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Limited Hangout Files
A case for careful scrutiny of The Telegraph's so-called "Lockdown Files"
March 10, 2023
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Here are the show notes for Limited Hangout Files - Rounding the News, livestreamed on March 10, 2023. Watch the episode on the following platforms:

You can also listen to the audio podcast here:

 

Limited Hangout Files

Is anyone else picking up on a trend?

Image source: The Daily Telegraph

On February 28, British new outlet The Daily Telegraph kicked off a new series of articles titled “The Lockdown Files”. The series is centred around a set of 100,000+ WhatsApp messages provided to the Telegraph, purporting to demonstrate the many failures of key British Government officials during the course of the COVID-19 era — in particular, former Health Secretary Matt Hancock and Chief Scientific Adviser Chris Witty.

The supposed revelations are exciting, affirming the emerging consensus that the response to the declared pandemic caused far more harm than good. From the government’s use of “nudge” units to govern by fear, to the outright rejection of evidence-based scientific advice, to conflicts of interest linking together bureaucrats and lobbyists, the Lockdown Files have it all. Topped off, of course, with nods to sex scandals and Bill Gates.

Despite the appearance of a full-on revelation of wrongdoing, The Lockdown Files are far from a tell-all exposé. In fact, I am concerned that behind the flashy headlines lies an effort to misdirect and mislead believers and dissidents alike.

Defining a Limited Hangout

At the risk of telling readers what they already know, allow me to introduce the concept of the “limited hangout.” For this, I will borrow the words of Victor Marchetti, former special assistant to the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency:

A "limited hangout" is spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting - sometimes even volunteering some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.

It goes without saying that the general public is much more openminded to the idea that the last few years have not only resulted in policy decisions that didn’t work for their stated purpose, but actually caused significant harm. Certain topics are starting to seep into mainstream publications, including the reality that all-cause mortality is soaring in countries all around the world — in other words, more people are dying from all causes, including so-called “COVID-19”, after COVID-19 measures were implemented in 2020.

Of course, few of them are outright blaming pandemic policies. Specifically, there is a long list of reasons why decision-makers at all levels would aggressively want to redirect focus away from the ever-clearer reality that all available COVID-19 vaccines are injuring and killing people en masse. The legal and spiritual liability on those who promoted, coerced and forced needles into arms is immense and is increasingly difficult to avoid. As such, it’s no surprise that as news of vaccine injury and death continues to spread, so too will stories focusing on other causes that are equally or less likely to explain the global state of affairs. In the end, it was the totality of institutional actions that led to this widespread harm, and all must be examined with precision and depth for accountability to be possible. Nothing must be left out.

And as the reality of the illness and death worldwide continues to take hold in the public consciousness, “we don’t know” will quickly lose its validity as an explanation.

Image source: CBC News

Here are a few examples:

With this in mind, let’s examine The Lockdown Files.

The Lockdown Files

 

On February 28, 2023, the first article in The Lockdown Files was published. Titled “The Lockdown Files: How WhatsApp messages offer an unprecedented view of government failings,” the Telegraph article explained that the revelations to follow “will help people form their own conclusions about what the UK went through in the darkest days of the pandemic.”

No author was listed on the debut article. In fact, the vast majority of articles in the series would be credited to the pseudonymous “Lockdown Files Team” with accompanying commentary inserted as opinion pieces by Telegraph writers, columnists and editors.

Image source: The Daily Telegraph

One of the 12 articles published on Day 1 was titled “I had to release Matt Hancock’s Covid WhatsApp messages to avoid a whitewash”, written by Isabel Oakeshott, the source of the “leaked” communications. She explains that she was provided copies of the 100,000 messages by Matt Hancock himself while the two collaborated on writing his memoir, titled The Pandemic Diaries. Specifically, she says that Hancock “downloaded the records from his phone and shared them with various people” following his June 2021 resignation from government. Hancock publicly confirmed this, stating they had “worked closely together for more than a year on [his] book, based on legal confidentiality and a process approved by the Cabinet Office.”

Oakeshott immediately defended her decision to provide copies of these confidential messages to The Telegraph, expressing concern that the United Kingdom’s “Covid Inquiry” would “become a colossal whitewash.” After all, the inquiry had already spent nearly two years and tens of millions of pounds in taxpayer money, and has not yet even started in earnest.

In order to fast-track the process, Oakeshott decided it would be the most ethical choice to tap The Telegraph to help her get what she feels is the real story to the public.

Format matters

This brings us to a very important question: if Oakeshott’s mission was full disclosure of the dark inner workings of the UK government’s COVID-19 decision-making, then why did she decide to selectively release the messages one-by-one through a third party news organization? Why introduce a gatekeeper into the process, when you’re claiming to be removing the gatekeeper from the equation?

In her article published in the British Medical Journal, writer Jacqui Wise points out that “Oakeshott has said she chose [The Telegraph] because of its anti-lockdown stance.”

 Surely she could have seen this coming as a criticism, and combatted it by inviting at least one so-called “pro-lockdown” outlet to balance out the public perception of Oakeshott’s good intentions of unbiased, transparent revelations of the truth. As noted in the BMJ article, “The BMJ, like other media outlets, has not seen or independently verified the messages.”

Image source: The BMJ

It gets even more suspect when you realize that so far, no actual WhatsApp messages have been produced.

Hear me out for a second on this.

We’re told that Hancock downloaded the 100,000 WhatsApp messages from his phone. There are a few ways for him to have done this. As outlined by this explainer published by data storage service Backblaze, there is an Export Chat feature that results in messages in .txt format, along with accompanying media files in their own specific format (.jpg, .mov, .mp4, .gif, and so on).

Image source: Backblaze

Assuming Hancock wasn’t sending and receiving hundreds or thousands of videos or high-quality pictures, the resulting folder would be very small and easy to share, as he did with Oakeshott and others — especially when compressed into a .zip archive, which is a required step depending on how the files were shared. Alternatively, they may have been stored on a Google Drive or Dropbox account, reducing the need to repeatedly upload and download copies of the whole archive.

Here’s what I’m getting at: it would be very easy to include copies of the messages in their original format, complete with metadata for verifiability, to substantiate The Telegraph’s reporting. Why are they not doing this? If they are taking advantage of the trove to squeeze as much attention as possible, they could opt to release one message at a time as they are revealed in a given article.

If not this specific process, a near equivalent necessarily took place. At least for Android phones, message backups are stored in a folder called “Databases”, as shown on WhatsApp’s own website:

Image source: WhatsApp Help Center

The database would need to be loaded up inside WhatsApp in order to actually read the messages, an option available to the general public and journalists alike. It seems to me less likely that Hancock would have shared the messages in this clunkier format, but even if it is the case that he did, the Database folder would still be easily published for the public to review and independently verify as real.

Your next thought might be: “But Liam, they are releasing the messages! Even better; they’re releasing screenshots, which could only have been taken by Hancock’s phone (or the recipient).” Actually, that’s not even true. Think about how overwhelmingly laborious it would be to take individual screenshots of every single message, let alone the limitations that would place on what else could be seen onscreen for context. It’s not a reasonable premise, and is logically baseless to think that Hancock would even try to sit down and take hundreds of thousands of screenshots as a backup, whether or not he intended to then hand them out to journalists. It would be far more reasonable to suggest he had captured screenshots of specific messages that he considered particularly notable — heck, I do that in the moment sometimes, with no specific intention to store or distribute them. But that’s not what we’re being told happened. We are told that 100,000 WhatsApp messages were downloaded from Hancock’s phone, which necessarily were not in the form of “images” generated by screenshots.

So why do we instinctually think of them as screenshots? Let’s take a closer look at the “messages” as they appear in The Telegraph articles.

Image source: The Daily Telegraph

The above image is a screenshot taken by me from the March 9 article titled “Ministers feared 'racist' label if they spoke about Covid spread”. For the purposes of this demonstration, you'll need to open up the article on your own computer (a smartphone should still work, but will be more finicky).

On first glance, the WhatsApp message thread looks like it was taken straight from Hancock’s phone, or perhaps his iPad or laptop (due to the width). But with the benefit of four seconds of thought, the reality begins to set in. Are we supposed to believe that those profile pictures are the photos selected by Hancock and/or Nadine Dorries? Look closely at Hancock’s face.

Matt Hancock

From a distance, he’s not exactly portraying a sympathetic character, though a larger version of the same photo looks much more like a press shot. A reverse image search reveals that the photo has been used for a handful of news pieces starting with a March 31, 2020 BBC article about Hancock recovering from a “mild” case of COVID-19.

Image source: Google Images

I suppose the implication here is that Hancock admired the Reuters-attributed picture so much that he decided to set it as his WhatsApp profile picture. Similar results are found by repeating the process for Dorries.

Image source: Google Images

Alas, The Telegraph is not actually even pretending these are screenshots. If you look even closer, the messages are presented in a composite format of text, images, and interactive annotations.

Image source: The Daily Telegraph

In this image, I scrolled my cursor over the highlighted “Andy Burnham” text, which reveals an annotation explaining who Burnham is (the Mayor of Greater Manchester). Needless to say, these are useful elements that were added by The Telegraph. Hovering over the “i” icon beside a message results in a similar pop-up annotation, this time offering an interpretation of the message as opposed to adding simple biographic context.

Image source: The Daily Telegraph

My point is this: these are not the original messages, nor are they screenshots of the original messages. They are editorialized representations of .txt files, which were backed up and then exported from Hancock’s phone for easy distribution in bulk.

If this is such a monumental story, the effects of which are supposedly intended to dramatically alter the course of the United Kingdom’s post-COVID-19 inquiry in the court of public opinion, then why fail to provide the evidence required to independently verify the basis of the reporting?

Cold calling tips and tricks for dealing with the toughest gatekeepers -Revenue
Image source: Revenue

Even if my wish were granted and the underlying messages were disclosed along with their accompanying articles, there’s still the matter of the selective disclosures. A narrative is being written by the team behind The Lockdown Files, and it is a biased one. It’s not possible to avoid gatekeeping, as the individual or collective bias of The Telegraph team working on the articles will result in some material being withheld so as to best support whichever “truth” they’re trying to architect — for better or worse.

What is being said?

At this point, I can confidently say that I feel it’s most likely that The Lockdown Files are an attempted “limited hangout” operation. It is an institutional campaign by all accounts; the WhatsApp messages were provided by a representative of the institution to an number of institutionally-sanctioned co-authors, who then provided those messages to an institutional media organization. At no point in this process were the messages “leaked”, and no “whistleblower” makes an appearance. These words are misleading, and do not represent the chain of events.

Heck, The Lockdown Files already has its own Wikipedia page. It doesn’t get much more institutionally-endorsed than that, especially in the context of COVID-19.

With that in mind, let’s summarize some of the primary “revelations” from The Lockdown Files.

Harm to elderly long-term care residents

Image source: The Daily Telegraph

In an article titled “Far from a ‘protective ring’, WhatsApp messages show care homes were cast adrift”, Hancock is accused of putting senior citizens in danger by failing to make COVID-19 tests mandatory for all entering long-term care facilities.

This "widely criticised policy was blamed for care homes accounting for roughly half of all excess deaths (25,374) between March 7 and Sept 18 last year, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), as coronavirus ripped through facilities caring for 400,000 residents in England.

All of this harm is blamed squarely on community transmission of SARS-CoV-2, which apparently would have been prevented if mandatory testing was, in fact, implemented. The article’s entire premise relies on the notion that diagnostic testing ever did, or ever could, provide any meaningful information with which to determine whether or not someone is contagious with a disease-causing virus.

It also entirely fails to mention the plethora of other reasons long-term care residents were dying in large numbers in 2020, not the least of which is the widespread use of “end-of-life” care to treat patients that tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. What I would have expected The Telegraph to cover is the record-breaking increase in the use of powerful sedatives including midazolam and morphine, both of which depress breathing and essentially resulted in the systemic euthanizing of senior citizens.

Incredibly, there were even calls to loosen regulations to allow morphine to be deployed in even greater quantities for "relaxing patients who have acute shortness of breath."

Image source: The Conversation

A second article describes Hancock’s concern that increasing the rate of testing at nursing homes would “get in the way of actually fulfilling the capacity in testing” — or, as The Telegraph put it, “put his personal goal in jeopardy.” 

Heaven forbid the campaign operate within its capacity to succeed!

This was compounded by facilities that chose not to subject staff to testing, apparently out of concern they would be forced to operate with even less staff than their already-thin roster.

Image source: The Daily Telegraph

Granted, a later article correctly emphasizes the “inhumane” decision to prevent friends and family from visiting care home residents. This is reminiscent of what my friend Dr. York Hsiang experienced with his mother here in British Columbia, Canada. Many elderly residents suffered due to these policies with no reason whatsoever to believe they would help. Former U.K. First Lady Rachel Johnson penned a guest piece for The Lockdown Files (yes, you read that right) sharing her mother’s own experience in “care home prison.”

Discussion of senior citizens and long-term care facilities essentially ended after March 2, moving on to more sensational matters.

Preferential treatment for government officials

There are numerous examples provided of elected officials and bureaucrats receiving preferential treatment, “unfairly” getting a step up in the pandemic.

On what exactly? Testing.

Image source: The Daily Telegraph

Then there was the “Partygate” incident - or rather, a similar incident recounting government officials getting together to party while regular citizens were forced to stay isolated.

Image source: The Daily Telegraph

The country’s “Quarantine Hotels” were a source of humour for Hancock and Permanent Secretary Simon Case.

Image source: The Daily Telegraph

Here are several more examples of the COVID chiefs enjoying themselves:

Physical and psychological health damage from “shielding” policies

And yes, there is even mention of the harms caused by “shielding policies” - another way of describing “social distancing” or “lockdown” policies.

This is just a sampling of the dozen or so topics covered by The Lockdown Files. It is by no means exhaustive, but I have attempted to at least capture the headlines and archived versions of the articles as they appear daily; these can be seen on the Campfire Wiki on the page titled “Lockdown Files”.

Image source: Campfire Wiki

The Telegraph themselves are also publishing all of the Lockdown Files articles on a special page for the series, which you can keep track of here.

What is the outcome?

Just as with our discussion of Canada’s Political Chaos last week, we must ask, qui bono? Who benefits from the selective release of these messages and the narrative architected out of it? Furthermore, what are the stated objectives of the mission?

We already know that The Telegraph’s source, Isabel Oakeshott, wants to sway public opinion to expedite the UK’s Covid Inquiry. But the Lockdown Files are beginning to also include headlines such as the following:

In other words, Matt Hancock is absolutely being painted as the patsy to be taken down in some form or another, perhaps even put in jail. Don’t get me wrong; I agree that Hancock is to blame for his actions, assuming it can be demonstrated that they resulted in harm (which is essentially a given). But to put the blame squarely and solely on him is absurd and transparently dumb.

Then there’s the matter of the “lab leak”, which the British Government under Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is apparently starting to take seriously just now. As my friend Jonathan Couey commented yesterday during his livestream of the U.S. Congress’ Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, this comes three years after critical thinking individuals like him were warning of the possibility of laboratory manipulation, and many months after those same people went one step further to warn that the “lab leak” premise was fundamentally impossible, arguing instead that the “lab leak vs. natural spillover” dichotomy is a trap that dooms humanity to biosecurity tyranny in either case. How convenient that the mainstream narrative is now catching up.

It’s a trap: COVID-19 variant “deployed”

Speaking of traps, I must bring up an example of how the Lockdown Files have already shown themselves able to trip up highly intelligent, critical thinking people.

Matt Hancock's WhatsApp messages show he hoped to shock the public into complying with ever-changing lockdown rules
Image source: The Daily Telegraph

On March 4, an article was published titled “‘Project Fear’ authors discussed when to ‘deploy’ new Covid variant”. The headline is deceptive, and so is the body of the article. It reads:

Matt Hancock wanted to “deploy” a new Covid variant to “frighten the pants off” the public and ensure they complied with lockdown, leaked messages seen by The Telegraph have revealed. …

 

The previous month, Matt Hancock, the then health secretary, appeared to suggest in one message that a new strain of Covid that had recently emerged would be helpful in preparing the ground for the looming lockdown, by scaring people into compliance.

 

In a WhatsApp conversation on Dec 13, obtained by The Telegraph, Damon Poole - one of Mr Hancock’s media advisers - informed his boss that Tory MPs were “furious already about the prospect” of stricter Covid measures and suggested “we can roll pitch with the new strain”.

 

The comment suggested that they believed the strain could be helpful in preparing the ground for a future lockdown and tougher restrictions in the run-up to Christmas 2020.

 

Mr Hancock then replied: “We frighten the pants off everyone with the new strain.”

 

Mr Poole agreed, saying: “Yep that’s what will get proper bahviour [sic] change.”

The following day, Rounding the Earth’s own Mathew Crawford posted the following on Twitter:

 

I had some questions.

 

Others we know did, too.

 

The problem, as far as I see it, is that nothing in the article actually indicates, or even suggests, that there was any sort of “release” of anything — other than propaganda. However, I don’t blame Mathew for jumping from A to Z, filling in gaps with what is the most likely scenario based on his research outside of the Twitter thread. The result of this article is obviously that some people, like Mathew, will read this as a literal “deployment” of a new variant, rather than what the article actually says and provides as evidence, which is that the British Government sought to “deploy” propaganda to frighten to public into compliance.

Gain-of-function viruses are not the threat to our humanity. Fear is.

I’m not trying to be hard on Mathew. On the other hand, he is a role model of mine and a mentor, and I won’t hesitate to point out when I think he’s making mistakes. I did it before when he began his Chaos Agents series, and I have since come around to believe that he was much closer to reality than I was. This is the scientific method, and I look forward to learning more about his Omicron hypothesis — whether or not this article has anything to do with it after all.

In the end, I ask every one to question: what other “Insert-noun-here Files” have we recently experienced, and did they too fail to provide the underlying evidence behind their explosive revelations? And if so, why are we not holding such outlets and journalists to the same high standard to which we hold those we disagree with?


 

Telegraph View. (2023, February 28). The Lockdown Files: How WhatsApp messages offer an unprecedented view of government failings. The Telegraphhttps://archive.ph/kXhG7

Oakeshott, I. (2023, February 28). I had to release Matt Hancock’s Covid WhatsApp messages to avoid a whitewash. The Telegraphhttps://archive.ph/3UXR7

Whannel, K. (2023, March 1). Covid messages leak a massive betrayal, says Matt Hancock. BBC Newshttps://archive.ph/QsLVA

Harrison, E. (2021, May 12). Covid: Lessons to be learned from spring 2022 public inquiry - PM. BBC Newshttps://archive.ph/Lrhq8

Rayner, G. (2022, June 27). Covid inquiry hires more than 60 barristers – and could cost £14m a year. The Telegraphhttps://archive.ph/UrBeM

Wise, J. (2023). Covid-19: Leaked messages reveal casual policy making—and love for Whitty. BMJ, p522. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.p522

Kaufman, B. (2022, June 1). How to Back Up and Restore WhatsApp Messages and Files. Backblaze Blog. https://archive.ph/czL6U

The Lockdown Files Team. (2023, March 9). Ministers feared “racist” label if they spoke about Covid spread. The Telegraphhttps://archive.ph/DQQnZ

Tominey, C. (2023, February 28). Far from a “protective ring”, WhatsApp messages show care homes were cast adrift. The Telegraphhttps://archive.ph/u6XWC

Fuller, A. (2020, July 12). Care homes accused of using powerful sedatives to kill corona victims quickly. The Sun. https://archive.ph/C1dUc

Adams, S. (2020, July 12). Prescriptions for the drug midazolam doubled during the pandemic. Daily Mail Online. https://archive.ph/MiFZh

Nutt, D., & Hamilton, I. (2020, May 12). Coronavirus: why the law on morphine should be loosened. The Conversation. https://web.archive.org/web/20220812161740/https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-why-the-law-on-morphine-should-be-loosened-138055

The Lockdown Files Team. (2023, February 28). Matt Hancock feared care homes could “get in the way” of his ambitious Covid testing target. The Telegraphhttps://archive.ph/if9Za

Johnson, R. (2023, March 2). As police pursued my father during Covid lockdown, my lonely mother endured care home prison. The Telegraphhttps://archive.ph/SVdua

The Lockdown Files Team. (2023, March 2). Piers Morgan has quit – how about we celebrate, asked minister while parties were banned. The Telegraphhttps://archive.ph/M5ZMQ

The Lockdown Files Team. (2023, March 4). “Project Fear” authors discussed when to “deploy” new Covid variant. The Telegraphhttps://archive.ph/26dLs

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Evidence of the HUB and the Zero Efficacy Hypothesis for COVID-19 Vaccines
Shattering the Efficacy Illusion, Part 4

"The difficult lies to detect are lies our minds wish they were true." -Aniekee Tochukwu Ezekiel

Articles from the Vaccine Wars can be found here. See Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 if you're just getting started. This may be necessary to handle all the acronyms, and if you're truly interested in unraveling the vaccine effectiveness illusion, this is the article you're going to want to read carefully and understand.

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All the green lines are straight. The illusion is in the periphery.


For the sake of this article, I would like readers to keep multiple points in mind:

  • HUB = WUB = EUB (health is wealth is education, as variables, in aggregate)

  • It may very well be that HUB accounts for all of VE in U.S. county level data, but may be a small or moderately-size part of the illusion in other nations.

  • If VE is effectively zero in any one nation, then there is likely no complete mechanism for effects of these biological products at all, so any VE in any data set is an illusion. I focus my primary data argument on the U.S. county data via the CDC.

While I led this article series with a graph that showed that the slightly negative correlation between vaccine uptake and COVID-19 deaths basically tracked (was slightly higher than, on average) median household income by U.S. county, that is not alone enough to declare that the HUB validates the ZEH. It would be irresponsible to stop there and scream from the hills, "These quasi-vaccine genetic products don't stop COVID!" So, I've gathered further evidence. A lot of it. Understand that the graphs in this article are a fraction of those that I have available, and may include in a more complete book on the topic. Walk with me…

I'm going to lead with the punchline again. All correlation between vaccine uptake and COVID-19 mortality rates by county appears to be completely explained by income and education status. The correlations are almost perfect mirror images of one another!

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This chart screams HUB and ZEH, but let's look for other evidence..

Consider these two charts I made last year of all cause mortality (per million residents) for all U.S. counties where the x-axis represents the percentile score for median household income (a good proxy for wealth).

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Clearly, poorer counties suffer substantially higher mortality rates (almost 68% higher from the lowest income to the highest earning counties). Clearly, these are not equivalent cohorts, and any analysis that clumsily mashes them together will necessarily suffer from the ecological fallacy in a way that drives up VE. But this is not my point for the moment.

Now, look at the same charts for 2020 and 2021. The slopes of the trendlines tilt a little more, meaning that the mortality increase among poorer counties was significantly higher throughout the pandemic—both before and after the vaccines were rolled out.

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The slope got sharper during COVID, so apparently COVID kills the poor faster. COVID mortality was a bit higher in 2021 than in 2020, and the slope tilted just a bit more negative. If the vaccines were effective, we should see a sharper change—the tilt toward the wealthier counties should be more extreme. In fact, if we combine the 2021 and 2022 slopes through May 22, 2022, we get -646.33, which is a softer slope than in 2020 before the vaccines rolled out, which is the exact opposite of what we would see if the vaccines were effective at reducing death.

Of course, this is all cause mortality, which means that other variables affect the slope. These include changes in rates of obesity and diabetes that make COVID-19 a more severe disease, murder and suicide rates, and drug overdoses. The problem is that these all affect poor counties more severely, which would have the effect of making the slope sharper, so a softer slope post-vaccine than before looks extremely bad for the hypothesis that the vaccines are effective.

Now, I do have the state-level data ready through all of 2022, and while the advantage in excess deaths began the year tilting toward the wealthier, more vaccinated states, that trend began to reverse in 2022. The crowd that argues "waning efficacy" should only see a partial flattening of the trend, but not a reversal.

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Over at I Numero, T Coddington has been performing a parallel self-education similar to my own. He graphed serious indicators of poor health versus booster uptake showing much great dose administration in areas where the people are healthier.

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Hat tip: T Coddington

There is no possible way that these graphs can be confused: healthier Americans were substantially more likely to get vaccinated. And that only makes sense given the strict mandates put in place for groups that include large numbers of the healthiest Americans: many colleges applied strict mandates, resulting in vaccination rates up to nearly 100%, thumbs were on the scales to push corporate workers into vaccination, and 

More specifically, he firms up my claim that "wealth is health"!

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I think that T Coddington has had a similar journey to my own over the past year, recognizing key health/wealth correlates, then discovering the literature (that authorities damn well surely know about) on the HUB.

While the graphs we just saw were based on U.S. county-level aggregates, there is research (in addition to the VSD's publication) that shows the HUB on a more individual level. And that's without mandates that pushed young people (military, college students, corporate workers) into vaccination.

Here is another scatter plot with U.S. county data as of mid-August 2022 (h/t Operation Uplift), this time with both axes rank-ordered (each number is ranked from 1 to the total number of counties, in strictly increasing order). The lack of clustering is another way to see how little relationship exists between vaccination rates and COVID-19 spread.

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Before we talk about breakthrough cases, let's talk about R again for a moment. The following plots were provided by computer scientist Timothy Snyder, a volunteer with Operation Uplift. The scatter plots compare vaccination rates with viral spread across U.S. counties. Do you see a trend line? Overall? Or for any one color (month)? I sure don't.

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What we see in these charts is that there is no significant correlation between vaccination rates and spread---at least by some definition, which we'll put a pin in and come back to later. But this is at least interesting on its own because it presents a puzzle where "efficacy" (defined only as relative risk reduction) of the vaccines occurs entirely without any absolute risk reduction of the system. If there is relative risk reduction without absolute risk reduction, that means that vaccinating a cohort of individuals somehow prevents infections that take place in that cohort while pushing infections into the remaining unvaccinated cohort. That would be quite bizarre, but would also imply that the effects of the vaccine would not be a public health concern, on the whole. Either that, or somehow, in a way that would seem quite magical, only the people who were never going to get sick got vaccinated (basically), which is evidence of the HUB sculpting the relative risk reduction.

Epidemiology and Biostatistics Professor Emeritus Eyal Shahar agrees that HUB has been at play, artificially elevating VE with what he calls "pseudo-protection".

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Shahar on the UK data

Not everyone agrees that HUB is entirely to blame for potentially false appearances of substantial VE. In a paper uploaded to researchgate last year (Neil et al, 2022; preprint), a deep team of investigators analyzed COVID-19 mortality data by vaccine status as presented by the UK's Office of National Statistics (ONS). They concluded that healthy vaccinee bias explained less of the VE than delays in reporting of vaccination status combined with systemic miscategorization of deaths.

The risk/benefit of Covid vaccines is arguably most accurately measured by comparing the all-cause mortality rate of vaccinated against unvaccinated, since it not only avoids most confounders relating to case definition but also fulfils the WHO/CDC definition of "vaccine effectiveness" for mortality. We examine two of the most recent UK ONS vaccine mortality surveillance reports, which provide the necessary information to monitor this crucial comparison over time. At first glance the ONS data suggest that, in each of the older age groups, all-cause mortality is lower in the vaccinated than the unvaccinated. This conclusion is cast into doubt upon closer inspection of the data due to a range of fundamental inconsistencies and anomalies in the data. Whatever the explanations for these are, it is clear that the data is both unreliable and misleading. It has been suggested that the anomalies are the result of healthy vaccinee selection bias and population differences. However, we show why the most likely explanations for the observed anomalies are a combination of systemic miscategorisation of deaths between the different categories of unvaccinated and vaccinated; delayed or non-reporting of vaccinations; systemic underestimation of the proportion of unvaccinated; and/or incorrect population selection for Covid deaths. We also find no evidence that socio-demographic or behavioural differences between vaccinated and unvaccinated can explain these anomalies.

Could the answer be a combination of miscategorization and HUB? Since I am more familiar with the U.S. data, I will focus there. After all, if the experimental quasi-vaccines aren't effective in one nation, it stands to reason that they aren't effective in any nations. And while we should expect VE computations [corrected for bias where necessary] to be highly similar between nations, there is no reason to expect that HUB should be the same from one nation to the next. The HUB is highly sensitive to policy decisions made qua nation. For instance, mandates focused on members of the military and universities should be expected to introduce the HUB among young adult demographics.

It's not just in the U.S. where HUB is clearly and substantially observed. Studies around the world tend to point toward consistently unidirectional HUB bias.  A study out of China (Miao et al, 2022) examined the relationship between COVID-19 vaccine uptake and 12 different healthy lifestyle habits. In all 12 cases, there was positive correlation in all 12 cases. Since the vast majority of China (91.8% now; 89.4% in the study) is vaccinated, this pools the least healthy people into the unvaccinated category.

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In a recently published study (Kwan et al, 2023), researchers found baseline rates of diabetes to be 41% lower among the vaccinated. Though this measurement did not quite achieve statistical significance, it seems clinically meaningful—particularly in light of all of the other evidence that the vaccinated are a substantially healthier cohort.

We also have the vaccine trial data itself (Benn et al, 2022; still preprint?) to demonstrate that the HUB works to massage the illusion of effectiveness into retrospective vaccine analyses. There was no overall mortality benefit whatsoever for the mRNA vaccines during their trials.


Consistency Across Observations

While there is no "proof" in science or statistics, we love to examine problems from different vectors. We gravitate toward hypotheses that are consistent with all observations.

Recall now that after a basic correction over risk-adjusted person days, the quickly scrubbed data from the military contractor SAIC showed negative efficacy shortly after vaccination, which asymptotically moved toward zero efficacy thereafter.

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In Japan, researchers (Aug 2022 Med Check, Vol. 8, No. 24r) discovered two cases of data manipulation by the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare. Emphasis mine:

One is the case of misregistration of vaccine recipients. When comparing the proportion of newly reported COVID-19 patients by vaccination status, patients who were surely vaccinated but with unknown date of vaccination were treated as “unvaccinated” by MHLW. Hence, the proportion was extremely low in the vaccinated and extremely high in the unvaccinated. As a result, the data gave the impression that the vaccine worked very well. 

The data from April 11 onwards have been corrected as pointed out by a researcher. As a result, the proportion of new infections per 100,000 people no longer differs across most age groups. Considering the “healthy vaccinee effect”, the protective effect of vaccine is even lower.

Interested readers can also read later in the article about increases in myocarditis rates among young, healthy Japanese citizens, post-transfection. But this article is primarily focused on the benefit side of the risk-benefit analysis—specifically the fact that there doesn't appear to be any.

Also, let us not forget studies showing similar viral loads between the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations (Riemersma et al, 2021). So, all those magical antibodies aren't doing their jobs, but this is supposed to slow mortality?

It didn't.

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Even worse, in a reply to the concerns of Statistics and data experts Norman Fenton, Martin Neil (seen on RTE here), Clare Craig, and Scott McLachlan, the UK's Office of National Statistics (ONS) admitted that their publicly presented data summaries suffer from vaccine status errors and demographic skews that likely embeds some amount of HUB into the results (at least for some demographic bands).

…For an individual to be included in the PHDA, they must have responded to the 2011 census and be presently registered with a GP. Approximately 79% of the population fall into this category. Those missing from the PHDA dataset are therefore not missing at random, and they are more likely to fall under one or more of the following categories:

  • Younger in age

  • Born outside of the UK

  • Unvaccinated (as it is more difficult to obtain a COVID-19 vaccination without being registered with a GP)

We consider that it is therefore likely that the sample used in the Deaths by Vaccination Status publication is not representative of the general population. Those who are missing are, we think, more likely to be younger and unvaccinated. This is also acknowledged by ONS in its Deaths by Vaccination Status publications.

ONS is working to address some of the sampling issues present in the first six iterations of the publication…

And while the ONS data does not seem to suffer from as severe a degree of HUB skew as the U.S. county data, one of the frightening things that I discovered when I examined the publicly available ONS data set in May 2022 was that the ONS admitted at the time (as a note in their own spreadsheet) to excluding over 2,000 COVID-19 deaths from their data set—all of whom died shortly after vaccination.

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Maybe some of those deaths were due to vaccination, and maybe they weren't, but it does stack the deck not to include the COVID-19 illness rates among the most frail, which is itself a form of HUB.

Globally, the wealthiest nations were generally the most highly vaccinated, though vaccine uptake in the second quartile nations was highly similar to that of the highest quartile nations.

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So, did those nations see similar changes in their rates of COVID-19 mortality?

No. In fact, the results look absolutely nothing alike.

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If the vaccines were effective, why do we see such dramatic divergence between high income and upper middle income nations more than two years into the experimental mass vaccination program? Is it because the mRNA vaccines more often used among the wealthier nations simply don't work at all? It would seem that way, but there may be other variables at play in terms of what might actually be causing illness around the globe.


A Mechanistic Reason Why None of This Should Surprise Us

The idea that vaccination to generate antibodies in the blood stream has an effect on respiratory viruses has long been a controversial one. And as we've seen, it appears that the influenza vaccines never worked, which bolsters the argument that such antibodies fail to work at the right location—the mucosal membrane. This has been pointed out by Dr. Richard Urso, Dr. Ryan Cole, and others. Dr. Joseph Lee puts it thusly,

Never mind, I'll let you off the hook. No bet. The COVID antibody was barely present in 2020. The COVID antibody doesn't seem to have a path through the lung barrier into the lung alveolar cell area. The lung barrier can stop water molecules that are 18 Daltons in size and the COVID antibody is a gargantuan 145,000 Daltons in size. The lung barrier can stop WATER molecules. This barrier MUST be passed by the COVID antibody in order to reach the lung alveolar cells. But, this barrier WILL stop the COVID antibody.

We are not yet done. More to come…

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The Right and Wrong Definitions of Technology
The Monetary Wars, Part II

This article was originally published on March 23, 2021. A couple of minor changes have been made to enhance the article. Find more articles in The Monetary Wars series here.

As I republish around an article a week, this one stands out as important with respect ot the substack of the education enterprises that I have once again started to pursue.


Before we jump into the topic of technology, let us consider the level importance of the topic. You may already understand the immense power of technology on many levels, but we cannot overstate the importance of a good definition. A bad definition is like tunnel vision or blurry eyesight. It can leave us half-blind to the ways in which technology shapes the world.

What is technology?

Go to Wikipedia for the answer and you get a terrible definition---something like the one you were probably taught during your schooling indoctrination years:

Technology is the sum of techniques, skill, methods, and processes used in the production of goods or services or in the accomplishment of objectives, such as scientific investigation. Technology can be the knowledge of...embedded in machines…

To be sure, the Wikipedia answer explores a broad subset of the terrain of technology, pushing visions of academic research and silicon chips. But this terrain falls short. The definition is incomplete. The fundamental quality of technology is entirely missing---perhaps intentionally so?

In order to understand technology, let us dive into a piece of economic history. Don't worry---we dodge the mathy stuff as it doesn't pertain much to our story (but study that if you're interested!). During the mid-twentieth century, one of the chief pursuits of economists was to describe an aggregate growth model, considered by some necessary for the completeness of neoclassical economic theory. In 1956, economists Robert Solow (MIT) and Travor Swan (Australian National University) simultaneously published what has become known as the Solow-Swan growth model. For this achievement and others, Solow received the 1987 Nobel Prize in Economics, though Swan was never acknowledged by the committee. Their model will be the source of our definition of technology.

Let us keep the Solow-Swan model (SSM) as simple as possible. We can certainly build an intuitive understanding of the model without learning how to read differential equations. Simply put, the SSM describes economic output is the result several inputs:

  • Capital: the stuff used in production that can be bought with money.

  • Labor: bodies that do stuff with capital that results in output products/services.

  • Technology: Wizard magic? We'll get to that.

Here are the first basic observations we make:

  1. Capital and labor scale the output linearly. If we double the number of workers and the amount of capital they have to work with, we then double the output of the economy. If we triple those inputs, we triple the output.

  2. We live in a world of exponential rates of wealth and production growth. Who would invest their resources (capital) in production if the output wasn't expected to be larger than the input?! Economic feedback loops result in the multiplication of capital repeatedly, resulting in an exponential output function. (linear in read, exponential in green)

So, given that labor and capital only result in linear scaling of outputs, and technology is the only other system input, that means that technology is the sole source of exponential growth! In fact, this gives us the best definition of technology---one based implicitly on results, and casts aside our biases of what qualifies as "academic" or "process of silicon machines".

Technology is anything that grows resources.

If you make a change to a process so that your outputs are greater than your inputs (or previous outputs), you have applied technology.

So simple. So perfect. This will be a foundation on which we rebuild a lot of the terrible ideas that have led us into the era of The Monetary Wars.

Now, by defining technology implicitly (as opposed to relying on some narrower explicit definition), we might seek to at least describe some areas of technology in order to bring focus to the landscape. Ultimately any of the following might or might not be technology---we only know by evaluating the results of any action!

  • Machines (including computers)

  • Culture! We might even categorize religion here. (I consider culture the most underrated technology.)

  • Education/Meditation

  • Law

  • Medicine

  • Weapons?

  • Agriculture

  • Business organization

  • Human relations (think community building or zoom out to international relations)

  • Literature

  • Transportation

  • Methods of engineering not listed

We'll stop here---not because we cannot think of other good sources of technology, but because those sources are truly limitless. Anything practical or productive you have ever thought---any creative energy---is a source of technology. Technology is all those things that are worth investing ourselves (time, energy, capital...all of it) in doing because by definition they make us better off.

Thank you for reading. We hope you think hard on this topic and we plan to come back to this definition in future articles for the purpose of digging deep into challenging topics. As a teaser, we plan to add another twist: technology is in the eye of the beholder. Just as aggregating utility is difficult, the game theory of technology can get interesting when we realize that some actions and products may be technology for some, but not for others. Check back again in the future.

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Woody Harrelson Said the Quiet Part Out Loud
The Pharmafia, Part 2

For more on The Pharmafia, check out the RTE articles here. Also, join our Locals community where active discussions often take place about challenging events in real time.


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Woody Harrelson Talks About A Movie Script That No One Would Believe...

I can hear the chants if I close my eyes.

"Go, Woody, Go! Go, Woody, Go!"

I don't usually publish the same sensational news that you can read at any of several dozen Substacks, social media accounts (thousands, perhaps), and blogs of highly variable quality and curation, so I owe you a few words of explanation. This is important. We need to know exactly what just happened.

While Woody Harrelson did not say "Pharmafia", he said "drug cartels", by which we know that he means Big Pharma. We're on the same page. And…he was…allowed to say it.

Allowed…why, exactly?

You've just been given an ounce of social approbation. Is this the thin gruel that keeps you alive?

Most people in the Medical Freedom Movement—the millions who woke up due to harsh mandates and other authoritarian government actions—are happy to simply sit behind their screens and pump their fists. These are the same throngs following Chaos Agents through social media and Substack. These are mostly the intuitives who are not well enough educated to track down all the important information on their own, but know that the mainstream media and governments were lying to them. They are at risk of falling into the trap of the mass formation of the movement—and at risk of finding themselves steered by a false prophet.

Why would powerful corporate interests want to keep you alive as you study their crimes and threaten to do something about them?

I have multiple hypotheses that are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and I'm not sure the list is exhaustive in a realistic sense. I may add suggestions from the peanut gallery this time.

  • Part of the corporate power base (possibly military, too) was always against Plandemonium, but could not stop it. Instead, they waited to build momentum on the other side.

  • Perhaps like FTX/Alameida, the Pharmafia's plan was one of several attempts at global domination (the "vax tax") that failed, and this is a necessary step toward recall.

  • This is part of an elaborate trap, much like Mao's Hundred Flowers campaign that saw his opponents out themselves—compiled into an easy list, complete with street addresses so that his communist troops could rip them from their homes one-by-one and imprison, enslave, or murder those who could not be otherwise turned.

Woody Harrelson may be the perfect man to deliver the message such that we cannot easily discern the meaning. He is not a man from a powerful family. He is the son of a heinous hitman who worked his own way up from poverty and obscurity in a career with notable downturns. You won't find him in Jeffrey Epstein's little black book. He is a man that I quite frankly want to root for, given what I know about him.

And yet the fact remains: he was allowed to say what he said.

Unless there is a James O'Keefe moment yet to come where Woody Harrelson finds himself on the outside?

Unfortunately, I think we'll have to wait and find out.

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