing Covid-19 policies’. Freedom-of-information requests show that Fauci was asked by officials to engage in a ‘quick and devastating takedown’ of the GBD. He hopped to it. He ‘jumped into action to smear and discredit the GBD in the media’, as one account describes it. This included writing off the GBD’s authors – Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta and Jay Bhattacharya – as ‘fringe epidemiologists’ who were peddling ‘nonsense’. We know now that Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford, was subsequently shadow-banned on Twitter and even added to its McCarthyite ‘Trends Blacklist’, meaning his tweets would never make it into ‘trending topics’. The algorithm weaponised against a heretical professor who had been publicly denounced by Fauci.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/12/19/time-for-congress-to-solve-the-prior-authorization-problem-for-all-americans/

The unanimous passage of the Improving Seniors’ Timely Access to Care Act in the U.S. House is an important victory in the ongoing fight to curb insurance company abuses that delay or outright deny medically necessary care for patients in need. The entire patient community is glad to see lawmakers support this much-needed legislation, which will help streamline and simplify the delivery and coordination of care for seniors and persons with disabilities enrolled in Medicare Advantage.

But there’s still work to be done.

The bipartisan Improving Seniors’ Access to Timely Care Act aims to overhaul the prior authorization process – one of insurers’ most widespread and flagrant abuses – and protect Medicare Advantage beneficiaries from having to jump through hoops simply to access the care they need and that their doctor prescribed. The legislation would modernize the outdated process by requiring the use of electronic prior authorization tools, which would speed up approvals. This is crucial since 93% of doctors say prior authorization leads to delays in treatment, and 34% say it has led to a serious adverse event for a patient in their care. By preventing dangerous delays, the legislation – along with a complementary rule recently proposed by the federal government – would help ensure seniors and patients with disabilities can access prescribed treatments and services when they need them.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/12/19/should-we-mask-kids-under-5-to-contain-covid-ii-tipp-poll/

Fearing a huge winter upswing in the number of COVID and flu cases, government officials are once again calling on Americans to don their masks to keep the deadly viruses from spreading. But some take it a step further, suggesting even children 5 and under should put on masks. The latest I&I/TIPP Poll asks: Is that a good idea?

The answer, probably not surprisingly to anyone, appears to depend heavily on a variety of factors, including where you live, your race, your gender and your political leanings. So, at the very least, we’re likely in for another politicized debate over the practice of masking, this time for the youngest among us.

The I&I/TIPP Poll, taken online from Dec. 7-9, asked 1,351 American adults the following simple question: “Is it a good or bad idea to put masks on children under age 5 to deal with COVID?”

The response to the online poll, which has a margin of error of +/-2.8 percentage points, was split nearly evenly: 39% said it was a good idea, versus 38% who said it was a bad idea. Because of the size of the margin of error, that means it’s basically a tossup.

The same can’t be said when it comes to responses by political party, ideology, gender and race. In each of those, significant difference emerge.

Take political party. A solid majority of Democrats (56%) believe masking children under 5 is a good idea, compared with just 24% of Republicans and 31% of independents. Conversely, only 24% of Democrats said it was a bad idea, versus 58% of Republicans and 38% of independents.