COVID-19
Academics Raise Concerns About UK Covid-19 Inquiry
From the Brownstone Institute
Over 50 prominent UK academics have signed an open letter to Baroness Heather Hallett, chair of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry, calling for urgent action to address the shortcomings of the probe so far. The signatories of the letter say the Hallett Inquiry suffers from bias, false assumptions, and a lack of impartiality.
“The Covid Inquiry is not living up to its mission to evaluate the mistakes made during the pandemic, whether Covid measures were appropriate, and to prepare the country for the next pandemic,” they write.
Kevin Bardosh, lead signatory and Director of Collateral Global has been following the Inquiry closely. He’s concerned it has focused too much on “who said what and when,” rather than homing in on key scientific questions about the evidence (or lack thereof) underpinning policy decisions.
Prof Kevin Bardosh, Director of Collateral Global. Photo credit: Shutterstock
“The Inquiry was pre-designed on the assumption that the government ‘didn’t do enough’ to protect people during the pandemic,” says Bardosh. “But the thing about the pandemic is that more measures, didn’t mean more lives saved. It’s a paradoxical aspect of health policy that more doesn’t necessarily mean better.”
Bardosh, who is affiliated with University of Edinburgh Medical School, says because the Inquiry’s starting position is that non-pharmaceutical interventions (e.g. masks) and lockdowns were necessary and effective, it’s not actually interrogating the trade-offs of these policies.
“If you go back to pre-Covid, policies like lockdowns, extended school closures, and contact tracing for a respiratory virus, were not the ‘scientific consensus’ for how to respond rationally to a pandemic,” he says. “In fact, the reverse was true. The goal was to minimise the disruption to society because it would have all these short and long-term unintended consequences.”
In December 2023, when Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was questioned at the Inquiry, he admitted the UK government had failed to discuss the costs and benefits of pandemic policies.
UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunk questioned at UK Covid Inquiry
Sunak pointed to a peer-reviewed report by Imperial College London and the University of Manchester that applied a Quality-Adjusted Life Year analysis to the first lockdown in the UK and found “for every permutation of lives saved and GDP lost, the costs of lockdown exceed the benefits.” [emphasis added]
Bardosh has also called out the Inquiry for its double standards in scrutinising experts.
Take for example, Neil Ferguson, professor at Imperial College and former SAGE member. He was the architect behind lockdowns after his March 2020 models warned that 500,000 Brits would die unless tougher restrictions were put in place to curb spread of the virus.
Bardosh says, “The Inquiry hasn’t really questioned Ferguson’s mathematical model in any substantial way. But if you compare that to the questioning of Professor Carl Heneghan, who’s based out of Oxford, it was very confrontational, and they used provocative language to suggest he didn’t have expertise in this area.”
Heneghan, the director of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, was among 32 senior UK academics who urged then-Prime Minister, Boris Johnson to think twice about plunging Britain into a second lockdown in the autumn of 2020.
It was revealed during evidence to the Inquiry, that the UK’s Chief Scientific Adviser, Dame Angela McLean, called Heneghan a “fuckwit” on a WhatsApp chat during a September 2020 Government meeting for his dissenting views on lockdowns.
Prof Carl Heneghan, director of Centre of Evidence-Based Medicine, Oxford
Later, Heneghan penned a scathing article in The Spectator, calling the Inquiry a “farce – a spectacle of hysteria, name-calling and trivialities.”
“Lockdown was the most disruptive policy in British peacetime history, with huge ramifications for our health, children’s education and the economy,” wrote Heneghan.
“This is an opportunity for the inquiry to gather evidence and ask whether lockdown and other interventions actually worked…Instead we have a KC [King’s Counsel] who seems uninterested in substance and obsessed with reading out rude words he has found in other people’s private messages.”
Bardosh and the other signatories have also raised concerns about the structure of the scientific advisory groups in the Inquiry, which have omitted key experts in child development, schooling impacts, social, and economic policy.
“The Inquiry must invite a much broader range of scientific experts with more critical viewpoints. It must also review the evidence on diverse topics so that it can be fully informed of relevant science and the economic and social cost of Covid policies to British society,” write the signatories.
So far, Bardosh is unimpressed with the ‘political theatre’ of the Inquiry, but hopes Baroness Hallett will urgently address its shortcomings to avoid compromising the credibility of future public inquiries.
“Not having an inquiry that really asks those questions is very damaging to the idea of accountability. We need to hold to account the policy decisions that were made because if we don’t, the next time there’s a public health emergency, these measures will come back into place whether or not they actually work,” says Bardosh.
The Hallett Inquiry is slated to run until 2026 and is reported to be one of the largest public inquiries in UK history. The cost of the UK government’s Covid measures are estimated to be between £310bn and £410bn.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
From LifeSiteNews
A study of 1.47 million Florida adults by MIT’s Retsef Levi and Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo finds significantly higher all-cause mortality after Pfizer vaccination compared to Moderna
A new study of 1.47 million Florida adults by MIT’s Retsef Levi and Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo finds significantly higher all-cause, cardiovascular, and COVID-19 mortality after Pfizer vaccination.
The study titled “Twelve-Month All-Cause Mortality after Initial COVID-19 Vaccination with Pfizer-BioNTech or mRNA-1273 among Adults Living in Florida” was just uploaded to the MedRxiv preprint server. This study was headed by MIT Professor Retsef Levi, with Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo serving as senior author:
Study Overview
- Population: 1,470,100 noninstitutionalized Florida adults (735,050 Pfizer recipients and 735,050 Moderna recipients).
- Intervention: Two doses of either:
- BNT162b2 (Pfizer-BioNTech)
- mRNA-1273 (Moderna)
- Follow-up Duration: 12 months after second dose.
- Comparison: Head-to-head between Pfizer vs. Moderna recipients.
- Main Outcomes:
- All-cause mortality
- Cardiovascular mortality
- COVID-19 mortality
- Non-COVID-19 mortality
All-cause mortality
Pfizer recipients had a significantly higher 12-month all-cause death rate than Moderna recipients — about 37% higher risk.
- Pfizer Risk: 847.2 deaths per 100,000 people
- Moderna Risk: 617.9 deaths per 100,000 people
- Risk Difference:
➔ +229.2 deaths per 100,000 (Pfizer excess) - Risk Ratio (RR):
➔ 1.37 (i.e., 37% higher mortality risk with Pfizer) - Odds Ratio (Adjusted):
➔ 1.384 (95% CI: 1.331–1.439)
Cardiovascular mortality
Pfizer recipients had a 53% higher risk of dying from cardiovascular causes compared to Moderna recipients.
- Pfizer Risk: 248.7 deaths per 100,000 people
- Moderna Risk: 162.4 deaths per 100,000 people
- Risk Difference:
➔ +86.3 deaths per 100,000 (Pfizer excess) - Risk Ratio (RR):
➔ 1.53 (i.e., 53% higher cardiovascular mortality risk) - Odds Ratio (Adjusted):
➔ 1.540 (95% CI: 1.431–1.657)
COVID-19 mortality
Pfizer recipients had nearly double the risk of COVID-19 death compared to Moderna recipients.
- Pfizer Risk: 55.5 deaths per 100,000 people
- Moderna Risk: 29.5 deaths per 100,000 people
- Risk Difference:
➔ +26.0 deaths per 100,000 (Pfizer excess) - Risk Ratio (RR):
➔ 1.88 (i.e., 88% higher COVID-19 mortality risk) - Odds Ratio (Adjusted):
➔ 1.882 (95% CI: 1.596–2.220)
Non-COVID-19 mortality
Pfizer recipients faced a 35% higher risk of dying from non-COVID causes compared to Moderna recipients.
- Pfizer Risk: 791.6 deaths per 100,000 people
- Moderna Risk: 588.4 deaths per 100,000 people
- Risk Difference:
➔ +203.3 deaths per 100,000 (Pfizer excess) - Risk Ratio (RR):
➔ 1.35 (i.e., 35% higher non-COVID mortality risk) - Odds Ratio (Adjusted):
➔ 1.356 (95% CI: 1.303–1.412)
Biological explanations
The findings of this study are surprising, given that Moderna’s mRNA-1273 vaccine contains approximately three times more mRNA (100 µg) than Pfizer’s BNT162b2 vaccine (30 µg). This suggests that the higher mortality observed among Pfizer recipients could potentially be related to higher levels of DNA contamination — an issue that has been consistently reported worldwide:
The paper hypothesizes differences between Pfizer and Moderna may be due to:
- Different lipid nanoparticle compositions
- Differences in manufacturing, biodistribution, or storage conditions
Final conclusion
Florida adults who received Pfizer’s BNT162b2 vaccine had higher 12-month risks of all-cause, cardiovascular, COVID-19, and non-COVID-19 mortality compared to Moderna’s mRNA-1273 vaccine recipients.
Unfortunately, without an unvaccinated group, the study cannot determine the absolute increase in mortality risk attributable to mRNA vaccination itself. However, based on the mountain of existing evidence, it is likely that an unvaccinated cohort would have experienced much lower mortality risks. It’s also important to remember that Moderna mRNA injections are still dangerous.
As the authors conclude:
These findings are suggestive of differential non-specific effects of the BNT162b2 and mRNA-1273 COVID-19 vaccines, and potential concerning adverse effects on all-cause and cardiovascular mortality. They underscore the need to evaluate vaccines using clinical endpoints that extend beyond their targeted diseases.
Epidemiologist and Foundation Administrator, McCullough Foundation
Please consider following both the McCullough Foundation and my personal accounton X (formerly Twitter) for further content.
Reprinted with permission from Focal Points.
Fr0m LifeSiteNews
A Department of Health memo warns that Canada’s Vaccine Injury Support Program will exceed its $75 million budget due to high demand, with $16 million already paid out.
COVID vaccine injury payments are expected to go over budget, according to a Canadian Department of Health memo.
According to information published April 28 by Blacklock’s Reporter, the Department of Health will exceed their projected payouts for COVID vaccine injuries, despite already spending $16 million on compensating those harmed by the once-mandated experimental shots.
“A total $75 million in funding has been earmarked for the first five years of the program and $9 million on an ongoing basis,” the December memo read. “However the overall cost of the program is dependent on the volume of claims and compensation awarded over time, and that the demand remains at very high levels.”
“The purpose of this funding is to ensure people in Canada who experience a serious and permanent injury as a result of receiving a Health Canada authorized vaccine administered in Canada on or after December 8, 2020 have access to a fair and timely financial support mechanism,” it continued.
Canada’s Vaccine Injury Support Program (VISP) was launched in December 2020 after the Canadian government gave vaccine makers a shield from liability regarding COVID-19 jab-related injuries.
While Parliament originally budgeted $75 million, thousands of Canadians have filed claims after received the so-called “safe and effective” COVID shots. Of the 3,060 claims received to date, only 219 had been approved so far, with payouts totaling over $16 million.
Since the start of the COVID crisis, official data shows that the virus has been listed as the cause of death for less than 20 kids in Canada under age 15. This is out of six million children in the age group.
The COVID jabs approved in Canada have also been associated with severe side effects such as blood clots, rashes, miscarriages, and even heart attacks in young, healthy men.
Additionally, a recent study done by researchers with Canada-based Correlation Research in the Public Interest showed that 17 countries have found a “definite causal link” between peaks in all-cause mortality and the fast rollouts of the COVID shots as well as boosters.
Interestingly, while the Department of Health has spent $16 million on injury payouts, the Liberal government spent $54 million COVID propaganda promoting the vaccine to young Canadians.
The Public Health Agency of Canada especially targeted young Canadians ages 18-24 because they “may play down the seriousness of the situation.”
The campaign took place despite the fact that the Liberal government knew about COVID vaccine injuries, according to a secret memo.
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