Tag: pandemic

Singapore Compensates Hundreds Injured or Killed by COVID Shots

The government of Singapore has paid out nearly $1.9 million in financial assistance to 413 people who have suffered serious adverse reactions or died after getting a COVID-19 shot as of Dec. 31, 2022. The money was paid out under the country’s Vaccine Injury Financial Assistance Program (VIFAP), according to Singapore’s Ministry of Health.1 2

Of those individuals who received compensation, the individual or families of three were awarded a “Tier 1” payout of $225,000 each because they either died or were permanently disabled following COVID vaccination. Among the vaccine injured is a 16-year-old boy who suffered a heart attack and collapsed after a weightlifting session in a gym six days after getting a first dose of Pfizer/BioNTech’s Comirnaty messenger RNA (mRNA) COVID biologic on June 27, 2021. The teenager was admitted to a hospital intensive care unit (ICU) and underwent inpatient rehabilitation.1 3 4 5

According to a report by The Straits Times in August 2021, the teenager was diagnosed with myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) and the Ministry of Health said that the condition was “likely a serious adverse event caused by the vaccine which may have been aggravated by the youth’s strenuous lifting of weights and high consumption of caffeine through energy drinks and supplements.”3 4

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CDC Aware of Reports of ‘Debilitating Illnesses’ After COVID-19 Vaccination: Official

U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officials are aware of reports of long-lasting problems following COVID-19 vaccination, an official recently disclosed.

“With respect to reports of people experiencing debilitating illnesses, we are aware of these reports of people experiencing long-lasting health problems following COVID vaccination,” Dr. Tom Shimabukuro, director of the CDC’s Immunization Safety Office, said on Jan. 26.

“In some cases, the clinical presentation of people suffering these health problems is variable and no specific medical cause for the symptoms have been found,” Shimabukuro added. “We understand that illness is disruptive and stressful, especially under those circumstances. And we acknowledge these health problems have substantially impacted the quality of life for people and have also affected those around them. And we hope for improvement and recovery, and we will continue to monitor the safety of these vaccines and work with partners to try to better understand these types of adverse events.”

Shimabukuro was speaking during a Jan. 26 Food and Drug Administration (FDA) meeting that discussed COVID-19 vaccine safety and effectiveness.

Dr. Hayley Gans, a pediatrics professor at Stanford University Medical Center, had asked how federal authorities were tracking problems that have cropped up after vaccination and might not be “amenable” to rapid cycle analysis, or one way of monitoring vaccine safety.

Shimabukuro noted that any person, including health care workers, can submit reports of adverse events to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which the CDC manages, “and we accept all those reports without judging the clinical seriousness or how plausible the adverse event may be with respect to causation.” Other systems also monitor safety beyond the rapid analysis, he added.

“We take vaccine safety very seriously,” Shimabukuro said.

Shimabukuro’s comments are unusual among federal officials, who have been reluctant to connect adverse events with the COVID-19 vaccines.

Brianne Dressen, who was injured by AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine, said that the response was welcome but wondered whether it was enough.

“This was an unprecedented move but also was a carefully worded response. Instead of a little whisper in an FDA meeting, this really needs to be communicated to the medical community,” Dressen, co-founder of the support group React19, told The Epoch Times in an email. “They have said these very words to us privately so it’s good they are finally leaning in the right direction to start the conversation publicly, but is it too little too late?”

“Injured Americans have been begging these agencies for acknowledgement for over two years. This small utterance should have happened long ago. By now we should be openly discussing and researching these Covid vaccine reactions,” she added.

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Woman injured after Covid vaccine demands retractions after media falsely declares her video to be faked

A Louisiana woman with documented seizures and other medical issues following Covid vaccine is demanding retractions from a mob of ill-informed media who published attacks that she calls false and libelous.

Angelia Desselle, 47, is a former manager of a surgery center outside of New Orleans. Earlier this week, she responded to a post by Twitter CEO Elon Musk. Musk stated that he’d had a bad reaction to a Covid-19 vaccine booster, and had a cousin who suffered heart inflammation after the shot. 

Desselle can relate.

Days after getting Pfizer’s Covid vaccine in January of 2021, she reported serious medical issues. She posted a video clip recorded at Ochsner Hospital in Jefferson, Louisiana showing her apparently suffering an episode of uncontrollable shaking.

Evidently without investigating the matter in even a cursory fashion, many vaccine industry interests and others on Twitter declared the video, and Desselle’s apparent illness, to be fake. Desselle, who is white, was subjected to bullying and a barrage of racist attacks.

In one of the tamer exchanges, a user by the name “Ducky” Tweeted: “Why does this phenomenon only happen to white American republicans?” 

“Because they’re all victims,” replied user Pauly Cassilas.

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It’s Time for the Scientific Community to Admit We Were Wrong About COVID and It Cost Lives. Newsweek Op-ed

As a medical student and researcher, I staunchly supported the efforts of the public health authorities when it came to COVID-19. I believed that the authorities responded to the largest public health crisis of our lives with compassion, diligence, and scientific expertise. I was with them when they called for lockdowns, vaccines, and boosters.

I was wrong. We in the scientific community were wrong. And it cost lives.

I can see now that the scientific community from the CDC to the WHO to the FDA and their representatives, repeatedly overstated the evidence and misled the public about its own views and policies, including on natural vs. artificial immunity, school closures and disease transmission, aerosol spread, mask mandates, and vaccine effectiveness andsafety, especially among the young. All of these were scientific mistakes at the time, not in hindsight. Amazingly, some of these obfuscations continue to the present day.

But perhaps more important than any individual error was how inherently flawed the overall approach of the scientific community was, and continues to be. It was flawed in a way that undermined its efficacy and resulted in thousands if not millions of preventable deaths.

What we did not properly appreciate is that preferences determine how scientific expertise is used, and that our preferences might be—indeed, our preferences were—very different from many of the people that we serve. We created policy based on ourpreferences, then justified it using data. And then we portrayed those opposing our efforts as misguided, ignorant, selfish, and evil.

We made science a team sport, and in so doing, we made it no longer science. It became us versus them, and “they” responded the only way anyone might expect them to: by resisting.

We excluded important parts of the population from policy development and castigated critics, which meant that we deployed a monolithic response across an exceptionally diverse nation, forged a society more fractured than ever, and exacerbated longstanding heath and economic disparities.

Our emotional response and ingrained partisanship prevented us from seeing the full impact of our actions on the people we are supposed to serve. We systematically minimized the downsides of the interventions we imposed—imposed without the input, consent, and recognition of those forced to live with them. In so doing, we violated the autonomy of those who would be most negatively impacted by our policies: the poor, the working class, small business owners, Blacks and Latinos, and children. These populations were overlooked because they were made invisible to us by their systematic exclusion from the dominant, corporatized media machine that presumed omniscience.

Most of us did not speak up in support of alternative views, and many of us tried to suppress them. When strong scientific voices like world-renowned Stanford professors John Ioannidis, Jay Bhattacharya, and Scott Atlas, or University of California San Francisco professors Vinay Prasad and Monica Gandhi, sounded the alarm on behalf of vulnerable communities, they faced severe censure by relentless mobs of critics and detractors in the scientific community—often not on the basis of fact but solely on the basis of differences in scientific opinion.

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Pfizer Rakes in Billions on COVID-19 Vaccine Sales, Highest Revenue in Company’s History

Vaccine maker Pfizer has reported record revenues for 2022, with its COVID-19 products accounting for a large chunk of the sales even as the company is facing backlash for claiming to “mutate” viruses, and a growing number of doctors are turning away from boosters.

Full-year revenues for 2022 came in at $100.3 billion, which is an “all-time high” for the multinational corporation, according to the earnings release by Pfizer on Jan. 31. This is the first time the company has seen annual sales in excess of $100 billion, with revenues reflecting 30 percent operational growth. Excluding contributions from COVID-19 products, Comirnaty vaccine and Paxlovid antiviral, revenues only grew by 2 percent operationally. The two products combined generated over $56 billion in sales for the company.

The year “2022 was a record-breaking year for Pfizer, not only in terms of revenue and earnings per share, which were the highest in our long history,” said Dr. Albert Bourla, chairman and CEO of Pfizer.

“As we turn to 2023, we expect to once again set records, with potentially the largest number of new product and indication launches that we’ve ever had in such a short period of time.”

Sales of Comirnaty and Paxlovid are expected to hit their lowest levels in 2023 before getting back to growth next year “due to significant government supply on hand” at the beginning of this year, the company said.

Pfizer calculates Comirnaty sales to decline by 64 percent, to $13.5 billion this year, and Paxlovid sales to drop 58 percent, to $8 billion.

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CDC Officials Who Spread Misinformation Apologized To Source Of False Data But Not To Public: Emails

U.S. health officials who spread inflated COVID-19 child death data in public meetings apologized to the source of the false data but not to the public, newly obtained emails show.

Drs. Katherine Fleming-Dutra and Sara Oliver, with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), offered the false data in 2022 while U.S. officials weighed granting emergency authorization to COVID-19 vaccines for children as young as 6 months.

The study they cited for the data was published ahead of peer review by a group comprised primarily of British authors. The study was corrected after the public meetings.

Emails obtained by The Epoch Times showed that Fleming-Dutra and Oliver were alerted that they had spread misinformation. Neither the officials nor the CDC have informed the public of the false information. Newly obtained emails showed the officials apologized to Seth Flaxman, one of the study’s authors, and even offered to see whether the study could be published in the CDC’s quasi-journal.

“I feel … that we owe you an apology,” Oliver wrote to Flaxman on June 27, about 10 days after she and Fleming-Dutra falsely said there had been at least 1,433 deaths primarily attributed to COVID-19 in America among those 19 and younger. “We draw the attention of a variety of individuals with the ACIP meetings, and apologize that you got caught in it this time.”

“I am also sorry that you got pulled into the attention around the VRBPAC and ACIP meetings,” Fleming-Dutra added. She had presented the data to the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, which advises the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which advises the CDC.

Fleming-Dutra, Oliver, and Flaxman did not respond to requests for comment.

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EXPOSED: Shadowy Military Operation Spied on Covid Response Critics

A shadowy military operation was launched in Great Britain to conduct surveillance on Covid response critics and treat them as ‘enemies of the state.’

Military operatives in the U.K.’s ‘information warfare’ brigade were part of a “sinister operation that targeted politicians and high-profile journalists who raised doubts about the official pandemic response,” the Daily Mail reported on Sunday.

The official documents exposing the domestic espionage operation were obtained by the civil liberties group Big Brother Watch. The documents were shared exclusively with the Daily Mail. They expose the inner workings of the Counter Disinformation Unit, which is based in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, and the Rapid Response Unit in the Cabinet Office.

Influence operations were run out of the MoD’s 77th Brigade seeking to “non-lethal engagement and legitimate non-military levers as a means to adapt behaviours of adversaries,” according to the report.

 A whistleblower that contacted the Mail who claimed to work for the brigade said the unit had strayed far beyond its scope of targeting foreign powers. British citizens’ social media accounts were even scrutinised, which the U.K.’s Ministry of Defence, in public, has repeatedly denied doing.

The Mail reports that U.K. government justified its domestic surveillance and censorship activities as countering ‘disinformation’ and ‘harmful narratives… from purported experts.’

“The information was then used to orchestrate Government responses to criticisms of policies such as the stay-at-home order, when police were given power to issue fines and break up gatherings,” the Mail reported. “It also allowed Ministers to push social media platforms to remove posts and promote Government-approved lines.”

The Army whistleblower added: “It is quite obvious that our activities resulted in the monitoring of the UK population… monitoring the social media posts of ordinary, scared people. These posts did not contain information that was untrue or co-ordinated – it was simply fear.”

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Renowned MIT Professor and Drug Safety Analytics Specialist Calls for Immediate Suspension of all mRNA COVID Vaccines

The number of health professionals and experts calling for the immediate suspension of COVID mRNA vaccines is growing, and yet governments still turn a blind eye to one of the most atrocious crimes against humanity.

Late Sunday night, Prof. Retsef Levi from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) warned about the risks associated with experimental mRNA COVID vaccines.

Prof. Levi has been a faculty member at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts since 2006. MIT is one of the top private universities in Cambridge, United States. It is ranked #1 in QS World University Rankings 2023.

“I have more than 30 years of experience as a practitioner and an academic in using data and analytics to assess and manage risk, particularly in the context of health systems health policies, as well as the management of safety and quality of manufacturing of biologic drugs,” said Levi.

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“The Deep State Is Real”, UK’s Dominic Cummings Admits

“The deep state is real,” according to Dominic Cummings, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s ex-chief advisor.

In an interview with the “Manifold” podcast last week, Cummings said the so-called deep state, a moniker for the unelected bureaucracy, wields far more power than the elected politicians.

But in his view, it’s often “very good, sensible, intelligent,” and experienced officials trying to “stop the idiots who are being elected doing terrible things.”

“A lot of the things that were best in COVID was the deep state thwarting [then-Health Secretary] Matt Hancock, the elected politician for the benefit of the country,” Cummings declared.

COVID-19 Lockdown

Cummings spoke of how Johnson and Hancock were pressured by officials into locking down the country in March 2020, after COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic.

“There was an official plan which was herd immunity,” Cummings said, adding that the plan came from the Cabinet Office and the Department of Health and Social Care, which “kept thinking that … this was the only way of handling it.”

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W.H.O. Chief: Coronavirus Still a Global Health Emergency, Ignore ‘Pandemic Fatigue’ and Get Vaccinated

The coronavirus epidemic remains a global health emergency, the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) chief warned Monday, telling the world to keep getting vaccinated and boosted, use antivirals, and heed directions from the Switzerland-based instrumentality.

State health bodies have also been cautioned to “continue to monitor individual and public response” to directions.

Speaking at the opening of W.H.O.’s annual executive board meeting, Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus conceded “there is no doubt that we’re in a far better situation now” than a year ago — when the highly transmissible Omicron variant was at its peak, but that does not mean anyone should drop their guard.

Despite the urging of the W.H.O. global resistance still exists to the compulsory vaccination regimes, with some countries like Australia looking at fourth and fifth boosters while telling citizens to step forward.

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