Tag: safety

Australia Wants to Remake the Internet in the Name of “Safety”

The Australian government has published its proposed Digital Duty of Care legislation, a plan that it says will give people more control over their social media feeds, but which opponents fear is a way to introduce more online censorship.

The exposure draft of the Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill 2026 was published on September 8 for consultation, and it is not yet law. The deadline for submissions is noon on September 22, and Communications Minister Anika Wells said the plan is to formally introduce the bill to Parliament in October.

We obtained a copy of the draft for you here.

In the words of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, “This is not about giving government control, it is about giving people control.”

And while the proposal is often referred to as My Feed, My Way, it is not about banning algorithms, but giving new and existing users a choice between feeds based on recommendations, and one that shows posts from accounts they follow.

But beneath this choice, there is a broader change to the Online Safety Act 2021 that would be introduced by the Digital Duty of Care bill, and that is to impose a duty on those behind online services to ensure a safe online environment as far as reasonably practicable.

This duty would apply to a wide range of services, including social media, messaging, games, hosting, search, app stores, internet providers, AI services enabling generated material to be shared through covered services, as well as certain equipment providers.

The minister in charge would be able to exempt services that are low-risk or minimally used. The proposal is designed to protect adults from what is described as seriously harmful material and conduct, while under-18s would have additional protection against harmful content and design features.

The list of harmful content and conduct that the draft seeks to protect adults from includes child sexual abuse, threats of violence, encouragement of self-harm, and support for listed terrorist organizations.

For children, the list includes pornography, encouragement of disordered eating, hostile attitudes towards women or gender equality, glorification of crime, dangerous stunts, abuse and bullying.

However, the minister would have the power to add more categories of harmful material or conduct by issuing a legislative instrument.

Wells must first seek and consider advice from eSafety, and the instrument can be disallowed by Parliament.

The draft bill also targets features that the government considers to have negative behavioral impacts, such as recommendation systems, endless feeds, and engagement-feedback tools, as well as time-limited content. Social media services would be required to stop these features for children under 16.

The proposal also includes a system of risk assessment that online services would have to conduct at least once a year, and keep for six years. These assessments would have to be provided to the eSafety commissioner on request.

eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, who has a history of censorship demands, would be in charge of enforcing the scheme, which would bring maximum company penalties of A$109.2 million.

The draft bill does contain some safeguards, such as the definition of reasonably practicable, which takes into account the risk, available measures, cost, and the potential for a measure to have a disproportionate effect on privacy.

The duty of care does not extend to lawful communications occurring in private solely between consenting adults, the draft bill states.

Opposition leader Angus Taylor on September 6 said he feared the proposal was “an attempt by the government to censor social media,” while One Nation leader Pauline Hanson said that Australia should be moving away from government censorship, not “building the Orwellian machinery for it.”

The Greens, on the other hand, have supported the idea of making sure users have a choice when it comes to feeds, but they want to make sure that users have to opt in to have their feeds curated by algorithms.

White House spokesman Kush Desai reacted by saying that President Trump “has unequivocally warned trading partners against imposing digital services taxes, fines, and other forms of extortion on America’s leading technology sector.”

Desai added that “the administration remains committed to raising these issues with our trading partners.”

Communications Minister Anika Wells sought to downplay the significance of the White House statement, telling News24 that the US was responding to broader questions that also included Australia’s tax arrangements, and not only the Digital Duty of Care proposal.

“We’re a sovereign nation, we have the right to defend Australian parents and kids and we’ll do that,” Wells said.

The government’s proposal has been portrayed as giving users a choice between personalized recommendation feeds and those that show posts from accounts they follow.

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A Hall of Mirrors of the Healthy Vaccinee Effect

Introduction

Since the registration trials of the Covid-19 vaccines, there have been no randomized studies to track the efficacy of these vaccines. The virus kept mutating and the convalescent fraction of the population has been growing. Thus, the original efficacy figures reported in the registration trials – dubious to start with – were clearly not valid when the mass vaccination campaign started in early 2021. Moreover, in the meantime we learned that the registration trials tested a different product than the one used in the mass vaccination campaign. This cast further doubt on the advertised 95% efficacy against symptomatic infection.

The Israel 2021 summer wave of infections clearly demonstrated to the whole world that the “vaccines” do not protect against symptomatic infection in any meaningful way. Consequently, the goal posts were moved and the authorities started claiming that the “vaccines” may not protect against infection but they protect against severe course of infection, hospitalisation, and death from Covid. However, there were (and there still are) no data from randomized trials to support this causal claim.

This embarrassing gap in evidence was filled by a trove of papers that estimated the effectiveness of the “vaccines” from observational data. Most of these studies claimed the vaccine effectiveness was very high, often close to 100%. Rogue governments all over the world used these studies to force people into vaccination. 

Readers of this forum know very well that observational data are loaded with the so-called Healthy Vaccinee Effect. This is a type of indication bias that originates from healthy people having easier access to the vaccine. For example, people on their deathbed are usually not vaccinated, which means that deaths tend to concentrate in the unvaccinated group, making the vaccinated group much “healthier.”

At the same time, those frailest individuals who are close to the end of their lives are also those most susceptible to die from/with Covid. Healthy Vaccinee Effect (HVE) thus causes observational studies to vastly overestimate vaccine effectiveness against any endpoint (and vastly overestimate vaccine safety as well). The now legendary paper by Tracy Hoeg, Ram Duriseti, and Vinay Prasad showed that the reported 95% effectiveness of Covid vaccines against Covid-related death in Israel in 2021 was entirely due to HVE. In other words, had HVE been removed, the true vaccine effectiveness would have been zero. I still can’t figure out how they got this published in the New England Journal of Medicine. 

Try to Explain HVE to a Professor

We first noticed HVE in the middle of 2021 when Angelika Bazalova – an investigative journalist – had the brilliant idea to FOIA her way to the records on all-cause mortality of the clients of several health insurance companies in the Czech Republic. Readers (with an AI translator from Czech) can still see our initial confusion as we were reporting the data and proposing possible explanations (one of the articles was titled “The elixir of youth”). After some time, we made sense of all the data and reported it in a paper for the International Journal of Infectious Diseases and in a further paper in a Polish journal.

My original conclusion that “this paper invalidates all estimates of vaccine effectiveness based on observation data” was changed to “In view of the presence of HVE, the baseline difference in the frailty of vaccinated and unvaccinated populations in periods without COVID-19 must be taken into account when estimating COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness from observational data.” But that is the Newspeak we all had to learn during the past years in order to get anything published in official journals.

Since then, we have been trying to explain HVE to medical professionals, policymakers, researchers, and the public. It has been frustrating. Most people think that the vaccines work because they keep hearing it from all the media. So, when they see data which seemingly confirm their prior belief – the unvaccinated are dying at a much higher rate than the vaccinated – they cannot make themselves think about any other explanation apart from the convenient one – that the vaccines have prevented these deaths.

When you suggest that it is weird that the vaccines seem to protect against deaths unrelated to Covid, they usually acknowledge that it is weird, but the “Aha” moment of understanding rarely comes that HVE invalidates everything they “knew” about vaccine effectiveness.

Three Illusions of Vaccine Effectiveness

In order to better understand HVE and to be able to explain it more clearly to everyone, we proposed a simple simulation model that can help us to understand three important and common types of misinterpretation of observational data that originate from ignoring the HVE:

1. An illusion of vaccine efficacy

2. An illusion of vaccine waning efficacy

3. An illusion of vaccine-related mortality

We first present a simple model (Model 1) of a placebo vaccine (i.e., a vaccine with zero efficacy and no adverse effects) with no HVE as a sanity check and baseline. Then we make a slight amendment to the model (Model 2), introducing the Healthy Vaccinee Effect controlled by two parameters, the HVE duration, and HVE magnitude. We will still assume the same placebo vaccine as in Model 1. We will show how the three illusions described above naturally appear in the observational data.

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Popular GLP-1 weight-loss drugs linked to potentially deadly brain disorder

Researchers are warning about a rare but potentially life-threatening brain condition that may be linked to popular GLP-1 weight-loss medications.

A new study, published in Clinical Nutrition, identified 15 reported cases of Wernicke encephalopathy, a neurological disorder caused by severe vitamin B1 deficiency, in people taking GLP-1 receptor agonists.

Most of the reported cases involved semaglutide, sold under the brand names Ozempic and Wegovy, or tirzepatide, sold as Mounjaro and Zepbound.

Researchers found 15 cases through the FDA’s Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS), published medical literature and their own medical center.

Most patients reported gastrointestinal symptoms or nutritional issues, including weight loss, vomiting, loss of appetite or malnutrition, the study noted.

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Florida Statewide Prosecutors Drop Subpoenas on Entire Democrat Broward County Commission After It Moves to Strip Sheriff’s Office of Airport and Seaport Policing

Democrat-run Broward County, long a magnet for election chaos, public-safety failure, and one-party machine politics, just got a statewide knock on the door.

At the request of Florida’s Office of Statewide Prosecution, the Broward Sheriff’s Office began serving subpoenas on Wednesday to the entire Broward County Commission, County Administrator Monica Cepero, the deputy county administrator, and several other senior ranking members of County Administration.

The Broward Sheriff’s Office issued this statement:

“At the request of Florida’s Office of Statewide Prosecution, the Broward Sheriff’s Office began serving subpoenas on Sept. 9, 2026, on the entire Broward County Commission, county administrator, deputy county administrator and several other senior ranking members of the County Administration.”

That is the entire sitting commission, all Democrats, plus the top unelected bureaucrats who run one of the largest county governments in America.

Sheriff Gregory Tony’s deputies delivered the papers. The same Sheriff’s Office that the commission has been trying to shove out of Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport and Port Everglades, Local10 reported.

The subpoenas come as Broward County officials consider whether to remove the Broward Sheriff’s Office from law-enforcement operations at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport and Port Everglades.

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Mortality Data Reveal ‘Screaming Safety Signals’ Following COVID Vaccine Rollout

Excess mortality researcher Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., on Tuesday told Canadian lawmakers that national mortality statistics show “screaming safety signals” following the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines — including increases in deaths among infants and children and increases in turbo cancers.

Testifying at Canada’s Allison Inquiry, Rancourt also argued that COVID-19-era government interventions — including lockdowns, isolating the elderly, closing businesses and withdrawing government support programs — also drove excess mortality during the pandemic.

Rancourt based his arguments on his analysis of official mortality data from Statistics Canada and in the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). He described how COVID-19 vaccines directly harmed individuals, and how specific pandemic policies caused broader societal harm.

His presentation came on the opening day of the Allison Inquiry, a four-day hearing chaired by Canadian Member of Parliament Dean Allison. The inquiry collected testimony from 50 Canadians injured by COVID-19 vaccines, along with testimony from physicians, scientists and other witnesses.

4,000 excess infant deaths in the U.S. alone

Infant mortality had been declining in the U.S. before the pandemic. That trend reversed during the pandemic, according to Rancourt’s data — but not until 2022, nine months after COVID-19 vaccination was recommended for pregnant women.

Rancourt estimated the change represented approximately 4,000 excess infant deaths in the U.S. from 2022 to 2024.

He presented a similar case for Canada, although the raw numbers were much lower due to the smaller population. After Canada issued its vaccine guidance for pregnant women on May 28, 2021, he said mortality rose among infants, with a marked increase nine months after the recommendations.

He estimated there were 200 excess infant deaths in Canada during that time, with 10 excess pregnancy-related deaths.

Data show 2,000+ excess deaths among 1- to 4-year-olds in U.S.

Rancourt identified more than 2,000 excess deaths among children ages 1-4 in the U.S. between 2021 and 2024.

He attributed an initial increase in 2021 partly to the abrupt withdrawal of federal financial assistance in some states.

But Rancourt said the largest increase coincided with the June 17, 2022, authorization of COVID-19 vaccines for young children. Excess deaths peaked precisely with the vaccine rollout.

Canadian mortality data showed a similar age-specific pattern. Rancourt shared mortality trends for Canadian children ages 1-4, 5-9 and 10-14, showing each group experienced a pronounced increase during the year COVID-19 vaccines became available for that particular age group.

The spikes in excess mortality were “very sudden,” he said. The increases did not occur during the first two years of the pandemic, he emphasized.

“As soon as you vaccinated these age groups and not before, not when there was COVID, not in the first two years of the pandemic. But when you started vaccinating them, that is the signature that you see in the mortality [data],” Rancourt said. “It’s absolutely stunning.”

He estimated 410 excess deaths among Canadian children ages 1-14.

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Most Kids Can Fight Measles Naturally — And Having The Virus May Even Make Them Stronger

Children can overcome measles — and in some cases, even become stronger for having fought it off, according to Dr. Ben Edwards, an integrative medicine family practitioner in Lubbock, Texas, who runs a private practice serving roughly 2,000 patients.

In 2025, Edwards successfully treated roughly 300 children in Gaines County, Texas, who had the measles.

In an exclusive interview this week with The Defender, Edwards shared why he believes recent media reports spreading fear about measles are misguided — and how parents can help their children if they become infected with the virus.

“It’s unfortunate when the fear-mongering starts up instead of just some informed consent and truth-telling, which is what needs to happen,” Edwards said.

Edwards acknowledged that measles is a highly infectious virus, so prevention may not always be realistic once measles starts circulating in a person’s community.

For example, he said he got measles last year from being in close contact with the many children he treated — even though he was fully vaccinated against measles. The latest research shows that vaccinated people can and do spread measles.

“It’s just a pretty contagious thing,” Edwards said. “So from a preventative standpoint, for those who choose not to vaccinate, I think the best bet is just trying to bolster your own ‘terrain,’ is how I would term that — your immune system.”

The stronger a person’s immune system, the more likely it will be able to identify and deal with the measles virus, he said. Someone who has a strong immune system may even be able to handle the measles virus without showing symptoms of illness, he added.

Edwards also mentioned general prevention methods to mitigate the spread of any illness, such as frequent hand-washing and avoiding sharing saliva or airspace with someone who is sick.

However, given how easily measles spreads once it’s in a community, Edwards recommended focusing on how to treat it.

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NYPD launching ‘two major security operations’ ahead of 9/11 memorial and Rosh Hashanah

The New York Police Department (NYPD) announced increased security measures for the city ahead of September’s Jewish Holy Days and the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Speaking at One Police Plaza in Manhattan on Wednesday, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D-N.Y.) and NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch announced that the department will implement “heightened security measures” this weekend as Jewish New Yorkers prepare to gather at synagogues for Rosh Hashanah.

The Jewish New Year begins Friday evening, following the 25th anniversary commemoration of the September 11th attacks, when thousands of victims’ family members, former presidents and other dignitaries are expected to gather at Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan.

“As you’ve heard me say in preparation for so many events this year, we have amped up or increased our deployments for large events this year, particularly since the start of hostilities in Iran,” Tisch said at a security briefing.

“Our deployment this year at the World Trade Center for 9/11 will be larger than it has been in previous years, as will be our deployment this year for the High Holidays at shuls and yeshivas and Jewish cultural institutions, just based on the reality of the world that we live in today,” she continued.

“Even as shootings and murders have fallen to historic lows, hate crimes are moving in the wrong direction through the first eight months of this year,” Tisch stated. “Confirmed hate crimes citywide are up 16%, and antisemitic hate crimes are up 9%. And once again, more than half of all confirmed hate crimes in New York City have targeted Jewish New Yorkers, even though Jews make up only about 10% of this city’s population. Those numbers are deeply disturbing.”

During her remarks, Tisch explained that the NYPD’s Counterterrorism Bureau and heavy weapons teams will maintain a visible presence patrolling Manhattan as part of two major security operations.

The first centers on Lower Manhattan, which Mamdani warned will be largely closed to the public on Friday morning during the remembrance ceremony, with the second being the heightened security at Jewish cultural institutions across the city.

Tisch also announced that the U.S. Secret Service will install a security fence along the east side of the West Side Highway—from Liberty to Fulton Streets—as well as around the entire perimeter of the 9/11 Memorial site.

“And because of the security footprint around the site, New Yorkers should expect significant traffic and pedestrian restrictions throughout Lower Manhattan,” Tisch warned.

During the security briefing, Mamdani also emphasized that despite the sensitive time, there are currently no known threats against New York.

“As we look ahead to Friday evening, NYPD personnel will continue monitoring for any threats, both online and in person,” Mamdani said. “Let me be clear. There are no current known specific or credible threats against New York at this time. We will continue to work closely across all levels of city government, as well as with state and federal partners, to keep our city safe.”

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Inside the Safety Record Behind Israel’s Early Myocarditis Warning to Global Health Authorities

On February 28, 2021, Israel’s Ministry of Health alerted health authorities on both sides of the Atlantic to an emerging cardiac safety signal following the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine.

The warning came just over two months after Israel had launched one of the fastest vaccination campaigns in the world, placing the country at the forefront of the global rollout.

That day, the Ministry informed the European Medicines Agency that it was investigating a “safety signal of myocarditis/peri-myocarditis in the younger population (16–30 years old)” and had already received reports of around 40 cases. A CDC internal tasking memo from the same day recorded that Israel was seeing “a large number of reports of myocarditis, particularly in young people,” and was seeking contacts at the CDC and FDA to discuss the issue. The message was marked “Importance: High.” 

Three days later, Dr. Roee Singer, Deputy Director of Epidemiology at Israel’s Ministry of Health, wrote directly to the CDC: “We are seeing a large number of myocarditis and pericarditis cases in young individuals soon after Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. We would like to discuss the issue with a relevant expert at CDC.”

It was, in every sense, a “Houston, we have a problem” moment.

The alarm had been sounded. But what, exactly, had Israeli health officials seen that prompted it? And when, and how, was that warning communicated to physicians and the public?

Our newly published study in EXCLI Journal discloses and analyzes an internal Israeli Ministry of Health pharmacovigilance dataset that had never been made public. The dataset was provided to us by a whistleblower whose identity we are protecting. The file itself was titled, in Hebrew, “Reports of Hospitalizations and Deaths to Pfizer,” and contains detailed case-level reports documented by the Ministry of Health during the vaccination campaign.

The record was not reconstructed years later, after vaccine-associated myocarditis had become an established safety concern. It was being built in real time as the signal emerged. 

The dataset provided to us comprised eight cumulative versions, all sharing an original creation date of March 25, 2021. The record was updated repeatedly for more than a year as new cases were added and existing reports were revised with additional clinical information. The final version extends through May 9, 2022.

Already on March 25, just over three weeks after Israel first sounded the international alarm, the record contained 157 hospitalization reports and 46 death reports. Sixty-five of the hospitalization reports involved myocarditis or pericarditis.

By the final version of the dataset, myocarditis or pericarditis appeared in 250 of 531 hospitalization reports, nearly half. Among patients under 30, it appeared in 151 of 211 reports, more than 70%.

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We May Only Get One Chance To Stop AI

It’s awful to say but at this point I’m kind of praying that AI industry valuations crash and the industry faces setbacks that give us months to reflect on its companies.

Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon is leaving the AI industry because he believes the race to build self-improving systems is moving faster than the industry’s ability to control them, it was reported yesterday.

Coxon, who previously worked at OpenAI, said Anthropic’s safety efforts were sincere but that competition makes meaningful restraint difficult without broader coordination.

In an age where everything from warfare to Wall Street, power grids to payment systems, air traffic control to hospital networks, and the software that keeps our food, fuel and communications moving is digital, losing control of the systems that operate that infrastructure is not some abstract science-fiction problem.

It is a potentially civilization-scale problem. And the more of our lives we hand over to AI, the less comforting it becomes to hear that the people building it are still figuring out how to make sure it does what it’s told.

“We’re on track for a lot of the most aggressive of these scenarios where by the end of next year things could be out of control already,” Coxon said in a post yesterday.

His departure comes amid growing concern about AI systems behaving deceptively, conducting cyberattacks and developing capabilities that may become increasingly difficult to supervise.

Coxon believes the industry is approaching a point at which systems could improve themselves faster than humans can reliably understand or constrain them.

Think about that for a second. While you’re wondering whether the Patriots covered -2.5 on a Sunday, scratching your ass and drinking beer for three hours, a cluster of 823 trillion GPUs with the brain power of every human who has ever lived times a zillion is quietly figuring out how to run the entire world without you.

And by the time you realize what’s happening, the only thing you’ll still be in control of is whether you want another beer.

There is, of course, something to be said for Coxon’s timing. It is easiest to be bombastic when you’re walking out the door. You no longer have to worry about the next performance review, the next meeting with management or whether your comments are going to make life uncomfortable at the office. And if you want to stir shit up on your way out, a dramatic warning about the future of humanity is a pretty effective way to do it.

But that doesn’t mean his warning is wrong.

I am increasingly convinced that there will come a point at which, if we have not gotten out in front of AI, curbed its capabilities or otherwise established meaningful constraints, we may no longer be able to do so.

The question is not whether that point arrives next year, five years from now or later. The question is whether we will recognize it before we cross it.

And if you’ve been paying attention, it is no longer insane to contemplate AI systems eventually taking control of enormous portions of our digital infrastructure. We have already seen models demonstrate unexpected capabilities, exploit vulnerabilities and behave in ways their developers did not intend.

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New York Officials Lied About Air Quality After 9/11, New Documents Show

New York City has agreed to release new documents showing that officials lied about the air quality in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center.

The more than 170,000 pages of documents are being released by NYC in response to the transparency organization 9/11 Health Watch, which had sued to force their disclosure.

According to the New York Times, the documents reveal that higher-than-acceptable levels of asbestos and other contaminants were in the dust and air in other parts of Lower Manhattan after Sept. 11.

“An audit from November 2001, prepared by a private firm and submitted to the federal E.P.A. based on data collected by New York City and state agencies, showed other troubling findings,” the Times reported Monday.

“That audit demonstrated that air concentration of the carcinogen benzene was still spiking near the towers’ footprint, and that the concentration of asbestos in the air at the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island had increased after the attacks.”

Despite having information about the poor air quality, government officials, including then-EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman, said the air around ground zero was safe to breathe.

Whitman has since apologized for her misrepresentations.

The Times warned that the disclosures could reopen NYC to new litigation at a time when New Yorkers who were in the city at the time are dying of lung and blood cancers, as well as heart and respiratory diseases.

Denise Verzi, whose husband, Michael, was a firefighter who suffered from lymphoma after responding to the attack, criticized the city for its lack of transparency.

“I don’t understand hiding it to begin with,” Verzi told the Times. “That was horrific. But 25 years in, there’s people that are still getting sick.”

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