"Larry Sanger, the man who co-founded Wikipedia, has cautioned that the website can’t always be trusted to give people the truth.
He said it can give a “reliably establishment point of view on pretty much everything.”
“Can you trust it to always give you the truth? Well, it depends on what you think the truth is,” said Mr Sanger, who co-founded Wikipedia in 2001 alongside Jimmy Wales.
He told Lockdown TV that “if only one version of the facts is allowed then that gives a huge incentive to wealthy and powerful people to seize control of things like Wikipedia in order to shore up their power. And they do that.”"
Imagine that a newly published comprehensive review of mask-wearing by a prestigious medical publication concluded that mask wearing offered us significant protections from COVID. You'd see those findings echoed by most major news organizations. Biden's attorneys would trumpet those findings in Biden's attempt to reverse the 11th Circuit ruling, so that he could make better arguments requiring airline passengers to put their damned masks back on. Well, the opposite has happened.
I personally know Dr. Kristen Walsh. She is a dedicated pediatrician. She is one of the many practicing physicians who read the January 30, 2023 Cochrane Library review of evidence as to whether masks prevented the spread of COVID. Walsh's Feb 1, 2023 article is titled: "New meta-analysis should end discussion of mask mandates in schools." An excerpt:
From where I sit, as a primary care doctor practicing in an academic clinic setting, this review was big, huge science news. It gathered and studied 78 randomized controlled trials, both pre- and mid-COVID, and addressed COVID, flu, and other respiratory viral illnesses. I was surprised (and not in a pleasant way), therefore, to see almost complete media silence after the review was released. I didn’t see anything about it on cable news; no articles in well-known newspapers. The tweet from the Cochrane Database announcing the review only had 68 likes and 24 retweets after 24 hours. “How is this possible?” I thought. “Why does no one care whether masks work or not?” Probably because the answer was pretty much: not.
Upon reading Walsh's Substack article, I did my due diligence, searching the websites of the NYT, WaPo, CNN, MSNBC and NPR. As of today, you will not find a single word about the Cochrane Review declaring that there is no evidence supporting the use of masks to prevent COVID.
Why the silence? I would start my answer with the COVID edition of the Twitter files. I would add that we are looking squarely at a sad example of the sunk costs phenomenon: Most legacy news outlets (and their pals in the U.S. Government) are determined to keep riding their severely flawed COVID narrative because they fear the ridicule they would face if they did an about-face. They have shown themselves to be obedient servants to the stern dictates of the Trusted News Initiative, to the Biden Administration and to the U.S. Security State, which has dedicated at least eighty FBI agents to the task of making sure that highly decorated doctors and researchers (and ordinary people) stop thinking for themselves for safety's sake. We are being protected from facts regarding the failures of masks for the same reason that we are being protected from other COVID-related facts and opinions, including the recent shocking revelations of Jordon Walker, Pfizer's Worldwide Director of R&D Strategic Operations and mRNA Scientific Planning.
Let me be clear: The science did not change. Public health experts started lying. We never had good data that mask mandates help, or that mask advice (a softer policy) improves outcomes. Yet it was widely pushed— most likely to distract from true federal failures. After vaccination, not only do we not have evidence. . . Here is the big summary finding. With 276,000 participants in RCTs or cluster RCTs, masking does nothing. No reduction in influenza like or Covid like illness and no reduction in confirmed flu or COVID. That’s stone cold negative. . . . This is why Fauci said what he said initially on 60 minutes. He wasn’t lying. The best evidence showed no benefit. That was before we saw a concerted campaign to promote cloth masking— a bizarre way to treat anxiety. People routinely wore cloth masks outside— something that was less 21st century and more 3rd century, akin to animal sacrifice, and dancing to make the rains come.
Our public health officials have earned our distrust. Vinay Prasad John Mandrola, writing at The Free Press:
We believe the feverish speculation that Covid-19 vaccines have led to increased sudden deaths is largely due to a trust problem with our public health leaders. And Americans have good reasons for their skepticism.
For example, when the evidence emerged that myocarditis in young males was linked to the mRNA vaccines, the Biden administration denied it: We have not seen a signal and we’ve actually looked intentionally for the signal in the over 200 million doses we’ve given,” Rochelle Walensky, CDC director, said last April. This was despite the fact that it had been reported by researchers in Israel two months earlier.
When further studies confirmed a link to heart inflammation in younger males, instead of acknowledging that the evidence was concerning and requiring changes to vaccination recommendations to protect this group, officials pivoted. They asserted that vaccine-related myocarditis was not a big concern. Walensky described the myocarditis findings as “these mild, self-limited cases.” They also pushed the line that infection with Covid-19 itself—as is true of many viruses—can cause myocarditis, and that this was a far bigger danger.
We dispute both claims. The majority of young people with vaccine-related myocarditis are hospitalized, and then given long lists of activities to avoid. That is serious. And the evidence for the assertion that a Covid-19 infection is a big heart risk for young people is unconvincing.
Another front on which the government has not been forthcoming is the question of whether or not the vaccines actually prevent the spread of the disease. Last January, Walensky finally acknowledged what millions of people who had gotten the shots, then came down with Covid-19, could have told her—that the vaccines do not prevent people from getting or spreading the illness. Walensky herself contracted the virus for a second time last October, a month after she was boosted with the new bivalent vaccine she wants everyone to take.
People expect leaders to incorporate changing information into their messaging. For instance, since the vaccine does not prevent transmission, there was no longer a societal benefit in getting vaccinated. It should have become a personal health decision. But this message never came—just the opposite. Our health officials have been pushing boosters on everyone from kindergarten on up.
Even worse, many colleges, following CDC guidance, are mandating the new bivalent booster for all students. That means that these schools are violating the rights of bodily autonomy in young people, and increasing their risk of a vaccine side effect for no purpose.
Yet another unanswered question is why U.S. public health leaders, unlike many others around the world, do not consider natural immunity from contracting Covid-19 when making vaccination recommendations. Our officials simply ignore the growing evidence that a Covid infection confers resistance to reinfection as effectively, or even more so, than vaccines.
News this week about the FDA indicates that a change is coming to the current vaccination recommendations. Officials are expected to call for an annual dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, similar to the flu shot schedule. But there is no indication this guidance will be accompanied by the long-overdue studies looking into whether these vaccines provide sufficient protection to make any risks worthwhile.
Trust, once lost, is hard to regain. People feel that their medical leaders are withholding basic facts, denying reality, disregarding new information, or worse, causing them harm.
I have now seen enough to regret that that I had two COVID vaccines and a booster. I accepted these jabs because I trusted the public health authorities. I will not accept any more boosters. I am not alone. In the past six months, I have spoken to at least six friends who vote Democrat--all but one of them told me that they will not accept any more boosters and that they are concerned about risks associated with the vaccines.
I follow about ten well credentialed doctors online, including Dr. Aseem Malhotra, Dr. Robert Malone and Dr. Peter McCoullough, who raise these concerns and many others. I've seen highly disturbing evidence that many smart doctors have been shut out of the conversation for three years (and they continue to be kept out of the conversation on legacy news outlets). We did not have a real or meaningful national conversation on the risks of these vaccines compared to the risks of COVID regarding many age groups. I saw the Great Barrington Declaration disparaged for mere political reasons, not medical. Our public health authorities told us that the vaccines were extremely safe, but now I'm not convinced of that.
Our public health authorities told us many things with the utmost confidence that have now been proven untrue. And although this is anecdotal, I've seen far too many videos of young healthy people collapsing, many of them dying. Over the past several years, I saw many numbers regarding the COVID risk of death that failed to break out the numbers of those who were obese, elderly and with comorbidities, failing to separate those from those of us who are healthy or young. I found out that many hospitals were conflating death with COVID with death from COVID, thereby inflating COVID death numbers.
Prior to vaccination, I was in very good health prior to getting vaccinated, very unlikely to die of COVID, even unvaccinated. I had an adverse reaction after my 2nd vaccination and it continues to affect me (inflamed toes). I know that I was also at some risk of harm from COVID, but as I write this, I believe we have been manipulated and lied to in many ways and that I have no meaningful way to be assured whether I was at more risk of harm from the vaccine than from the disease. Maybe someday we will know for sure.
The historically wretched track record of Big Pharma for lying to us in order to make $ multiplies my concern and frustration. Everyone will have their own opinion on this topic. I'm not suggesting to anyone else what they should do, but no more boosters for me.
The evidence comes from the original double-blind, randomised control trials, that led to the approval of both Pfizer and Moderna by regulators worldwide. Malhotra explains, ‘In a reanalysis of the original trials with the Wuhan strain, eminent scientists essentially found you were more likely to suffer a serious adverse event – for example hospitalisation, disability, or a life-changing event – than you were to be hospitalised with Covid. That means, in essence, the mRNA vaccine should likely never, ever have been approved for anybody in the first place.’
Here is Brand's Rumble Interview of Dr. Aseem Malhotra:
In his interview, Malhotra quotes Gandhi: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” He indicates that we are not, finally, in the "fight" stage.
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