Tag: covid-19

Tim Walz Was Dead Wrong About Misinformation and Free Speech

Now that Minnesota Democratic Gov. Tim Walz has become Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, it is ostensibly time for the media to scrutinize his record and past statements. (Emphasis on ostensibly.)

To say the mainstream coverage of Walz has been fawning thus far would be quite an understatement; The New York Times described him as “a one-man rejoinder to the idea that the Democrats are the party of the cultural and coastal elite.” The Atlantic‘s Charlie Warzel merrily aided media efforts to portray Walz as a lovable, folksy paternal figure, writing that “dad is on the ballot.” CNN proclaimed the Harris-Walz team as “an antidote to Trump’s American carnage.”

“Kamala Harris and Tim Walz want to make America joyful again,” wrote CNN’s Stephen Collinson.

The task of scrutinizing Walz will clearly fall to other interested parties. (See Reason‘s Eric Boehm on his overall record, and this piece by me on his COVID-19 policies.)

Conservatives on social media did manage to dig up an old clip of Walz making an alarming and false claim: “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.”

Walz is wrong, of course: The First Amendment, which vigorously protects Americans’ free speech rights, does not distinguish between good information and misinformation. Moreover, so-called hate speech—an arbitrary category, as different people find different sorts of speech to be hateful—is quite obviously protected.

But that clip of Walz is only eight seconds long, and I am wary of taking people out of context. So I looked for the rest of the clip, which is available here.

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Walz Created ‘Snitch Line’ for COVID Mandate Violators

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has been selected as Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate for the 2024 presidential election. 

This choice has reignited discussions around Walz’s controversial actions during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly the establishment of a notorious “snitch line” in March 2020.

He and his family have also been under fire for their actions and revealing remarks amid the 2020 BLM riots.

The Post Millennial (TPM) reported that Walz’s administration set up the hotline to encourage Minnesotans to report their neighbors for violating COVID-19 lockdown orders. 

This initiative drew thousands of complaints, with citizens reporting on activities such as going to church, hosting birthday parties, buying nonessential items, and not enforcing mask mandates.

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Paper showing COVID and flu vaccines do NOT reduce hospitalization was published today

Today was a good day.

Two breakthroughs:

  1. My paper showing the COVID and flu vaccines do not work was published in PrePrints today. The paper shows that the COVID and flu vaccines don’t reduce hospitalization at all. Zero. Zip. Nada. It uses VA data published in JAMA by a top epidemiologist to expose the truth. No hospitalization benefit implies no death benefit because there is no precedent in medicine for no hospitalization benefit yielding a death benefit. So they lied to us about the benefits. It was ALL downside risk with the shots.
  2. I was able to confirm that the Medicare data shows that the mortality rate of the shots depends on brand. Statistically significant. Yet, nobody in the world is looking at this. Not at the local level, not the state level, not the national level. They all look the other way. I guess it’s time for another paper?

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Walz administration threatened voters for not masking up; critics tear apart new mask study

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris picked a running mate, Tim Walz, known for severe COVID-19 restrictions as Minnesota’s governor, including a hotline on which residents could report each other for violating his stay-at-home executive order.

Walz’s administration threatened the medical license of his 2022 Republican challenger, Scott Jensen, who won Minnesota’s Family Physician of the Year award in 2016, for COVID wrongthink. Two of its five investigations were opened after Jensen entered the race.

But it’s Walz’s crusade for masking, which he called  “one of the last” COVID mandates he would lift in fall 2020 and was upheld as constitutional a year ago, that could make swing voters more wary of a Democratic ticket that, unlike the GOP ticket, might bring mandates back.

When Minnesota Republicans sued to block Walz’s mask mandate at polling places ahead of the 2020 primary, Secretary of State Steve Simon told the Star Tribune that he would direct officials to record the names of voters who refused to accept masks “and let them know they will be reported to authorities” if they vote inside without a “health reason.”

Germany is still using a similar tack to protect masking from scrutiny.

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Tim Walz Was a COVID-19 Tyrant

Vice President Kamala Harris has chosen Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate. Walz was a moderate Democrat when he served in the House of Representatives but veered left during his two terms as governor. He referred to socialism as synonymous with neighborliness, pursued an extremely progressive governing agenda, and earned an F from the Cato Institute on fiscal policy.

Another notable thing about Walz is that he served as governor during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is thus possible to parse his approach to the virus—and that record is extremely disturbing. Indeed, Walz’s coronavirus policies were extremely heavy-handed and restrictive; under his leadership, the state endured the pandemic in a fundamentally anti-libertarian fashion.

When the coronavirus was first spreading, Walz was an enthusiastic promoter of social distancing rules. He described the crowds in public, outdoor spaces as “a little too big.” He even defended Minnesota’s ridiculous hotline for COVID-19 snitches. That’s right: Walz’s government maintained a method for people to report their neighbors for failing to abide by social distancing rules. Walz insisted in a recent interview that “one person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness”; denouncing one’s neighbors as insufficiently loyal to government policies is a fundamental aspect of socialism, however.

When asked by Republicans to take down the hotline, Walz responded: “We’re not going to take down a phone number that people can call to keep their families safe.”

And though Walz instructed police to merely issue citations to people caught violating stay-at-home orders—which is still bad enough—he also maintained the right, via executive order, to issue $1,000 fines and send violators to jail for 90 days. His government maintained that private, indoor gatherings should be limited to 10 people. Outdoor gatherings were arbitrarily capped at 25 people. On July 23, 2020, Walz declared a statewide mask mandate for most indoor spaces and even some outdoor spaces.

“If we can get a 90 to 95% compliance, which we’ve seen the science shows, we can reduce the infection rates dramatically, which slows that spread and breaks that chain,” Walz said at the time. “This is the way, the cheapest, the most effective way for us to open up our businesses, for us to get our kids back in school, for us to keep our grandparents healthy and for us to get back that life that we all miss so much.”

What followed was the implementation of one of the stupidest COVID-19 rules: Diners at restaurants had to wear masks while walking to their table and moving about the establishment but were allowed to go maskless as long as they were eating and drinking.

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The virus was safer than the vaccine. Whoops!

A quick summary of what we know so far

  1. The COVID vaccines were all downside risk for no benefit. The vaccine provided no protection against hospitalization or death, and actually increased your risk of getting COVID. So there was no benefit whatsoever.They all (except maybe Novavax) increased your all-cause mortality, something a vaccine is never supposed to do.
  2. Virus safer than the shots. The adverse event profile is, in general, much higher for those taking the jabs than for those infected with COVID.
  3. The medical community is willfully blind to the harms. It is appalling that the medical literature refuses to accept 1 and 2.
  4. COVID shots are not equally safe, but nobody will publish the relative brand safety data. There are significant mortality differences between the vaccine brands. It is beyond shameful that none of the health authorities anywhere in the world will expose the numbers or even want to see them. Hiding that safety information is not in the public interest.
  5. They need to stop hiding the data. As long as they keep the record level data secret on vaccines and mortality, nobody should take them.
  6. They need to acknowledge that fully unvaccinated kids are healthier. Every study in the peer-reviewed literature shows fully unvaccinated kids are healthier than their fully vaccinated counterparts.
  7. Vaccines are the primary cause of autism and a large number of chronic disorders. The data also points very strongly that vaccines are the major cause of sexual orientation and gender dysphoria conditions. A lot of people can’t accept that but the data is stunning and cannot be explained away.
  8. It’s hard to get the truth published nowadays. It is ridiculously hard to get a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal that goes against mainstream beliefs.
  9. The Czech Republic data where we found that Moderna increases all-cause mortality by 30%. If that’s wrong, what’s the right number and how come nobody knows what it is?
  10. You can’t keep hiding the truth. Sooner or later, however, we will see papers emerge that validate everything I’ve said above. I just can’t predict when that will happen.

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Meta-Analysis Finds Massive Failure of COVID-19 Vaccines to Stop SARS-CoV-2

Virtually every vaccinated person I meet has contracted COVID-19. Many still believe vaccination was worth the risk because they did not end up in the hospital in 2021 through the present day. Vaccine-takers tended to be younger working age individuals who were mandated by work or school, and therefore healthier than those not forced into taking the jab. In my practice, the senior citizens who took the vaccine tended to be healthier and far more worried about COVID-19. They were the first to get early treatment for the illness. Finally, we all saw COVID-19 illness become far milder on the second, third, and fourth infections because of natural immunity as we were faced with milder strains. So in the midst of this confounded set of relationships, how did the COVID-19 vaccines perform?

Wu et al, published a meta-analysis of 68 studies evaluating efficacy of COVID-19 vaccination. Keep in mind only favorable studies were accepted by editors. The results indicate a stunning failure of vaccination. Because the data are not from high-quality, prospective, double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized trials, and publication bias, we must be conservative and consider the lower-bound of the confidence interval as the statistic of interest. This means that vaccine performance could be as bad as that number.

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What the Australian excess deaths inquiry refused to publish

A committee investigating potential causes of Australia’s record excess deaths has refused to publish a comprehensive interdisciplinary submission by the Australian Medical Professionals Society (AMPS), of which I am a contributor.

Since 2021, Australia has experienced excess mortality at rates not seen outside of wartime. Not all of it is due to Covid. Therefore, the Australian Parliament established the world’s first excess deaths inquiry to get to the bottom of what’s causing so many more Australians to die than would normally be expected.

The AMPS submission includes :

  • Evidence of an uptick in all-cause mortality (ACM) with the introduction of Covid vaccines to a zero Covid community,
  • An estimate of the true contribution of Covid to excess deaths (29% at most),
  • An estimate of the true number of Australian cumulative excess deaths throughout 2021-2023 in the ballpark of 40,000 as opposed to the official Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) estimate of 29,601,
  • Discussion of how the ABS drastically reduced its excess deaths estimate overnight by changing its baseline modelling,
  • Evidence that Covid vaccine injuries and deaths are under-reported in official record keeping,
  • A review of the Australian Government’s unscientific response to the Covid pandemic and its detrimental impact on health outcomes, likely contributing to excess deaths,
  • And evidence that deaths in the vaccine arm of the Pfizer trial were concealed prior to the US Emergency Use Approval (EUA) data cut-off date, plus evidence of a 3.7-fold increase in cardiac events in vaccinated vs. placebo arm subjects.

After AMPS made its submission to the inquiry earlier this year, the organisation was invited to testify at a public hearing. This resulted in some rather explosive content going in the public record, including Dr Jeyanthi Kunadhasan asking the committee,

“If the clinical sponsor can hide deaths and autopsy results, ignore a sudden adult death and cardiac event signal in the clinical trial, with the regulator waving this along, what else can they hide?”

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NIH Top Brass Caught Conspiring to Evade Questions About Coronavirus Research at Wuhan Lab

Newly disclosed emails reveal that top officials at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) planned to provide Congress with a response that “doesn’t actually answer the questions” about a grant the agency awarded to a nonprofit for controversial research conducted in collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

Independent journalist Paul D. Thacker, author of “The Disinformation Chronicle” on Substack, analyzed the emails, which were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by investigative reporter Jimmy Tobias.

Thacker’s report shows NIH officials discussing how to respond to congressional inquiries about the grant awarded to EcoHealth Alliance.

In a July 2020 email exchange, Adrienne Hallett, then-NIH associate director for legislative policy, outlined a strategy to evade direct answers to congressional inquiries.

“We are going to draft a response to the letter that doesn’t actually answer the questions in the letter but rather presents a narrative of what happened at a high level,” Hallett wrote. “The Committee may come back for other documents but I’m hoping to run out the clock.”

The email chain reveals that top NIH leadership, including then-Director Francis Collins and then-Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak, were aware of and supportive of this approach.

Collins responded, “Sounds like a good plan.” Dr. Michael Lauer, the NIH’s deputy director for extramural research, replied, “Thanks so much Adrienne! I’ll draft something today.”

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Study of 125 Countries Finds ‘No Apparent Benefit’ From COVID Vaccines

A new study by a team of Canadian researchers into excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic found that patterns of excess death globally could not be explained by the virus, including long COVID.

The study, by researchers with Correlation Research in the Public Interest, examined excess mortality in 125 countries during the pandemic. It found that mortality patterns correlate closely with the imposition of restrictions such as lockdowns and with the COVID-19 vaccine rollout.

The investigation determined that pandemic-related restrictions resulted in 30 million deaths globally and that 17 million deaths can be attributed to the COVID-19 vaccines.

The researchers concluded that “nothing special would have occurred in terms of mortality had a pandemic not been declared and had the declaration not been acted upon.”

Joseph Hickey, Ph.D., one of the paper’s co-authors and president of Correlation, joined “The Defender In-Depth” this week to discuss the study’s findings and analyze the likely causes contributing to increases in excess deaths and overall mortality.

Excess death data ‘not compatible’ with ‘particularly virulent special pathogen’

Hickey explained that “all-cause mortality” refers to “the number of deaths without filtering by the cause of death” during a given period, while “excess deaths” refers to “how many deaths occurred that are above and beyond what would have been predicted” for a certain period.

Hickey and the study’s co-authors analyzed pre-pandemic raw data from 2015 to 2019, and data collected between 2020 and 2023. Hickey said the data, collected from 125 countries, found “a large amount of excess deaths.”

“We calculate that over the COVID period … about 0.39% of the global population died in excess. That compares to about 0.97%” during the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918.

Hickey said this was “the largest non-war mortality event in 100 years” globally.

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