The Murdoch Media and the Pandemic of the Vaccinated
By Paul Collits
The Australian newspaper, News Limited's flagship publication in the country of birth of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, has attempted a desperate throw of the dice in an effort to somehow maintain the Covid vaccine narrative. In doing so, the Murdoch's right-of-centre Aussie organ has, effectively, admitted defeat. Without saying so, of course. The hopelessness of the corporate media’s attempts to keep the vaccines-as-saviour story going has hit the wall.
If anyone is paying attention.
The Australian recently commissioned “research” in an attempt to show that Australian jurisdictions that have higher rates of Covid vaccination have better Covid death outcomes than those with lesser take-ups of the jab.
The Australian, of course, has been The Daily Vaccinator for two years now.
Its journalists and sadly its columnists, no doubt encouraged or pressured by senior management, have run the line that vaccines will save us from Covid (palpably false), that vaccine mandates are no big deal for rights and freedom (from a newspaper proprietor who was once feted by freedom-loving think tanks) , and that dissidents who oppose vaccine mandates are crackpots (we are not).
The study’s headline reads, breathlessly:
Covid-19 booster shots work to reduce the death rate.
“Work to reduce”. That is, do not stop. Do not prevent. The vaccinated still die. In their thousands, in Australia. Conversely, thousands, indeed millions, would not die from Covid if they got it, absent the vaccine. This basic reality about Covid makes studies like this and their conclusions meaningless.
As per the usual way these reports are put together, a tame academic of apparent weight is suddenly produced in order both to lend weight to the validity of the study and to support its conclusions. The Australian has these tame academics on speed dial.
Deakin University epidemiologist Catherine Bennett said the apparent correlation between booster doses and death rates was a demonstration of the significant extra protection against severe disease and death conferred by a third shot. “I certainly think it’s one of the things we expect to see,” Professor Bennett said. “The vaccine efficacy against severe illness is reasonably striking.”
Catherine Bennett has form in relation to Covid State spruiking: "Deakin University epidemiology chair Catherine Bennett told the Geelong Advertiser that many lives were saved because of the lockdown."
A completely unproven, unprovable and indeed implausible assertion. Catherine Bennett also has professional links to Dorevitch Pathology which makes large sums of money from Covid testing. Deakin University, of course, has received substantial funding from both the Gates Foundation and from the British Wellcome Trust, which has close like to eugenics (and is chaired by Julia Gillard). Deakin here is yet another case of the “two clicks to Bill Gates funding” rule, which seldom fails.
What of the “study” itself? The study notes: "States with higher booster vaccination rates have experienced markedly lower death rates from Covid-19, new analysis shows, as top heath chiefs urge those holding out to get their third shot immediately."
Only 58.1 per cent of eligible people have had a third shot in Queensland, 64.1 per cent in NSW, 68.1 per cent in Victoria and 68.4 per cent in South Australia.
Western Australia has the highest booster rate in the country at 80.2 per cent, and despite experiencing the highest number of cases per head of population since February it has had the lowest death rate from Covid-19.
First, and an obvious point. Weren’t vaccines sold to us as preventing Covid transmission? That is (or, at least, was) the point of the much-hyped vaccines. All the rabid attacks on those described as “anti-vaxxers” by Jack the Insider and all the other Murdoch operatives were, I thought, based on this premise. If the vaccines didn’t stop you getting Covid, what, pray, would be the point of mandates? Any undergraduate student of logic would be scratching his or her head to figure out the point of this particular policy.
Second, there is the problem of correlation not meaning causation. While studies at state or national scale that match the vaccination status of victims of Covid can be useful, they should be augmented (“triangulated”) by other research methods.
Third, the study is selective. Western Australia versus three other states is not conclusive.
Fourth, the study is not sufficiently granular to support the conclusions that are reached. We would need to know far more about the health status and other circumstances of those who died, for example, in order to reach firm conclusions. Perhaps more of those vaccinated with boosters in WA were young and healthy.
Fifth, the study only provides a single snapshot in time. Studies taken at different stages of the vaccination rollout might well show very different results.
Sixth, as we shall see, the findings of the research undertaken on behalf of The Australian are contradicted by many international studies of a far more robust nature. The Oz’s study is an outlier.
Seventh, even if the study accurate, so what? If vaccines simply reduce the death rate from Covid – if they do – well, their function becomes therapeutic rather than prophylactic. If you need a therapeutic, well we already have plenty of those. Oh, I forgot, the Big Pharma-Big Government establishment made them illegal. Why should it be the remotest interest of government whether those making relative assessments about their own risk of getting Covid choose or do not choose to get the jab?
Finally, if the study is anything, it is merely reinforcement of the idea of selectively targeted and voluntary, not universal and enforced, vaccinations. As per the Great Barrington Declaration, now signed by nearly a million people.
https://gbdeclaration.org/
In any case, is it really the case that Covid vaccines reduce the death rate from Covid? Not so much. International research of far greater scientific heft than that outlined above shows clearly that vaccines are ineffective, at every level. It tells a very different story to The Australian’s propaganda and its intellectually feeble and clearly ideological attempt at vaccines research.
Studies about the effectiveness of vaccines in stopping viral transmission turn out to be relevant to claims that the vaccines ameliorate disease and cut deaths from Covid, simply because the more people that are infected, the more are likely to get sick and to die, especially the aged and infirm. Stop infections and you will cut deaths. And mounting evidence suggests that the jab may work for a while, then it doesn’t any more.
A recent Qatar study shows vaccine effectiveness reduces to zero within six months.
Other studies of vaccine effectiveness show similar fade. Israeli research has suggested the boosters fade after a mere eight weeks. One headline in January 2022 read, “Fourth vaccine shot not good enough against Omicron”. Another suggested “minimal protection”. As The Daily Sceptic noted Other studies of vaccine effectiveness show similar fade. Israeli research has suggested the boosters fade after a mere eight weeks. One headline in January 2022 read, “Fourth vaccine shot not good enough against Omicron”. Another suggested “minimal protection”. As The Daily Sceptic noted: "Fourth Vaccine Dose Makes No Difference, Study From Israel Shows, as Infections and ICU Admissions Surge."
Then there is the latest British research. Boosters do not help and may makes things worse for the vaccinated.
"mRNA Covid vaccines offer essentially no defense against Omicron only months after a booster shot, according to a major new study from British researchers.
"Both antibody and T-cell protection are nearly non-existent, the scientists found.
"In an even more worrisome development, when vaccinated but previously uninfected people suffer breakthrough Omicron infections, their T-cell response is biased toward earlier versions of Sars-Cov-2 - not to the Omicron variant that has actually infected them.
"In other words, the mRNA shots appear to permanently wrongfoot the immune systems of people who receive and bias them toward producing T-cells to attack variants that no longer exist - even though they never were infected with those variants at all.
"The T-cell problems are particularly surprising and worrisome.
"While antibodies are the first line of defense against infection and try to clear the virus from the bloodstream, T-cells are the crucial second line. They attack and destroy infected cells and also work with other parts of the immune system to produce more and better targeted antibodies later."
Vaccine advocates have claimed endlessly that mRNA-generated T-cells help keep people from becoming severely ill with Covid even after frontline antibody protection against infection disappears.
This study suggests that supposed protection may be a myth, and the low death rates from Omicron are simply a result of Omicron’s general lack of virulence in vaccinated and unvaccinated people alike.
Natural immunity offers far, far greater protection against Covid than the vaccines. As does prior infection with Covid.
In another piece Alex Berenson, former New York Times reporter and author of Pandemia: How Coronavirus Hysteria Took Over Our Government, Rights, and Lives, is labelled "The news for Covid vaccines gets worse and worse".
He writes: "A big study says natural immunity protects against Omicron for over a year; mRNA shots fail in months. This is the third paper with awful mRNA data in a week. When will the media even pretend to care?
"Two doses of Covid vaccines offer no protection against Omicron infection and may even increase the risk of infection within months, according to a new paper in the New England Journal of Medicine.
"In contrast, people previously infected with earlier coronavirus variants had a 50 percent lower risk of Omicron infection. That protection remained steady even more than a year after the initial infection.
"But the details of the paper are even more devastating for mRNA shot advocates than those topline figures."
https://asenseofplacemagazine.com/australias-unmitigated-covid-fiasco/
day ago · 556 likes · 166 comments · Alex Berenson
The scrupulously fair Swiss Doctor reports:
Prior to omicron (i.e. during the alpha and delta periods), several large studies showed that vaccine protection against symptomatic infection decreased from about 90%/95% shortly after vaccination to close to 0% within about half a year (Lancet). This decrease was first seen in Israel during the delta wave in summer 2021…
… Since omicron, vaccine protection against infection starts at 50%-60% shortly after vaccination and decreases to 0% within 4 to 6 months. A booster vaccination restores protection to 50%-60%, but again only for a short period of time. (NEJM) The lower peak protection is due to the partial immune escape of the omicron variant.
… The fact that vaccine protection against infection and transmission is waning rapidly means that so-called “vaccine passports” are epidemiologically inappropriate or indeed counterproductive. For the same reason, vaccine mandates, even in healthcare workers, are medically unjustified. Based on Israeli data from early summer 2021, these facts had already been known before most countries even introduced such schemes.
What about protection against severe disease and death, the core of The Australian’s claims?
… since omicron, protection against infection starts at 50% and drops to zero within a few months, whereas protection against severe disease and death in senior citizens starts at 75% and decreases to 50% within a few months.
On this view, there is certainly some protection, but no guarantees, and it wanes dramatically over time. You are vaccinated, and still at risk of serious illness and death. Moreover, astonishingly, much of the international data doesn’t break down effectiveness against death by age. So perhaps many of those vaccinated people who are jabbed, then get Covid, don’t get really sick and die because, well they never were going to, as they were largely young and healthy. And perhaps the data on vaccinated deaths might have been considerably less favourable had more old people been included in the various studies.
As Alex Berenson often says, “virus gonna virus”.
Then there are the studies related to hospitalisations and deaths, both from Covid itself and from adverse reactions to the vaccines. First, there are data on the risk of hospitalisation and death, and they are not reassuring.
For example, country-by-country data showing the relationship between vaccination rates and Covid deaths show a clear pattern. Speaking of correlations, Craig Kelly recently shared the following charts. Not quite the same numbers reported by The Australian. Our nation beats all comers on both the highest vaccination rate and the highest number of deaths per million. Ouch.
Some recent New South Wales hospitalisation figures confirm this. As noted on Craig Kelly’s Telegram page on 11 June 2022, the official NSW weekly figures were as follows:
Admitted to hospital with Covid:
· 50 – who had 4 or more injections
· 184 – 3 injections
· 93 – two injections
· 0 – no injections.
Admitted to Intensive Care Units with Covid:
· 5 – 4 or more injections
· 20 – 3 injections
· 2 – 2 injections
· 0 – no injections.
So, at least in the Premier State that week, it was far better to be unvaccinated if you want to not get very ill with Covid.
https://asenseofplacemagazine.com/is-this-what-success-looks-like-what-the-australian-government-doesnt-want-the-public-to-know/
As Igor Chudov notes: Hospitals are overwhelmed by the vaccinated. Endless Covid short term reinfections, plaguing the UK and the rest of the Western world, are sliding towards “Chronic Covid”.
Herd immunity is enjoyed only by unvaccinated countries.
Overwhelmed by the vaccinated. No herd immunity among highly vaccinated countries.
Tom Woods noted in April 2022: A new Danish study making the rounds will surprise people who have been getting their information from officially approved sources.
We've heard it said again and again that the shots help prevent death from Covid.
This study seeks to find out just how effective the vaccines have been in preventing death.
It concludes that the AstraZeneca and Johnson and Johnson vaccines have had a positive effect in preventing deaths, while the mRNA vaccines (Pfizer and Moderna) have had no effect.
Woods quoted the renowned former Harvard medical scholar, Martin Kulldorff.
In the case of the mRNA vaccines, says Kulldorff:
… there was no evidence of a mortality reduction. For every 100 deaths among the unvaccinated, there are 103 deaths among the vaccinated, with a 95% confidence interval of 63 to 171 deaths. That is, the mRNA vaccines may reduce mortality a little bit, or they may increase it; we do not know....
For the mRNA vaccines, there was a reduction in Covid deaths but an increase in cardiovascular deaths, but neither was statistically significant. So, either result could be due to random chance.
Alternatively, the vaccines may reduce the risk for Covid deaths while increasing the risk for cardiovascular deaths. We do not know, and Pfizer and Moderna did not design the RCTs to let us know.
So, no evidence of mortality reduction. Then, (yet again), there is Israel: Professor Yaakov Jerris, the Director of a coronavirus ward in an Israeli hospital, has said between 70% and 80% of the serious cases in his hospital are vaccinated and that the vaccine has “no significance regarding severe illness”. Israel National News has the story.
Are Israeli hospitals really overloaded with unvaccinated Covid patients? According to Professor Yaakov Jerris, Director of Ichilov Hospital’s coronavirus ward, the situation is completely opposite.
“Right now, most of our severe cases are vaccinated,” Jerris told Channel 13 News. “They had at least three injections. Between seventy and eighty percent of the serious cases are vaccinated. So, the vaccine has no significance regarding severe illness, which is why just 20% to 25% of our patients are unvaccinated.”
“Most of our severe cases are vaccinated”. Boom.
Then there is the question of adverse events from the jab. Will Jones has been examining this. His headline?
Covid Vaccines More Likely to Put You in Hospital Than Keep You Out, BMJ Editor’s Analysis of Pfizer and Moderna Trial Data Finds.
The BMJ is the British Medical Journal. More likely to put you in hospital. Oops.
The World Health Organisation concurs, as The Daily Expose points out:
World Health Organization Study concludes risk of suffering Serious Injury due to COVID Vaccination is 339% higher than risk of being hospitalised with COVID-19.
The list of illnesses and adverse reactions recorded related to the Covid jab runs to many pages. Not just, infamously, myocarditis. Official data are said by insiders seriously to under-represent the actual deaths and illnesses. Declining sperm counts among the vaccinated is merely the most recent side effect reported.
One of the world's leading and most respected critics on the rollout of the vaccines, Alex Berenson, is always worth following on these issues. Here, for example, is his notes on the widely reported drop in sperm counts amongst vaccinated males, and all the usual denials from vaccine promoters and their now totally discredited supporters in the mainstream media.
The vaccine injuries and deaths reported both anecdotally (if you look hard enough) and through official Government adverse reactions reports should be front page headlines. Rebecca Weisser at The Spectator, a formidable intellect and former senior editor at The Australian, wondered in May 2022 why no one in Australia was asking questions about reports of vaccine-linked deaths. They still aren’t.
What about Sudden Adult Death Syndrome (SADS) and excess death data, stated by the Australian Bureau of Statistics and noted by The Australian’s own Adam Creighton to be around 20 per cent in 2022?
This is the new way of dying. Dying of “died suddenly”. 20 per cent is not nothing. Something to be discussed, you might think, even if not fully explained. Still, it is of no interest to the vaccine deaths deniers.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/04/vaccine-mysteries-need-explaining/
What about the negative impact of vaccines on herd immunity and, therefore, Covid health?
Here is Igor Chudov, one of the many critics who have gained credibility and followers as the government engineered fiasco unfolds.
He wrote in his piece Herd Immunity Was Entirely Possible!:
Controversy over “herd immunity” has been with us since beginning of Covid-19. “Herd immunity” is defined as a critical percentage of people who are immune to the virus, that is so high that the pathogen does not have enough susceptible hosts to jump to and from to sustain transmission, and thus the pandemic stops or remains at extremely low level.
I would like to explain and show, in this article, that if we did not have “lockdowns” and “vaccination”, we, in the United States and elsewhere, would already be at herd immunity and Covid would be in the past, just like the Spanish Flu of 1918 became a thing of the past without any vaccines.
Unfortunately, after the majority of people were vaccinated, herd immunity is no longer possible at all.
Narratives of mainstream media and the so called “health experts” about herd immunity changed several times. Before vaccines, “herd immunity” and the Great Barrington Declaration, calling for smart ways to reach herd immunity, were vilified and declared to be a very dangerous concept...
What about the impact on T cells? Alex Berenson notes: "mRNA Covid vaccines offer essentially no defence against Omicron only months after a booster shot, according to a major new study from British researchers.
"Both antibody and T-cell protection are nearly non-existent, the scientists found.
"In an even more worrisome development, when vaccinated but previously uninfected people suffer breakthrough Omicron infections, their T-cell response is biased toward earlier versions of Sars-Cov-2 - not to the Omicron variant that has actually infected them.
"In other words, the mRNA shots appear to permanently wrongfoot the immune systems of people who receive and bias them toward producing T-cells to attack variants that no longer exist - even though they never were infected with those variants at all.
"The T-cell problems are particularly surprising and worrisome."
Then there is the question of vaccine shedding, described as “the latest anti-vaxx myth” by some of Google’s optimised pro-vaxxers. Maybe it is. But isn’t science meant to ask questions, not dismiss them? The lab leak theory of the virus’s origins was once ridiculed, too. Now it is the default position. It is the same with any number of “conspiracy theories” about Covid that have been proven correct.
In any case, Chudov again takes on the issue:
Do vaccinated people shed their vaccine by-products to us? We definitely, for sure, knew that vaccine shedding was not a thing, because “health experts and fact checkers” told us so. And we “believe science” and our “health experts”. Right?
Wrong, he says. There is both anecdotal and scientific evidence, the latter still embryonic. But with these vaccines, who knows? There is literally NO evidence of long-term damage from the Covid jab. How could there be with a rushed (at warp speed, alas), politicised, experimental product? Certainly, one is immediately suspicious when fact checkers rush to pooh-pooh a theory.
What about the falsification of data during the vaccine scam? As Thorsteinn Siglaugsson points out:
Even if the majority of the vaccinated may still hang on to their belief that the vaccination did something for them, the spiking excess mortality and the obvious failure of the vaccines to prevent transmission are really too clear to be denied. And now it even turns out the original claims of efficacy were based on a falsification of data.
As Icelandic writer and economist Thornsteinn Siglaugsson writes: "Most people have become complicit in the lockdown and vaccination narrative. They have repeated the mantras so often they themselves have become stakeholders; it is now their narrative also, which means changing opinion is difficult. It is hard to admit having been fooled, especially when you‘ve taken an active part in fooling others also. And if you‘ve been active in ostracising your unvaccinated friends and relatives, there may even be no way back for you.
Most people still believe in the narrative, consider those sceptical of the vaccines as crazy „anti-vaxxers“, and the belief in the lockdowns is based on a very strong fallacy of intuition, which is hard to escape. Admitting that what you‘ve wholeheartedly supported is not only causing misery and death all around the world, but even scarring your own children for life, is probably too difficult for most people. So they close their eyes.
"I believe we‘re approaching a tipping point. The facts speak for themselves, and facts have the annoying habit of becoming known; in the end they always do. We are still in the phase of denial, we still cling to our false beliefs, we still cannot comprehend the consequences of what was done to us; what we did to ourselves."
Akin to falsification of data are the grandiose and utterly baseless claims for vaccines as therapeutics, as is inferred in The Australian’s study. Justin Trudeau has now had Covid. He stated on Twitter: "I’ve tested positive for COVID-19. I’ll be following public health guidelines and isolating. I feel okay, but that’s because I got my shots. So, if you haven’t, get vaccinated - and if you can, get boosted. Let’s protect our healthcare system, each other, and ourselves."
What a load of tendentious propaganda. But is this so different from The Australian’s “research” in its intent and sloppiness? No, not really. I feel okay because “I got my shots”. Something unprovable is pitched to the unboostered to get them to take an experimental drug most of them don’t need. Unprovable and most likely false, given Trudeau’s youth and seeming good health.
Second, what a load of tendentious propaganda. But is this so different from The Australian’s “research” in its intent and sloppiness? No, not really. I feel okay because “I got my shots”. Something unprovable is pitched to the unboostered to get them to take an experimental drug most of them don’t need. Unprovable and most likely false, given Trudeau’s youth and seeming good health.
The Daily Expose notes:
Quite how Trudeau was able to claim he only had mild symptoms because he had taken an experimental injection is beyond us, it’s impossible to prove.
And judging by official Government of Canada data he is actually incredibly lucky not to have been hospitalised or have lost his life if he truly has been vaccinated. Because over the past month, 9 in every 10 Covid-19 deaths in Canada have been among the fully vaccinated, and 4 in every 5 of those deaths were among the triple jabbed.
80 per cent of hospitalisations were triple jabbed. 80 per cent.
Not to mention all of the studies done on vaccine inefficacy, just a few of which are noted above. The Murdoch study mentions none of these things, and engages in none of the accepted methods of (natural and social) scientific research. You might think that not referring to contrary evidence or difficult questions for your own research is the ethical equivalent of falsifying data. The greatest sin of scholarship.
It should be taken for what it is, cherry picking and propaganda. Journalism-as-advocacy. Similar to the bias of which The Oz journalists and columnists endlessly accuse the ABC.
The Swiss Doctor identifies three positions in relation to vaccines:
Positive/promotional: This is the position taken by vaccine manufacturers, many politicians and many (but not all) health agencies. It is typically driven by commercial or political considerations. In addition, many scientists who depend on government or industry money or who want to publish in high-impact journals have also taken a promotional position.
It is clear where the Australian corporate media fall, along with their house-trained academics.
Despite The Australian’s commissioned study and its best efforts overall, the science is in. Covid is a pandemic of the vaccinated. End. Of. Story.
https://swprs.org/how-effective-are-covid-vaccines-really/
The Murdoch press in Australia specialises in Covid ideology and pro-vaxx disinformation. It is a corporatist media spruiker for Big Pharma. Good journalism, indeed all good research, requires context, a statement of the research’s strengths and its weaknesses, situates it among broader research findings on the topic in question, and assesses its own contribution to overall knowledge.
So, whatever else the senior management at The Oz thinks it is doing, it is, in fact, admitting defeat in relation to its persistent, obstinate and, at times, vicious campaign in support of the jab and against those who question the Vaccine State. It most assuredly is not strengthening their case. If they are aware of the contrary position, yet do not run it, or even refer to it, that makes them liars. Worse still, however, they and their supine journalists might actually believe it all.
The Corona astrologers are corrupt, but also sincere, and that makes them even more dangerous.
German scholar Eugyppius
Very true in relation both to the Covid media and to the Covid-university-pharma industrial technocracy.
Paul Collits is an Australian freelance writer and independent researcher. He publishes widely across a number of Australia’s leading publications and has been one of the country’s single most cogent commentators throughout the Covid era. He has worked in government, industry and the university sector, and has taught at tertiary level in three different disciplines – politics, geography and planning and business studies. A collection of his writing published in A Sense of Place Magazine can be found here. You can follow his most recent work here.
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