Vaccines and the Road to Hell

This is not intended to be a thorough review of vaccination. There are entire books on the subject, for example the excellent Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and The Forgotten History, by Suzanne Humphries, MD.

It is just some thoughts on the matter as we dash to sign up to Bill Gates' hurried attempt at vaccinating the entire world in less than 18 months, against Covid-19, a disease that is plausibly not nearly as dangerous as the press would have us believe, and one that - like other coronaviruses (eg the common cold) - will have mutated before long into something that this new vaccine would not in any case guard against.

Unless...

The fact that development of the seasonal flu vaccine manages to anticipate the strain of seasonal flu makes you wonder if all is as it should be. A vaccine purportedly takes a minimum of 18 months to produce (often 15 years or never), assuming that it is not carefully tested beforehand. The common cold has no vaccine against it; the seasonal flu vaccine supposedly protects less than 30% of its recipients. The real figure is probably far lower, as a bad cold is often indistinguishable from the flu, people do not like to admit to having had the vaccine for no good reason, and it is difficult to measure its effectiveness against anything else.

Does receiving the vaccine make the flu, if you get it, worse? It does make you more susceptible to coronavirus in general and human metapneumovirus.

Given that Bill Gates has now received multi-million pledges from almost all major world governments ($8 billion in total) in order to develop a vaccine for Covid-19 in record time - his de facto guarantee that he will have a vaccine in place in just 18 months should make you shudder -, one that is to be applied to the entire world almost simultaneously.

The MSM constantly propagandises for this vaccine, and no one steps outside of the script of when, what type, how much money, etc, to ask whether a vaccine is necessary or desirable. Nor does the MSM ask Gates the pertinent question of how his insistence on vaccination, to the exclusion of proven, long-lasting improvements to health provided by clean water and sufficient food, fits in with his stated aim of reducing the world population by 30%.

The MSM has worked hard to tell us that CV-19 is dangerous for everybody. This is not true. The Guardian headline on 10 May 2020 was "New York warns of children's illness linked to Covid-19 after three deaths". The interesting part is that in the article you can find out that the children did not have any Covid-19 symptoms, nor respiratory problems. They did test positive for Covid-19 antibodies, but just because you have measles antibodies this does not mean that your headache is caused by measles! For the beady eyed, the article establishes no link with CV-19, but does say that the children fell "severely ill with toxic shock-like reaction that has symptoms similar to Kawasaki disease", a disease that is itself related to vaccinating young children.

Given that, excluding the very old and the very infirm, there are in fact no people you know that have died from Covid-19, and that all that means is that when you are old and sick you may die, is rushing to get an untested vaccine that incorporates the new concept of altering your DNA a good idea?

Vaccines are not innocuous

Bill Gates has publicly said over the last few weeks that he wants immunity from liability for vaccine caused damage.

Since the 1960s, tests of vaccine candidates for diseases such as dengue, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) have shown a paradoxical phenomenon: some animals or people who received the vaccine and were later exposed to the virus developed more severe disease than those who had not been vaccinated.

In 1966, a vaccine was tested in the United States against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) — which infects almost all children before they turn two. The tests had dire consequences: Children weren't protected; many infants still caught RSV, suffered worse symptoms than usual, and needed to be hospitalised, and two toddlers died as a result of enhanced disease symptoms.

The official explanation was that the catastrophic vaccine failure could have been averted if adjuvants — chemicals that prime the immune system — had been added to the vaccine. The problem is that adjuvants are typically mercury or aluminium, both highly toxic - do you really want to inject them into your baby? Vaccines also contain fetal tissue from humans and other animals.

In 2019 the CDC (US Govt Centre for Disease Control) admitted in Federal court that it has no studies to support that the DTaP vaccine does not cause autism, despite many parents of autistic children believing that it does indeed cause autism.

The UK government advises those who have immune deficiency to avoid live attenuated vaccines "because the vaccine strain could replicate too much and cause an extensive, serious infection." What this also means is that a recently vaccinated person can spread the virus to others.

Until vaccination programmes were implanted, children got all the childhood diseases and, it was widely accepted, benefited from them. Decades of hysteria make it hard for people to understand how routine these diseases were and how - in my case at least - mothers would rush their children over to a friend's house where they had measles, mumps, rubella, etc, so that their own children could get the diseases at an age at which they posed no practical risk. No hospital scares, no doctors, just how to keep your children amused for a few days.

Small babies were not at risk because their naturally immunised mothers provided them with antibodies for the first year or so of life. Now with successive generations of vaccinated people no effective immunity is passed on to the babies.

Infectious diseases declined in western countries at the time when deep poverty was almost eliminated; and clean water, decent food and good air were available to all. These diseases, which were generally benign - and they were officially called so -, were dangerous to those who were malnourished or very ill. They still are, and this is why vaccination programmes in very poor areas of the world do not improve health because the risk to health is from lack of decent food and water.

Small pox, generally lauded as eradicated worldwide in 1980, is kept in two laboratories in the US and Russia. "Experts agreed on keeping the virus in case the disease reappears," which means that a virus is never really eradicated but that they come and go in waves. The vaccine was anything but inoffensive (and has not changed): a 1969 study found that, out of every one million people vaccinated, 74 would suffer serious complications, and at least one would die.

Scarlet fever has not, in any case, been eradicated. And yet... you do not get the disease and you are not vaccinated against it!!!

The problem with the idea that those who are immune deficient should make everyone else get vaccinated, with the associated real risks that this imposes on others, instead of concentrating on improving their own health and backing measures that improve the community's health in general - like good water, good food, clean air, animal welfare -, is that it is badly thought out. Even if you were to impose the burden of vaccination on  entire population, vaccinated people still get diseases and spread them to others, many diseases have no vaccines, viruses mutate, and you have no control over people from abroad, animals, wildlife...

It is probable that vaccines are keeping some diseases going, like polio in India, where children have been left permanently disabled after receiving the vaccine; or measles, a disease that has a different denomination in vaccinated people because it is far more lethal for those people. Measles in vaccinated people in Spain has been catalogued from 2003 to 2014.

Herd immunity, a naturally occurring immunity when some 50% or less of a group has had the disease and the virus cannot find another host easily, does not work in vaccinated people because they do not gain life-time immunity, and the vaccine contains live virus and is propagated over time. When mass vaccination started, it was said that with this 50% cover, herd immunity would be reached. This was later changed to 80%, 90%, 95%... because vaccines do not function the same way as natural immunity does, the latter being generally for life.

Vaccines carry a risk and can result in death or serious lesions. The CDC typifies vaccine injuries,  and the US government has a National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, within a "no-fault" premise, that has to date (and with great impediment to claimants) paid out some $4 billion.

Back in 2009 the historically ALWAYS wrong Neil Ferguson from Imperial College (the same Imperial College that has received $185 million from the Gates Foundation, and $400 million from the Wellcome Trust by the end of 2018)  claimed that swine flu, H1N1 would take the lives of 65,000 people in the UK. In the end, 457 people died from the virus.

In response to the threat of swine flu, Big Pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) developed the Pandemrix vaccine. Sixty patients suffered brain damage as a result of the vaccine and were allocated £60 million in compensation by the UK Government. Most of the victims were children. GSK had been granted indemnity by the Gordon Brown Government.

But - almost all roads lead to Gates - our western, over-vaccinated societies are coincidentally those where assisted reproduction facilities have appeared like mushrooms over the last decades, as young, healthy people find themselves increasingly infertile. In poor countries, people very often try to avoid the WHO and Gates Foundation's forced vaccination programmes, believing that they do little for their well-being and will actually make them infertile.

The papilloma virus vaccination programme in the UK resulted in several young women dying or being seriously injured; and the WHO itself reports that "since 2012, individual case reports have linked vaccination against HPV with primary ovarian insufficiency (POI), defined as dysfunction or depletion of ovarian follicles, menopausal symptoms and reduced fertility before the age of 40," but finds no link between the vaccine and the symptoms, despite a "temporal association" being found!

Equally sinister, is the fact that in developing countries, the tetanus vaccine may be laced with an anti-fertility drug, in a UN vaccination programme.

The WHO has admitted culpability for at least one "serious breach of international ethical standards", vaccinating people without their consent and causing grievous harm and death.

Bill Gates' capture of the WHO (he is the largest individual donor, and his participation is greater than that of the UK) should not be viewed as benign. He has become extremely rich and powerful through his "philanthropy" and there is no reason to assume that this unempathetic computer geek has anything useful to say about anyone's health.

The right to bodily integrity (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, art. 3) is routinely flouted when parents are not given informed consent for the vaccination of their children. In Sweden, the incidence of diphtheria, polio and tetanus was quantified as less than one in a million. Even in the unlikely event that these diseases were to stage a comeback, they would in any case enjoy far better healthcare nowadays than was once the case. The incidence of the disease combined with the risk of the disease becoming serious in case of infection is absurdly low.

However, in a confidential internal report, the makers of the vaccine GSK, quantifies the incidence of secondary effects between 0.6 and 1 in a hundred, with many secondary effects being life-long extremely serious conditions including death.

It could be argued that any of our material possessions could be used for the common good (that's a discussion for another day); but our bodies are inalienable and should not be damaged in order to line the pockets of very rich people. The reasons put forward for damaging our health, no matter how small the purported risks, are feeble and not shown to be true.

Why Private Healthcare Makes Public Healthcare Worse

Like so much that goes on today, there's an idea that private healthcare does not impact public healthcare and can even lessen the burden on the public system. Years of neoliberal simplification of everything into pounds and pence, always understood as today's pecuniary cost, often an imaginary spin on the real cost, without taking into account other repercussions or future impacts, have meant that, even though we can see that every year is a little worse than the previous one, we cannot see why that is. We continue to be told that, if we just apply the selfish, everyone-in-it-for-themselves, I'm-all right-Jack doctrine, suddenly, magically, everything will come out fine.

It was a historic triumph in almost all modern countries - excluding the USA - to achieve a National Health Service, a stunning symbol of solidarity in the community. 

As Aneurin Bevan, the creator of the NHS in England and Wales in 1948, said, “Illness is neither an indulgence for which people have to pay, nor an offence for which they should be penalised, but a misfortune, the cost of which should be shared by the community.” We apply the same principle of solidarity to state education or welfare payments and the arguments for a national health service are more or less the same as for other forms of solidarity within a community.

Margaret Thatcher famously said that there is no society, only individuals. Were this true, it would be a sad and depressing reflection on humankind. But it is not true: we are social animals and become dysfunctional the more isolated we are.

Most people in favour of private health care pay at least lip service to the notion that the national health service should be maintained.

But...

The very existence of private health care undermine the principle of solidarity, one of the most precious foundations of our coexistence with other beings. Do we really want to return to having to avoid others in the street for fear of their carrying dangerous diseases that they cannot afford to have cured?

Bill Gates used to have a huge public image problem, arising from his unattractive personality, his criminal undermining of all competition to Windows (and its awful browser), his sullen and shifty performance in the the US anti-trust court case against him, and his ubiquitous and horrible OS and browser. That was until he took advantage of the neoliberal creed that the wealthy managed to foist on us of hardly taxing the very rich. His soaring wealth allowed him to reinvent himself as a health expert and philanthropist. Luckily for him, all that giving was mostly to his own organisations or those he controlled, and it always worked towards his own interests (of gaining power over 99% of the world) so that, although Microsoft is only 20% of his portfolio, his wealth has doubled during these years of "giving", from $50 billion to $100 billion over the last decade.

Amancio Ortega, Zara's immensely rich owner, chooses to produce its garments using cheap labour abroad where the minimum wage is truly minimum and where health and safety measures are in short supply. Zara pays taxes in Holland, Ireland and Switzerland, not Spain, saving itself at least 585 million euros from 2011 to 2014.

There are Irish companies belonging to Inditex that report millions of euros in turnover, but do not have a single employee on the payroll and paid no corporate tax at all.

Ortega is worth more than 62 billion euros, and his yearly dividend is around 270 million euros per year or, if you like 739,726€ per day. Just 514€ per minute, every minute of every day of the year! He  donates from time to time to the health service in specific machines - mostly inappropriate for the public health service and requiring expensive maintenance - or surgical masks, gaining huge popularity. His donation, made possible by starving the Spanish state of the taxes it should receive and by ensuring that Spain's unemployment rate is never mitigated by his company, is always specific, never in cash, and never democratically accountable. It gives him an incalculable value in cheap publicity at an insignificant cost. 

Worse still, as these donations reduce his tax bill, a substantial sum of money comes out of the public purse to pay for these generally useless so-called gifts, should they be accepted. As they say - and, pertinently, was first documented as being put into common parlance in the 1930s during the Great Depression -, there's no such thing as a free lunch (TNSTAAFL).

Philanthropy does not, and cannot, substitute for a proper, solidaristic State. State institutions, when they work, when they have not been undermined and infiltrated by rich, vested interests, protect against the venal interests of particular individuals. Both Gates and Ortega have no medical nor medical research training, yet are able to use their tremendous wealth in order to pressure governments into buying into their agenda. Neither support, either ideologically or economically, the national health service. Gates has received huge pledges of money from most western governments in order to fund the vaccine he intends to use on the entire world population against Covid-19 (excluding his own family, I have no doubt). They will start with Africa, I suspect, although Africa really does not have a problem with the coronavirus. Yet.

As we have just seen, the private health services do NOT generally cover serious new infectious diseases, be they Covid-19, Sars, Mers, Ebola, HIV, tuberculosis..., nor do they cover pre-existing illnesses. New minor ailments are covered but the yearly premium quickly becomes prohibitive once they become serious or chronic. Private health services scrimp on personnel costs, often employing trainees and insufficient qualified staff. When things go wrong, as they often do, patients are frequently transferred to the public hospital, at public cost, never the other way round, and the public sector ends up with patients who may need very expensive life-long treatment, often as a result of mala praxis or incompetence while in private care.

For years, governments have been stealthily selling off the NHS, sending patients for minor treatments to private clinics and paying these clinics for the service. The private clinics make a profit (that is what they are there for), money that should have been saved or invested into the public sector. The public sector increasingly ends up with a disproportionate number of poor, very ill, or chronic patients, making its cost per patient far higher than the private sector's. This leads it to be criticised by unscrupulous people who can then justify further privatisation.

The Centre for Health and the Public Interest claims that post-operative care is generally carried out by a junior doctor, one who is working up to 168 hours a week without supervision.

The criminal surgeon Ian Paterson, who treated more than a thousand patients fraudulently at private hospitals under Spire Healthcare and carried out useless, life-changing operations where many of his patients died and hundreds were mutilated, cost the NHS more than £17m in compensation to victims. Patients were referred to him due to the NHS's long waiting lists, following decades of intentional mismanagement of the NHS, despite Ian Paterson having a dubious background and previous suspension. He was ultimately sentenced to 20 years' prison, and his motive is assumed to have been simply to earn more money.

Such is the incentive to make a profit and line some specific pockets that in Madrid during the Covid scare the authorities dolled out free masks, overalls, gels and the like to the private care homes, valued at 3.2 million euros; and sent many patients to these private centres although there was room in the public ones, costing another million euros. At the same time the overwhelming proportion of deaths was in the private care homes, where many patients were isolated, abandoned, and purposefully not given treatment for illness, nor water, nor food. These deaths tended to be of old people over 70 years of age, in private macro-'care' homes, while the small public sector homes had much better outcomes. Private 'care' and hospitals cost up to six times more than public sector ones.

As Noam Chomsky famously said, "That’s the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital."

Other surgeons, like Dr Arackal Manu Nair who carried out unnecessary prostate operations at Spire Parkway private hospital in Solihull, have also been suspended after years of abusing patients, years too late for their victims, due to lack of oversight and the way that doctors are outsourced and allowed to have private practices elsewhere.

In small, fragmented clinics, consultants, who carry out the surgery, do not hang around to look after their patients afterwards but disappear home. Private clinics often do not have intensive care facilities and, if they do, they may well not have sufficient qualified staff permanently on hand. The transfer to a public hospital also transfers a large cost to the public sector and, at the same time, further endangers the patient's life by the transit.

In 2018, a report by the CQC into the independent sector was scathing. It found two in five private hospitals were failing to meet safety standards. In particular it raised a major concern into the lack of effective oversight of consultants "working" for the hospital but not formally employed by them. It also said there was not enough reporting of serious incidents or transparency when something went wrong.

Mr Patterson worked independently, the private hospital he worked at did not employ him (clinicians are effectively freelance) and he had his own insurance.

So, when something went wrong, as it so cruelly did, the hospital was able to claim it was not liable (though Spire healthcare has paid out some damages to some patients as has Mr Paterson’s insurance company, but the victims had to fight tooth and nail to get it).

The public health system often seems expensive not only because it treats the most expensive patients (and continues to do so even when extensive private healthcare is available), but also because it incorporates safety and quality procedures and maintains permanent in-house staff. The private sector charges far more in fact but will always end up cutting corners, because it exists in order to make a profit, the larger the better. The US has a highly privatised healthcare system that per capita is the most expensive in the world, yet the US is ranked number 38 in life expectancy.

But far more insidious is the fact that private healthcare starves the public sector of its resources. Imagine if $9,892 per person were used for a public sector healthcare budget in the US. Instead, the biggest cause of personal bankruptcy in the US is medical treatment, despite the country's huge healthcare cost. And yet, over 6 decades, surveys have repeatedly shown that the US population is overwhelmingly in favour of a public, single-payer healthcare system; yet, the private industry's lobbyists ensure that this never happens.

A near-universal single-payer public service can negotiate cheap medicines and supplies, due to the fact that its very size makes it a match for negotiating with any laboratory. Witness the cost of medicines in the US compared to Canada: an Epipen (for serious allergic reactions) typically costs $100 in Canada and $300 in the US. In the UK you will be charged £8.80 ($11). However, the NHS buys them for around £45 ($58).

The last reason why a private system will never coexist in harmony with a public system is that the current system is now out of date. Covid-19 and other recent pandemics shows that infectious diseases, which have been long on the back foot, are perhaps coming back, for whatever reason. Possibly the reliance on vaccines for decades has allowed viruses to mutate and, together with increasing poverty and precarious health for a significant part of the population, allowed them to get a new hold on us.

These infectious diseases must be kept separate from chronic diseases and, indeed, Covid-19 has been shown to be on a practical level dangerous only for those who are chronically ill, who should have been kept away from the Covid-19 patients, but were not or - equally worryingly - have not been able to receive their customary treatment due to hospital saturation with Covid-19 patients.

For any area with sufficient population to warrant a hospital, at the moment the paucity of the public sector ensures that, although there will also be various private clinics, there will not be sufficient resources for there to be a second public hospital, to treat the infectious patients in a different facility to the chronically ill.

We should realise that health is a communal issue and that other people's health affects ours. For that reason alone we should invest in a first class public health system and ditch the idea that a two tier system can do anything decent for us. 

Nero and Why Who Controls the Message Controls the Masses

Nero has gone down in history as a mad, bad guy - the crazy emperor who fiddled while Rome burned.

Nero was Roman emperor from 54 to 68 AD. The last of the Julio-Claudians to rule the Roman Empire, his 14-year reign seems to represent everything decadent about that period in Roman history. We're told that he was self-indulgent, cruel, and violent - as well as a cross-dressing exhibitionist! His lavish parties combined with the burning of Rome continued the economic chaos that had plagued the Roman citizenry since the days of Tiberius (r. 14-37 CE). According to the historian Suetonius in his The Twelve Caesars, upon hearing of the emperor's death by suicide, "…citizens ran through the streets wearing caps of liberty as though they were freed slaves."

Nero's rule is associated with tyranny and extravagance. Roman sources - such as Suetonius and Cassius Dio - offer overwhelmingly negative assessments of his personality and reign. Tacitus claims that the Roman people thought him compulsive and corrupt. Suetonius tells that many Romans believed that the Great Fire of Rome was instigated by Nero to clear the way for his planned palatial complex, the Domus Aurea. According to Tacitus he was said to have seized Christians as scapegoats for the fire and burned them alive, seemingly motivated not by public justice but by personal cruelty.

However...

Some modern historians question the reliability of the ancient sources on Nero's tyrannical acts. There is evidence of his popularity among the Roman commoners, especially in the eastern provinces of the Empire. At least three leaders of short-lived, failed rebellions after his death presented themselves as "Nero reborn" to enlist popular support.

Agrippina

Nero was brought up by his mother, Agrippina. After poisoning her second husband, Agrippina became the wife of her uncle, the emperor Claudius, and managed to get him to nominate her son, Nero, as his successor, rather than Claudius' own son, Britannicus. She eliminated her opponents among the palace advisers and had Emperor Claudius himself poisoned, poisoning Claudius' son Britannicus one year later.

Nero as emperor

Upon the emperor Claudius' death, Nero was proclaimed Emperor at the age of nearly 17. Nero was encouraged by his old tutor and the philosopher Seneca to think for himself and not be entirely under Agrippina's influence; and one year later Agrippina was forced into retirement, leaving Burrus, one of her previous allies, and Seneca as effective rulers.

Nero put an immediate end to some of the worst features of Claudius' latter reign, including secret trials, and he gave the Senate more power. His early years were full of generosity and clemency, banning bloodshed in the circus and capital punishment, reducing taxes and permitting slaves to bring civil complaints of mistreatment. Nero pardoned those who wrote against him and even those who plotted against him. He inaugurated poetry and theatrical competitions and encouraged athletics, against gladiatorial combats. Cities that suffered disaster received assistance and aid was given to the Jews.

He inherited the empire at a moment of great decline and financial difficulty. Rome had in fact entered into a period of rapidly changing emperors and instability. Nero undertook a typically Keynesian approach of public works, increasing taxes on the rich, which probably earned him an everlasting black mark in the history books.

It is true that, after he tired of his mother's constant meddling, he had her killed in the year 59, five years after acceding to the throne. He was also, at his young age, scandalously debauched, having no limits to his behaviour. He felt that his artistic talents were appropriate to giving performances in public, which was viewed as indecorous by many around him, but was actually very modern, rather like our current leaders on TV.

When the Great Fire of Rome started in 64, Nero rushed back from Antium, helped the effort to put out the flames, distributed food to the needy, and lodged the homeless in his palaces. When the fire started he was 35 miles (56 km) from Rome, so clearly did not start the fire. He did not "fiddle" during the fire either, as bowed stringed instruments would not reach Europe for almost a thousand years. He did, however, start a ridiculously ostentatious palace shortly afterwards, which was designed to cover fully one third of Rome. He would not be the first leader in history to be attracted to megalomaniacal building works, nor the last.

Claudius, the previous emperor, lost control to Agrippina while away fighting in the numerous wars that beset the Roman Empire in its decline. Claudius had allowed Armenia, an important buffer state, to gain a king that was no longer amenable to Rome. Nero managed to solve the problem, but the empire was increasingly stretched by wars and unrest. Nero had to raise taxes. It is said that the taxes were to pay for his excessive personal expenditure, but the constant military cost associated with all declining empires would have been far, far higher. His personal expenditure would have been publicised by his enemies and used to foment criticism.

As was typical in those years, there was constant plotting against Nero, and he was frequently saved by his slaves giving him warnings about imminent attempts on his life, in the nick of time. One such attempt, the Piso conspiracy, included 41 participants, only 18 being executed. This clemency shows Nero's great leniency.

By the year 68 he had the Senate against him, plus the wealthy families and a large part of the middle class, who were resentful of having to pay taxes and who found his artistic pretensions inappropriate for an emperor.

He was away when the Senate communicated to him that he was to be put to death. Apparently the aim was for him to abdicate but, taking the message seriously, Nero asked his private secretary to help kill him.

He died, age 30, in the year 68.

Most of what we hear is from the historian Tacitus, himself not perhaps an entirely impartial recorder of events. Throughout history, taxes raised on the rich tend to provoke a propaganda blitz of bad press.

Added afterwards to this article:

The Guardian (23.4.21): https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2021/apr/22/was-nero-cruel-british-museum-offers-hidden-depths-to-roman-emperor