The WHO Pandemic Agreement: A Guide By David Bell, Thi Thuy Van Dinh March 22, 2024 Government, Society 30 minute read The World Health Organization (WHO) and its 194 Member States have been engaged for over two years in the development of two ‘instruments’ or agreements with the intent of radically changing the way pandemics and other health emergencies are managed. One, consisting of draft amendments to the existing International health Regulations (IHR), seeks to change the current IHR non-binding recommendations into requirements or binding recommendations, by having countries “undertake” to implement those given by the WHO in future declared health emergencies. It covers all ‘public health emergencies of international concern’ (PHEIC), with a single person, the WHO Director-General (DG) determining what a PHEIC is, where it extends, and when it ends. It specifies mandated vaccines, border closures, and other directives understood as lockdowns among the requirements the DG can impose. It is discussed further elsewhere and still under negotiation in Geneva. A second document, previously known as the (draft) Pandemic Treaty, then Pandemic Accord, and more recently the Pandemic Agreement, seeks to specify governance, supply chains, and various other interventions aimed at preventing, preparing for, and responding to, pandemics (pandemic prevention, preparedness and response – PPPR). It is currently being negotiated by the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB). Both texts will be subject to a vote at the May 2024 World Health Assembly (WHA) in Geneva, Switzerland. These votes are intended, by those promoting these projects, to bring governance of future multi-country healthcare emergencies (or threats thereof) under the WHO umbrella. The latest version of the draft Pandemic Agreement (here forth the ‘Agreement’) was released on 7th March 2024. However, it is still being negotiated by various committees comprising representatives of Member States and other interested entities. It has been through multiple iterations over two years, and looks like it. With the teeth of the pandemic response proposals in the IHR, the Agreement looks increasingly irrelevant, or at least unsure of its purpose, picking up bits and pieces in a half-hearted way that the IHR amendments do not, or cannot, include. However, as discussed below, it is far from irrelevant. Historical Perspective These aim to increase the centralization of decision-making within the WHO as the “directing and coordinating authority.” This terminology comes from the WHO’s 1946 Constitution, developed in the aftermath of the Second World War as the world faced the outcomes of European fascism and the similar approaches widely imposed through colonialist regimes. The WHO would support emerging countries, with rapidly expanding and poorly resourced populations struggling under high disease burdens, and coordinate some areas of international support as these sovereign countries requested it. The emphasis of action was on coordinating rather than directing. In the 80 years prior to the WHO’s existence, international public health had grown within a more directive mindset, with a series of meetings by colonial and slave-owning powers from 1851 to manage pandemics, culminating in the inauguration of the Office Internationale d’Hygiene Publique in Paris in 1907, and later the League of Nations Health Office. World powers imposed health dictates on those less powerful, in other parts of the world and increasingly on their own population through the eugenics movement and similar approaches. Public health would direct, for the greater good, as a tool of those who wish to direct the lives of others. The WHO, governed by the WHA, was to be very different. Newly independent States and their former colonial masters were ostensibly on an equal footing within the WHA (one country – one vote), and the WHO’s work overall was to be an example of how human rights could dominate the way society works. The model for international public health, as exemplified in the Declaration of Alma Ata in 1978, was to be horizontal rather than vertical, with communities and countries in the driving seat. With the evolution of the WHO in recent decades from a core funding model (countries give money, the WHO decides under the WHA guidance how to spend it) to a model based on specified funding (funders, both public and increasingly private, instruct the WHO on how to spend it), the WHO has inevitably changed to become a public-private partnership required to serve the interests of funders rather than populations. As most funding comes from a few countries with major Pharma industrial bases, or private investors and corporations in the same industry, the WHO has been required to emphasize the use of pharmaceuticals and downplay evidence and knowledge where these clash (if it wants to keep all its staff funded). It is helpful to view the draft Agreement, and the IHR amendments, in this context. Why May 2024? The WHO, together with the World Bank, G20, and other institutions have been emphasizing the urgency of putting the new pandemic instruments in place earnestly, before the ‘next pandemic.’ This is based on claims that the world was unprepared for Covid-19, and that the economic and health harm would be somehow avoidable if we had these agreements in place. They emphasize, contrary to evidence that Covid-19 virus (SARS-CoV-2) origins involve laboratory manipulation, that the main threats we face are natural, and that these are increasing exponentially and present an “existential” threat to humanity. The data on which the WHO, the World Bank, and G20 base these claims demonstrates the contrary, with reported natural outbreaks having increased as detection technologies have developed, but reducing in mortality rate, and in numbers, over the past 10 to 20 years.. A paper cited by the World Bank to justify urgency and quoted as suggesting a 3x increase in risk in the coming decade actually suggests that a Covid-19-like event would occur roughly every 129 years, and a Spanish-flu repetition every 292 to 877 years. Such predictions are unable to take into account the rapidly changing nature of medicine and improved sanitation and nutrition (most deaths from Spanish flu would not have occurred if modern antibiotics had been available), and so may still overestimate risk. Similarly, the WHO’s own priority disease list for new outbreaks only includes two diseases of proven natural origin that have over 1,000 historical deaths attributed to them. It is well demonstrated that the risk and expected burden of pandemics is misrepresented by major international agencies in current discussions. The urgency for May 2024 is clearly therefore inadequately supported, firstly because neither the WHO nor others have demonstrated how the harms accrued through Covid-19 would be reduced through the measures proposed, and secondly because the burden and risk is misrepresented. In this context, the state of the Agreement is clearly not where it should be as a draft international legally binding agreement intended to impose considerable financial and other obligations on States and populations. This is particularly problematic as the proposed expenditure; the proposed budget is over $31 billion per year, with over $10 billion more on other One Health activities. Much of this will have to be diverted from addressing other diseases burdens that impose far greater burden. This trade-off, essential to understand in public health policy development, has not yet been clearly addressed by the WHO. The WHO DG stated recently that the WHO does not want the power to impose vaccine mandates or lockdowns on anyone, and does not want this. This begs the question of why either of the current WHO pandemic instruments is being proposed, both as legally binding documents. The current IHR (2005) already sets out such approaches as recommendations the DG can make, and there is nothing non-mandatory that countries cannot do now without pushing new treaty-like mechanisms through a vote in Geneva. Based on the DG’s claims, they are essentially redundant, and what new non-mandatory clauses they contain, as set out below, are certainly not urgent. Clauses that are mandatory (Member States “shall”) must be considered within national decision-making contexts and appear against the WHO’s stated intent. Common sense would suggest that the Agreement, and the accompanying IHR amendments, be properly thought through before Member States commit. The WHO has already abandoned the legal requirement for a 4-month review time for the IHR amendments (Article 55.2 IHR), which are also still under negotiation just 2 months before the WHA deadline. The Agreement should also have at least such a period for States to properly consider whether to agree – treaties normally take many years to develop and negotiate and no valid arguments have been put forward as to why these should be different. The Covid-19 response resulted in an unprecedented transfer of wealth from those of lower income to the very wealthy few, completely contrary to the way in which the WHO was intended to affect human society. A considerable portion of these pandemic profits went to current sponsors of the WHO, and these same corporate entities and investors are set to further benefit from the new pandemic agreements. As written, the Pandemic Agreement risks entrenching such centralization and profit-taking, and the accompanying unprecedented restrictions on human rights and freedoms, as a public health norm. To continue with a clearly flawed agreement simply because of a previously set deadline, when no clear population benefit is articulated and no true urgency demonstrated, would therefore be a major step backward in international public health. Basic principles of proportionality, human agency, and community empowerment, essential for health and human rights outcomes, are missing or paid lip-service. The WHO clearly wishes to increase its funding and show it is ‘doing something,’ but must first articulate why the voluntary provisions of the current IHR are insufficient. It is hoped that by systematically reviewing some key clauses of the agreement here, it will become clear why a rethink of the whole approach is necessary. The full text is found below. The commentary below concentrates on selected draft provisions of the latest publicly available version of the draft agreement that seem to be unclear or potentially problematic. Much of the remaining text is essentially pointless as it reiterates vague intentions to be found in other documents or activities which countries normally undertake in the course of running health services, and have no place in a focused legally-binding international agreement. REVISED Draft of the negotiating text of the WHO Pandemic Agreement. 7th March, 2024 Preamble Recognizing that the World Health Organization…is the directing and coordinating authority on international health work. This is inconsistent with a recent statement by the WHO DG that the WHO has no interest or intent to direct country health responses. To reiterate it here suggests that the DG is not representing the true position regarding the Agreement. “Directing authority” is however in line with the proposed IHR Amendments (and the WHO’s Constitution), under which countries will “undertake” ahead of time to follow the DG’s recommendations (which thereby become instructions). As the HR amendments make clear, this is intended to apply even to a perceived threat rather than actual harm. Recalling the constitution of the World Health Organization…highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being without distinction of race, religion, political belief, economic or social condition. This statement recalls fundamental understandings of public health, and is of importance here as it raises the question of why the WHO did not strongly condemn prolonged school closures, workplace closures, and other impoverishing policies during the Covid-19 response. In 2019, WHO made clear that these dangers should prevent actions we now call ‘lockdowns’ from being imposed. Deeply concerned by the gross inequities at national and international levels that hindered timely and equitable access to medical and other Covid-19 pandemic-related products, and the serious shortcomings in pandemic preparedness. In terms of health equity (as distinct from commodity of ‘vaccine’ equity), inequity in the Covid-19 response was not in failing to provide a vaccine against former variants to immune, young people in low-income countries who were at far higher risk from endemic diseases, but in the disproportionate harm to them of uniformly-imposed NPIs that reduced current and future income and basic healthcare, as was noted by the WHO in 2019 Pandemic Influenza recommendations. The failure of the text to recognize this suggests that lessons from Covid-19 have not informed this draft Agreement. The WHO has not yet demonstrated how pandemic ‘preparedness,’ in the terms they use below, would have reduced impact, given that there is poor correlation between strictness or speed of response and eventual outcomes. Reiterating the need to work towards…an equitable approach to mitigate the risk that pandemics exacerbate existing inequities in access to health services, As above – in the past century, the issue of inequity has been most pronounced in pandemic response, rather than the impact of the virus itself (excluding the physiological variation in risk). Most recorded deaths from acute pandemics, since the Spanish flu, were during Covid-19, in which the virus hit mainly sick elderly, but response impacted working-age adults and children heavily and will continue to have effect, due to increased poverty and debt; reduced education and child marriage, in future generations. These have disproportionately affected lower-income people, and particularly women. The lack of recognition of this in this document, though they are recognized by the World Bank and UN agencies elsewhere, must raise real questions on whether this Agreement has been thoroughly thought through, and the process of development been sufficiently inclusive and objective. Chapter I. Introduction Article 1. Use of terms (i) “pathogen with pandemic potential” means any pathogen that has been identified to infect a human and that is: novel (not yet characterized) or known (including a variant of a known pathogen), potentially highly transmissible and/or highly virulent with the potential to cause a public health emergency of international concern. This provides a very wide scope to alter provisions. Any pathogen that can infect humans and is potentially highly transmissible or virulent, though yet uncharacterized means virtually any coronavirus, influenza virus, or a plethora of other relatively common pathogen groups. The IHR Amendments intend that the DG alone can make this call, over the advice of others, as occurred with monkeypox in 2022. (j) “persons in vulnerable situations” means individuals, groups or communities with a disproportionate increased risk of infection, severity, disease or mortality. This is a good definition – in Covid-19 context, would mean the sick elderly, and so is relevant to targeting a response. “Universal health coverage” means that all people have access to the full range of quality health services they need, when and where they need them, without financial hardship. While the general UHC concept is good, it is time a sensible (rather than patently silly) definition was adopted. Society cannot afford the full range of possible interventions and remedies for all, and clearly there is a scale of cost vs benefit that prioritizes certain ones over others. Sensible definitions make action more likely, and inaction harder to justify. One could argue that none should have the full range until all have good basic care, but clearly the earth will not support ‘the full range’ for 8 billion people. Article 2. Objective This Agreement is specifically for pandemics (a poorly defined term but essentially a pathogen that spreads rapidly across national borders). In contrast, the IHR amendments accompanying it are broader in scope – for any public health emergencies of international concern. Article 3. Principles 2. the sovereign right of States to adopt, legislate and implement legislation The amendments to the IHR require States to undertake to follow WHO instructions ahead of time, before such instruction and context are known. These two documents must be understood, as noted later in the Agreement draft, as complementary. 3. equity as the goal and outcome of pandemic prevention, preparedness and response, ensuring the absence of unfair, avoidable or remediable differences among groups of people. This definition of equity here needs clarification. In the pandemic context, the WHO emphasized commodity (vaccine) equity during the Covid-19 response. Elimination of differences implied equal access to Covid-19 vaccines in countries with large aging, obese highly vulnerable populations (e.g. the USA or Italy), and those with young populations at minimal risk and with far more pressing health priorities (e.g. Niger or Uganda). Alternatively, but equally damaging, equal access to different age groups within a country when the risk-benefit ratio is clearly greatly different. This promotes worse health outcomes by diverting resources from where they are most useful, as it ignores heterogeneity of risk. Again, an adult approach is required in international agreements, rather than feel-good sentences, if they are going to have a positive impact. 5. …a more equitable and better prepared world to prevent, respond to and recover from pandemics As with ‘3’ above, this raises a fundamental problem: What if health equity demands that some populations divert resources to childhood nutrition and endemic diseases rather than the latest pandemic, as these are likely of far higher burden to many younger but lower-income populations? This would not be equity in the definition implied here, but would clearly lead to better and more equal health outcomes. The WHO must decide whether it is about uniform action, or minimizing poor health, as these are clearly very different. They are the difference between the WHO’s commodity equity, and true health equity. Chapter II. The world together equitably: achieving equity in, for and through pandemic prevention, preparedness and response Equity in health should imply a reasonably equal chance of overcoming or avoiding preventable sickness. The vast majority of sickness and death is due to either non-communicable diseases often related to lifestyle, such as obesity and type 2 diabetes mellitus, undernutrition in childhood, and endemic infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV/AIDS. Achieving health equity would primarily mean addressing these. In this chapter of the draft Pandemic Agreement, equity is used to imply equal access to specific health commodities, particularly vaccines, for intermittent health emergencies, although these exert a small fraction of the burden of other diseases. It is, specifically, commodity-equity, and not geared to equalizing overall health burden but to enabling centrally-coordinated homogenous responses to unusual events. Article 4. Pandemic prevention and surveillance 2. The Parties shall undertake to cooperate: (b) in support of…initiatives aimed at preventing pandemics, in particular those that improve surveillance, early warning and risk assessment; .…and identify settings and activities presenting a risk of emergence and re-emergence of pathogens with pandemic potential. (c-h) [Paragraphs on water and sanitation, infection control, strengthening of biosafety, surveillance and prevention of vector-born diseases, and addressing antimicrobial resistance.] The WHO intends the Agreement to have force under international law. Therefore, countries are undertaking to put themselves under force of international law in regards to complying with the agreement’s stipulations. The provisions under this long article mostly cover general health stuff that countries try to do anyway. The difference will be that countries will be assessed on progress. Assessment can be fine if in context, less fine if it consists of entitled ‘experts’ from wealthy countries with little local knowledge or context. Perhaps such compliance is best left to national authorities, who are more in use with local needs and priorities. The justification for the international bureaucracy being built to support this, while fun for those involved, is unclear and will divert resources from actual health work. 6. The Conference of the Parties may adopt, as necessary, guidelines, recommendations and standards, including in relation to pandemic prevention capacities, to support the implementation of this Article. Here and later, the COP is invoked as a vehicle to decide on what will actually be done. The rules are explained later (Articles 21-23). While allowing more time is sensible, it begs the question of why it is not better to wait and discuss what is needed in the current INB process, before committing to a legally-binding agreement. This current article says nothing not already covered by the IHR2005 or other ongoing programs. Article 5. One Health approach to pandemic prevention, preparedness and response Nothing specific or new in this article. It seems redundant (it is advocating a holistic approach mentioned elsewhere) and so presumably is just to get the term ‘One Health’ into the agreement. (One could ask, why bother?) Some mainstream definitions of One Health (e.g. Lancet) consider that it means non-human species are on a par with humans in terms of rights and importance. If this is meant here, clearly most Member States would disagree. So we may assume that it is just words to keep someone happy (a little childish in an international document, but the term ‘One Health’ has been trending, like ‘equity,’ as if the concept of holistic approaches to public health were new). Article 6. Preparedness, health system resilience and recovery 2. Each Party commits…[to] : (a) routine and essential health services during pandemics with a focus on primary health care, routine immunization and mental health care, and with particular attention to persons in vulnerable situations (b) developing, strengthening and maintaining health infrastructure (c) developing post-pandemic health system recovery strategies (d) developing, strengthening and maintaining: health information systems This is good, and (a) seems to require avoidance of lockdowns (which inevitably cause the harms listed). Unfortunately other WHO documents lead one to assume this is not the intent…It does appear therefore that this is simply another list of fairly non-specific feel-good measures that have no useful place in a new legally-binding agreement, and which most countries are already undertaking. (e) promoting the use of social and behavioural sciences, risk communication and community engagement for pandemic prevention, preparedness and response. This requires clarification, as the use of behavioral science during the Covid-19 response involved deliberate inducement of fear to promote behaviors that people would not otherwise follow (e.g. Spi-B). It is essential here that the document clarifies how behavioral science should be used ethically in healthcare. Otherwise, this is also a quite meaningless provision. Article 7. Health and care workforce This long Article discusses health workforce, training, retention, non-discrimination, stigma, bias, adequate remuneration, and other standard provisions for workplaces. It is unclear why it is included in a legally binding pandemic agreement, except for: 4. [The Parties]…shall invest in establishing, sustaining, coordinating and mobilizing a skilled and trained multidisciplinary global public health emergency workforce…Parties having established emergency health teams should inform WHO thereof and make best efforts to respond to requests for deployment… Emergency health teams established (within capacity etc.) – are something countries already do, when they have capacity. There is no reason to have this as a legally-binding instrument, and clearly no urgency to do so. Article 8. Preparedness monitoring and functional reviews 1. The Parties shall, building on existing and relevant tools, develop and implement an inclusive, transparent, effective and efficient pandemic prevention, preparedness and response monitoring and evaluation system. 2. Each Party shall assess, every five years, with technical support from the WHO Secretariat upon request, the functioning and readiness of, and gaps in, its pandemic prevention, preparedness and response capacity, based on the relevant tools and guidelines developed by WHO in partnership with relevant organizations at international, regional and sub-regional levels. Note that this is being required of countries that are already struggling to implement monitoring systems for major endemic diseases, including tuberculosis, malaria, HIV, and nutritional deficiencies. They will be legally bound to divert resources to pandemic prevention. While there is some overlap, it will inevitably divert resources from currently underfunded programs for diseases of far higher local burdens, and so (not theoretically, but inevitably) raise mortality. Poor countries are being required to put resources into problems deemed significant by richer countries. Article 9. Research and development Various general provisions about undertaking background research that countries are generally doing anyway, but with an ’emerging disease’ slant. Again, the INB fails to justify why this diversion of resources from researching greater disease burdens should occur in all countries (why not just those with excess resources?). Article 10. Sustainable and geographically diversified production Mostly non-binding but suggested cooperation on making pandemic-related products available, including support for manufacturing in “inter-pandemic times” (a fascinating rendering of ‘normal’), when they would only be viable through subsidies. Much of this is probably unimplementable, as it would not be practical to maintain facilities in most or all countries on stand-by for rare events, at cost of resources otherwise useful for other priorities. The desire to increase production in ‘developing’ countries will face major barriers and costs in terms of maintaining quality of production, particularly as many products will have limited use outside of rare outbreak situations. Article 11. Transfer of technology and know-how This article, always problematic for large pharmaceutical corporations sponsoring much WHO outbreak activities, is now watered down to weak requirements to ‘consider,’ promote,’ provide, within capabilities’ etc. Article 12. Access and benefit sharing This Article is intended to establish the WHO Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing System (PABS System). PABS is intended to “ensure rapid, systematic and timely access to biological materials of pathogens with pandemic potential and the genetic sequence data.” This system is of potential high relevance and needs to be interpreted in the context that SARS-CoV-2, the pathogen causing the recent Covid-19 outbreak, was highly likely to have escaped from a laboratory. PABS is intended to expand the laboratory storage, transport, and handling of such viruses, under the oversight of the WHO, an organization outside of national jurisdiction with no significant direct experience in handling biological materials. 3. When a Party has access to a pathogen [it shall]: (a) share with WHO any pathogen sequence information as soon as it is available to the Party; (b) as soon as biological materials are available to the Party, provide the materials to one or more laboratories and/or biorepositories participating in WHO-coordinated laboratory networks (CLNs), Subsequent clauses state that benefits will be shared, and seek to prevent recipient laboratories from patenting materials received from other countries. This has been a major concern of low-and middle-income countries previously, who perceive that institutions in wealthy countries patent and benefit from materials derived from less-wealthy populations. It remains to be seen whether provisions here will be sufficient to address this. The article then becomes yet more concerning: 6. WHO shall conclude legally binding standard PABS contracts with manufacturers to provide the following, taking into account the size, nature and capacities of the manufacturer: (a) annual monetary contributions to support the PABS System and relevant capacities in countries; the determination of the annual amount, use, and approach for monitoring and accountability, shall be finalized by the Parties; (b) real-time contributions of relevant diagnostics, therapeutics or vaccines produced by the manufacturer, 10% free of charge and 10% at not-for-profit prices during public health emergencies of international concern or pandemics, … It is clearly intended that the WHO becomes directly involved in setting up legally binding manufacturing contracts, despite the WHO being outside of national jurisdictional oversight, within the territories of Member States. The PABS system, and therefore its staff and dependent entities, are also to be supported in part by funds from the manufacturers whom they are supposed to be managing. The income of the organization will be dependent on maintaining positive relationships with these private entities in a similar way in which many national regulatory agencies are dependent upon funds from pharmaceutical companies whom their staff ostensibly regulate. In this case, the regulator will be even further removed from public oversight. The clause on 10% (why 10?) products being free of charge, and similar at cost, while ensuring lower-priced commodities irrespective of actual need (the outbreak may be confined to wealthy countries). The same entity, the WHO, will determine whether the triggering emergency exists, determine the response, and manage the contracts to provide the commodities, without direct jurisdictional oversight regarding the potential for corruption or conflict of interest. It is a remarkable system to suggest, irrespective of political or regulatory environment. 8. The Parties shall cooperate…public financing of research and development, prepurchase agreements, or regulatory procedures, to encourage and facilitate as many manufacturers as possible to enter into standard PABS contracts as early as possible. The article envisions that public funding will be used to build the process, ensuring essentially no-risk private profit. 10. To support operationalization of the PABS System, WHO shall…make such contracts public, while respecting commercial confidentiality. The public may know whom contracts are made with, but not all details of the contracts. There will therefore be no independent oversight of the clauses agreed between the WHO, a body outside of national jurisdiction and dependent of commercial companies for funding some of its work and salaries, and these same companies, on ‘needs’ that the WHO itself will have sole authority, under the proposed amendments to the IHR, to determine. The Article further states that the WHO shall use its own product regulatory system (prequalification) and Emergency Use Listing Procedure to open and stimulate markets for the manufacturers of these products. It is doubtful that any national government could make such an overall agreement, yet in May 2024 they will be voting to provide this to what is essentially a foreign, and partly privately financed, entity. Article 13. Supply chain and logistics The WHO will become convenor of a ‘Global Supply Chain and Logistics Network’ for commercially-produced products, to be supplied under WHO contracts when and where the WHO determines, whilst also having the role of ensuring safety of such products. Having mutual support coordinated between countries is good. Having this run by an organization that is significantly funded directly by those gaining from the sale of these same commodities seems reckless and counterintuitive. Few countries would allow this (or at least plan for it). For this to occur safely, the WHO would logically have to forgo all private investment, and greatly restrict national specified funding contributions. Otherwise, the conflicts of interest involved would destroy confidence in the system. There is no suggestion of such divestment from the WHO, but rather, as in Article 12, private sector dependency, directly tied to contracts, will increase. Article 13bis: National procurement- and distribution-related provisions While suffering the same (perhaps unavoidable) issues regarding commercial confidentiality, this alternate Article 13 seems far more appropriate, keeping commercial issues under national jurisdiction and avoiding the obvious conflict of interests that underpin funding for WHO activities and staffing. Article 14. Regulatory systems strengthening This entire Article reflects initiatives and programs already in place. Nothing here appears likely to add to current effort. Article 15. Liability and compensation management 1. Each Party shall consider developing, as necessary and in accordance with applicable law, national strategies for managing liability in its territory related to pandemic vaccines…no-fault compensation mechanisms… 2. The Parties…shall develop recommendations for the establishment and implementation of national, regional and/or global no-fault compensation mechanisms and strategies for managing liability during pandemic emergencies, including with regard to individuals that are in a humanitarian setting or vulnerable situations. This is quite remarkable, but also reflects some national legislation, in removing any fault or liability specifically from vaccine manufacturers, for harms done in pushing out vaccines to the public. During the Covid-19 response, genetic therapeutics being developed by BioNtech and Moderna were reclassified as vaccines, on the basis that an immune response is stimulated after they have modified intracellular biochemical pathways as a medicine normally does. This enabled specific trials normally required for carcinogenicity and teratogenicity to be bypassed, despite raised fetal abnormality rates in animal trials. It will enable the CEPI 100-day vaccine program, supported with private funding to support private mRNA vaccine manufacturers, to proceed without any risk to the manufacturer should there be subsequent public harm. Together with an earlier provision on public funding of research and manufacturing readiness, and the removal of former wording requiring intellectual property sharing in Article 11, this ensures vaccine manufacturers and their investors make profit in effective absence of risk. These entities are currently heavily invested in support for WHO, and were strongly aligned with the introduction of newly restrictive outbreak responses that emphasized and sometimes mandated their products during the Covid-19 outbreak. Article 16. International collaboration and cooperation A somewhat pointless article. It suggests that countries cooperate with each other and the WHO to implement the other agreements in the Agreement. Article 17. Whole-of-government and whole-of-society approaches A list of essentially motherhood provisions related to planning for a pandemic. However, countries will legally be required to maintain a ‘national coordination multisectoral body’ for PPPR. This will essentially be an added burden on budgets, and inevitably divert further resources from other priorities. Perhaps just strengthening current infectious disease and nutritional programs would be more impactful. (Nowhere in this Agreement is nutrition discussed (essential for resilience to pathogens) and minimal wording is included on sanitation and clean water (other major reasons for reduction in infectious disease mortality over past centuries). However, the ‘community ownership’ wording is interesting (“empower and enable community ownership of, and contribution to, community readiness for and resilience [for PPPR]”), as this directly contradicts much of the rest of the Agreement, including the centralization of control under the Conference of Parties, requirements for countries to allocate resources to pandemic preparedness over other community priorities, and the idea of inspecting and assessing adherence to the centralized requirements of the Agreement. Either much of the rest of the Agreement is redundant, or this wording is purely for appearance and not to be followed (and therefore should be removed). Article 18. Communication and public awareness 1. Each Party shall promote timely access to credible and evidence-based information …with the aim of countering and addressing misinformation or disinformation… 2. The Parties shall, as appropriate, promote and/or conduct research and inform policies on factors that hinder or strengthen adherence to public health and social measures in a pandemic, as well as trust in science and public health institutions and agencies. The key word is as appropriate, given that many agencies, including the WHO, have overseen or aided policies during the Covid-19 response that have greatly increased poverty, child marriage, teenage pregnancy, and education loss. As the WHO has been shown to be significantly misrepresenting pandemic risk in the process of advocating for this Agreement and related instruments, its own communications would also fall outside the provision here related to evidence-based information, and fall within normal understandings of misinformation. It could not therefore be an arbiter of correctness of information here, so the Article is not implementable. Rewritten to recommend accurate evidence-based information being promoted, it would make good sense, but this is not an issue requiring a legally binding international agreement. Article 19. Implementation and support 3. The WHO Secretariat…organize the technical and financial assistance necessary to address such gaps and needs in implementing the commitments agreed upon under the Pandemic Agreement and the International Health Regulations (2005). As the WHO is dependent on donor support, its ability to address gaps in funding within Member States is clearly not something it can guarantee. The purpose of this article is unclear, repeating in paragraphs 1 and 2 the earlier intent for countries to generally support each other. Article 20. Sustainable financing 1. The Parties commit to working together…In this regard, each Party, within the means and resources at its disposal, shall: (a) prioritize and maintain or increase, as necessary, domestic funding for pandemic prevention, preparedness and response, without undermining other domestic public health priorities including for: (i) strengthening and sustaining capacities for the prevention, preparedness and response to health emergencies and pandemics, in particular the core capacities of the International Health Regulations (2005);… This is silly wording, as countries obviously have to prioritize within budgets, so that moving funds to one area means removing from another. The essence of public health policy is weighing and making such decisions; this reality seems to be ignored here through wishful thinking. (a) is clearly redundant, as the IHR (2005) already exists and countries have agreed to support it. 3. A Coordinating Financial Mechanism (the “Mechanism”) is hereby established to support the implementation of both the WHO Pandemic Agreement and the International Health Regulations (2005) This will be in parallel to the Pandemic Fund recently commenced by the World Bank – an issue not lost on INB delegates and so likely to change here in the final version. It will also be additive to the Global Fund to fight AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, and other health financing mechanisms, and so require another parallel international bureaucracy, presumably based in Geneva. It is intended to have its own capacity to “conduct relevant analyses on needs and gaps, in addition to tracking cooperation efforts,” so it will not be a small undertaking. Chapter III. Institutional and final provisions Article 21. Conference of the Parties 1. A Conference of the Parties is hereby established. 2. The Conference of the Parties shall keep under regular review, every three years, the implementation of the WHO Pandemic Agreement and take the decisions necessary to promote its effective implementation. This sets up the governing body to oversee this Agreement (another body requiring a secretariat and support). It is intended to meet within a year of the Agreement coming into force, and then set its own rules on meeting thereafter. It is likely that many provisions outlined in this draft of the Agreement will be deferred to the COP for further discussion. Articles 22 – 37 These articles cover the functioning of the Conference of Parties (COP) and various administrative issues. Of note, ‘block votes’ will be allowed from regional bodies (e.g. the EU). The WHO will provide the secretariat. Under Article 24 is noted: 3. Nothing in the WHO Pandemic Agreement shall be interpreted as providing the Secretariat of the World Health Organization, including the WHO Director-General, any authority to direct, order, alter or otherwise prescribe the domestic laws or policies of any Party, or to mandate or otherwise impose any requirements that Parties take specific actions, such as ban or accept travellers, impose vaccination mandates or therapeutic or diagnostic measures, or implement lockdowns. These provisions are explicitly stated in the proposed amendments to the IHR, to be considered alongside this agreement. Article 26 notes that the IHR is to be interpreted as compatible, thereby confirming that the IHR provisions including border closures and limits on freedom of movement, mandated vaccination, and other lockdown measures are not negated by this statement. As Article 26 states: “The Parties recognize that the WHO Pandemic Agreement and the International Health Regulations should be interpreted so as to be compatible.” Some would consider this subterfuge – The Director-General recently labeled as liars those who claimed the Agreement included these powers, whilst failing to acknowledge the accompanying IHR amendments. The WHO could do better in avoiding misleading messaging, especially when this involves denigration of the public. Article 32 (Withdrawal) requires that, once adopted, Parties cannot withdraw for a total of 3 years (giving notice after a minimum of 2 years). Financial obligations undertaken under the agreement continue beyond that time. Finally, the Agreement will come into force, assuming a two-thirds majority in the WHA is achieved (Article 19, WHO Constitution), 30 days after the fortieth country has ratified it. Further reading: WHO Pandemic Agreement Intergovernmental Negotiating Board website: https://inb.who.int/ International Health Regulations Working Group website: https://apps.who.int/gb/wgihr/index.html On background to the WHO texts: Amendments to WHO’s International Health Regulations: An Annotated Guide An Unofficial Q&A on International Health Regulations On urgency and burden of pandemics: https://essl.leeds.ac.uk/downloads/download/228/rational-policy-over-panic Disease X and Davos: This is Not the Way to Evaluate and Formulate Public Health Policy Before Preparing for Pandemics, We Need Better Evidence of Risk Revised Draft of the negotiating text of the WHO Pandemic Agreement: Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License For reprints, please set the canonical link back to the original Brownstone Institute Article and Author. Authors David Bell David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a public health physician and biotech consultant in global health. He is a former medical officer and scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO), Programme Head for malaria and febrile diseases at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, Switzerland, and Director of Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in Bellevue, WA, USA. View all posts Thi Thuy Van Dinh Dr. Thi Thuy Van Dinh (LLM, PhD) worked on international law in the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Subsequently, she managed multilateral organization partnerships for Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund and led environmental health technology development efforts for low-resource settings. View all posts Your financial backing of Brownstone Institute goes to support writers, lawyers, scientists, economists, and other people of courage who have been professionally purged and displaced during the upheaval of our times. You can help get the truth out through their ongoing work. https://brownstone.org/articles/the-who-pandemic-agreement-a-guide/ https://www.minds.com/donshafi911/blog/the-who-pandemic-agreement-a-guide-1621719398509187077

The Silent Shame of Health Institutions J.R. Bruning For how much longer will health policy ignore multimorbidity, that looming, giant elephant in the room, that propagates and amplifies suffering? For how much longer will the ‘trend’ of increasing diagnoses of multiple health conditions, at younger and younger ages be rendered down by government agencies to better and more efficient services, screening modalities, and drug choices? Multimorbidity, the presence of many chronic conditions, is the silent shame of health policy. All too often chronic conditions overlap and accumulate. From cancer, to diabetes, to digestive system diseases, to high blood pressure, to skin conditions in cascades of suffering. Heartbreakingly, these conditions commonly overlap with mental illnesses or disorders. It’s increasingly common for people to be diagnosed with multiple mental conditions, such as having anxiety and depression, or anxiety and schizophrenia. Calls for equity tend to revolve around medical treatment, even as absurdities and injustices accrue. Multimorbidity occurs a decade earlier in socioeconomically deprived communities. Doctors are diagnosing multimorbidity at younger and younger ages. Treatment regimens for people with multiple conditions necessarily entail a polypharmacy approach – the prescribing of multiple medications. One condition may require multiple medications. Thus, with multimorbidity comes increased risk of adverse outcomes and polyiatrogenesis – ‘medical harm caused by medical treatments on multiple fronts simultaneously and in conjunction with one another.’ Side effects, whether short-term or patients’ concerns about long-term harm, are the main reason for non-adherence to prescribed medications. So ‘equity’ which only implies drug treatment doesn’t involve equity at all. Poor diets may be foundational to the Western world’s health crisis. But are governments considering this? The antinomies are piling up. We are amid a global epidemic of metabolic syndrome. Insulin resistance, obesity, elevated triglyceride levels and low levels of high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, and elevated blood pressure haunt the people queuing up to see doctors. Research, from individual cases to clinical trials, consistently show that diets containing high levels of ultra-processed foods and carbohydrates amplify inflammation, oxidative stress, and insulin resistance. What researchers and scientists are also identifying, at the cellular level, in clinical and medical practice, and at the global level – is that insulin resistance, inflammation, oxidative stress, and nutrient deficiencies from poor diets not only drive metabolic illness, but mental illnesses, compounding suffering. There is also ample evidence that the metabolic and mental health epidemic that is driving years lost due to disease, reducing productivity, and creating mayhem in personal lives – may be preventable and reversible. Doctors generally recognise that poor diets are a problem. Ultra-processed foods are strongly associated with adult and childhood ill health. Ultra-processed foods are ‘formulations of ingredients, mostly of exclusive industrial use, typically created by series of industrial techniques and processes (hence ‘ultra-processed’).’ In the USA young people under age 19 consume on average 67% of their diet, while adults consume around 60% of their diet in ultra-processed food. Ultra-processed food contributes 60% of UK children’s calories; 42% of Australian children’s calories and over half the dietary calories for children and adolescents in Canada. In New Zealand in 2009-2010, ultra-processed foods contributed to the 45% (12 months), 42% (24 months), and 51% (60 months) of energy intake to the diets of children. All too frequently, doctors are diagnosing both metabolic and mental illnesses. What may be predictable is that a person is likely to develop insulin resistance, inflammation, oxidative stress, and nutrient deficiencies from chronic exposure to ultra-processed food. How this will manifest in a disease or syndrome condition is reflective of a human equivalent of quantum entanglement. Cascades, feedback loops, and other interdependencies often leave doctors and patients bouncing from one condition to another, and managing medicine side effects and drug-drug relationships as they go. In New Zealand it is more common to have multiple conditions than a single condition. The costs of having two NCDs simultaneously is typically superadditive and ‘more so for younger adults.’ This information is outside the ‘work programme’ of the top echelons in the Ministry of Health: Official Information Act (OIA) requests confirm that the Ministries’ Directors General who are responsible for setting policy and long-term strategy aren’t considering these issues. The problem of multimorbidity and the overlapping, entangled relationship with ultra-processed food is outside of the scope of the work programme of the top directorates in our health agency. New Zealand’s Ministry of Health’s top deputy directors general might be earning a quarter of a million dollars each, but they are ignorant of the relationship of dietary nutrition and mental health. Nor are they seemingly aware of the extent of multimorbidity and the overlap between metabolic and mental illnesses. Neither the Public Health Agency Deputy Director-General – Dr Andrew Old, nor the Deputy Director-General Evidence, Research and Innovation, Dean Rutherford, nor the Deputy Director-General of Strategy Policy and Legislation, Maree Roberts, nor the Clinical, Community and Mental Health Deputy Director-General Robyn Shearer have been briefed on these relationships. If they’re not being briefed, policy won’t be developed to address dietary nutrition. Diet will be lower-order. The OIA request revealed that New Zealand’s Ministry of Health ‘does not widely use the metabolic syndrome classification.’ When I asked ‘How do you classify, or what term do you use to classify the cluster of symptoms characterised by central obesity, dyslipidemia, hypertension, and insulin resistance?’, they responded: ‘The conditions referred to are considered either on their own or as part of a broader cardiovascular disease risk calculation.’ This is interesting. What if governments should be calculating insulin resistance first, in order to then calculate a broader cardiovascular risk? What if insulin resistance, inflammation, and oxidative stress are appearing at younger and younger ages, and ultra-processed food is the major driver? Pre-diabetes and Type 2 diabetes are driven by too much blood glucose. Type 1 diabetics can’t make insulin, while Type 2 diabetics can’t make enough to compensate for their dietary intake of carbohydrates. One of insulin’s (many) jobs is to tuck away that blood glucose into cells (as fat) but when there are too many dietary carbohydrates pumping up blood glucose, the body can’t keep up. New Zealand practitioners use the HbA1c blood test, which measures the average blood glucose level over the past 2-3 months. In New Zealand, doctors diagnose pre-diabetes if HbA1c levels are 41-49 nmol/mol, and diabetes at levels of 50 nmol/mol and above. Type 2 diabetes management guidelines recommend that sugar intake should be reduced, while people should aim for consistent carbohydrates across the day. The New Zealand government does not recommend paleo or low-carbohydrate diets. If you have diabetes you are twice as likely to have heart disease or a stroke, and at a younger age. Prediabetes, which apparently 20% of Kiwis have, is also high-risk due to, as the Ministry of Health states: ‘increased risk of macrovascular complications and early death.’ The question might become – should we be looking at insulin levels, to more sensitively gauge risk at an early stage? Without more sensitive screens at younger ages these opportunities to repivot to avoid chronic disease are likely to be missed. Currently, Ministry of Health policies are unlikely to justify the funding of tests for insulin resistance by using three simple blood tests: fasting insulin, fasting lipids (cholesterol and triglycerides), and fasting glucose – to estimate where children, young people, and adults stand on the insulin resistance spectrum when other diagnoses pop up. Yet insulin plays a powerful role in brain health. Insulin supports neurotransmitter function and brain energy, directly impacting mood and behaviours. Insulin resistance might arrive before mental illness. Harvard-based psychiatrist Chris Palmer recounts in the book Brain Energy, a large 15,000-participant study of young people from age 0-24: ‘Children who had persistently high insulin levels (a sign of insulin resistance) beginning at age nine were five times more likely to be at risk for psychosis, meaning they were showing at least some worrisome signs, and they were three times for likely to already be diagnosed with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia by the time they turned twenty-four. This study clearly demonstrated that insulin resistance comes first, then psychosis.’ Psychiatrist Georgia Ede suggests that high blood glucose and high insulin levels act like a ‘deadly one-two punch’ for the brain, triggering waves of inflammation and oxidative stress. The blood-brain barrier becomes increasingly resistant to chronic high insulin levels. Even though the body might have higher blood insulin, the same may not be true for the brain. As Ede maintains, ‘cells deprived of adequate insulin ‘sputter and struggle to maintain normal operations.’ Looking at the relationship between brain health and high blood glucose and high insulin simply might not be on the programme for strategists looking at long-term planning. Nor are Directors General in a position to assess the role of food addiction. Ultra-processed food has addictive qualities designed into the product formulations. Food addiction is increasingly recognised as pervasive and difficult to manage as any substance addiction. But how many children and young people have insulin resistance and are showing markers for inflammation and oxidative stress – in the body and in the brain? To what extent do young people have both insulin resistance and depression resistance or ADHD or bipolar disorder? This kind of thinking is completely outside the work programme. But insulin levels, inflammation, and oxidative stress may not only be driving chronic illness – but driving the global mental health tsunami. Metabolic disorders are involved in complex pathways and feedback loops across body systems, and doctors learn this at medical school. Patterns and relationships between hormones, the brain, the gastrointestinal system, kidneys, and liver; as well as problems with joints and bone health, autoimmunity, nerves, and sensory conditions evolve from and revolve around metabolic health. Nutrition and diet are downplayed in medical school. What doctors don’t learn so much – the cognitive dissonance that they must accept throughout their training – is that metabolic health is commonly (except for some instances) shaped by the quality of dietary nutrition. The aetiology of a given condition can be very different, while the evidence that common chronic and mental illnesses are accompanied by oxidative stress, inflammation, and insulin resistance are primarily driven by diet – is growing stronger and stronger. But without recognising the overlapping relationships, policy to support healthy diets will remain limp. What we witness are notions of equity that support pharmaceutical delivery – not health delivery. What also inevitably happens is that ‘equity’ focuses on medical treatment. When the Ministry of Health prefers to atomise the different conditions or associate them with heart disease – they become single conditions to treat with single drugs. They’re lots of small problems, not one big problem, and insulin resistance is downplayed. But just as insulin resistance, inflammation, and oxidative stress send cascading impacts across body systems, systemic ignorance sends cascading effects across government departments tasked with ‘improving, promoting, and protecting health.’ It’s an injustice. The literature solidly points to lower socio-economic status driving much poorer diets and increased exposures to ultra-processed food, but the treatments exclusively involve drugs and therapy. Briefings to Incoming Ministers with the election of new Governments show how ignorance cascades across responsible authorities. Health New Zealand, Te Whatu Ora’s November 2023 Briefing to the new government outlined the agency’s obligations. However, the ‘health’ targets are medical, and the agency’s focus is on infrastructure, staff, and servicing. The promotion of health, and health equity, which can only be addressed by addressing the determinants of health, is not addressed. The Māori Health Authority and Health New Zealand Joint Briefing to the Incoming Minister for Mental Health does not address the role of diet and nutrition as a driver of mental illness and disorder in New Zealand. The issue of multimorbidity, the related problem of commensurate metabolic illness, and diet as a driver is outside scope. When the Briefing states that it is important to address the ‘social, cultural, environmental and economic determinants of mental health,’ without any sound policy footing, real movement to address diet will not happen, or will only happen ad hoc. The Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission, Te Hiringa Mahara’s November 2023 Briefing to Incoming Ministers that went to the Ministers for Health and Mental Health might use the term ‘well-being’ over 120 times – but was silent on the related and overlapping drivers of mental illness which include metabolic or multimorbidity, nutrition, or diet. Five years earlier, He Ara Ora, New Zealand’s 2018 Mental Health and Addiction enquiry had recognised that tāngata whaiora, people seeking wellness, or service users, also tend to have multiple health conditions. The enquiry recommended that a whole of government approach to well-being, prevention, and social determinants was required. Vague nods were made to diet and nutrition, but this was not sufficiently emphasised as to be a priority. He Ara Ora was followed by 2020 Long-term pathway to mental well-being viewed nutrition as being one of a range of factors. No policy framework strategically prioritised diet, nutrition, and healthy food. No governmental obligation or commitment was built into policy to improve access to healthy food or nutrition education. Understanding the science, the relationships, and the drivers of the global epidemic, is ‘outside the work programmes’ of New Zealand’s Ministry of Health and outside the scope of all the related authorities. There is an extraordinary amount of data in the scientific literature, so many case studies, cohort studies, and clinical trials. Popular books are being written, however government agencies remain ignorant. In the meantime, doctors must deal with the suffering in front of them without an adequate toolkit. Doctors and pharmacists are faced with a Hobson’s choice of managing multiple chronic conditions and complex drug cocktails, in patients at younger and younger ages. Ultimately, they are treating a patient whom they recognise will only become sicker, cost the health system more, and suffer more. Currently there is little support for New Zealand medical doctors (known as general practitioners, or GPs) in changing practices and recommendations to support non-pharmaceutical drug treatment approaches. Their medical education does not equip them to recognise the extent to which multiple co-existing conditions may be alleviated or reversed. Doctors are paid to prescribe, to inject, and to screen, not to ameliorate or reverse disease and lessen prescribing. The prescribing of nutrients is discouraged and as doctors do not have nutritional training, they hesitate to prescribe nutrients. Many do not want to risk going outside treatment guidelines. Recent surges in protocols and guidelines for medical doctors reduce flexibility and narrow treatment choices for doctors. If they were to be reported to the Medical Council of New Zealand, they would risk losing their medical license. They would then be unable to practice. Inevitably, without Ministry of Health leadership, medical doctors in New Zealand are unlikely to voluntarily prescribe non-drug modalities such as nutritional options to any meaningful extent, for fear of being reported. Yet some doctors are proactive, such as Dr Glen Davies in Taupo, New Zealand. Some doctors are in a better ‘place’ to work to alleviate and reverse long-term conditions. They may be later in their career, with 10-20 years of research into metabolism, dietary nutrition, and patient care, and motivated to guide a patient through a personal care regime which might alleviate or reverse a patient’s suffering. Barriers include resourcing. Doctors aren’t paid for reversing disease and taking patients off medications. Doctors witness daily the hopelessness felt by their patients in dealing with chronic conditions in their short 15-minute consultations, and the vigilance required for dealing with adverse drug effects. Drug non-compliance is associated with adverse effects suffered by patients. Yet without wrap-around support changing treatments, even if it has potential to alleviate multiple conditions, to reduce symptoms, lower prescribing and therefore lessen side effects, is just too uncertain. They saw what happened to disobedient doctors during Covid-19. Given such context, what are we to do? Have open public discussions about doctor-patient relationships and trust. Inform and overlay such conversations by drawing attention to the foundational Hippocratic Oath made by doctors, to first do no harm. Questions can be asked. If patients were to understand that diet may be an underlying driver of multiple conditions, and a change in diet and improvement in micronutrient status might alleviate suffering – would patients be more likely to change? Economically, if wrap-around services were provided in clinics to support dietary change, would less harm occur to patients from worsening conditions that accompany many diseases (such as Type 2 diabetes) and the ever-present problem of drug side-effects? Would education and wrap-around services in early childhood and youth delay or prevent the onset of multimorbid diagnoses? Is it more ethical to give young people a choice of treatment? Could doctors prescribe dietary changes and multinutrients and support change with wrap-around support when children and young people are first diagnosed with a mental health condition – from the clinic, to school, to after school? If that doesn’t work, then prescribe pharmaceutical drugs. Should children and young people be educated to appreciate the extent to which their consumption of ultra-processed food likely drives their metabolic and mental health conditions? Not just in a blithe ‘eat healthy’ fashion that patently avoids discussing addiction. Through deeper policy mechanisms, including cooking classes and nutritional biology by the implementation of nourishing, low-carbohydrate cooked school lunches. With officials uninformed, it’s easy to see why funding for Green Prescriptions that would support dietary changes have sputtered out. It’s easy to understand why neither the Ministry of Health nor Pharmac have proactively sourced multi-nutrient treatments that improve resilience to stress and trauma for low-income young people. Why there’s no discussion on a lower side-effect risk for multinutrient treatments. Why are there no policies in the education curriculum diving into the relationship between ultra-processed food and mental and physical health? It’s not in the work programme. There’s another surfacing dilemma. Currently, if doctors tell their patients that there is very good evidence that their disease or syndrome could be reversed, and this information is not held as factual information by New Zealand’s Ministry of Health – do doctors risk being accused of spreading misinformation? Government agencies have pivoted in the past 5 years to focus intensively on the problem of dis- and misinformation. New Zealand’s disinformation project states that Disinformation is false or modified information knowingly and deliberately shared to cause harm or achieve a broader aim. Misinformation is information that is false or misleading, though not created or shared with the direct intention of causing harm. Unfortunately, as we see, there is no division inside the Ministry of Health that reviews the latest evidence in the scientific literature, to ensure that policy decisions correctly reflect the latest evidence. There is no scientific agency outside the Ministry of Health that has flexibility and the capacity to undertake autonomous, long-term monitoring and research in nutrition, diet, and health. There is no independent, autonomous, public health research facility with sufficient long-term funding to translate dietary and nutritional evidence into policy, particularly if it contradicted current policy positions. Despite excellent research being undertaken, it is highly controlled, ad hoc, and frequently short-term. Problematically, there is no resourcing for those scientists to meaningfully feedback that information to either the Ministry of Health or to Members of Parliament and government Ministers. Dietary guidelines can become locked in, and contradictions can fail to be chewed over. Without the capacity to address errors, information can become outdated and misleading. Government agencies and elected members – from local councils all the way up to government Ministers, are dependent on being informed by the Ministry of Health, when it comes to government policy. When it comes to complex health conditions, and alleviating and reversing metabolic or mental illness, based on different patient capacity – from socio-economic, to cultural, to social, and taking into account capacity for change, what is sound, evidence-based information and what is misinformation? In the impasse, who can we trust? Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License For reprints, please set the canonical link back to the original Brownstone Institute Article and Author. Author J.R. Bruning is a consultant sociologist (B.Bus.Agribusiness; MA Sociology) based in New Zealand. Her work explores governance cultures, policy and the production of scientific and technical knowledge. Her Master’s thesis explored the ways science policy creates barriers to funding, stymying scientists’ efforts to explore upstream drivers of harm. Bruning is a trustee of Physicians & Scientists for Global Responsibility (PSGR.org.nz). Papers and writing can be found at TalkingRisk.NZ and at JRBruning.Substack.com and at Talking Risk on Rumble. View all posts Your financial backing of Brownstone Institute goes to support writers, lawyers, scientists, economists, and other people of courage who have been professionally purged and displaced during the upheaval of our times. You can help get the truth out through their ongoing work. https://brownstone.org/articles/the-silent-shame-of-health-institutions/

Ignorance, Stupidity, or Malice? Rob Jenkins A major topic of conversation at the recent Brownstone retreat was whether the people who locked us down and then mandated an experimental gene therapy, along with their supporters and enablers, were motivated primarily by stupidity or malice. I’d like to propose a third option: ignorance. In my view, all three played a part in the Covid debacle. I believe—I choose to believe—that many of the people who are to some degree responsible for the devastation of the last four years—particularly the millions of Americans who allowed it to happen because they docilely went along—were simply ignorant. They accepted what they were told in March 2020 about the virulence and lethality of the virus. They fell for the fake videos of Chinese citizens keeling over in the streets. They watched in horror as what appeared to be freezer trucks sat parked outside New York hospitals. They assumed the government wouldn’t be sending military hospital ships to New York and Los Angeles if the disease wasn’t ravaging those cities. And they eagerly embraced the notion that, if we all just stayed home for two weeks, we could actually “flatten the curve.” I confess: I fell into this category initially, for about those first two weeks. I’m blessed (or maybe cursed) with a natural skepticism and fortunate to have found, early on, alternative news sources that were reporting the truth—or at least trying to get at it. So I began to suspect, as “two weeks” stretched to infinity, that we were being had. But most Westerners have been conditioned to believe whatever the government and the media tell them, without questioning. Those people bought into the indefinite forced isolation and the social distancing and the Zoom school and the grocery delivery because they were ignorant. They didn’t really understand what was happening. That includes, by the way, many in positions of authority and responsibility, like medical doctors and nurses, teachers and administrators, religious leaders, and local elected officials. Maybe even some elected officials at the national level. They swallowed the official narrative, too. I’m convinced most of these people honestly believed they were doing the right thing, saving lives, when in fact they were doing nothing of the sort because, as we now know, none of those “mitigation strategies” had any effect on the virus. But to be completely fair to them—and I think it’s important to be fair, however angry we might be at the consequences of their behavior—they were acting out of ignorance. Of course, at some point, ignorance begins to bleed over into stupidity—perhaps at the point where people could have known better, and maybe even should have known better. Then their ignorance, which is a legitimate excuse for bad behavior, becomes willful. And willful ignorance is a form of stupidity, which is not an excuse, especially not for those we entrust with important decisions that affect all our lives. The definition of stupidity proposed by UC Berkeley economist Carlo Cipolla in 1976 seems relevant in this context: “A stupid person is one who causes losses to another person or group while deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.” (You can find a nice summary of Cipolla’s theory here.) In other words, stupid people do stupid things for no reason. They harm other people, and they don’t even get anything out of it. They might even harm themselves in the process—“shooting themselves in the foot,” as we sometimes say, or “cutting off their nose to spite their face.” That is indeed the height of stupidity. This definition certainly applies to many, many of the Covidians, including quite a few who (if we want to be generous) started out as merely ignorant. Over time, their perhaps understandable ignorance morphed into stupidity as they held on stubbornly to masking, distancing, and school closures despite literal mountains of evidence that none of those had any salutary effect. And most of them didn’t even benefit from their stubborn, stupid refusal to acknowledge reality. Yes, some did, and we’ll get to them in a moment. But most didn’t. In many cases, they embarrassed themselves, damaged their careers, lost businesses and personal relationships, and for what? So they could yell at the rest of us about masks? That’s pretty stupid. Also instructive here is Cipolla’s Second Law of Stupidity: “The probability that a certain person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.” In other words, stupidity, as he defines it, is more or less evenly distributed throughout the population. It has nothing to do with intelligence, education, or income level. There are stupid doctors, lawyers, and college professors, just as there are stupid plumbers and ditch diggers. If anything, the former groups are somewhat more likely to contain stupid people. It all comes down to a person’s willingness to do things that make no sense, things that harm others—aka, stupid things—despite not getting anything out of it and perhaps even losing in the bargain. And then there are the people who actually DO benefit from the harm they cause to others. They exhibit many of the same behaviors as the stupid people, except that they actually get something out of it—money, fame, power. Cipolla refers to these people—those who harm others for their own benefit—as “bandits.” Most of the best-known Covidians, the biggest names in media, government, “public health,” and the pharmaceuticals industry, fall into this category. They initiated, enforced, and supported policies that seemingly made no sense, and they came away smelling like roses. They became the toast of the media circuit, earned cushy sinecures, and expanded their bank accounts by millions. The main difference between stupid people and bandits, according to Cipolla, is that the latter’s actions actually make sense, once you understand what they’re trying to accomplish. If a person knocks you down for no reason—well, that’s just stupid. But if they knock you down and then take your wallet, that makes sense. You understand why they knocked you down, even if you don’t like it any better. Moreover, you can to some degree adjust for the actions of “bandits”—for instance, by staying out of the bad part of town, where someone might knock you down and take your wallet. But if you’re at a mall in a nice suburb, and people are just knocking you down for no apparent reason, there’s no way to plan for that. The problem with stupidity, says Cipolla, is two-fold. First, we consistently “underestimate the number of stupid people in circulation.” We assume the vast majority of people will act rationally under most circumstances, but—as we’ve seen plainly over the last four years—that turns out not to be true. Many behave irrationally much of the time, and it appears that a majority will do so in a time of crisis. Second, as Cipolla points out, the stupid people are if anything more dangerous than the bandits, mostly for the reasons cited above: There are a lot more of them, and it’s nearly impossible to account for them. You can have a perfectly good plan to address some emergency—like, say, a pandemic—and the stupid people will blow it up for no good reason. Sure, malicious bad actors will make off with the treasury, if they can, but that has always been the case. I mean, is anybody really surprised that Albert Bourla added millions to his net worth? Or that Anthony Fauci now has a cushy job teaching at Georgetown? Yes, it’s frustrating and disgusting. There’s no doubt they were among the main architects of this disaster, as well as its main beneficiaries. But none of that is, or was, completely unexpected. Bandits gonna bandit. What has been most frustrating to me over the past couple of years has been the way that millions of otherwise normal people—including friends, relatives and colleagues, as well as store clerks, flight attendants, and random people on the streets—have behaved so stupidly. A surprising number continue to do so, embarrassing themselves by haranguing the rest of us about masks and “vaccines,” alienating everyone in sight, making life more difficult for themselves and others even though they gain nothing by it. So yes, the four-year debacle that is our collective Covid response is attributable in part to ignorance and in part to malice. But worse than either of those, and far more damaging to society in the long term, has been the sheer stupidity—humanity’s capacity for which I will never again underestimate. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License For reprints, please set the canonical link back to the original Brownstone Institute Article and Author. Author Rob Jenkins is an associate professor of English at Georgia State University – Perimeter College and a Higher Education Fellow at Campus Reform. He is the author or co-author of six books, including Think Better, Write Better, Welcome to My Classroom, and The 9 Virtues of Exceptional Leaders. In addition to Brownstone and Campus Reform, he has written for Townhall, The Daily Wire, American Thinker, PJ Media, The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. The opinions expressed here are his own. View all posts Your financial backing of Brownstone Institute goes to support writers, lawyers, scientists, economists, and other people of courage who have been professionally purged and displaced during the upheaval of our times. You can help get the truth out through their ongoing work. https://brownstone.org/articles/ignorance-stupidity-or-malice/

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A compilation of corporate media’s explanation of sudden deaths Rhoda WilsonMarch 22, 2024 As sudden deaths and cardiovascular diseases became more common, corporate media has needed to find explanations for the alarming trends. Filipe Rafaeli has compiled corporate media headlines that provide the most curious explanations. Let’s not lose touch…Your Government and Big Tech are actively trying to censor the information reported by The Exposé to serve their own needs. Subscribe now to make sure you receive the latest uncensored news in your inbox… The list of reasons for increased sudden deaths and strokes, according to the mainstream media By Filipe Rafaeli In the initial study of the Pfizer vaccine, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, with around 44,000 people, with 22,000 in the placebo group and about 22,000 in the vaccine group, more people died from all causes in the vaccine arm than in the placebo arm. Initially, it was 15 to 14. Shortly after, when updating this number at the Food and Drug Administration, the US regulatory agency, the number changed to 21 to 17. Now, without any surprise, in the most recent update, it’s already 22 to 16. “Most importantly, we found evidence of an over 3.7-fold increase in number of deaths due to cardiac events in the BNT162b2 [Pfizer-BioNTech] vaccinated individuals compared to those who received only the placebo.” wrote the scientists in the latest update. After the mass application of the product, an excess of population mortality was recorded. In The Lancet, the world’s most impactful scientific journal, they analysed UK data: a 7.2% excess in 2022 and an 8.6% excess in 2023. The highlight? Cardiovascular diseases. The comparison is with the 5 previous years. And do you know what is the most interesting thing in this Lancet analysis? It’s the increase in deaths at home, that is, sudden deaths. There wasn’t even time to go to the hospital. There’s an impressive 22% increase. US life insurance companies, the ones paying the bills, also found the same thing: more deaths in younger people since 2021. Well, since everyone is seeing many people suddenly dying and others with cardiovascular diseases, the mainstream media needed to talk about heart attacks and sudden deaths. It made headlines. They needed to explain. Normalisation Here, the collection of headlines in the national and international mainstream media with the most curious explanations since 2021. According to Wales Online, from Wales, what is causing heart attacks is the increase in electricity bills: Energy bill price rise may cause heart attacks and strokes, says TV GP – Wales Online On the other hand, the Express from the UK claims that the cause of heart attacks is heavy metal and techno music: Atrial fibrillation: Two music genres linked to ‘potentially dangerous’ heart arrhythmias In Revista Veja, from Brazil, the cause of heart attacks is attributed to global warming: With a warmer world, the impact of climate change on health increases However, according to CNN Brazil, the real culprit isn’t heat but cold: Cardiovascular diseases can increase by up to 30% in winter; see precautions For the Daily Mail, from the UK, it is indeed the cold, but the issue arises only if you remove the snow: Expert warns that shovelling snow can be a deadly way to discover underlying heart conditions In The Times of India, the blame isn’t on the cold, but on the heat, along with humidity: Heart attacks more frequent when heat, humidity high: Study | Ahmedabad News In The Guardian, from the UK, the blame is actually on rain: Floods linked to increased deaths from heart and lung disease, Australian-led research shows In the Express, from the UK, it has nothing to do with the weather. The culprit for heart attacks is dirty dishes: Washing up helps wipe out heart risk In the UK’s Express, the mystery is solved. Skipping breakfast is blamed for heart attacks: Heart attack: Does skipping breakfast increase your risk? According to The Sun, from the UK, the reason for the excess of heart attacks is because you poop too much: RISK FACTOR How often you go to the toilet every day can ‘predict your risk of heart attack’ In The Times, from the UK, the cause of heart attacks is being single: Lonely older women at greater risk of heart attack, study shows However, according to Wales Online, from Wales, the reason people die suddenly is the opposite. It’s because people are dating: Average age of sudden death during sex is 38 – why it happens – Wales Online On the other hand, The Independent, from the UK, explains that the real cause is troubled relationships: A happy relationship enhances heart health, claims new study | The Independent According to News19, from the US, the cause of increased heart attacks is breaking up: Doctors say ‘Broken Heart Syndrome’ is real, and it can be deadly | WHNT.com In Isto é, from Brazil, the cause of cardiovascular problems is not exercising and watching too much TV: Watching TV can increase the risk of blood clots, study suggests However, The Irish Times, from Ireland, says the opposite, that the culprit is exercising: Physical activity may increase heart attack risk, study suggests – The Irish Times According to the British Heart Foundation, the cause is improper sleep. It’s because people sleep too little or too much: Does sleeping too little or too much raise your risk of heart disease? – BHF In The Sun, from the UK, the cause is indeed related to sleep, but because of daylight saving time: Moving clocks forward an hour could be dangerous for millions of Brits with serious heart problems – The Sun Meanwhile, for Canaltech, from Brazil, the culprit of heart attacks isn’t daylight saving time, but rather illuminated light: Sleeping with lights on increases the risk of heart disease and diabetes; understand For the Express, from the UK, the cause of heart attacks is “low-fat” processed foods: Heart attack: The ‘healthy’ food which may ‘put you at risk for heart disease’ – avoid According to The Standard, from the UK, what’s causing heart attacks is stress: Thousands facing heart problems due to ‘post-pandemic stress disorder’ | Evening Standard In the North Wales Chronicle, from Australia, the culprit of heart attacks is artificial sweeteners: Artificial sweeteners found in diet drinks could increase risk of heart attack – research | North Wales Chronicle In The Sun, from the UK, scientists have recently discovered the culprit. It’s the common cold: Common cold can trigger a killer blood clot disorder, scientists discover for the first time | The Sun The Express, from the UK, blames obsessive-compulsive disorder for strokes: Stroke: People with a common disorder could be ‘three times’ more likely to have a stroke In the UK’s Express, the culprit is the gluten-free diet: Heart attack: A gluten-free diet could increase the risk | Express.co.uk According to The Scientist, from the US, the culprit of heart attacks and strokes is noise from cars, airplanes, and trains: How Environmental Noise Harms the Cardiovascular System | The Scientist Magazine® According to UOL, from Brazil, the culprit for the increase in heart attacks and strokes is elections: How elections increased cases of heart attack and stroke in the US: is there the same risk in Brazil? In the New York Post, from the US, sudden infant deaths are caused by video games: Video games could trigger deadly heart problems in children: study According to Today, from the US, sudden infant deaths are actually common occurrences: All kids should be screened for possibility of sudden cardiac arrest, group says According to Today, from the US, the cause is that people are angry or emotionally disturbed: Stroke may be triggered by anger, upset or intense exercise in the hour before In the UK’s Daily Mail, the cause of heart attacks is said to be sun exposure for just one day: Sunbathing for just ONE DAY may increase your risk of heart disease – and stop the body fighting infections, study suggests However, according to The Times UK, all of the above are wrong. It’s only known that it’s happening, but the reason is a mystery: Mystery rise in heart attacks from blocked arteries The US-based New Scientist confirms it is indeed a mystery. Nobody knows the reason: There are thousands more UK deaths than usual and we don’t know why | New Scientist And even though it’s a mystery, and therefore could be anything, absolutely anything, the Brazilian Government has already assured me that one thing, at least, is not the cause: It’s false that Covid-19 vaccines cause sudden illness Although nobody should worry too much, because according to the US-based health and science website Revyuh News, it’s actually beneficial to have a heart attack: New Study Reveals Shocking Benefit of “Heart Attack” About the Author Filipe Rafaeli is a filmmaker and four-time Brazilian aerial acrobatics champion. He publishes articles on a Substack page titled ‘Pandemia’ which you can subscribe to and follow HERE. The Expose Urgently Needs Your Help... Can you please help power The Expose’s honest, reliable, powerful journalism for the years to come… Your Government & Big Tech organisations such as Google, Facebook, Twitter & PayPal are trying to silence & shut down The Expose. So we need your help to ensure we can continue to bring you the facts the mainstream refuse to… We’re not funded by the Government to publish lies & propaganda on their behalf like the mainstream media. Instead, we rely solely on our support. So please support us in our efforts to bring you honest, reliable, investigative journalism today. It’s secure, quick and easy… Just choose your preferred method to show your support below support Lawyer, Dr Reiner Fuellmich asks to Be Released From Jail With an Electronic Anklet. While you were distracted by the “Where’s Princess Kate Conspiracy”, Deagel’s Depopulation Forecast was confirmed by Heavily Censored Pfizer Documents It’s all over for the Anthropocene, the official geologic period of human-caused climate change The List of Reasons for Increased Sudden Deaths and Strokes, According to the Mainstream Media. https://expose-news.com/2024/03/22/corporate-medias-explanation-of-sudden-deaths/

Politicians come and go, but the elite are permanent in Malaysia Too powerful to overcome Murray Hunter Kuala Lumpur Itinerary : A Guide to the Perfect Five-Day Trip in KL Share Governments do change in Malaysia. Each incoming administration will have its own narratives and specific agendas. However, policies will be generally very similar, and based upon the same principles as the previous government. In and around the executive and administrative government is a network of elite people, who collectively yield massive power. The actors can be seen in GLCs, corporations, royal households, civil servants, the judiciary, police, and within the executive itself. This massive power is however, hidden due to its fragmentation, and unseen influence its membership carries. The Elite consolidate Malay power While politicians come and go, the elites are permanent, exercising both formal and informal influence. Together, the elite permeates across all society in all states and territories. There is an established elite in Penang, Sarawak, and Sabah. They act independently and in conjunction with the rest of the nation’s class of elites. Sometimes groups within the elite work together, and sometimes they oppose each other. ไฟล์:Flag of the Federated Malay States (1895 - 1946).png ... The real symbol of elite power No matter who is in power, the interwoven network of the elite is there. Governments must work in cooperation with these elites, or be seriously undermined. As we can see monopolies and concessions continue to flourish no matter which political grouping is in power. Major contracts are still dished out by direct negotiation, rather than open tender. Annual budgets and five-year plans still deliver ‘crafted opportunities’ to these groups, cementing crony capitalism and kleptocracy in Malaysia as a way of life. No administration will tax the Top 10 percent of income earners in the country. The power of the prime minister is only as strong as the relationships he carries with sections of the elite. Networks control corporate Malaysia Today’s public policy initiatives are implemented through government linked companies (GLCs) and partnerships with corporations. Thus, the running of government is concerned about business deals and contracts to business vehicles owned by the elite. This is why the Malaysian economy is so heavily dependent upon GLCs and crony corporations, which have been granted artificial monopolies. The only way someone can become a member of this exclusive group is to have strong connections with various stakeholders within the elite class. This is why new entrants strive to find ‘God fathers’ within the GLCs that employ them, and politicians seek to be appointed to agency and GLC boards. Some powerful people are members of multiple public corporation boards, and also on the boards of agencies and GLCs. Their networking potential is vast, where through informal relationship, much can be achieved to achieve their own ends. Much of elite networking with the government decision makers of the day, carries massive persuasion. Sometimes this persuasion is too powerful for government decision makers to refuse. Those activists, journalists, and NGOs who criticise what the elites do is dealt with through lawfare, humiliation through the media and even arrest by the police. Defamation actions are taken to drain the financial resources of activists to make them bankrupt, in order to silence them. Some just disappear all-together. The privileged elite are generally immune from the law, investigation by the politicised police, and Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC). This network controls and defines the law. The elite live by the creed ‘greed is good’ They look after the interests of their own, using tools like the New Economic Policy (NEP), at the cost of the rest of Malaysians. After 60 years of the NEP most of the most marginalised people in Malaysia are Bumiputeras. The NEP concerns itself with equity within the economy, and not income, so the KPIs are skewed. The primary objective of the elite is to pursue ‘created opportunities’ to make money. This is why the Malaysian economy today is primarily based upon rent-seeking activities and not innovation. The elite take few risks. There was no indigenous Malaysian vaccine created during the Covid-19 pandemic, even though the government spent great sums of money promoting a biotechnology sector. Rather than local companies gearing up to produce parts for the local production of indigenous electric vehicles (EVs), most are facing financial difficulties and heading towards bankruptcy. These are just two examples of the rent-seeking Malaysian economy today. All countries have their own elites, where Malaysia is no exception. The elites form a strong component of the nature of the real-politic of the nation. Subscribe Below: https://open.substack.com/pub/murrayhunter/p/politicians-come-and-go-but-the-elite?r=29hg4d&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web https://youtu.be/VVxYOQS6ggk

I own a small business and have been self employed since 1993 - this rings so very true!!! The unfortunate truth of owning and running a business. Running a business is really hard. What they don’t tell you is that it can cause severe stress and anxiety, and drains you mentally to the point of depression in even the most laid-back people. People will talk about you, compare you to others, use you, they will view you as a service and not a person anymore. People will expect discounts and people will value you and your hard work less than a big chain store. You have to worry about if you forget to email/message someone back, are they going to think it was on purpose? Did you disappoint them? Will they hold that against you? When in reality you just can’t get to everyone’s messages and emails. Starting up and running a successful business puts incredible strain on personal lives and relationships, many of which fail because there is just often no work life balance. You need to be the director, the worker, the admin, the marketing team, the accountant, the cleaner..... All whilst being a parent, a provider, family support, friend, spouse... There’s a reason you don’t see many people succeed in small businesses after 5-10 years. If they are successful they are overwhelmed. It takes a toll. It’s freaking exhausting. Especially the past couple of years when so much has been out of our control. Here’s a small reminder that we are just normal people with hectic lives. Be kind, be patient, support small businesses…….and hopefully more of us will stick around!

🚨 Study Claims COVID Caused More Heart Damage Than Vaccines — Here’s What the Authors Got Wrong Rainer Johannes Klement, Ph.D + Harald Walach reanalyzed data and found that while coronaviruses might cause myocarditis, the COVID-19 vaccines cause at least as much or more. Study Claims COVID Caused More Heart Damage Than Vaccines — Here’s What the Authors Got Wrong A 2023 study admitted that the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines cause myocarditis, but claimed the COVID-19 virus was even more damaging than the vaccine. A recent, more detailed review of their data, however, showed the opposite is likely true. Angelo DePalma, Ph.D. human heart with covid vaccine Miss a day, miss a lot. Subscribe to The Defender's Top News of the Day. It's free. Despite the known side effects of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, some studies (here, here and here) and health websites (here, here and here) argue that whatever vaccination’s adverse outcomes, being unvaccinated is worse. In one such study, Dr. Christian Mueller and his co-authors concluded the COVID-19 virus — not the vaccine — was responsible for more myocarditis, or heart muscle damage, than the vaccine. However, when Rainer Johannes Klement, Ph.D., a physicist at Leopoldina Hospital in Schweinfurt, Germany, and Harald Walach, a clinical psychologist and head of the Change Health Institute in Basel, Switzerland, reanalyzed Mueller’s data they found that while coronaviruses might cause myocarditis, the COVID-19 vaccines cause at least as much or more. The Klement paper appeared in the Feb. 1 edition of The Egyptian Health Journal. Mueller’s study Mueller set out to quantify and compare myocarditis in vaxed versus unvaxed subjects and to explain possible mechanisms. To explore these mechanisms, the researchers tested subjects for antibodies against interleukin-1 receptor antagonist (IL-1RA), the SARS-CoV-2-nucleoprotein, the viral spike protein and 14 inflammatory cytokines. Since none of these measures differed between study groups, the “mechanism” issue was unresolved. To assess myocarditis investigators tested 777 hospital workers (median age 37, 69.5% women) for cardiac troponin T one and three days after they received an mRNA-1273 booster. Cardiologists typically prescribe this test after a suspected heart attack to quantify the extent and duration of heart damage. Of the 40 subjects (5.1%) with elevated troponin on Day 3, 22 (2.8%) were diagnosed with myocarditis, with 20 cases occurring in women and two in men. The researchers reported that among these subjects troponin elevations were mild and temporary and did not involve abnormalities as determined by electrocardiogram. No patients experienced “major adverse cardiac events” within 30 days of receiving the shot. Mueller’s team concluded: COVID-19 associates with a substantially higher risk for myocarditis that [sic] mRNA vaccination … Myocarditis related to COVID-19 infection has shown a higher mortality than myocarditis related to mRNA vaccination. Before the COVID-19 vaccine were [sic] available, the incidence and extent of myocardial injury associated with COVID-19 infection was [sic] much higher than observed in this active surveillance study after booster vaccination. One of the Mueller co-authors had commercial ties to diagnostics companies. Another had previously been compensated by diagnostics and vaccine manufacturers. Mueller had relationships with diagnostics, pharmaceutical and vaccine companies at the time he wrote the paper. Where did Mueller go wrong? One way to measure treatment effects is to compare an outcome, for example, blood pressure, in the same subjects before and after the treatment and report before-and-after results. Although this option was known to medical researchers and available to him, Mueller did not take advantage of it — either because he did not think to measure pre-booster troponin levels or chose not to report them for some reason, perhaps because they did not align with his other results. Instead, his team took an approach that required two well-matched study groups. Although Mueller claimed placebos and controls met this requirement they differed on the feature that mattered most: heart health. Vaccinated subjects with current or recent heart issues were excluded from the study, while all control subjects had just entered the hospital with heart symptoms and were therefore already at greater risk for myocarditis. Klement and Walach found more anomalies in the Mueller paper. RFK Jr. and Brian Hooker Vax-Unvax RFK Jr. and Brian Hooker’s New Book: “Vax-Unvax” Order Now They began their critique by citing three 2021 studies on COVID-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis (here, here and here). All three studies showed myocarditis became a concern shortly after the COVID-19 vaccine introductions. They discussed three papers in some detail: A 2023 German autopsy study on 25 unexpected deaths within 20 days of COVID-19 vaccination identified acute myocarditis as the most probable cause of death in four cases. A 2023 report on myocarditis in 303 non-vaccinated and 700 vaccinated asymptomatic subjects found significantly higher damage in the vaccinated persisting for up to 180 days post-vaccination. One of the first autopsy papers, an Indian-led study based on World Health Organization pharmacovigilance data reported 2.1 times the risk for cardiac arrest, 2.7 times the risk for acute heart attack, 2.6 times the risk for elevated troponin, and 7.3-fold higher levels of D-dimer for COVID-19 vaccinations compared with the use of other medications. These studies strongly suggest that myocarditis became an issue only after the mRNA vaccine rollouts. They contradict Mueller’s statement that the “extent of myocardial injury associated with COVID-19 infection was much higher than observed in this active surveillance study after booster vaccination.” According to Klement and Walach, this statement is wrong for two reasons. First, in addition to the non-equivalence of controls’ and subjects’ heart-health status, Mueller ignored the much larger number of COVID-19-infected, unhospitalized, unvaccinated individuals with (presumably) much lower troponin levels compared with patients entering the hospital with heart symptoms. Second, Klement and Walach argued that the public health impact of myocarditis depends not only on the incidence or rate among study groups but the size of those groups. The significance is that a lower incidence in a very large group (vaccinated) is more meaningful than a slightly higher rate in a very small group (individuals infected with COVID-19). scales of justice Your support helps fund this work, and CHD’s related advocacy, education and scientific research. Donate Now On that basis, Klement and Walach estimated the number of myocarditis cases among all German COVID-19 hospitalizations at 27,467, and among those who were vaccinated at 1.97 million. As a result, regardless of myocarditis severity, there were 71.7 times as many myocarditis cases among the vaccinated as among those hospitalized for COVID-19. A similar analysis for Switzerland estimated 169,960 cases of myocarditis among vaccinated compared with 8,179 among those hospitalized for COVID-19. Although not as dramatic as the German estimates this still shows a much higher occurrence of heart damage among vaccinated versus hospitalized. In a June 2021 paper, Walach, Klement and Dutch data analyst Wouter Aukema concluded that based on 700 adverse reactions, 16 serious side effects and 4.11 deaths for every 100,000 vaccinations, COVID-19 vaccines were released with insufficient safety data. The authors said the risk-benefit ratio for mRNA vaccines did not add up because “for three deaths prevented by vaccination we have to accept two inflicted by vaccination.” Mueller told The Defender via email: “Our study reveals an important lack of prospective safety data concerning COVID-19 vaccines. Given the magnitude of the vaccinated population compared to the much smaller proportion of the population that became infected and developed symptoms, including a small percentage with possible heart damage, our findings should remain qualitatively robust.” LEARN MORE ⬇️ https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/covid-study-myocarditis-vaccines/ Join ➡️ @ShankaraChetty

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Many Say They Want Peace When What They Really Want Is Obedience: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix Caitlin JohnstoneWednesday 24 Jan 24 Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley): Everyone says they want peace, but they mean different things by this. To an anti-imperialist, peace means the end of violence, oppression and exploitation. To a Zionist, peace means Palestinians lie down and accept their fate and neighboring nations cease disobeying Israel. To a supporter of the US empire, peace means all nations around the world submit to US unipolar hegemony. Many say they want peace when what they really want is tyranny. If “peace” to you means other populations bow down and submit to your will, then it makes perfect sense for you to believe that your wars are being waged to attain peace, because those wars are being used to violently bludgeon those populations into obedience. If your definition of peace means the cessation of all violence and abuse, then you will support ceasefires, peace negotiations, diplomacy, the de-escalation of tensions, the cessation of imperialist extraction, and the end of apartheid and injustice. Pay less attention to people’s words about wanting “peace” and focus instead on what actions they are supporting to accomplish that end. This will show you the truth about what they really want. ❖ https://x.com/caitoz/status/1748455323126632957?s=20 ❖ Someone asked “Can we all agree that our world would be better without a Hamas?” This is the sort of question that can only make sense to you if you view Hamas as some kind of invasive alien presence that was imposed upon Palestine from the outside instead of a natural emergence from the material circumstances that have been forced upon Palestinians. If you’ve got a group of people being sufficiently oppressed and violently persecuted by the ruling power, you’re going to start seeing violent opposition to that ruling power as sure as you’ll see blood arise from a wound. If Hamas had been completely eliminated a decade ago, there would be a Palestinian group organizing violence against the state of Israel today under that or some other name. If Hamas is completely eliminated tomorrow, there will be a Palestinian group organizing violence against the state of Israel in a matter of years (assuming there are any Palestinians left when this is all over, of course). If a man starts strangling me, at some point I’m going to try to gouge his eyes and crush his testicles. That’s just what happens when humans find themselves under a sufficient amount of existential pressure. Asking if the world would be better without Hamas is as nonsensical as asking if Alaska would be better without coats. The presence of coats in Alaska is the natural consequence of the material conditions in that region, and as long as those material conditions persist for the population of Alaska then there will necessarily be coats. Don’t ask if the world would be better without a Hamas, ask if the world would be better without the conditions which make a Hamas inevitable. ❖ Biden has started a new US war in Yemen while backing a genocide in Gaza, both of which are fully supported by the party which supposedly opposes him. But by all means go ahead and spend the rest of the year fixating on the US presidential race. ❖ Know how you can tell it no longer matters who the US president is? They stopped getting assassinated. ❖ The Biden administration’s justifications for its acts of war in Yemen are premised on the absurd assumption that the world economy should march on completely uninhibited during an active genocide. ❖ Supporting the world’s most powerful government bombing the poorest country in the middle east for trying to stop a genocide is the most sycophantic bootlicking you can possibly cram into a single political opinion. ❖ https://x.com/caitoz/status/1748478825602953304?s=20 ❖ Israel isn’t relentlessly murderous and abusive because it’s run by Jews, it’s relentlessly murderous and abusive because that’s the only way to maintain an ethnostate that was abruptly dropped on top of an already existing civilization. This would be true if it’d been a Mormon state or a Romani state. Take any already existing country with its own ethnic and religious makeup and its own relationships with surrounding countries and drop a brand new artificial ethnostate on top of it with a deluge of immigrants who are designated special and above the people in that region, and you’re going to get a ton of violence. You’re also going to see the dominant group espouse supremacist ideological beliefs to justify why it’s fine for them to be placed above the other group and receive better treatment by the state. These things would happen regardless of what those respective ethnic and religious makeups happen to be. How can we be sure of this? Because we’ve seen it happen time and time again in other settler-colonialist projects throughout history which had nothing to do with Jews or Muslims. It’s not about Jews and Judaism, it’s about the nature and character of the ethnostate which got placed overtop a pre-existing civilization in the 1940s. The religions and ethnicities are interchangeable with pretty much any other in terms of how much violence would be necessary to institute and maintain such a state. ❖ People who say they oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza but don’t forcefully oppose Biden’s facilitation of Israel’s actions in Gaza do not actually oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza. ❖ There’s a type of uninformed comment I keep seeing, usually from Americans, that goes something like this: “What do I care about Israel and Hamas? It’s none of our business and we should stay out of it.” This comment is born of the misunderstanding that people want the US to meddle in middle eastern affairs to stop the slaughter in Gaza, which is a notion many Americans reflexively oppose these days because they have learned that US “humanitarian interventions” in that region are consistently disastrous and often very costly. But that isn’t what’s being called for. What’s being called for is for the US to STOP intervening in Israel and Gaza — to END an intervention that is ALREADY taking place. The US has been pouring billions of dollars of weaponry into Israel every year for many years now, and has sent a whole lot more since October 7 to assist the Israeli butchery that’s been happening in Gaza. If the US ceased supporting Israel’s violence in Gaza, that violence would necessarily be forced to end. As a retired Israeli major general named Yitzhak Brick told the Jewish News Syndicate in November, “All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the US. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability… Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.” If you don’t want your government engaging in foreign conflicts and intervening in foreign affairs, then you should oppose the US-backed massacres in Gaza, because that’s exactly what it is. The anti-interventionist position for an American to have is to demand that the Biden administration stop actively facilitating this mass atrocity. https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/many-say-they-want-peace-when-what

Many Say They Want Peace When What They Really Want Is Obedience: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix Caitlin JohnstoneWednesday 24 Jan 24 Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley): Everyone says they want peace, but they mean different things by this. To an anti-imperialist, peace means the end of violence, oppression and exploitation. To a Zionist, peace means Palestinians lie down and accept their fate and neighboring nations cease disobeying Israel. To a supporter of the US empire, peace means all nations around the world submit to US unipolar hegemony. Many say they want peace when what they really want is tyranny. If “peace” to you means other populations bow down and submit to your will, then it makes perfect sense for you to believe that your wars are being waged to attain peace, because those wars are being used to violently bludgeon those populations into obedience. If your definition of peace means the cessation of all violence and abuse, then you will support ceasefires, peace negotiations, diplomacy, the de-escalation of tensions, the cessation of imperialist extraction, and the end of apartheid and injustice. Pay less attention to people’s words about wanting “peace” and focus instead on what actions they are supporting to accomplish that end. This will show you the truth about what they really want. ❖ https://x.com/caitoz/status/1748455323126632957?s=20 ❖ Someone asked “Can we all agree that our world would be better without a Hamas?” This is the sort of question that can only make sense to you if you view Hamas as some kind of invasive alien presence that was imposed upon Palestine from the outside instead of a natural emergence from the material circumstances that have been forced upon Palestinians. If you’ve got a group of people being sufficiently oppressed and violently persecuted by the ruling power, you’re going to start seeing violent opposition to that ruling power as sure as you’ll see blood arise from a wound. If Hamas had been completely eliminated a decade ago, there would be a Palestinian group organizing violence against the state of Israel today under that or some other name. If Hamas is completely eliminated tomorrow, there will be a Palestinian group organizing violence against the state of Israel in a matter of years (assuming there are any Palestinians left when this is all over, of course). If a man starts strangling me, at some point I’m going to try to gouge his eyes and crush his testicles. That’s just what happens when humans find themselves under a sufficient amount of existential pressure. Asking if the world would be better without Hamas is as nonsensical as asking if Alaska would be better without coats. The presence of coats in Alaska is the natural consequence of the material conditions in that region, and as long as those material conditions persist for the population of Alaska then there will necessarily be coats. Don’t ask if the world would be better without a Hamas, ask if the world would be better without the conditions which make a Hamas inevitable. ❖ Biden has started a new US war in Yemen while backing a genocide in Gaza, both of which are fully supported by the party which supposedly opposes him. But by all means go ahead and spend the rest of the year fixating on the US presidential race. ❖ Know how you can tell it no longer matters who the US president is? They stopped getting assassinated. ❖ The Biden administration’s justifications for its acts of war in Yemen are premised on the absurd assumption that the world economy should march on completely uninhibited during an active genocide. ❖ Supporting the world’s most powerful government bombing the poorest country in the middle east for trying to stop a genocide is the most sycophantic bootlicking you can possibly cram into a single political opinion. ❖ https://x.com/caitoz/status/1748478825602953304?s=20 ❖ Israel isn’t relentlessly murderous and abusive because it’s run by Jews, it’s relentlessly murderous and abusive because that’s the only way to maintain an ethnostate that was abruptly dropped on top of an already existing civilization. This would be true if it’d been a Mormon state or a Romani state. Take any already existing country with its own ethnic and religious makeup and its own relationships with surrounding countries and drop a brand new artificial ethnostate on top of it with a deluge of immigrants who are designated special and above the people in that region, and you’re going to get a ton of violence. You’re also going to see the dominant group espouse supremacist ideological beliefs to justify why it’s fine for them to be placed above the other group and receive better treatment by the state. These things would happen regardless of what those respective ethnic and religious makeups happen to be. How can we be sure of this? Because we’ve seen it happen time and time again in other settler-colonialist projects throughout history which had nothing to do with Jews or Muslims. It’s not about Jews and Judaism, it’s about the nature and character of the ethnostate which got placed overtop a pre-existing civilization in the 1940s. The religions and ethnicities are interchangeable with pretty much any other in terms of how much violence would be necessary to institute and maintain such a state. ❖ People who say they oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza but don’t forcefully oppose Biden’s facilitation of Israel’s actions in Gaza do not actually oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza. ❖ There’s a type of uninformed comment I keep seeing, usually from Americans, that goes something like this: “What do I care about Israel and Hamas? It’s none of our business and we should stay out of it.” This comment is born of the misunderstanding that people want the US to meddle in middle eastern affairs to stop the slaughter in Gaza, which is a notion many Americans reflexively oppose these days because they have learned that US “humanitarian interventions” in that region are consistently disastrous and often very costly. But that isn’t what’s being called for. What’s being called for is for the US to STOP intervening in Israel and Gaza — to END an intervention that is ALREADY taking place. The US has been pouring billions of dollars of weaponry into Israel every year for many years now, and has sent a whole lot more since October 7 to assist the Israeli butchery that’s been happening in Gaza. If the US ceased supporting Israel’s violence in Gaza, that violence would necessarily be forced to end. As a retired Israeli major general named Yitzhak Brick told the Jewish News Syndicate in November, “All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the US. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability… Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.” If you don’t want your government engaging in foreign conflicts and intervening in foreign affairs, then you should oppose the US-backed massacres in Gaza, because that’s exactly what it is. The anti-interventionist position for an American to have is to demand that the Biden administration stop actively facilitating this mass atrocity. https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/many-say-they-want-peace-when-what https://thealtworld.com/caitlin_johnston/many-say-they-want-peace-when-what-they-really-want-is-obedience

The Lion Diet Reset for Jumpstarting Your Healing Journey Just red meat, salt and mineral water to wash it down. Dr. Syed Haider What do Lions Eat? - Discovery UK I gained about 40 - 50 pounds during the pandemic primarily due to stress, poor sleep and too much sugar, then I lost it all by eating whole foods, sleeping well and walking 10,000-15,000 steps a day, then I gained some of it back by eating sugar again and slacking on sleep hygiene, though I mostly kept up the walking, which had become a morning habit (I was actually pleasantly surprised to see that for over 18 months now I’ve always averaged close to 10,000 steps a day over any 6 month period (the health app in my phone)). Meanwhile a friend of mine who had benefited greatly from the carnivore diet in the past, but fell off the wagon and had been trying to get back on for awhile had been encouraging me for some time to be his accountability partner on a diet change journey so finally I decided to take the plunge. From personal experience I know very well that the hardest hill to climb is that initial decision to make a change for the better. After you’ve truly made a commitment to change, sustaining it is not nearly as hard. You also find many complementary healthy changes suddenly become easier to implement. It feels like there is a “good boy” template in the subconscious and an opposing “bad boy” one, though that term carries other perhaps conflicting (perhaps not) connotations. What I mean is that all the things I’ve collected throughout my life that I consider good healthy behaviors tend to creep back sooner or later once I decided to get healthier and take the first steps towards better health. Similarly if I cheat unexpectedly, that single “bad” choice has usually led to most of the good I was doing falling apart and me going back to all the old bad ways. In order to circumvent this tendency I’m planning to build in some flexibility in the form of “cheat” days, but I don’t think it’s helpful to think of them as cheat days, in fact I think it only serves to make it likely that your subconscious considers them a “bad” thing. The key to success and sustainability is to consider them a good thing instead, think of them more as health/metabolic/recovery hormetic stress tests, that are preplanned and executed as a key part of a healthy lifestyle protocol (hormesis: low dose stressor is beneficial, high dose is harmful. Applies to exercise, sunlight, water, food, homeopathy, pharmacology, herbology, even many so called chemical toxins - the dose makes the poison and all). The goal is not only to regain good health but to regain maximal resilience and ability to sustain that good health in the face of challenging situations where you can’t sleep properly, or eat properly or exercise the way you usually do, or you’re exposed to toxic blue light for prolonged periods, or someone close to you passes away, or you lose a job, etc. Thank you for reading Dr. Syed Haider. This post is public so feel free to share it. Share I’m one of those people who can eat a dozen cupcakes if I’m feeling stressed out, but if I stop eating sugar entirely I don’t have any cravings for it. Moderation is impossible, but abstinence is easy. So maybe I’m addicted, or maybe I’m just populated by microbes that depend on sugar. I did a 5 day carnivore reset before my initial weight loss journey started perhaps 18 months ago now, and I was amazed to see that I had no sugar cravings for a couple of months afterwards. Literally for the first time in my life sugar bombs survived in my house for over 48 hours. We had a tub of ice cream that was not finished for a month, which would have been as likely as a pig flying before that. But after that period of a couple months I gradually lost my indifference to sweets and then eventually went back to full on sweet-tooth, cookie-monster mode, which was a big part of my eventual downfall later. My weight loss also stalled out before I got really lean, I felt way better, looked away better, at least in clothes, but I was probably still carrying an extra 30 pounds of fat internally - the visceral fat - which, though invisible to the naked eye, is the worst kind for your health. Carnivore seems to most people to be like an extreme overreaction to the vegan movement, and perhaps it is culturally an immune reaction of sorts, but it pays to consider what the proponents of the diet say. One of the most telling arguments in favor is that plants are trying to kill you. Losing my finger to a 'meat eating' plant? - YouTube Plants like all living things, would prefer to stay alive, and are in a life or death struggle with those who would kill them. Since they can’t run away or fight off their predators, they primarily rely on poisoning them, and animals have developed finely tuned senses that let them know if there is a poison present - it tastes bad, usually very bitter, and the usual reaction is to spit it out (and wash your mouth out), the way a baby will when you try to feed them broccoli or Brussel sprouts. Most non-human mammals that are herbivores or omnivores are only evolutionarily optimized to digest a small selection of plants in their environment. Human civilizations first of all domesticated and bred plants to make them more palatable, and then developed intricate methods of neutralizing and predigesting plants via soaking, sprouting, culturing and cooking plant foods to make them less toxic, though we can’t entirely eliminate all toxins even with these complicated traditional procedures (hormesis argues the remaining toxins are probably beneficial stressors, and there are other beneficial phytonutrients too). Modern manufacturing eschews all that traditional wisdom for quick production methods that leave the lectins, oxalates, phtyates, tannins, hormone disruptors, and nutrient blockers intact. But even if someone took appropriate care to use traditional methods of food preparation, and also made sure to use seasonal ingredients, and combined them in the traditional recipes that made use of various complementary ingredients, they would still be left with some degree of plant poisons in their diet. I was shocked to learn that every plant in the grocery store has dozens of known carcinogens, and plants produce phytotoxins that total 10,000 times the amount of pesticides sprayed on them (the primary concern with meat is improper handling leading to microorganisms polluting it, and improper cooking methods leading to char - i.e. you don’t want to burn it). As far as we know all human societies in every age throughout history ate as much meat as they could get their hands on, and supplemented with plants only when necessary to avert calorie restriction, treat/prevent illness, and as a garnish, or side dish to their meat. The farther back we go the less palatable the plants were and they required even more processing to make them edible. Agrarian societies were always, and still are, less healthy than their hunter gatherer counterparts. Now, to be clear, I’m not arguing for a forever meat diet. The Lion diet refers to eating just ruminant red meat garnished with salt and washed down with mineral rich water. The way I see it, this is an elimination diet, of which there are many. Some popular ones include AIP, Carnivore and Vegan. AIP is the autoimmune paleo diet and advises removing grains, sugars, eggs, dairy, soy, and nightshade vegetables. Carnivore allows all meat, fish, dairy and eggs. Vegan allows only plant products. The idea behind elimination diets, which were a mainstay of pre-modern medical systems, and still used heavily in functional and alternative medicine today, is that something you are eating is preventing your body from recovering from chronic illness, perhaps due to a “leaky gut”, i.e. your gut lining has become damaged and permeable by some toxic insult (like viral/vax entry into the bloodstream and subsequent transfection of key cells) to partially digested food particles which trigger immune reactions that can cross react with your own tissues or simply create inflammation that keeps you sick, and keeps the gut lining from healing. Eliminate the foods and eliminate your symptoms, heal the gut, then reintroduce the foods one at a time, carefully watching for reactions. It can get complicated because the reactions can take weeks to wear off, and days to recur upon reexposure. So the reintroduction phase is usually done by consuming the test food for 3 days then waiting another 4 days for a reaction. Tracking gut permeability tests (lactulose-mannitol ratio, zonulin level, antibodies to zonulin, actin, and lipopolysaccharide) can help determine when to begin the reintroduction phase. Given the inherent toxicity of plants, which has developed as an evolutionary defense mechanism against being eaten, and the relatively benign nature of animal meat the safest elimination diets either limit the most toxic plant foods, or eliminate plant foods altogether. Share In my case I know I have an autoimmune issue with mild psoriasis, which is likely related to leaky gut, I also have had chronic constipation, occasional reflux, occasional headaches, occasional stuffy nose, a tendency towards insomnia, and relatively rapid aging in the last few years with significant weight gain. So my plan is to try to reverse all of these naturally and I’ll likely be checking micronutrient levels and genetics at some point to fine tune things using protocols developed by Chris Masterjohn. Diet over the longer term will likely trend towards lower in carbs, higher in meat/seafood, dairy, and eggs, but this will depend on my carb tolerance in the future as evidenced by markers like body fat and fasting insulin levels. Will eat shortly after waking to help strengthen the circadian rhythm further. Exercise will start with mobility drills, walks, sprints (because no other exercise naturally stimulates muscle gain and fat loss better - just look at an olympic sprinter - the message to your body is either: something’s about to kill us, or we’re about to starve and need to catch some food fast, so shape up ASAP and help me out here), body weight exercises, maybe kettlebell swings. Skin and hair care will include traditional topical treatments like egg whites, egg yolks, tallow, and essential oils. Sleep will be as much as needed and regular hours. Light environment: aim to minimize blue light toxicity from sunlight filtered through window glass, and indoor bulbs by spending as much time outdoors as possible. Sun exposure in the mornings and around sunset especially with some midday sun. Also need to work on emotional and spiritual growth and interpersonal relationships, but those are higher hanging fruit. Anyway let me know if you’ve tried an elimination diet in the past and how it went for you. https://blog.mygotodoc.com/p/the-lion-diet-reset-for-jumpstarting

Mystery Pneumonia AKA White Lung Syndrome: What's Going On? More questions than answers for now, but it could be a mix of VAIDS and Vitamin A deficiency, and the unlikely edge case remains that the Middle Kingdom is giving us the middle finger yet again. Dr. Syed Haider Nothing will stop these kids from acing their exams, not even white lung disease China has been hit with a “mystery pneumonia”, AKA “white lung disease”, except they insist it’s not really a mystery pneumonia at all, it’s just the usual suspects like mycoplasma, Flu, RSV, rhinovirus, adenovirus, and yes, COVID-19. Or perhaps the word mystery refers to the mystery of why there is such a large outbreak of it this year? The prevalent explanations are an “immune debt” due to lockdowns overlaid on a multi-year cyclic upturn in mycoplasma infections. What we do know is that children are primarily affected and it has spread beyond China to many other countries, and possibly even the US now. But there does not seem to be a spike in deaths at this point. Beyond the immune debt and cycle theories, what else could be driving this? Well the elephant in the room is VAIDS, as well as Long COVID AIDS, which unfortunately is also a thing. But another lesser known possibility is relative vitamin A deficiency. Yes, Vitamin A, not Vitamin D. Vitamin A is important for immunity, especially from mycoplasma. It’s a fat soluble vitamin and what makes this an even more likely culprit in many cases is that so many people have been heavily supplementing with Vitamin D for the last 3 years, and Vitamin D supplementation can lead to deficiencies of Vitamins A, E and K, since all 4 of these fat soluble vitamins compete for absorption. So the cure of the last pandemic could have set some people up for this outbreak. The most common supplement regimen during and after COVID was Vitamin C, D, Zinc and Quercetin. The other nutritional imbalance that this regimen can trigger is a deficiency of copper due to prolonged Zinc suppelementation. Signs of copper deficiency also include immunodeficiency evidenced by low white blood cell count and thyroid problems, anemia, weak bones, irregular heartbeat, and loss of pigment from the skin. Thank you for reading Dr. Syed Haider. This post is public so feel free to share it. Share However mild deficiencies might not have any warning signs beyond increased susceptibility to illness and trouble with recovery. For this reason I’m working on a new supplement to balance the effects of our popular IMMUNITY [vitamins] supplement. We already included vitamin K2 in that one, to help balance the effect of D3 intake on calcium absorption, but this new one will have Vitamins A and E as well as copper and a few other ingredients like selenium, necessary for the optimal immune balance required for prevention, treatment of acute illness and recovery from long haul/vax injuries. Until then I would recommend most people who are supplementing with D3 on an ongoing basis to take the same dose of Vitamin A in retinol form, so if it’s 5000 IU D3, I would usually take 5000 IU of retinol as well. Vitamin E in the form of mixed tocopherols 20 IU and the K2 form of Vitamin K 100mcg per day. To balance 50 mg of zinc you probably need about 4-8 mg of copper per day. Oyster max is a powdered oyster supplement that has both zinc and copper in it. Optimally you would use lab testing along with a nutrient calculator to determine how. much of each micronutrient you get from your diet, and then just dial up your nutritional intake as required, or add supplemental doses based on nutritional deficiencies. At mygotodoc we offer comprehensive nutritional testing panels to help optimize nutrition, because the building blocks of health are at their most basic just two: nourishment and detoxification, of course those two words belie a lot of complexity. For example nourishment doesn’t just include food and vitamins, it also includes sunlight in the day, darkness at night, relaxation and rest, grounding, fulfilling relationships, happy thoughts, gratitude, etc. And detoxification doesn’t just include spike protein and heavy metals, but also plastics, industrial chemicals, chronic infections/infestations, non natural EMFs, light at night, anger and other toxic emotions, negative thoughts, harmful relationships, addictions, etc. Optimizing just some of these can often give your body enough strength and energy to overcome the others being suboptimal. Overall we need balance in life and the story of imbalanced micronutrients just serves to highlight the importance of balance in all things. In modern industrial societies we tend towards action over inactivity, but in truth we need both for optimal health and productivity. Muscles only get built during rest, not during exercise, which breaks them down to stimulate rebuilding. Similarly spending all our time in our heads processing the firehose of incoming information leaves us no time to chew it and digest it and make the most of it. Give yourself some down time to just do nothing, so that when you go back to doing something you do it better than you would have otherwise. This is why many cultures encourage timeouts during the day to pray or meditate instead of packing every waking moment with activity and information. We’re currently also undergoing an uptick in COVID infections around the world, but not an increase in severity. Geert Van Den Boscche’s warnings of a coming supervariant targeting the vaxed have not yet materialized At the same time many in the medical freedom community are hyperaware of the current happenings around the world because they expect round two of COVID or some other bioweapon along with lockdowns heading into the 2024 presidential election year. If this were going to happen this is when it would get started, because it takes some time to really get going. I hope we don’t fall for the same thing all over again, but it may just be a matter of time and the last one may have just been a dry run for the real power grab. No more pandemics | Bill Gates The next pandemic we’ve been warned is definitely coming has been termed “Disease X” by Gates and company, a placeholder name for some as yet unknown bug that could be far worse than COVID, i.e. an actual threat to human life on a scale similar to the Black Plague or the 1918 Spanish Flu. If something of that magnitude and severity were to be unleashed on humanity many would forget their righteous indignation over COVID lockdowns and demand stringent measures including quarantine camps and forced treatment - it sounds impossible, yet this has just become law in the state of New York. New Yorkers can be forcibly extracted from their homes and interred in quarantine camps. The Supreme Court actually ruled over a 100 years ago that compulsory vaccination was constitutional (and now the definition of vaccine extends to gene therapies). We’ll have to see what the future holds, but whatever it is, there is likely to be a cheap off-label treatment and if all else fails sunlight is the best disinfectant (i.e. get outside and get some sun). Ivermectin works for a number of viruses including RSV and Flu, and it even has activity against mycoplasma pneumonia. Other common meds are exceedingly helpful as well like doxycycline, which is why our Disaster-Pak prescriptions are as popular as ivermectin. We work with patients to prescribe an array of meds as comprehensive as possible. We have options that may work against Ebola and Marburg, as well as a whole host of other bioweapons and run of the mill infections. We prescribe the right doses and the right quantities, which I haven’t seen anywhere else. Usually patients who go somewhere else end up coming to us when they actually get sick, because they didn’t get anywhere near enough ivermectin or whatever else from another provider, who isn’t familiar with the latest dosing protocols. I’m also working on a vitamin C supplement, because in my experience high dose oral vitamin C is the single most effective treatment of any infection. A recent post on Vitamin C was one of my most popular ever: Is High Dose Vitamin C a PanaCea? Is High Dose Vitamin C a PanaCea? Sometimes you come across something that is so life changing you wonder how you made it through your entire life without knowing about it. Then you find out that many others already knew about it for decades and have been trying to spread the word to no avail, because there are multi billion dollar corporations that just can’t and won’t allow it. Read full story Unlike most Vitamin C supplements that come from GMO cornstarch and may have trace amounts of mold, mine will have 1000mg of non GMO tapioca sourced Vitamin C in a veggie cap (same as the C in our IMMUNITY [vitamins] supplement), which I find to be the most convenient form for rapidly consuming 30-50,000 mg of Vitamin C in a single dose (2-4 capsules at a time with a sip of water until you’re done). Back to our mystery pneumonia outbreak: I know why people are extra cautious given what we went through with COVID-19. Some people really did get very sick, and others ended up with debilitating long haul syndromes. China has not historically been exactly forthcoming with information on outbreaks early on. Social media and news reports said that 800 bed hospitals were overwhelmed with 5000-7000 patients per day, but the authorities on a call with the WHO denied that. This could just be a whole lot of nothing and one of the risks going forward is allowing the health authorities to turn regular or even really bad flu seasons into enough reason lock us down and take away all our rights. We should not want to entirely rid the world of infectious diseases even if we could, because we need to tune up our immune systems from time to time in order to prevent chronic illness. The same immune system that stays in shape fighting off a mild to moderate cold or flu every year, also fights off cancer cells and heart disease. Share I came cross a study once (that I can’t find - drop it in the comments if you know it) showing that 4 or more viral illnesses like chickenpox and measles as a child was associated with a 90% lower risk of heart disease as an older adult. So we need to keep our immune system in shape with occasional viral and bacterial infections, even though some small percentage of people will die from them. This sounds worse than it is though, because those people who die, would have died from something else anyway. COVID deaths in the elderly might have been pulled forward a year or two, which is terrible for each person who knew those who died, but fighting the natural way of things with technology can lead to far more harm than good. The real population “vaccines” are the infectious diseases themselves, not Big Pharma shots or government lockdowns. Artificially interfering with what nature demands just shuffles deaths around a bit, or God-forbid actually increases them. The upshot to all this is: don’t get scared, get prepared. https://blog.mygotodoc.com/p/mystery-pneumonia-aka-white-lung https://telegra.ph/Mystery-Pneumonia-AKA-White-Lung-Syndrome-Whats-Going-On-03-10

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