Tag: politics

He wouldn’t have got away with it in 2020. 

When Professor Wei Shen Lim, chairman of the JCVI’s Covid-19 sub-committee, announced last week that the Pfizer vaccine was to be ‘offered’ to all 16- and 17-year-olds, with 12-year-olds next, the UK gave a kind of collective shrug. 

Such is our fatigue, government scientists could make lederhosen mandatory and people would just react based on the political camp they’ve adopted (‘follow the science’ or ‘follow the science-money’).

Well, it’s time to wake up and grow up, because things don’t always just work out, and they are talking about our children.  

This vaccination programme may be a success, but it also has a life of its own, and it is being expanded at a furious rate without even the pretence of diligence, questioning or debate from the media or opposition parties. Scientific inquiry has been entirely censored, with the world’s formerly leading virologists and epidemiologists no-platformed. Since the word ‘science’ means precisely that process of open inquiry, then whatever the JCVI are doing, it is not what the lab-coat theatre suggests. 

However, the very fact Professor Lim’s press conference lacked any precision, rigour or coherence was actually very revealing.

We are now passed the point where the UK’s political advisers in lab coats are even pretending this is about science. (At one point, Lim actually laughed as he concluded a rambling answer with, ‘I hope that’s clear,’ when it was clearly a deflection.)

We have analysed Professor Lim’s explanations in search of a grain of logic or evidence for rushing out this vaccine to children. You can make up your own mind.

• “Risk from covid”

In his first point, he chose to gloss over the crucial matter of the frequency and severity with which children get covid, by deferring to the regulator’s casual opening comments. Rather an important point, you’d think, when you are effectively mandating (through coercion) an entirely new gene therapy for children. 

In fact, we know that there is zero statistical basis on which to say that children are at any risk at all from covid. Of the tiny yet tragic handful of children that have died with covid (as with all age groups, the data does not determine that they died from covid), all of them had serious existing conditions, such as leukaemia, and many were already in hospital with these, prior to infection. In the context of millions of children, the number is far, far below the level at which any determination of risk can be made. When it comes to children and covid, the word ‘risk’, in the sense of measurable statistics (which is how scientists use it) is simply inapplicable. Lim knows this of course, which is why he won’t speak about it.

• “Frequency of severe reaction to Pfizer vaccine”

Professor Lim next asserted that the frequency of severe reactions from the vaccine are “extremely rare or very rare” for bad outcomes. There is a big difference between ‘extremely’ and ‘very’ rare. Extremely rare means 1 in 100,000. Very rare means 1 in 10,000. And in fact, in the JCVI’s statement in July on vaccinating children, it said that the side effects were ‘rare but serious’. Rare means one in a thousand. 

In other words, if we vaccinate all children in this country, there could be as many as 10,000 children suffering serious side effects from a vaccine that was never going to do them any harm. The Pfizer trials on children in the US show that ‘serious’ incidents include heart inflammation and heart failure, that in several cases resulted in a healthy child dying within days (yes many children were killed earlier this year from the Pfizer shot during the rushed US trials, you can read about them on the US government’s official site here – search for Pfizer BioNTech Covid-19, by age.)

As far as we can determine, the risk from covid from these healthy children was zero.

It’s an interesting thought experiment to see how you can distinguish this programme from that followed by serial-killer Dr Harold Shipman. I’m yet to find any meaningful difference.

Maybe there is a different reading of the risk, and of the numbers. But if that was the case, why didn’t Professor Lim give it? Why hasn’t the JCVI ever given it, despite the many public and private requests from doctors and scientists around the country?  

You may also note what Lim did not say on this topic – that there is no long-term safety data on these vaccines. Most vaccine injuries in any age groups are longer-term effects, but for children this is crucial. And all the more so given that the short-term data has revealed that serious risks are present that were not predicted in the initial trials. They have their whole lives to live. Professor Lim entirely ignored this crucial point, as has the entire covid-vaccine industry. 

• “Long covid in children”

Professor Lim stated that long covid is ‘only true for a very small proportion’ of children. If this sounds uncharacteristically measured, you should know that on the day of his press conference, Kings College released the most comprehensive study on child ‘long covid’ to-date, which showed that, like many respiratory diseases, covid can cause a lingering headache in children for a few weeks, but that in every case it cleared up within eight weeks. Since the study was going to be the second news item of the evening, Lim had nowhere further to go.

• “Mental health and educational impact of covid”

Yes, this was actually one of Lim’s killer points. If you can’t work out why it’s nonsense, focus on the words ‘of covid’. 

• “Health inequality”

Perhaps the most vacuous and dangerous of all Lim’s non-points is his assertion that covid has “disproportionately affected young people”, and that “the effect of the vaccine on reducing healthcare inequalities.” 

What to make of this strange, unscientific series of statements?

Equality has never been a goal of medicine or healthcare. Equality is a goal within the Marxist political ideology, and whatever you think of that, it has never been applied to healthcare outcomes. The goal of healthcare is simply to make people healthy.

If the goal of healthcare is to make people equal, the quickest way to do that is to make everyone dead. If that sounds flippant, then you haven’t thought hard enough about how a society’s moral presuppositions force them down paths that nobody would have intended. 

• “One dose”

Here’s a strange thing. Lim and his JCVI colleagues aren’t going to give these teenagers both jabs within 3 weeks as some other countries have. They are going to wait to see what happens after the first dose.

You could look on this as relatively prudent. Or you could ask, if the vaccine is so safe, why wouldn’t you just give both? 

The answer lies, of course, in the US Pfizer trials, where a significant proportion of children did not take the second dose, because of ‘adverse effects’, which for some meant they were already dead. 

• “Parental consent”

Did I not mention this yet? There is no parental consent for 16-year-olds. To be fair, Lim didn’t bother to mention this either. He waited until the first, blatantly planted, question from the BBC, delivered and answered, as an after-thought. Nothing to see here.

• Why the U-turn.

Perhaps most amazingly (although there’s plenty of competition) this press conference amounted to a colossal U-turn that was barely acknowledged by the attending press. Just two weeks earlier, the JCVI stated that vaccine risks outweighed the benefits for under-18s.

What shocking new data had suddenly emerged? 

Not only was this not forthcoming (and still isn’t) but Lim said they didn’t even have it.

You see, “the evidence isn’t necessarily in the hands of the JCVI. We have spoken to academic partners in other countries,” and the data hasn’t been published. Lim shrugs at this, like, what can you do? 

And the journalists are like, nothing to see here. 

And that is so true.

What to conclude?

It’s one thing to demonstrate that someone is full of gas. But does that necessarily mean that Lim and the JCVI are acting malevolently? 

I mean, if the broad implications of the above analysis are even half-right, the JCVI would need to be evil or out-of-their minds. And that seems unlikely.

So, despite all of the nonsense they are talking, maybe they just know something we don’t, and for reasons that are unfathomable but that could exist, they just can’t tell us. 

Well, actually, I think that is not so far from the truth. And not in a good way.

Exhibit one

Lim is being paid by Pfizer. I know, this seems really far-fetched. But just take a look here. 

It’s band 3, so Pfizer pays him ‘over £25,000’. (There is no band 4.)

And this is just what has been dug up, it wasn’t offered up. 

Conflicts of interest can be managed, but the first step in managing them is full disclosure and transparency. This has not happened. In a sane world, this would be a huge scandal. But our press was bought off many months ago.

When you have a real personal interest in something, it can be very difficult to think in an unbiased way. This doesn’t make Lim evil. It just makes him unethical, compromised and dangerous (along with everyone else that have put themselves in a similar position.)

Exhibit two

In the weeks prior to this U-turn, one JCVI member was very much against vaccinating children. Robert Dingwall became known on social media as the only outspoken critic of any suggestions in this direction, and behind the scenes he is understood to have lobbied his colleagues. He told the Spectator that his scepticsm, “was not by any means an outlier in discussions within the committee.”

A week or so before the u-turn, Dingwall and a number of other members of the covid sub-committee were fired from the JCVI.

Let’s be clear. The medical-political establishment in this country is entirely intertwined. The NHS is the only game in town, the government is the only game in town, which means anyone questioning the dogma loses their positions, perks, income and means to practice. If you doubt that, just ask the world’s leading epidemiologist how things are going.  

There is a very simple reason why these doctors are not speaking out. Self-preservation.

Ultimately, if there was a good reason to extend this risky and rushed programme to children, they would have given it. They would be singing it from the roof tops. But they aren’t. Because it does not exist. 

I wanted to give Professor Lim the final word, because that’s only fair. So I dug out his least objectionable refrain. But you know, the more I read it, the less comforted I feel.

“We place a high value on the safety of children and young people, and that reflects the public viewpoint as well.”