URGENT: Dr. Peter McCullough calls for immediate vaxx halt

https://rumble.com/vp4vzb-urgent-dr.-peter-mccullough-calls-for-immediate-vaxx-halt.html

The story of this fall has been the story of “breakthrough” infections. It turns out vaccines don’t work and nobody actually believes in them. There’s no reasoning, no actual research, no cost-benefit analysis, not a single rational thought from any of the highly-trained and highly-paid professionals who have made themselves the dictators of our lives. Nobody understands this better than Dr. Peter McCullough, a cardiologist, internist, and epidemiologist, who has been a steadfast advocate for alternative Covid treatments like hydroxychloroquine.

CDC: No Record of Naturally Immune Transmitting COVID-19

Dear Doctors-Time for you to clue in to your obligations to the Nuremberg Code and Defense

“No polity could responsibly just decide to do nothing to mitigate the pandemic. But how much has to be done, how much the government should intrude on individual liberty in order to protect public safety, is a absolutely correct answer. In a democratic prudential question to which there is no republic, the steps to be taken, and the steps that might be taken but that had better be omitted, has to be determined by the sense of the people.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/12/vaccine-mandates-and-the-decline-of-self-government/

“If the COVID jabs are so effective that constitutionally dubious vaccine mandates are being pushed by the Biden regime, then those locales with the highest vaccination rates must have brought the virus under better control than elsewhere, obviously.  But that is not the case.  The countries with the highest vaccination rates are seeing soaring cases and even deaths.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/worldwide_vaccine_failure.html

“…the Fifth Circuit issued its decision in BST Holdings, L.L.C. et al. v. OSHA, reaffirming the initial stay it granted when multiple entities and individuals challenged OSHA’s recently issued vaccine mandate.  In one brutal paragraph after another, the Court rips apart the mandate, citing law, facts, OSHA precedent, and even a Ron Klain tweet.  It’s a tour de force that makes it unlikely that any halfway honest court can or would resuscitate the mandate or that either OSHA or even Congress could try again.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/the_5th_circuits_brilliant_opinion_staying_oshas_vaccine_mandate.html

November 14, 2021 | 27 Comments »

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27 Comments / 27 Comments

  1. @Bear
    Thank you, Bear. As I anticipated, the study was another retrospective throwback to the days when Alpha was dominant and which can not eliminate for the pre-myocarditis reporting bias. They did employ CMR in evaluation which is the second best method of testing for support of active myocarditis, but is poorly diagnostic beyond a few weeks and the CMR was conducted ~65 days after their diagnosis of myocarditis. Furthermore, the cases were not screened for, but were simply found during routine workups. It should be noted that in spite of the lack of screening, the presentation of myocarditis was still slightly elevated over the normal value, ie 1/87,000 rather than 1/100,000. Given the choice to pursue this study as a retrospective study in a time period when Alpha and not Delta was present and dominant, renders the conclusions to be relatively limited in relevance to the current epidemic. It is very routine for medical agencies to pursue such important matters with a 6month-1yr time lag in relevance to current outbreaks, but it qualifies their judgements, at times including here, as unhelpful. This is why medical practitioners are enabled to act and react to the changes on the ground without the encumbered dictates from such slowly paced officiates as the CDC, for example, pretending to present the most relevant info on a day by day basis. They of course can not hold such pretense honestly, as they never see patients, not one patient, not ever.

    Hence, for what it is worth, I find this study’s relevance and accuracy to both be unconvincing viz a viz current issues for the reasons I previously cited, which are all unsurprisingly present in this current study as well. Thanks again for sharing the citation and your perspectives.

  2. @ Peloni, what I read is below and the link of the whole article is at the bottom.

    Israeli MRI study finds heart damage from COVID-19 vaccine is rare and mild
    Beilinson Hosptial research, believed to be the largest using detailed imaging technique, concludes outcome is ‘favorable,’ long-term effects not expected.

    A study conducted by Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikva, using a detailed scanning technique to examine patients with symptoms of a heart muscle condition after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine, found that damage was rare, mild, and expected to heal.

    The study used cardiac magnetic resonance imaging on patients diagnosed with myocarditis, a weakening of the heart muscles that has been found in a few patients after they were inoculated.

    A link has been seen in recent months between coronavirus vaccines using mRNA technology and very rare cases of myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) and pericarditis (inflammation of the lining around the heart).

    Among patients who were diagnosed with post-vaccination clinical myocarditis, CMR imaging findings are mild and consistent with ‘classical myocarditis,’” researchers concluded in the study, which was published last week in the European heart journal Cardiovascular Imaging.

    “The short-term clinical course and outcomes were favorable,” they wrote.

    Ashraf Hamdan, head of cardio-imaging at the hospital and one of the authors of the paper, said the study was the largest so far done in the world using CMR to examine the damage caused to heart muscle tissue from the vaccines.

    “The study showed that this is a rare phenomenon characterized by slight damage to the heart muscle, which is thus not expected to affect patients’ long-term health,” Hamdan said in a hospital statement.

    Researchers scanned 15 out of 54 patients who were diagnosed with myocarditis 42 days after they received the first Pfizer-BioNTech shot. Of the 15 — all of whom were men — ten also had a second dose. The research was carried out between December 20, 2020, and May 24, 2021, and scans were taken between three and 130 days after diagnosis.

    It found that cases of such inflammation occurred in 54 people (51 men, three women) or 2.13 of every 100,000 vaccinees (some two thousandths of a percentage point). Of those, 98 percent of cases were mild (76%) to moderate (22%) and did not cause any damage to heart function. A single person of the 2.5 million experienced a severe case that required hospitalization, and went on to recover, the study found.

    Full Article at https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-mri-study-finds-heart-damage-from-covid-19-vaccine-is-rare-and-mild/
    It has references to the actual studies.

    I believe the vaccines work and are safe (certainly the Pfzier). I believe some people have a worldview which makes them inclined to look for ways to discredit anything that supports the vaccines. So anything that may cause shade on the vaccines is purported as truth or likely truth.

  3. @Bear

    I just read a study that has the opposite finding about a week ago.

    Could you share this study. I am quite open to the possibility that I am missing the footnote stating that these vaccinated and unvaccinated cohorts are selected without bias, tested alike, and powered only to prevent obvious confounders, and without interchanging members of cohorts based upon developing disease… but nothing I have read, and I have read a great deal, seems to actually detract from the observations I have raised, even as I would be most pleased to find I am quite wrong…

  4. BREAKING: Israeli physicians, scientists advise FDA of ‘severe concerns’ regarding reliability and legality of official Israeli COVID vaccine data

    I think this is what Adam references in his statement. It is not the basis of my own concerns, which are fundamentally enshrined into the data collection effort, but these are additional concerns.

    There is this as well:

    This is Dr. Ayelet Ramon, Head of the Emergency Room Unit at Dana-Dwek Children’s Hospital in Tel Aviv, talking about a 16-year-old patient who has been vaccinated for Covid-19, with no prior health issues, who was admitted with fatal cardiac arrhythmia and was resuscitated expressing her concerns that the Israeli Ministry of health, might not investigate the possible connection between his condition and the vaccine.

  5. @Bear

    Regarding the use of retrospective studies to prove the absence of myocarditis, during a period in which myocarditis was strictly noted not to be caused by the vaccine is another example of the accuracy being pursued in Israel. Searching for diagnostic coding in Jan-April for myocarditis among the vaccinated is a very low standard of ‘proo’ on this topic. There is a pre-conceived bias built into such retro studies which will result in them finding no disease:
    Myocarditis is easily missed or misdiagnosed, especially by non-cardiologists.
    The vaccines, before May, were noted to be safe and no concern of myocarditis was made.
    The political effort to secure the vaccines as ‘safe’ was and still is quite accute and could easily result in clinicians erring on the side of political virtue, as we have seen too readily these past two years.
    Retro studies can not such biases as these and others and this is well known. There is, however an easy way to determine if a child should be worked up for myocarditis. It requires a blood test for Troponin. This is a protein employed in cardiac contraction and is used to test for heart attacks in adults. Children should have no troponin in their blood, none. The test is a cheap, noninvasive, low tech and can be processed in any blood-draw clinic to screen for this life limiting disease. Troponin in the blood indicates heart damage. An adult with a full heart attack will have Troponin levels of between 1-5, but usually towards the lower end of this scale. A responding value is not specific for myocarditis, but cardiac Troponin in the blood means there is heart damage, and all healthy children should have no Troponin present. A child being vaccinated can have levels as high as 30-100 on the same testing scale where an adult with full heart failure will have only a level of 5. Yet we look in records for proof of what we know we will find very little. This is shocking and needs to be addressed.

    Also, there is no such thing as ‘recovered from myocarditis’ because they left the hospital – the heart is scarred. The children being hospitalized are seriously ill which is why they are hospitalized and this does not qualify for mild disease just because they ultimately leave the hospital. The heart is an electrical tissue, which requires the electrical system to maintain its routine rhythm by maintaining its conductivity. The infiltration of inflamatory cells into the heart muscle, myocardium, results in damage to this conductive tissue that does not regrow, it will cause some level of scarring. The child leaving the hospital does not qualify this level of scarring as mild. It only means that the child did not yet die from the process, and many will, as I have noted before.

    So when you raise the issue of accuracy, I would only note that the entire process is rigged to provide ‘evidence’ of safety and efficacy without a measure of clarity on these things. We do not need a certainty of safety and efficacy which these managed efforts provide, but we do need a clarity about the potential harms and benefits of the vax. We don’t have this, and this is what I have always raised objections towards.
    /2

  6. @Bear

    I belief the stats are very accurate.

    Accurate in what way? To faithfully report the vaccinated as unvaccinated for two weeks when they are most susceptible to secondary infections, any infection, including Covid? This belies the reality that they are only more susceptible to such infections due to their vaccinated status, ie the vaccine reduced their normal immunity…but they are ‘unvaccinated’ for two weeks, right? If this is this the accuracy you reference, well, it is accurately, but the effort is pointlessly duplicitous and undermines any valuation in the resulting ‘rising number of unvaccinated becoming ill and dying’ as being, well, accurate. And this is the point where reality and record keeping do not meet. This doesn’t even speak of the importance of testing the vaccinated and unvaccinated in a similar fashion or using similar cycle thresholds, each of which further provide accurately recorded records of inaccurate data. Here lies the rig in the records. So there is nothing to hide, because it is all hidden in plain sight. We just call it accurate and ignore the underlying reality that it is not. We either want to know the truth or the dead will keep dying and the ill will keep suffering in this viscious cycle.
    /1

  7. @Adam please site reports or article showing Israeli doctors complaining about adverse effects and lack of transparency. I just read a study that has the opposite finding about a week ago. Israel has the world;s best data base for a particular population. 99% of the population belongs to one of the four HMOs and their medical data is all on one data base.

  8. @Peloni, you believe studies in Israel were rigged? Is that accurate of your beliefs?

    I do not not have that belief. I belief the stats are very accurate. In Israel it is hard to hide things. Vaccine works!!

  9. ADAM-

    I was just looking through all the posts on this article, and you mention Stew Peters.

    I saw him today interviewing Ally who seems to have been around every major figure she can think of. But the point I want to make is that Peters reminds me of Olmert, not in facial resemblance, but in his foxy, cunning, slit eyed, ugly, criminal looking face. Like a pickpocket on the lookout both for victims and the cops, Hunched over like “Larry King”..

    Like Olmert, I certainly wouldn’t buy a used car from anyone with his physiognomy.

  10. Adam

    Dr. McCullough recommends that everyone be tested for an immune response to the cv19-2 virus, and only those who are not immune should be considered candidates for vaccination. But only if the vaccines are sufficiently modified, after a careful review and testing process, to make them safe….

    Good summary. No one should object to an independent review of these drugs because they are effective, right? and they are safe, right? So, if these are truthful facts, the independent review will find it to be so. However, an independent review would shut the vaccines down and would have done so in January, which is why they never agreed to an independent review and never will agree to an independent review – the fox(Pharma) is paying the guards(FDA/CDC) of the henhouse(public). The vaccines always have needed to be reformulated as the vaccine’s concerning reactions are too severe and the target was to the wuhan wild virus which is completely absent in the general public and now we have multiple resistant strains rising in the population – they are slowly growing, but they are growing. We have only delta and delta variants to deal with now, which is why the vaccine is off target and the antibodies are not sterilizingly effective. These have always been McCullough’s objectives, as how could he call to vanquish a vaccine program that was actually safe and actually effective. So, McCullough is obviously sound in his pursuits, but the medical shareholders controlling their new reigns of power have the full support of the White House, the Congress, and at least some of the courts and many of the states. This matter will ultimately fall at the feet of SCOTUS, and, as in all things, SCOTUS will do what it pleases to the benefit or ruin of the country…

    Also, the number of Covid recovered has finally been updated. It was last updated in May at ~120 million Covid recovered. Per the CDC, that number is now only ~146 million, but other claim it is slightly higer at ~186million. In truth the 146million seems very slightly increased from the May figure given that Delta only became an dominant in May and is known to be more successfully infectious than the wild type or Alpha or Beta or Gamma. So to only increase by 25million over the summer outbreak seems very slightly increased given that it is not even a proportional increase in that time and should reflect increased numbers not fewer numbers of cases. Just FYI

    Another FYI, I haven’t forgotten the Kostoff report. I have made my way through most of it, but it is very long and hope to have something to share in the next couple of days. I know you are keen on this report, so bear with me for another day or so. I have looked over the critiques of the paper and they are not serious critiques that I have seen. The worst of them was by the editor of the journal which published the study. In it, the editor cited the fact that he had no personal involvement in the publication, almost as a clear defense to his masters that he had not crossed them. This is a very strange world in which we live.

  11. @Bear. I agree with you that the vaccines have been effective in reducing the number of serious infections, hospitalizations and deaths from covid19-2. However, I don’t think that the issue of possible adverse reactions and illnesses caused by adverse reactions to the vaccines has been adequately addressed by the Israeli medical authorities. A number of Israeli physicians have complained that Israel’s ministry of health and Israeli hospitals have not been sufficiently transparent about this matter, and may have issued misleading numbers that minimize the number of adverse reactions to the vaccine. The Israelo department of public health needs to improve its performance in this important area. This vaccines will prove to be a mixed blessing if they reduce the incidence of covid19-2 but over time cause other serious diseases, even possibly including the extremely deadly prionic diseases, which few victims survive.

  12. The first quotation in Ted’s article is from Stew Peter’s introduction to his interview with Dr. McCullough, and is not a quotation from Dr. McCullough himself. None of his quotations in this article are from McCullough. However, the title of this column in accurate, in that in this interview McCullough does call for a halt in the vaccinations. However, this headline misses the nuance in Dr. McCullough’s position. He calls for a pause in the vaccination campaign for a safety review of them, made by a committee of qualified experts who don’t work for the CDC or any other government agency, and are therefore able to do an independent and unbised review of the vaccine’s safety issues. He leaves open the possibility that the vaccinations might be resumed sometime in the future for those that may benefit from them if the safety issues are seriously addressed and the vaccines, or some of them, are modified to make them both safe and more effective than they are at present.

    On the other hand, he thinks that those who have been previously infected and have a high count of antibodies, tcells and other indications that they have acquired natural immunity, should not be vaccinated. He thinks that this group probably includes over 150 million Americans. These individuals were either asymptomatic or recovered from covid. But if they virus was in their systems but their white blood cells fought it off, it is extremely unlikely that they will ever develop covid19-2 again.

    Dr. McCullough recommends that everyone be tested for an immune response to the cv19-2 virus, and only those who are not immune should be considered candidates for vaccination. But only if the vaccines are sufficiently modified, after a careful review and testing process, to make them safe.

    Even within this group, Dr. McCullough thinks that people under the age of thirty should not be vaccinated. And definitely not children or adolescents, who are most at risk for the developing serious autoimmune diseases, such as myocarditis, that may be “side effects”vaccines presently in use.
    Those under the age of thirty are more likely to suffer diseases caused by the vaccines than to get sick from Covid19-2, he believes.

    He believes that people over 65 have gained partial immunity from the vaccines, which is all well and good. But booster shots every six months for the rest of their lives might not be good for the health even of people in this age group. No one knows what the effects will be if people take the covid19 vaccines for the rest of their lives, he points out.

    McCullough believes that a vaccine should provide effective protection for at least one year before it is approved. He points out that the present vaccines become ineffective after only six months, which is too short an interval for a safe and effective vaccine.

  13. Regarding the vaccine working, I have no proof of this at all.

    I think a better way to express my true meaning than with this phrase would be to state that the shots, like all medical biologic products have a risk and a benefit. Neither of these qualities of the shots have been clearly demonstrated and that lack of clarity has been achieved with complete intent. This should be concerning to anyone taking the shots and to everyone force to take the shots. The emphasis to saddle the children with the risk and no benefit from the shots, demonstrates the lack of any judicious use of medical judgement when employing these biological compounds by the medical establishment. So too does the refusal to treat sick people with safe drugs while forcing healthy people to take risky vaccines. There is no easy explanation for these bizarrely unprincipled medical practices. None at all.

  14. @Bear
    Regarding the vaccine working, I have no proof of this at all. The EUA studies were rigged and now we have proof of fraudulent data from a whistleblower with photos. Even with this falsified data the findings in those studies were terrible. There was NO reduction in deaths from being vaccinated and the safety data was purposefully shotgunned when they vaccinated the placebo group. Since then, we are relying on retrospective studies to ‘prove’ what retrospective studies can not prove, and epidemiological studies based on ‘real world data’ where the data is manipulated to display an unreal reality. If these injections work, why do they mask the vaccinated as unvaccinated for two weeks. When they die post-jab, they will die with mRNA in their bodies and denying this fact undermines any use of such ‘real world data’ as being cooked to a desired effect. Hence, the use of such unuseful data is most unuseful. Post-jab patients have a reduced immunity. It’s a fact. There is also a reduction in their long term immunity, but how it is changed and for how long is not known.

    Some, such as yourself might find comfort in these purposefully untelling trials, but the truth is breaking out all about us. We have athletes around the world dying on the fields in record numbers. We have 12K cases of myocarditis/pericarditis occurring in just 5months. A cardiologist will find a few cases of this rare disease in a lifetime of medical practice, certainly not hundreds and certainly not thousands. To find 12K in a few months is not rare, and not noise. How can this be unrelated?

    It would be good if these shots worked, but they seem to carry a lot of death with them, a lot of severe adverse effects with them and a lot of managed data, carefully manipulated so that we can not really assess the reality of what we are looking at. If they really did work, no supporter of them would support this unuseful data collection to muddy the waters and hide the clear useful nature of the shots.

    Also, the all-cause mortality are rising around the world, and yet no world govt will support the use of autopsies to demonstrate why this is. It could be the virus or it could be the vaccine, it could be both, or it could be something completely unrelated. I do believe that the shareholders would be quite anxious to pay any price to demonstrate that their products are not the source of this cause. The fact that they are not funding any autopsies should suggest that they either have no interest in knowing why people are dying, or they have every interest in not knowing why people are dying. Whatever their motives, we should find out why people are dying so that we can help treat them and reduce the dying. I can’t believe that I feel the need to state this fact, as it is a fundamentally humane premise and falls back to first principles, if we still hold to such standards as the world has been remade to ignore harms we may cause, belittle suffering we do cause and give no medical treatments to the millions who have significant need of it.

  15. Ted’s Fourth quotation is from Andrea Widberg, also writing in American Thinker, in which she explains the reasons why the appelate court for the fifth district found Biden’s executive order, requiring that all employees of corpoations with over 100 employees be vaccinated, was unconstitutional. Ms. Widberg is a lawyer.

  16. @Bear

    do you trust the reporting out of India?

    The question of who do you trust is important, but it hides a greater truth when you focus on this issue of trust. In fact, there are reasons enough to distrust the figures coming from the US(especially), Israel, UK and India. They all take their orders from the master shareholders in Washington, sort of a one ring to rule them all type deal, where corruption is the greatest export of the year. I won’t bother trying to split hairs between who is more untrustworthy, but rather focus on your comment about testing.

    It is true that the more you test the more positive cases you will find. But testing is over-rated, especially in unvaccinated subjects where the ill actually become, well, ill after infection. Cao et al did genetic testing of 10million cases of people who were not sick and found only 300 positive cases, which means that the unsymptomatic cases are too rare to discuss, and this was reproduced in another(smaller) case study as well. So, if a person is not sick and you are testing for illness and find positive test, we should recall that the PCR has been recalled 5months ago for cross reactivity(which is why we are only using it till next month). The more you test, the more false positives you will find. Also, the fewer positive cases you find will also indicate an increase in the false positives. This last point is a confusing issue that I have largely avoided because it is base upon the positive predictive value, which is not so deep a topic but hard to explain in a blog site. Anything you test for will have a frequency in the population you are testing. So if Covid is present in a population at, say 5%, the testing will have a lower level of false positives than if Covid is present at, say 0.5%. So the level of false positives being tested for today is much higher than it was during the outbreak in Israel. Recall also that the false positives can be as high as over 90% when testing really low frequencies such as 0.5%. Overtesting can easily create a case-demic which is not very helpful when fighting a pandemic, unless we are intentionally trying to increase ‘cases’ as opposed to patients.

    The reality that is hidden when we get this deep in the trust issue is the reality that these tests don’t tell us who is ill, they just tell us who has a positive test. This is based on the frequency of testing, the level of disease in the community and the cycle threshold used in the labs. None of this is static, except perhaps the lab. So trusting Israel over India ignores this basic foundational flaw. What we should trust is the deaths. It is hard to hide a death and it is really hard to hide a lot of deaths. So, When you ask if I trust India, Israel or any of them, the answer is no. The cases mean little to me. But the deaths mean everything. The fact that Israel did not crush their deaths for so long, is deeply disturbing to me and I can not express how outraged I am that they have not pursued the use of early treatments and treatment packs. So, sorry for the long answer, but I believe it is a fair answer.

  17. @Bear

    your comment about deaths from Covid not being less in Israel is simply not accurate

    Let’s look at what I said:

    the deaths are still slightly higher, on average, than before the 3rd jab began in Israel

    It is not a striking difference, but before the 3rd jab program began the death rate was 3-4/day monthly average and now it is 5 monthly average. So, what I stated is quite accurate, but I think you might have misread it.

    It is a striking difference that the deaths per day skyrocketed to double digits for two months following the beginning of the 3rd jab program. It was almost as if no one was paying attention to this point of concern. Of course, one might argue that the deaths were all in the ‘unvaccinated cohort’, but so are the vaccinated who die within two weeks, which is when they are most likely to actually catch Covid, flu or something else while their immune system is significantly suppressed, and then possibly succumb to the disease following their jabs. And this is not even the most important reason why they should not be ‘vaccinating’ people in the midst of a pandemic….

  18. Ted, your quote from the American Greatness site is somewhat garbled and unintelligible. It should read, “No polity could responsibly just decide to do nothing to mitigate the pandemic. But how much has to be done, how much the government should intrude on individual liberty in order to protect public safety, is a prudential question to which there is no absolutely correct answer. In a democratic republic, the steps to be taken, and the steps that might be taken but that had better be omitted, has to be determined by the sense of the people.” The author is not Dr. McCullough but someone named Carson Holloway, who is described as a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation. He is not absolutely and unequivocally opposed to vaccination. But he says that only Congress, not the President, has the power to mandate vaccination, and that Biden’s vaccine mandate executive orders are of dubious constitutionality.

  19. @Peloni, do you trust the reporting out of India? They compared to other countries do very listing testing!

    I think the data from Israel is reliable. In Israel a study of those who had gotten myocarditis and found the cases contracted via the virus were mild and the those got it improved very well. I read this a week ago. The booster works and people are healthy. Great result. I hope the data from India is also reliable and their system works.

  20. The New York Times continues its war against free speech about covid and and the vaccines. This is from a Times article via Yahoo News. Now the times wants radio stations to ban “misinformation” about the vaccines and fire talk show hosts who question their safety. The article also denies inconvenient facts about the vaccines.

    On Podcasts and Radio, Misleading COVID-19 Talk Goes Unchecked
    Sun, November 14, 2021, 11:00 AM

    Rick Wiles
    On a recent episode of his podcast, Rick Wiles, a pastor and self-described “citizen reporter,” endorsed a conspiracy theory: that COVID-19 vaccines were the product of a “global coup d’état by the most evil cabal of people in the history of mankind.”

    “It’s an egg that hatches into a synthetic parasite and grows inside your body,” Wiles said on his Oct. 13 episode. “This is like a sci-fi nightmare, and it’s happening in front of us.”

    Wiles belongs to a group of hosts who have made false or misleading statements about COVID-19 and effective treatments for it. Like many of them, he has access to much of his listening audience because his show appears on a platform provided by a large media corporation.

    Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times

    Wiles’ podcast is available through iHeart Media, an audio company based in San Antonio that says it reaches 9 out of 10 Americans each month. Spotify and Apple are other major companies that provide significant audio platforms for hosts who have shared similar views with their listeners about COVID-19 and vaccination efforts, or have had guests on their shows who promoted such notions.

    Scientific studies have shown that vaccines will protect people against the coronavirus for long periods and have significantly reduced the spread of COVID-19. As the global death toll related to COVID-19 exceeds 5 million — and at a time when more than 40% of Americans are not fully vaccinated — iHeart, Spotify, Apple and many smaller audio companies have done little to rein in what radio hosts and podcasters say about the virus and vaccination efforts.

    “There’s really no curb on it,” said Jason Loviglio, an associate professor of media and communication studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “There’s no real mechanism to push back, other than advertisers boycotting and corporate executives saying we need a culture change.”

    Audio industry executives appear less likely than their counterparts in social media to try to check dangerous speech. TruNews, a conservative Christian media outlet founded by Wiles, who used the phrase “Jew coup” to describe efforts to impeach former President Donald Trump, has been banned by YouTube. His podcast remains available on iHeart.

    Asked about his false statements concerning COVID-19 vaccines, Wiles described pandemic mitigation efforts as “global communism.” “If the Needle Nazis win, freedom is over for generations, maybe forever,” he said in an email.

    The reach of radio shows and podcasts is great, especially among young people: A recent survey from the National Research Group, a consulting firm, found that 60% of listeners younger than 40 get their news primarily through audio, a type of media they say they trust more than print or video.

    “People develop really close relationships with podcasts,” said Evelyn Douek, a senior research fellow at Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute. “It’s a parasocial medium. There’s something about voice that humans really relate to.”

    Marc Bernier, a talk radio host in Daytona Beach, Florida, whose show is available for download or streaming on iHeart’s and Apple’s digital platforms, was among the talk radio hosts who died of COVID-19 complications after expressing anti-vaccination views on their programs. The deaths made national news and set off a cascade of commentary on social media. What drew less attention was the industry that helped give them an audience.

    On a June episode, Bernier said, after referring to unvaccinated people: “I’m one of them. Judge me if you want.” The next month, he cited an unfounded claim that “45,000 people have died from taking the vaccine.” In his final Twitter post, on July 30, Bernier accused the government of “acting like Nazis” for encouraging COVID-19 vaccines.

    Jimmy DeYoung Sr., whose program was available on iHeart, Apple and Spotify, died of COVID-19 complications after making his show a venue for false or misleading statements about vaccines. One of his frequent guests was Sam Rohrer, a former Pennsylvania state representative who likened the promotion of COVID-19 vaccines to Nazi tactics and made a sweeping false statement. “This is not a vaccine, by definition,” Rohrer said on an April episode. “It is a permanent altering of my immune system, which God created to handle the kinds of things that are coming that way.” DeYoung thanked his guest for his “insight.” DeYoung died four months later.

    Buck Sexton, host of a program syndicated by Premiere Networks, an iHeart subsidiary, recently floated the theory that mass COVID-19 vaccinations could speed the virus’ mutation into more dangerous strains. He made this suggestion while appearing on another Premiere Networks program, “The Jesse Kelly Show.”

    The theory appears to have its roots in a 2015 paper about vaccines for a chicken ailment called Marek’s disease. Its author, Andrew Read, a professor of biology and entomology at Pennsylvania State University, has said his research has been “misinterpreted” by anti-vaccine activists. He added that COVID-19 vaccines have been found to reduce transmissions substantially, whereas chickens inoculated with the Marek’s disease vaccine were still able to transmit the disease. Sexton did not reply to a request for comment.

    “We’re seeing lots of public radio stations doing amazing local work to spread good health information,” Loviglio said. “On the other side, you’re seeing mostly the AM radio dial and their podcast counterparts being the Wild West of the airwaves.”

    iHeart — which owns more than 860 radio stations, publishes more than 600 podcasts and operates a vast online archive of audio programs — has rules for the podcasters on its platform prohibiting them from making statements that incite hate, promote Nazi propaganda or are defamatory. It would not say whether it has a policy concerning false statements on COVID-19 or vaccination efforts.

    Apple’s content guidelines for podcasts prohibit “content that may lead to harmful or dangerous outcomes, or content that is obscene or gratuitous.” Apple did not reply to requests for comment for this article.

    Spotify, which says its podcast platform has 299 million monthly listeners, prohibits hate speech in its guidelines. In a response to inquiries, the company said in a written statement that it also prohibits content “that promotes dangerous false or dangerous deceptive content about COVID-19, which may cause offline harm and/or pose a direct threat to public health.” The company added that it had removed content that violated its policies. But the episode with DeYoung’s conversation with Rohrer was still available via Spotify.

    Dawn Ostroff, Spotify’s content and advertising business officer, said at a conference last month that the company was making “very aggressive moves” to invest more in content moderation. “There’s a difference between the content that we make and the content that we license and the content that’s on the platform,” she said, “but our policies are the same no matter what type of content is on our platform. We will not allow any content that infringes or that in any way is inaccurate.”

    The audio industry has not drawn the same scrutiny as large social media companies, whose executives have been questioned in congressional hearings about the platforms’ role in spreading false or misleading information.

    The social media giants have made efforts over the past year to stop the flow of false reports related to the pandemic. In September, YouTube said it was banning the accounts of several prominent anti-vaccine activists. It also removes or deemphasizes content it deems to be misinformation or close to it. Late last year, Twitter announced that it would remove posts and ads with false claims about coronavirus vaccines. Facebook followed suit in February, saying it would remove false claims about vaccines generally.

    Sylvia Chan-Olmsted, a media professor at the University of Florida, said that podcasts may be more effective in spreading false information than social media. “People who go to podcasts have much more active engagement,” she said. “It’s not like, ‘Oh, I went on Facebook, and I scrolled through and saw this misinformation.’ It’s more likely that you’re engaged, you’re interested in this host, you actively seek this person out and listen to what he or she has to say.”

    Audio media has grown more popular during the pandemic, according to iHeart CEO Robert W. Pittman, a former head of MTV and AOL. At a recent media industry conference, he noted a change in listening habits over the past 20 months: “The consumer before the pandemic, because of social and a lot of other things, was feeling disconnected, and they value media that feels like a companion. There are two of those: radio, and now there’s podcasting.”

    The Federal Communications Commission, which grants licenses to companies using the public airwaves, has oversight over radio operators, but not podcasts or online audio, which do not make use of the public airwaves.

    The FCC is barred from violating U.S. citizens’ right to free speech. When it takes action against a media company over programming, it is typically in response to complaints about content considered obscene or indecent, as when it fined a Virginia television station in 2015 for a newscast that included a segment on a pornographic film star.

    In a statement, an FCC spokesperson said the agency “reviews all complaints and determines what is actionable under the Constitution and the law.” It added that the main responsibility for what goes on the air lies with radio station owners, saying that “broadcast licensees have a duty to act in the public interest.”

    The world of talk radio and podcasting is huge, and anti-vaccine sentiment is a small part of it. iHeart offers an educational podcast series about COVID-19 vaccines, and Spotify created a hub for podcasts about COVID-19 from news outlets including ABC and Bloomberg.

    There has been at least one turnaround among hosts once skeptical of the pandemic and efforts to counter it. Bill Cunningham, who has a radio show in Cincinnati that is syndicated by iHeart’s Premiere Networks and available on Apple, spent the early part of the pandemic claiming that COVID-19 was overhyped. He revised his view on the air this year, describing his decision to get vaccinated and encouraging his listeners to do the same.

    Recently, he expressed his eagerness to get a booster shot and mentioned that he had picked up a new nickname: “The Vaxxinator.”

    © 2021 The New York Times Company

  21. 3 1/2 months after Israel enacted their 3rd jab, the daily cases are down to 480 per day from a high of 8,300 daily cases – an improvement of ~87.6% drop in daily cases. 3 1/2 months after Uttar Predesh enacted their medical treatment kits, the daily cases were down to 30 per day from a high of 35,311 per day – an improvement of ~99.91% drop in daily cases – with no deaths. In Israel the cases peaked 6wks after their 3rd jab policy began. In Uttar Predesh, the cases peaked 9 days after the early treatment pak policy began. It took Israel 3 1/2 months to drop their daily cases by 80%. It took Uttar Predesh 1 month to drop the daily cases by 90%.

    These are two very different pictures of success.

    Uttar Predesh is an Indian state which is 25-30X as large as Israel with a sub-par health care system, miserable living conditions and at the time had only ~5% vaccination with substandard vaccines. Israel has a premier healthcare system, easily superior living standards and ~90% vaccination with 60-70% boosters, for which top dollar has been paid.

    It is good that the case rate is finally dropped as far as it has in Israel, but the cases are not zero, and they are not nearly zero with 5,595 active cases and the deaths are still slightly higher, on average, than before the 3rd jab began in Israel. Covid is a serious disease that requires rapid treatment. Rapid treatment not only keeps people from being sick, it keeps them from being hospitalized, it keeps them from dying, and it keeps them from being infectious to others. Whereas the vaccines are the pursued policy in Israel, they are lacking the effect of early treatment. This is also ignoring the issue of Severe Adverse Effects from the vaccines as noise, which is also pursued policy, in most places, unfortunately.

    https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/thedesertreview.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/4/19/4199bf1a-044f-11ec-a092-c7981d379fcb/612402b02ca03.image.png (see top graph for Uttar Predesh)

    https://corona.help/country/india/state/uttar-pradesh

  22. There have been 10,600 people in Israel who have been fully vaccinated with three shots but still contracted COVID-19, the Health Ministry said.
    Does this mean the vaccines are not working?

    The opposite is true, health experts say: Those 10,600 out of four million people who received the third jab are only 0.27%.

    As more people in Israel received a third jab, the number of daily cases rapidly started to decline. In the second half of August, Israel was averaging 8,300 daily cases. Today, it is averaging only 480.

    The percentage of people testing positive for the virus has declined from an average of more than 5% to 0.56%.
    And hospitalizations have gone down, too, hitting only 200 people on Friday – and 20% of patients are in mild condition.

    Boosters are working when used. Claiming vaccines do not work is simply false!!!