tax dollars at work, yeah

Yesterday, the US Food and Drug Administration granted approval of one of the C-19 pharmaceuticals for persons 16 years and up. For those who are paying attention, this does not exactly provide warm fuzzies. 

Perhaps most concerning is the abandonment of protocols and transparency. Right out of the gate, the approval was based on only six months of data, about a year and a half before clinical studies could even be complete. 

Conducting studies assumes we care about the data, but this approval provided no visible data, no review of the data, nor a rigorous discussion of said data. The FDA abandoned its own protocol to hold a formal advisory committee meeting on the topic, conveniently avoiding scrutiny and discussion. (In fact, that committee only met twice this year, on Feb. 26 to consider the J & J EUA, and on June 10 to discuss pediatric use.)

Bear in mind, that discussion would have centered on the drugmaker’s own clinical study.

According to the FDA, “More than half of the clinical trial participants were followed for safety outcomes for at least four months after the second dose. Overall, approximately 12,000 recipients have been followed for at least six months.” This, when the original cohort in the study was 44,000. Some of those trial participants gone missing include the control group, in an obvious corruption of ‘science’, since placebo participants eventually took the drug under study.

This aggressive push to approval is hard to fathom especially in light of the truly disconcerting numbers in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System database. The lack of explanation or insight or basic follow-up on the historically high numbers, including the shocking number of deaths, cannot simply be ignored. One cannot wave the numbers away implying it’s all just a coincidence without any forthcoming, honest follow-up. Unless, I suppose, you’re the FDA and media relying on a complacent public.

Speaking of public, yesterday’s approval also brushed off the long-standing protocol of a public hearing. Such lack of transparency and dissing of the public and democratic values is consistent with what Harvard experts deduced about corporate capture of federal regulatory bodies.

All that aside, why the big rush anyway? Despite assertions to the contrary, this hasty, cloaked approval will do nothing to coerce the vaccine-hesitant. In fact, the secrecy, haste, and refusal to openly broach developing data provokes further concern in that group and others. The landscape of suppression, censorship, and propaganda does not encourage trust either.

The big rush does, however, pave the way for further and broader mandates. Strangely, this full court press comes in the context of increasing data that instead suggest caution and a closer look.

Health aside, this blasé corruption of process bears implications about our governance which should concern any citizen. Blindly finding comfort in this approval is misplaced trust. We should expect and demand better.

###

Stand for Freedom

yup, and science is real

We are hearing “science” every day. Our lives have been torn asunder the last few months because “science.” 

Except it hasn’t really been science we’ve been hearing. We’ve been hearing selected pieces of science accompanied by some mixed up data that serves a specific narrative.

As we all know, if what someone has to say does not agree with the selected science of the World Health Organization, it is likely to be censored on platforms like Facebook or YouTube or Twitter. When you’re doing that, it’s not science anymore, it’s dogma.

Way back when, Galileo was censored by the Pope because of his belief in a heliocentric system. He was finally hauled up before the Inquisition and condemned to life imprisonment for “heresy.” Hmm.

Or how about the somewhat less well known Ignaz Semmelweis who made the observation back in the mid-19th century that hand-washing could positively impact mortality rates in the hospital where he worked as an obstetrician? Others in his profession did not appreciate the inference that they were ‘dirty’ and it didn’t end well for him.

Even Einstein’s theory of relativity was largely dismissed by many for a good long while.

My point is simple. I believe in keeping an open mind and being fully informed. We need to hear it all. We need to discuss all of it.

We don’t need Big Brother-style fact checkers out there filtering what we can and can’t read or consider. We need to recognize that science has limitations, and that it can be politicized, subverted for particular purposes, or handled incorrectly.

We need to hear about all of the research, not just some of it. We need to hear about more than the industry-funded, cherry-picked studies. We need to entertain opposing points of view rather than rejecting them out of hand with scorn and labels of quackery. And, as always, we need to follow the money.

I do not believe the WHO is the final arbiter of TRUTH. Nor is Anthony Fauci or Deborah Birx. Or Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer or Andrew Cuomo.

There is so much money and power involved in the current life-impacting decision-making, that we cannot afford to settle for dogma.

We want science. And we want it in the context of objectivity and freedom.