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COVID-19

Dr. John Campbell – The health researcher who’s been explaining the pandemic to millions

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4 minute read

Throughout the last three years people around the world have been searching for answers.  As the Covid pandemic swept the globe, hundreds of millions of people where locked down. Most turned quickly to their trusted news sources for information.  But as the pandemic continued, millions found that this time newspapers, tv reporters and the regular experts haven’t been very much help.

After the initial lockdown turned from two weeks into month after month, regular citizens everywhere started to question what they were being told.  From lockdowns, to mask mandates, to early treatment, to vaccine mandates, millions became sceptical of media sources as they discovered data from around the world, experts who had different opinions, and doctors who treated patients despite the consequences.

But how could they know who was correct?

That’s where Dr. John Campbell came in.  Dr. Campbell is a retired nursing instructor from the United Kingdom.  For years, before the days of youtube even, he’s been making informative videos about health studies and sharing them with what used to be modest audiences of a few thousand medical enthusiasts.  When the pandemic began and he switched his focus to covid-19 topics, his popularity exploded.

His videos of 10 to 20 minutes are short enough to watch daily.  His conversational approach is easy for regular people to follow.  But perhaps his best attribute is that he shares every single source of information he talks about.  And he tends to only share data and studies from legitimate, recognizable and verifiable sources.  When data changes or new information comes to light, he apologizes and makes corrections. In short, his daily presentations are like nothing else out there.

In the late fall of 2021, millions of people followed his videos as he tracked the new Omicron variant in South Africa. Campbell correctly predicted the new variant would be far less dangerous than the Delta variant it was replacing.  He predicted almost to the day when Omicron would sweep into the UK and then through North America.  While the regular news outlets warned their viewers the new variant would affect even more people, Campbell was assuring his viewers that this was perfectly OK because the strain wasn’t very dangerous.  Thousands, and millions stopped going elsewhere for the latest information on the pandemic.

For three years, his audience has been growing steadily.  His presentations are often seen by larger audiences than almost any media outlet could hope for.  Dr. John Campbell has become “the” source of trusted covid information for millions.

If you haven’t been introduced to Dr. John Campbell yet, this interview by Russell Brand is a great place to start.  In this video Brand takes Dr. Campbell on a very quick and informative look back at the last three years of covid, and all the information surrounding the pandemic.

If you’d like to dive deeper into this conversation, here’s the entire conversation which lasted about an hour.

Here’s the very latest daily video from Dr. Campbell posted Thursday, March 30. In this video Campbell shows how Covid symptoms have evolved into what looks almost precisely like the common cold.

 

After 15 years as a TV reporter with Global and CBC and as news director of RDTV in Red Deer, Duane set out on his own 2008 as a visual storyteller. During this period, he became fascinated with a burgeoning online world and how it could better serve local communities. This fascination led to Todayville, launched in 2016.

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COVID-19

Why are people in Britain talking about Boris Johnson’s WhatsApp messages?

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By Jill Lawless

LONDON — Critics accuse the British administration of running “government by WhatsApp” because of the popularity of the messaging app with politicians and officials.

So it feels inevitable that a tussle over WhatsApp messages is at the heart of Britain’s official inquiry into how the country handled the COVID-19 pandemic.

Thousands of messages exchanged during the pandemic between then Prime Minister Boris Johnson and government ministers, aides and officials form key evidence for the investigation chaired by retired judge Heather Hallett. The Conservative government, now led by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, wants to be able to edit the messages before handing them over, saying some are personal and irrelevant to the inquiry. It has filed a legal challenge against Hallett’s order to surrender the unredacted messages.

WHAT IS THE INQUIRY INVESTIGATING?

More than 200,000 people have died in Britain after testing positive for COVID-19, one of the highest tolls in Europe, and the decisions of Johnson’s government have been endlessly debated. Johnson agreed in late 2021 to hold an investigation after pressure from bereaved families.

Hallett’s inquiry is due to scrutinize the U.K.’s preparedness for a pandemic, how the government responded and whether the “level of loss was inevitable or whether things could have been done better.”

Public hearings are scheduled to begin June 13 and last until 2026, with the former prime minister and a host of senior officials due to give evidence.

WHAT’S UP WITH WHATSAPP?

The Meta-owned messaging service has become a favorite communications tool among U.K. government officials and the journalists who cover them. It’s easy to use for both individual and group chats, and its end-to-end encryption offers users a sense of security that messages will be private.

That confidence has sometimes proved misguided. Former Health Secretary Matt Hancock, who helped lead Britain’s response to the virus, gave tens of thousands of his messages to a journalist who was helping him write a memoir. The journalist passed them to a newspaper, which splashed embarrassing details in a series of front-page stories.

Hallett has asked to see messages exchanged between Johnson and more than three dozen scientists and officials over two years from early 2020. She also wants to see Johnson’s notebooks and diaries from the same period.

WHAT’S THE GOVERNMENT’S POSITION?

The government of Sunak, who took office after Johnson resigned amid scandals in mid-2022, argues that some of the messages are “unambiguously irrelevant” to the COVID-19 inquiry. It says publishing them would be “an unwarranted intrusion into other aspects of the work of government,” and into individuals’ “legitimate expectations of privacy and protection of their personal information.”

On Thursday, the government’s Cabinet Office filed court papers seeking to challenge Hallett’s order for the documents. The next step will be a hearing at the High Court in the coming weeks.

Many lawyers think the government will lose the challenge. Under the terms of the inquiry, agreed upon with the government at the outset, Hallett has the power to summon evidence and question witnesses under oath.

“The government has an uphill task,” Jonathan Jones, a former head of the government legal service, wrote in a blog post for the Institute for Government. “The likelihood is that the court will say the inquiry chair should be the one to decide how she goes about it, and what material she needs to see for that purpose.”

WHAT DOES BORIS JOHNSON SAY?

Johnson has a history of friction with successor Sunak, whose resignation from the government in July 2022 helped topple Johnson from power.

Johnson has distanced himself from the government’s stance by saying he is happy to hand over his messages. On Friday, he said he has sent the WhatsApp messages directly to Hallett’s inquiry.

But — in another twist — they cover only part of the requested period. Johnson hasn’t passed on any messages from before April 2021. That period includes the early days of the pandemic — when the government made fateful and still-contested decisions — as well as three periods of national lockdown and the dates of rule-breaking parties in government buildings that led to scores of people, including Johnson, being fined by police.

Johnson says the messages are on a phone he was ordered to stop using after journalists noticed that his number had been publicly available online for 15 years.

Johnson says the security services told him to quit using the phone and never to turn it on again. He told Hallett on Friday that he had “asked the Cabinet Office for assistance in turning it on securely so that I can search it for all relevant material. I propose to pass all such material directly to you.”

 

 

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Brownstone Institute

My Official Apology to the New York Post

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From the Brownstone Institute

BY Yasmina PalumboYASMINA PALUMBO

There is an art to meaningful apologies. A sweet spot. Wait too long and they become pointless.

Ideally, they should also be accompanied with some kind of atonement as well.

I, along with many New Yorkers, have been waiting for apologies that don’t appear to be coming. But as I’ve been waiting in the interminable void, it’s occurred to me that I might owe some apologies myself. So here goes


An Apology

Years ago, I used to sneer at anyone who read the NY Post. At the café where I worked, I took quiet pleasure in tossing it in the trash whenever someone left it behind on a crumb-covered seat. Had I ever read it? No. But I knew I wasn’t the type of person to read the NY Post, and I was proud of that fact.

Then, a few years back, things started to look a little different to me. They started to look wrong, like a wool hat in summer, or a mask on a baby’s face. I started to detect lies and impossibilities coming out of the mouths of important people. “Gradually, then suddenly,” as the Hemingway quote goes, I saw things in a different light.

I could almost stomach the politicians lying, but when friends began repeating the lies it became too much to bear. Truth seemed to hover just outside of them, leaving them infuriatingly untouched.

It was a little after this time, my awakening of sorts, that I myself became an outcast.

I hadn’t set out to become an outcast. I’d reached middle age an average upstanding citizen, fairly respectful of authority. I was a mother who made her children take piano lessons for god’s sake!

But one morning, late in the summer of 2021, I woke up to find I no longer had civil rights. And things took a turn. I still marvel at how it all unfolded:

Early 2021, I thought I’d survived the worst of covid. I’d made it through a year of hysteria that I presumed would surely fade, maybe even some bashful apologies would follow, like after a long drunken night gone too far.

By then, the miracle vaccine had finally arrived and any American who wanted it could have it. But it so happened that I didn’t want it. I’d already gotten covid during lockdown, while selling essentials like coffee and toilet paper from the café I now owned, a café limping along on government funds.

An experimental vaccine for a virus I’d already had just wasn’t that appealing to me; why would it be? The decision, quite honestly, made itself. Who knew it would land me in the middle of a nightmare.

I recall the incremental announcements from our mayor at the time, a tall goofy man people likened to Big Bird. The first announcement came on the morning of August 16th, 2021;

My kind was no longer allowed to sit down and eat in cafés, he said, though we were allowed to take something in a paper bag to go.

My kind was no longer allowed to enter cultural buildings, he said; art and history were for the good citizens.

We were no longer allowed the privilege of working, or a college education.

We weren’t allowed to enter our child’s school or to serve the people we served when the vaccine was just a twinkle in Fauci’s eye. And society agreed. The “unvaccinated” deserved it. Damn them.

My anger simmered. It turned to rage. All I asked for was common sense. Every day that New York City hummed, I burned. Didn’t they see us withering with loss of hope and loss in general?

Didn’t they know there were a million of us who said no thanks? A million who didn’t have civil rights. A million who were right, as it turned out, about everything.

It seemed they did not, or if they did, they didn’t care.

And just when I was about to give up on humanity, out of the haze of covid hysteria came some of the clearest voices to be found in, of all places, the NY Post.

But of course!

I should’ve recognized Alexander Hamilton’s handsome face on the ten-dollar bill as a sign, right there next to the scrolled “We the People.” A Founding Father, Hamilton had worked to abolish the slave trade in New York City. I’d forgotten he founded the NY Post too!

While other mainstream news still wilted with ruminations on the invisible threat of long covid, or the latest Fauci whim, the NY Post blazed a trail with its demands for a return to common sense and decency.

There in print it called for an end to all mandates – if baseball players and celebrities didn’t need them why did the working class?

In chorus its editorial board called for a reckoning by way of a covid truth-and-reconciliation commission – Amen!

And long before anyone else, it dared to publish the opinions of some of the bravest academics and scientists of our time, the co-authors of the Great Barrington DeclarationDr. Martin Kulldorff and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.

So, I’m sorry, NY Post. I judged you by your cover. By your red and black barking headlines. But I was wrong. And for anyone else out there who feels they might owe someone an apology, let me tell you it feels good to settle a debt. I highly recommend it.

Author

  • Yasmina Palumbo

    Yasmina Palumbo is a NYC public-school parent, advocate for civil rights and pandemic response accountability, and co-editor of Restore Childhood Substack

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