COVID-19
AstraZeneca withdraws COVID vaccines worldwide amid lawsuits alleging severe harm
From LifeSiteNews
The manufacturer insists that its intention of pulling the COVID-19 vaccine from markets around the globe is based solely on decreased demand, but the shots have been linked to a condition that can cause fatal blood clots.
The European Medicines Agency (EMA) has withdrawn the marketing authorization for AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine at the manufacturer’s request.
AstraZeneca insists that its intention of pulling it COVID-19 vaccine, Vaxzevria, from markets around the globe is based solely on decreased demand as other more effective vaccines have become available.
However, the announcement comes as the pharmaceutical giant faces lawsuits concerning severe harm — including death — to some of the vaccine’s recipients.
AstraZeneca admitted in a court document submitted in February that Vaxzevria, “can, in very rare cases, cause TTS,” while adding, “The causal mechanism is not known.”
TTS (Thrombosis with Thrombocytopenia Syndrome) is perhaps better described as VITT, “Vaccine-Induced Immune Thrombotic Thrombocytopenia,” coined in March 2021, not long after the COVID-19 vaccines were being mandated around the globe.
VITT denotes a condition where blood clots form, reducing normal blood flow after reception of certain COVID-19 vaccines.
Young people were soon found to be at higher risk for developing the condition.
As early as May 2021, those under age 40 were being directed away from taking the AstraZeneca jab.
The UK government revealed in 2022 that 247 cases of fatal blood clots in those who had received AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine had been reported up until March 31 of that year. During that same period, 3,385 non-fatal blood clots were reported.
More than 50 cases have been lodged in a U.K. High Court, “with victims and grieving relatives seeking damages estimated to be worth up to £100 million,” according to a report by the UK Telegraph.
“It has taken AstraZeneca a year to formally admit that their vaccine can cause the devastating blood clots, when this fact has been widely accepted by the clinical community since the end of 2021,” Sarah Moore, a partner at law firm Leigh Day representing the victims, told The Telegraph in April.
Today’s news of Astrazeneca’s withdrawal of its vaccine European markets “will be seen as a decision linked with AstraZeneca’s recent admission that the vaccine can cause TTS, and the fact that regulators across the world suspended or stopped usage of the vaccine following concerns regarding TTS.”
Despite the acknowledgement of cases of TTS contracted by recipients of its COVID-19 vaccine, AstraZeneca has insisted that its product met industry standards.
“Our sympathy goes out to anyone who has lost loved ones or reported health problems,” the Big Pharma corporation said in a statement. “Patient safety is our highest priority, and regulatory authorities have clear and stringent standards to ensure the safe use of all medicines, including vaccines.
“AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine was first given the nod by the EMA in January 2021,” a report by the Associated Press (AP) noted. “Within weeks, however, concerns grew about the vaccine’s safety, when dozens of countries suspended the vaccine’s use after unusual but rare blood clots were detected in a small number of immunized people. The EU regulator concluded AstraZeneca’s shot didn’t raise the overall risk of clots, but doubts remained.”
“Partial results from its first major trial — which Britain used to authorize the vaccine — were clouded by a manufacturing mistake that researchers didn’t immediately acknowledge,” the AP report continued. Sadly, “Insufficient data about how well the vaccine protected older people led some countries to initially restrict its use to younger populations before reversing course.”
Some are questioning the morality of AstraZeneca’s leadership, fully supportive of its mandated vaccine even as evidence of serious side effects arose.
“When I met the AstraZeneca boss in Davos, he claimed Covid vaccine mandates were needed to PROTECT as many people as possible,” Rebel News reporter Avi Yemini recounted on X.
“Today, his drug was pulled off the market after it was revealed it HURT the same people forced to have it,” Yemini said. “Let that sink in.”
Brownstone Institute
Enough With These Dangerous Calculations
From the Brownstone Institute
BY
Now that there is more open talk about vaccine injury, we are continually assured that overall these vaccines were worth it even so. The thought always occurs: it has not been worth it for the injured. Nor is their injury lessened by the knowledge that others were helped, if they were.
What precise metric are we going to use to determine costs and benefits population-wide? Many millions were forced to take experimental injections that they did not want nor need. Many were injured and with no chance of compensation. This is gravely unjust. You don’t need to take recourse to fancy philosophical conjectures (The Trolley Problem, The Lifeboat Dilemma, The Fat Man on the Bridge, etc.) to do the utilitarian calculation.
And yet, such calculations are precisely what the defenders of society-wide pandemic interventions are citing as evidence that we can and should do it again. The costs are high, they now admit, but worth the benefit.
Well, maybe not. It’s hard to say but they will keep working on it. They will decide in due course.
This is the argument of Professor John M. Barry. His book on the 1918 flu pandemic kicked off the entire pandemic-planning industry once George W. Bush read the book flap in 2005. Barry’s new article in the New York Times raises alarms about the Avian Bird Flu, the same as the whole pandemic industry is doing right now, and makes the argument that the interventions last time were just great overall.
“Australia, Germany and Switzerland are among the countries that demonstrated those interventions can succeed,” he claims even though all three countries have been torn apart by the pandemic response that is still rocking politics and showing itself in economic decline “Even the experience of the United States provides overwhelming, if indirect, evidence of the success of those public health measures.”
What is that indirect evidence? This you won’t believe: that flu deaths dramatically fell. “The public health steps taken to slow Covid contributed significantly to this decline, and those same measures no doubt affected Covid as well.”
That’s a heck of a thing. If you burn down the house to kill the rats and fail, but happen to kill the pets, surely you have some bragging rights there.
There is indeed a big debate on why seasonal flu seems to have nearly disappeared during the pandemic. One theory is simple misclassification, that flu was just as present as always but labeled Covid because PCR tests pick up even slight elements of the pathogen and financial incentives drove one to displace the other. There is surely an element of this.
Another theory relates to crowding out: the more serious virus pushes aside the less serious one, which is an empirically testable hypothesis.
A third explanation might in fact be related to interventions. With vast numbers staying home and the banning of gatherings, there was indeed less opportunity for pathogenic spread. Even if granting that is true, the effect is far from perfect, as we know from the failure of every attempt to achieve zero Covid. Antarctica is a good example of that.
That said, and even postulating this might be correct, there is nothing to prevent the spread among the population after opening except with even worse results because immune systems are degraded for lack of exposure.
Barry concedes the point but says “such interventions can achieve two important goals.” The first is “preventing hospitals from being overrun. Achieving this outcome could require a cycle of imposing, lifting and reimposing public health measures to slow the spread of the virus. But the public should accept that because the goal is understandable, narrow and well defined.”
Fine, but there is a major glaring error. Most hospitals in the US were not overrun. There is even a genuine question about whether and to what extent New York City hospitals were overrun but, even if they were, this had nothing to do with hospitals in most of the country. And yet the grand central plan closed them all for diagnostics and elective surgeries. In major parts of the country, parking lots were completely empty and nurses were furloughed in more than 300 hospitals.
Overall, that scheme (and who imposed this?) didn’t work too well.
The second supposed benefit you can predict: shutting down buys time “for identifying, manufacturing and distributing therapeutics and vaccines and for clinicians to learn how to manage care with the resources at hand.” This is another strange statement because authorities actually removed therapeutics from the shelves all over the country even though physicians were prescribing them.
As for the supposed vaccine, it did not stop infection or transmission.
So that scheme didn’t work either. There is also something truly cruel about using compulsory methods to preserve the population’s immunological naïveté in anticipation of a vaccine that may or may not work and may or may not cause more harm than good. And yet that is precisely the plan.
The most alarming part of Barry’s article, even aside from his incorrect claim that masks work, is this statement: “So the question isn’t whether those measures work. They do. It’s whether their benefits outweigh their social and economic costs. This will be a continuing calculation.”
Again we are back to benefit vs costs. It’s one thing for a person confronting a true moral or personal difficulty to make that calculation and live with the consequences. Every philosophical problem listed above – Trolly Cars and Lifeboats – involves personal choices and single decision-makers. In the case of pandemic planning and response, we are talking about groups of intellectuals and bureaucrats making decisions for the whole of society. In the last go-round, they made these decisions for the entire world with catastrophic results.
Many hundreds of years ago and following, the Western mind decided that giving such power to elites was not a good idea. The “continuing calculation” about what costs and benefits are experienced by billions of people from compulsory impositions is not something we should risk, not even with AI (which Barry says will solve the problems next time). Instead, we generally decided that a presumption of freedom is a better idea than empowering a small elite of scientists with the power to make “continuing calculations” for our supposed benefit.
Among many problems with the scientistic scheme for elite rule in the realm of infectious disease is that the population as a whole has no way to evaluate schemes and claims made to them by the government itself. They told us terrible population-wide death would come from Covid but it turned out to be exactly what others said back in February 2020; a disease impactful mainly on the aged and infirm.
Similarly, with the bird flu, we’ve been through a quarter century of claims that half of humanity could die from it. So far, every jump from animals to humans has resulted in reparable maladies like conjunctivitis.
But let’s say the bird flu really does get bad. Should the scientists who ruled us last time be trusted to do it again? That’s Barry’s plea: he demands “trust in government.” At the same time, he wants government to have the power to censor dissent. He falsely claims that last time, “there was no organized effort to counter social media disinformation” despite vast evidence of exactly this.
More information is actually what we need, especially from dissidents. For example, Barry celebrates that dexamethasone worked against Covid. But he fails to point out that the “experts” said in February 2020 that dexamethasone should not be used. Indeed, if you followed the Lancet, you would not have used them at all. In other words, Barry’s article refutes itself simply by showing the experts were desperately wrong in this case.
And, honestly, he knows this. Every bit of it. I have no doubt that if we met for cocktails, he would agree with most of this article. But he would also quickly point out that, after all, the New York Times commissioned the article so he can only say so much. He is merely being strategic, don’t you know?
This is the problem we face today with nearly all ruling-class intellectuals. We don’t actually disagree that much on the facts. We disagree on how much of the facts we are in a position to admit. And this puts Brownstone in a very awkward position of being a venue to say publicly what most people in the know say only privately. We do it because we believe in doing so.
All of which underscores the more general point: government and its connected scientists simply cannot be trusted with this kind of power. The last experience illustrates why. We forged our societies to have laws and guaranteed liberties that can never be taken away, not even during a pandemic. It is never worth using the power of the state to ruin lives to fulfill anyone’s abstract vision of what constitutes the greater good.
COVID-19
The Vials and the Damage Done: Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory Scandal, Part II
From the C2C Journal
By Peter Shawn Taylor
In China, minor security infractions are routinely punished with lengthy jail terms in dreadful conditions. In Canada, it’s just the opposite. Clear evidence of espionage is rewarded with a free pass back home after the mission is complete. Neglecting our national security in this way may suit the Justin Trudeau government, but it is doing great harm to Canada’s relationship with its most important allies. In the concluding instalment of his two-part series, Peter Shawn Taylor examines the many ways in which the spy scandal at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg has damaged Canada’s international standing and contributed to the growing perception that Canada is a foreign agent’s happy place. (Part I is here.)
The Scientists Who Came in From the Cold: Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory Scandal, Part I
-
National2 days ago
Trudeau’s internet censorship Bill C-11 will not be implemented until late 2025
-
COVID-191 day ago
Tucker Carlson and NFL star Aaron Rodgers discuss Bill Gates, COVID-19, US Deep State
-
Energy2 days ago
Tech giants’ self-made AI energy crisis
-
Frontier Centre for Public Policy2 days ago
The PM as Leaf’s coach
-
COVID-1916 hours ago
Top Fauci Aide Allegedly Learned To Make ‘Smoking Gun’ Emails ‘Disappear,’ Testimony Reveals
-
Economy1 day ago
Prime minister’s misleading capital gains video misses the point
-
COVID-1910 hours ago
The Vials and the Damage Done: Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory Scandal, Part II
-
espionage2 days ago
The Scientists Who Came in From the Cold: Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory Scandal, Part I