Powerful Voices

10 reasons why failing to look back and learn from the covid years is a bad idea

Through the past two and a half years we've heard again and again that “we don't know enough about this - we're doing the best we can with limited information”. That being so, looking back and learning when more information is available later is of paramount importance.

Some months ago, my friend Wynn Williamson proposed to me the idea of creating a 'top ten' of the most important and informative stories from two and a half years of covid. Since then, we have collaborated extensively on doing that. Wynn and I, together with a small circle of others, shared, read, saved and circulated many hundreds of videos, news stories and scientific papers throughout the period, so we had a lot to draw upon, and a lot to evaluate. Many of these materials brought strongly into question, let´s say, the better-known story of the pandemic, as it has been repeated and reinforced through most governments and news channels.

OK, let's be balanced and accept that there are two sides (at least) to every debate. But since that 'officially sanctioned and endlessly repeated' story is well known, let's here do a retrospect on what could be called 'the counter story', as told here by ten eminently qualified and powerful voices:

ONE: PROFESSOR OF MEDICINE JAY BHATTACHARYA¹ AND BIO-STATISTICIAN MARTIN KULLDORFF²

In October of 2020, Bhattacharya and Kulldorff co-signed, with Professor Sunetra Gupta,³ the ‘Great Barrington Declaration’⁴ which sounded one of the strongest challenges to policies and responses being pursued in relation to the pandemic and the rationales behind them. Tens of thousand of medical science professionals subsequently counter-signed the declaration in support, and it should have become a central focus of policy debate. Instead, it was buried by the media to the extent that virtually nobody knows that it happened. Right after the declaration was published the head of the National Institutes for Health (NIH) wrote an email to Anthony Fauci, calling for a ‘devastating take-down’ of the work, referring to the three authors, despite their impressive medical background, and professorships at three of the most prestigious universities in the world, as ‘fringe epidemiologists’. Shortly afterward, online censorship began to make their work invisible to the public. In September of 2022, Bhattacharya and Kulldorff began legal proceedings against the U.S. Government and associated institutions (such as Fauci’s NIAID) for colluding with tech. platforms and publishers to suppress legitimate information. The full story of ‘The Great Barrington Declaration’, and the legal battle over its suppression is here.

TWO: EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGIST BRET WEINSTEIN⁵

In one of the most powerful retrospective analyses that we have come across, Weinstein spoke, in June of 2022, of the individuals and institutions which led the response to the pandemic, saying “ “Here's the problem: I don't want to consider them the enemy, but what we got during covid was not an inept response. It was the inverse of a good response – and you can't get there through incompetence. Had they simply failed that would be one thing, but what they gave us was a recipe for disaster. And to the extent that they were willing to do that, for whatever reason, and allow the harm to flow from it that did, I have to think of them that way. These people must be removed from power lest this happen again”. Weinstein’s powerful retrospective on the pandemic in general can be heard here. His further thoughtful, compelling and disturbing comments about the political psychology of mask mandates can be found here.

THREE: MEDICAL RESEARCHER AND ENTREPENEUR ROBERT MALONE⁶

Robert Malone is one of the original creators of the mRNA technology. Drawing on his long scientific and commercial experience of vaccine development, trialling, regulation and marketing, he has expressed major concerns regarding responses to the covid pandemic.

In particular, he has spoken of the effects of a well-established phenomenon called ‘immune imprinting’. This he outlined in an interview in July of 2022: The principle is that artificial stimulations of the adaptive immune system trains the body to focus more narrowly on specific pathogens, such that it potentially loses some of its adaptive ability to respond to wider ranges of pathogens (including ‘new variants’). When the same artificial stimulation is repeated multiple times (2, 3, 4 and more inoculations with the same agent) the immune system becomes more and more ‘imprinted’ with a narrow range of ability to respond, and the generalised capacity of the immune system is diminished. This, according to Malone, is why the effectiveness of covid vaccines has waned so quickly, and even begun to cross over into what is now being called ‘negative efficacy’ as viruses mutate and immune systems actually deteriorate. Malone was one of a number of scientist who warned against this before the vaccine rollout began.⁷ Malone explains the process and the problem of ‘immune imprinting’ here.

FOUR: MOLECULAR BIOLOGIST FAHRIE HASSAN⁸

In July of 2022, Hassan made an especially shocking presentation to the World Council For Health, concerning corporate conflicts of interest embedded in the W.H.O. decision making process. The video quality is not so good, but the content is spectacular, and easily verified as factual. No need here to throw around expressions like ‘conspiracy theory’, only to look at some factual connections of ownership, control and funding of webs of institutions, and make one’s own conclusions as whether or not those are problematic. Hassan summarises his shocking findings in a dialogue with Dr. Tess Lawrie here.

FIVE: PSYCHOLOGIST MATTIAS DESMET⁹

Were the strange dynamics and decisions around the pandemic the result of confused communications, the complexity and danger of the situation, hidden agendas, or something else? In May of 2022 Desmet offered, by way of an answer, an insight which went beyond any of the other dialogues which were taking place. In his recently published work,¹⁰ building in turn on the work of other psychologists, and social and political theorists, Desmet has clarified how generalised social anxiety, building up over time, can subsequently lead to mass overreactions to an emerging problem. Historical anaylsis of a number of large scale crises shows that the emerging problem becomes a kind of ´hypnotic focal point´ for other anxieties, providing a sense that ´something is being done´, as well a new sense of group identity and unified action, and thus a sense of hope, justified or not. Desmet explains how in these situations, the behaviours of society can become increasingly irrational, and potentially highly destructive. His insights have profound implications for where we will go next if we fail to learn from what has happened, and how we might be able to choose a better direction. It is not an overstatement to say that all of the other nine viewpoints presented here take on a different context in the light of his work. Desmet outlines his potentially world-changing perspective on the situation here.

SIX: HISTORIAN AND FORMER SUPREME COURT JUDGE LORD JONATHAN SUMPTION¹¹

Sumption expressed from the beginning serious concerns about the lack of both legal and scientific basis for lockdowns. His May 2020 interview with the BBC (here) proposed that governments were acting not in the public interest, nor in accordance with ´the science´, but primarily in the interest of protecting themselves from being criticised if they did not ‘lock down’. In this he seemed to anticipate Mattias Desmet’s argument (above) - especially since he also argued that distorted levels of fear among the public were worsening that problem, by leading them to actively support, or demand, measures which seemed clear in the long term to do more damage than good.

In an August 2022 interview (here), with a retrospective view, he spoke of psychological lines having been crossed in terms of what kind of action and consequence can be considered acceptable, and how difficult it is historically to regain freedoms after they have been surrendered. But he also expressed a degree of hope for ‘next time’, in that public tolerance of such excesses may be lower, having now witnessed the massive ‘collateral’ costs in lives, mental health, education and economic destruction. (Further testimony to the scale of those costs is found in Dr. John Campbell’s presentations below). In these two interviews at the beginning and end of the period, and others in between, Sumption also emphasised that the SARS-Cov2 pandemic was not only less severe than the Spanish flu of 1917, but broadly similar in scale to other pandemics in the last 100 years. (The Asian flu of 1957, the Hong Kong flu of 1968, and even the Russian flu of 1889, were all global pandemics, with death-tolls broadly comparable to 2020 - 2022, but none were met in such excessive and counter-productive ways. Nor with untrue assertions that they were each of them ‘unprecedented events’). Perhaps that is another confirmation of Desmet’s notion that this time the social context was ripe, for other reasons, for an extreme and damaging over-reaction.

SEVEN: EPIDEMIOLOGIST AND CARDIOLOGIST PETER McCULLOUGH¹²

In September of 2021 McCullough made a hard-hitting presentation to the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons. In it he noted that in their first month, covid vaccines resulted in more deaths in the USA than was normal in an entire year for the historical average of all other vaccines. By October of 2021 the numbers had risen to 15,937 dead and more than 20,000 permanently disabled - or more than one in a thousand of those who had at that time been vaccinated. And he urged that "we must figure out why in some individuals these vaccines are lethal". Regarding the evidence of causal connection between the vaccine and the cited deaths and injuries, he said the studies which provided them fulfill the 'Bradford Hill Criteria for Causality'. For example:

• a dangerous mechanism of action (toxicity of the spike protein)

• a tight temporal relationship (50% of the deaths and disablements within 48 hours of the shot, 80% within a week)

• internal consistency within the data (between deaths and non-fatal events)

• external consistency (the same evidence in multiple monitoring systems - such as VAERS in the USA, the MHRA Yellow Card System in the UK, and the EMA Eudra-Vigilance system for the European Union)

Thus he said “We’ve basically got it. We’ve fulfilled the Bradford Hill Criteria for Causality. The vaccines are causing these events”. McCullough went on to describe the systemic problems which have created this situation as an out-of-control juggernaut, and recounted how after one of his presentations a former president of the American Medical Association had said to him “Dr McCullough, we have the biggest medical catastrophe on our hands in human history, with a medical product. We’ve had two administrations buy into it, we’ve had all the houses of legislation buy into it, we’ve had the whole media buy into it, and no-one knows how to stop the freight-train”. The world cannot afford to disregard McCullough’s powerful presentation to the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons. Watch it here.

EIGHT: THE 30-FOLD INCREASE IN SUDDEN ATHLETE DEATHS IN 2021 - 2022

It is real-world feedback which speaks here. Studying international data from 1966 to 2004, The International Olympic Committee recorded an average of 29 sudden athlete deaths per year. Apparently the figure was 66 in the year 2005 -2006, but we have no information has to how that fits into the pattern of averages. In 2021 - 2022 however, the number of ‘sudden athlete deaths’ shot up to 975. It is not possible to prove the exact cause of death in all those cases, nor does the data presented tell us clearly whether there was a pattern of increase already in progess between 2004 and 2020. But there seem to be three factors which suggest scrutiny in relation to the vaccination program is very necessary: 1) The enormous scale of the increase. 2) The timing, with month on month figures rising steeply from May 2021, shortly after mass-vaccination began. 3) The context of known dramatic increases of vaccine death and injury (and in particular heart problems) testified to by (for instance) McCullough and Malone above, as well as other notable experts such as Dr. Tess Lawrie,¹³ Dr. Jessica Rose,¹⁴ and a great many others. The names of all 975 athletes and the cicumstances of their death can be found here.

NINE: PSYCHIATRIST NORMAN DOIDGE¹⁵

Doidge, like other scientists on this page, is passionately pro-vaccine. What he does not believe in however, is the way that they have been applied in response to covid. Nor the behaviour of the many institutions involved. According to Doidge’s carefully considered and researched (as well as lengthy) analysis, whole chains of institutions have violated science and medical ethics, and the result has been a widespread and justified withdrawal of trust in public health. Writing in October of 2021, he set out in detail the way that this happened and the serious consequences he believes will ensue if we don’t fix it.

For context, he sets out a number of serious historical abuses of the public health system in the USA. Then he itemises the times, year after year, that pharmaceutical companies have had multi-million and even billion-dollar fines for criminal behaviour. He describes the growing problem of hidden financial interests, ‘revolving doors’, systematic suppression of legitimate concerns from independent scientists, and a “hornet’s nest of corruption and regulatory capture”. Above all, he expresses grave concern at the way both governments and various big science institutions have interposed themselves between doctor and patient. That, he says, is deeply corrupting on many levels - and leads to false expertise being accepted by a perhaps excessively trusting public.

The real heart of Doidge’s essay is that “public health moves at the speed of trust,” and “If we want our public-health system to function better [and] safeguard the lives and livelihoods of all citizens, it must be rooted not in coercion but in confidence - and not only among the majority”. His supporting arguments are wide-ranging: Mass vaccination is not capable of producing herd immunity. The vaccines, even if providing some short term protection to the vaccinated, do not stop spread. Natural immunity is clearly much more potent than the protection provided by the vaccines. The pandemic has above all revealed the consequence of lifestyle problems that have led to weak immune systems. Important to note, those weak immune systems not only become problematic on exposure to a virus, but respond poorly to vaccination anyway. In Doidge's view the obsession with getting a needle into every arm, irrespective both of the above facts and of individual need, has led to "a new kind of scientific ideology, which we might call 'vaccinism'” and which is “the ideological mirror of anti-vaxxism”.

Another core element of his argument resonates with Desmet’s notions (above) about the psychological dynamics of ‘mass behaviour in crisis’. In this respect Doidge speaks of how massive and misleading message campaigns in the early months of the pandemic, based on fear and untrue statements, had a tremendously lasting effect and have still not relinquished their grip on ‘hijacked’ minds two years later. He also speaks of a long-standing phenomenon that he calls the ‘crystalisation’ of opinion in one part of the public to the point that it seeks to suppress all other opinions (or even to persecute those who hold them). This has already resulted for instance in a spiralling of stigmatisation wherein demonisation of the unvaccinated quickly morphed into demonisation of the the "not-vaccinated-enough".

In closing Doidge cites Professor Martin Kulldorff (already mentioned above): “Those who are pushing these vaccine mandates and vaccine passports—vaccine fanatics I would call them—to me they have done much more damage [to the cause of vaccination] during this one year than the anti-vaxxers have done in two decades”. His own concluding views are that we must rescue the extraordinary technology of vaccination from a from a flawed and broken system of poor regulation, insufficiently transparent testing and manipulative messaging and, critically, change our orientation to those who are skeptical. The four part serialisation of Doidge’s rather long essay is well worth reading in full. It’s one of the most serious and intelligent analyses of the whole period. You can find it here.

TEN: NURSE EDUCATOR JOHN CAMPBELL¹⁶

Campbell has published his reviews of scientific papers relating to covid every week throughout the past two and a half years, tracking the entire evolution of the pandemic. Some more concerning examples of his research include: An autumn 2022 review (here) of official data showing that deaths of new-born (that is, in first hours, days or weeks of life) babies in Scotland doubled during 2021 - 2022 . And a review (here) of other official data sources showing excess deaths running at around 16% around the world. Which is to say, more excess deaths occurring in late 2022 than during the worst peaks of the pandemic. He subsequently went deeper into those numbers (here), declaring that “something quite horrible is going on” and questioning why it could be that the media, so obsessed with death numbers during main period of the pandemic, apparently became disinterested in higher rates of death subsequently. Related to this issue, Professor Angus Dalgleish suggested (here) that the cause of these new excess deaths is non-diagnosis and non-treatment of other illness as a result of lockdowns. Thus it seems either that lockdowns have effectively killed more than they saved, or something else has begun to kill large numbers of people in 2022, as yet officially unidentified.

Some concluding thoughts: The voices above, while chosen for their special relevance or impact, are only the tip of the iceberg.

All of the concerns expressed here are shared (though not necessarily unanimously in each case) by many thousands of medical scientists around the world. For a number of systemic reasons, that sea of concerned professional voices has been marginalised and almost entirely excluded from the discourse of both mainstream media and governments. The conclusion that our medical and governmental institutions have gone of the rails is unavoidable. As a former chair of the Institute of Medical Microbiology in Germany put it “Let´s not be naive - science is every bit as corrupt as politics”.¹⁷ Or from a former head of the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons: “The current system is so corrupt that we have to start from scratch and build something alongside, as an alternative”. ¹⁸ And a great many health professionals and independent scientists have begun to do that.

As to the unknown extent of problems from experimental vaccines, it is sobering to reflect on how it was that hundreds of millions of people bought into the widespread application of an experimental gene therapy which, perhaps unsurprisingly, has not worked out quite as expected. And how clear it now is that ´interests´ and subterfuge were in play to at least some extent. While the costs of that are thus far not manifesting universally, there does seem to be real reason for concern. And also real reason to believe there has been malfeasance.

At the same time as demanding both change and justice however, we might also draw at least some comfort from the fact that many medical scientists have already been working on ways to mitigate known mechanisms of damage. It should be clear that if the world is open to analysing this properly and honestly, solutions will be found - and indeed some early possibilities are already being offered in that regard. Some of the scientists involved in that are giving assurance that such research will go on well into the future, driven by talented (and mostly independent) scientists from all over the world. Doctors and health scientists who were early in ´challenging the narratives´ are already expressing a conciliatory attitude to their fellows. Which is to say that their attitude to doctors and nurses who may have unwittingly participated in something which in retrospect they might feel they shouldn´t have, is most often, ´if you have a change of heart, we will not blame you, we will welcome you´.

Great and committed people are working with integrity, compassion, realism and political balance to bring a clearer and more comprehensive understanding of our situation, and to cultivate, based on that understanding, shared visions of how we can catalyse positive social and institutional change. We must get behind them.

1. Jay Bhattacharya is a Professor of Medicine at Stanford University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, and was outspoken against many ‘official narratives’ on the pandemic right from the spring of 2020.

2. Martin Kulldorff is a professor of medicine, biostatistician, and epidemiologist with expertise in detecting and monitoring of infectious disease outbreaks, and vaccine safety evaluations. He has served on the Centre for Disease Control’s panel for overseeing vaccine safety systems. He taught at Harvard from 2003 to 2021, after which dissent from ‘the narrative’ led to a parting of ways. He is now the Scientific Director at the Brownstone Institute, a new scientific institution to help save public health and science, as well as a founding Fellow at Hillsdale College’s newly formed Academy for Science & Freedom.

3. Sunetra Gupta is a professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford Universtity.

4. The Great Barrington Declaration can be viewed here.

5. Bret Weinstein was a professor of evolutionary biology at Evergreen State College in the U.S.A. for fourteen years, until he resigned in 2017 over his refusal to accept that institution’s ongoing politicisation. With his brother, mathematician, economist and writer Eric Weinstein, neuroscientist Sam Harris and clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson and others, he was a founder of the so-called ‘Intellectual Dark Web’, a coalition of intellectuals seeking to challenge accepted social assumptions. He continues to fullfil a role as a ‘public intellectual’ mainly through his ‘Dark Horse Podcast’.

6. Robert Malone is a physician and surgeon with decades of experience in clinical trials, vaccines, gene therapy, bio-defense, and immunology. He holds multiple patents for mRNA technologies which he developed while working at the Salk Institute. He has worked across all sectors including government, academia, NGO´s, and commerce, but most extensively as an entrepeneur and commercial consultant in the field of medical science.

7. For instance Professor Theo Schetters and Dr. Geert vanden Bossche.

8. Fahrie Hassan is a Molecular Biologist and MSc in Chemical Pathology, specializing in Molecular Genetics, Enzymology, Immunology, and Biochemistry.

9. Mattias Desmet is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Ghent in Belgium. He also has a master´s degree in statistics, and has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed scientific papers.

10. ´The Psychology of Totalitarianism´, Mattias Desmet, 2022.

11. Jonathan Sumption is a former Oxford University historian, who later began a career in law, becoming a barrister, judge and supreme court judge. He was knighted in 2003.

12. Peter McCullough is an internationally-known consultant cardiologist with over 1,000 peer-reviewed publications to his name, and over 500 citations in the National Library of Medicine.

13. Tess Lawrie is a medical doctor and scientific reasearcher who specialises in medical meta-analysis. She has consulted to the W.H.O., and runs The Evidence-Based Medicine Consultancy. She also conducted what was arguably the definitive meta-analysis on the effectiveness of Ivermectin in the treatment of covid, which can be found here.

14. Jessica Rose is a medical research scientist. She has degrees in applied mathematics and immunology, a PhD in computational biology and two post-doctoral degrees, in molecular biology and bio-chemistry.

15. Norman Doidge is a medical doctor, psychiatrist and psychotherapist as well as poet and prolific author. He has taught in the departments of Philosophy, Political Science, Law and Psychiatry at the University of Toronto. He has sat on the Editorial Board of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and been a peer reviewer for The Harvard Review of Psychiatry.

16. John Campbell has an MSc in health science and a PhD in nursing science. He has spent his career training nurses.

17. See ´Corona: A False Alarm´ by Professor Sucharit Bhakti´, 2020.

18. Dr. Richard Amerling expressed that view in an October 2022 interview here.