During the pandemic, the challenge for each of us was to maintain critical distance: spurning both the tribalism of those insisting Covid was a hoax and the counter-tribalism of those who demanded complete acquiesence to a corporate-political agenda dictated by Big Pharma under the mantle of “Follow the science”.
Fear of living under Big Brother or of dying from plague drove many people not only into the arms of one of these two oppositional camps but fuelled a pandemic mania in which reason and compassion were replaced with either extreme cynicism or extreme compliance. We are still living with the consequences.
There has been a spate of “excess deaths” over the past two years across the West – well above what would normally be expected – and yet this sustained trend is being universally ignored by governments, establishment media and medical bodies. No one is protesting. The cult of compliance is still in the ascendant.
More on that in a moment.
But it is worth first revisiting briefly the climate of intolerance and willed ignorance that predominated at the height of the pandemic, as I documented in real time in a series of essays that upset more of my readers than any I had written before.
It was always unwarranted to press for vaccine mandates, if only because they violated the critically important principle of bodily autonomy. But the demand became completely unhinged once it was clear – as it was much earlier than publicly let on by Big Pharma, the World Health Organisation and national regulators – that the vaccines were doing little to halt virus transmission.
Similarly, it was always unethical to insist that children should be routinely given the vaccine and boosters when it was evident that the virus posed no threat to the overwhelming majority of them – and all the more so given that the mRNA vaccines were based on a new technology whose development had been rushed through on an emergency licence.
By definition, no one could know the long-term effects of mRNA vaccines on humans because there had been no long-term studies. The science was built on a wing and a prayer, which is part of the reason the Joint Committee on Vaccinations and Immunisation, the British government’s official advisory body on vaccinations, demurred for so long, and despite huge political pressure, on recommending vaccination for children.
And it was always deeply irresponsible to refuse to consider, or even study, other treatments that might have had an impact on the virus. Medical authorities ignored or warned the public of potential prophylactics and immunity-boosting treatments and behaviours – even when those interventions could have complemented the role of the vaccines, rather than serving as an alternative to them.
Nothing could be allowed to dilute the public’s exclusive reliance on vaccinations.
One prize example was Vitamin D, the sunshine hormone that, uniquely, every cell in the human body has a receptor for. Most people in the West are deficient in Vitamin D, many of them severely so, and doctors still have little understanding of what the consequences of that deficiency – beyond osteoporosis – might be.
Even before Covid, there were many studies suggesting that Vitamin D was critical to improving the health of our immune systems, including by warding off and aiding recovery from coronaviruses. That evidence has only grown stronger subsequently.
But definitive proof has been lacking because full-scale controlled studies are extraordinarily expensive and only Big Pharma has deep enough pockets to fund such studies (given that our captured governments refuse to dig deep themselves), but Big Pharma has no interest in proving a cheap hormone like Vitamin D – one it cannot patent or profit from – might offer the public health benefits not only in relation to Covid but for a wide range of chronic health conditions.
The fact that most medical regulators and media commentators continue to prefer to shut down debate about the potential benefits of Vitamin D rather than demand that governments fund research to confirm or refute the growing body of evidence for such benefits should be a scandal. But, predictably, it isn’t.
I set this out as a preface to this latest scandal on excess deaths, one that – like so much else related to the pandemic and its aftermath – continues to elicit a blanket silence from the establishment media, politicians and, of course, our medical authorities.
The consistent and markedly elevated death rates each month across most of the Western world are not due to Covid and are far above the seasonal five-year average before the pandemic.
Such deaths have been significantly raised since late 2020 or mid-2021. That is all the more surprising because, after early waves of Covid killed off those who were already sick and vulnerable, the expectation was that excess deaths would fall, not rise. That anomaly needs explaining – scientifically.
Despite the backlash inevitably provoked by asking critical questions, I want to examine this development because it highlights something important about the way of our supposedly democratic governments, and the regulatory and adversarial institutions meant to hold them in check, have been hollowed out. We imagine we live in societies where scientific reason and compassion guide our response to a medical crisis. The reality is different. In our societies, one thing rules: money.
The issue of excess deaths is only one of many problems – though probably the most serious – that have emerged in the aftermath of the pandemic. Unless you have made an extraordinary effort to do your own research and managed to evade the internet censors and their algorithms, you will most likely not know about these developments. Neither politicians nor establishment media have publicised them.
Instead troubling data is buried away in obscure, peer-reviewed scientific journals, or has to be squeezed out of government authorities through freedom of information requests – and even then the information is often heavily redacted.
Such data would remain largely unnoticed but for the efforts of a few brave souls daring to draw attention to it – only to be smeared as cranks and crackpots, whatever their formal qualifications.
Dr John Campbell, whose Youtube channel became an invaluable internet resource during the pandemic and since (at least for those trying to sift the wheat from the chaff), has done sterling work shedding light on many of those problems.
Some notable videos have covered:
- the mishandling and lack of oversight of Pfizer’s research into its vaccine;
- the astounding admission that Pfizer never actually tested whether its vaccine stopped transmission;
- continuing efforts to obscure evidence demonstrating that natural infection confers superior immunity to the vaccine;
- the troubling discovery that mRNA can remain in the blood for at least a month after vaccination, with no understanding of what it might be doing in that time to our immune systems;
- high variation in adverse reactions caused by different batches of mRNA vaccine, with some off the scale;
- the involvement of US researchers and Pfizer in engineering Frankenstein’s monster-type coronaviruses of the very kind that, it increasingly seems, led to the Covid pandemic in the first place;
- new research demonstrating the lack of evidence for reduction in virus transmission from masking;
- the failure of policymakers to weigh the serious financial, social and possibly medical costs of lockdowns;
- and a causal connection, confirmed by the WHO, between vaccination and the development of autoimmune disease like multiple sclerosis.
There is doubtless much worse, but we cannot learn of it – at least from qualified sources – because any effort to discuss it publicly will almost certainly result in banning by the corporations that run social media, our modern town squares.
For his efforts shining a light into the darkest recesses of the West’s pandemic response, Dr Campbell has been pilloried by the tribe that still identifies with Big Pharma. Arrogantly, they dismiss him as a glorified “nurse”, even though he has written widely read and authoritative medical textbooks.
More to the point, the smears are designed to distract from the fact that, more often than not, Dr Campbell is not speaking for himself but relaying in intelligible language the findings of peer-reviewed studies or interviewing respected experts in their field to draw attention to their work.
Nonetheless, the issue of unexplained excess deaths is an order of magnitude more serious than even these other matters, which is why Dr Campbell has dedicated so many of his videos to discussing it.
Many, many thousands more people, including young people, are now dying each month across the Western world (where such data is reliably collected) than should be, compared to previous years. And they are dying for entirely mysterious reasons.
Yet:
This deeply troubling phenomenon barely merits a mention from politicians, the media or medical authorities.
Governments are failing to fund research to determine the causes of these extra deaths, even though the rates have been elevated for two years or more.
This reckless, self-imposed climate of ignorance is being sustained even as expert medical bodies warn that we face future pandemics.
It is almost as if Western governments prefer to let large numbers of people die unnecessarily, and potentially at great cost to health care services, rather than learn the truth. It seems these governments are quite happy, if they believe another pandemic is on the way, to risk repeating any mistakes they made during Covid that may have caused those excess deaths.
In a world where we are supposed to “follow the science”, how can that possibly be the case? What is going on?
If we try to understand why a blind eye is being turned to the shocking data showing a sustained and unexplained rise in deaths, it is hard not to arrive at one, and only one, conclusion.
Governments, establishment media and the medical regulators are frightened. They are scared of what they may discover if the research is carried out.
And that suggests something further. That these are not groups with their own discrete or competing interests and agendas.
The media, whatever it claims, is not a watchdog on government or the medical establishment. It colludes with them against the public. In fact, the corporate interests of all three are closely aligned.
Why? Because the government is captured by Big Business. Because the medical authorities are funded by Big Pharma, which can make or break careers. And because the media is owned by billionaires, and serves as little more than the public relations arm of concentrated wealth and as cheerleader for a neoliberalism that normalises the criminal profiteering of drug manufacturers like Pfizer.
Before I continue further, let me state unequivocally – because sadly, these things need emphasising in our ever-more tribal, polarised societies – that I have no idea what is causing this wave of excess deaths.
The point of this piece is not to pre-judge the matter or adopt a tribal position.
Rather, I’m trying de-tribalise your and my own thinking so that we can better understand why our governments and medical agencies prefer that no research is conducted, and why our establishment media chooses not to expose this glaring failure.
Dr Vibeke Manniche, a member of the Danish medical team whose peer-reviewed research showed that some batches of the mRNA vaccine caused off-the-scale adverse reactions, believes there are likely to be an array of contributory factors. That sounds right to me.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
