If you asked your barber whether you needed a haircut, would you expect an unbiased answer?
And what would you expect, if you asked the vaccine industry whether the world needed more vaccines – would they say no?
It’s time to spill the beans, with a thread. Strap yourself in.
A few disclaimers.
Firstly, believing things which are in your economic self-interest doesn’t make you a bad person. It’s completely normal.
Like millions of others, I would benefit financially from the scrapping of Covid-19 rules. I have no hesitation in acknowledging that.
But what about the experts who hype the risks from Covid-19? What if they might benefit from the fear they generate?
We should still trust that they act in good faith, and we should recognise their expertise (we recognise our barber’s expertise in cutting hair, after all).
The people I’m about to review are all brilliant minds, with illustrious careers and countless valuable achievements.
All I’m saying is: let’s be realistic about their incentives.
Here’s some information on Covid-19 experts you often see in the Irish (and sometimes UK) media.
PROFESSOR LUKE O’NEILL
O’Neill is Chair of Biochemistry at TCD.
His links to the pharma industry are as follows: he's a co-founder of Sitryx, in which the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), a developer of Covid-19 vaccines, has invested millions of dollars.
O’Neill’s team at TCD is said to be “working flat out” on Covid-19 treatments. O’Neill says “Sitryx is interested in our work”.
In July, the Irish government awarded €4.8 million to a team of researchers, including O’Neill, for work which might lead to Covid-19 vaccinations.
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR TOMÁS RYAN
Ryan is a neuroscientist at the School of Biochemistry & Immunology at TCD (where O’Neill is Chair of Biochemistry).
Ryan has ties to the pharmaceutical industry through Wellcome Trust, who funded his PhD at Cambridge University with a Fellowship.
Wellcome is a very wealthy foundation (£26bn). It has historic ties with GSK (formerly known as Glaxo Wellcome), and is hugely active in vaccine research.
Wellcome created the “COVID-Zero” campaign. Ryan is one of the most prominent campaigners for "Zero Covid Island".
SIR JEREMY FARRAR (UK)
The links between Wellcome and other pro-vaccine organisations are very interesting.
Sir Jeremy is in charge at Wellcome. He's also a member of the UK’s SAGE and a co-founder and board member of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI).
CEPI is funded by Wellcome, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the EU.
Its goal is “to stimulate and accelerate the development of vaccines”. It created COVAX (along with the WHO & The Vaccine Alliance).
COVAX seeks to produce two billion doses of Covid-19 vaccine in 2021.
PROFESSOR SAM MCCONKEY
McConkey is Head of the Department of International Health & Tropical Medicine at Royal College of Surgeons.
He’s also Director of the European Vaccine Initiative (EVI), an organisation whose objective is “to spearhead global vaccine development efforts”.
EVI’s donors include CEPI (see above). Other major donors are the EU and the World Health Organisation.
In July 2020, McConkey said in relation to EVI that “we are involved in seeking funding for some Phase 2 trials and Phase 3 trials and staff” for Covid-19 vaccine candidates.
PROFESSOR GERRY KILLEEN
Killeen is AXA Research Chair in Applied Pathogen Ecology at UCC.
He spent many years in Africa, studying malaria.
In 2005, he was awarded a Wellcome Trust Fellowship, to assist this research. He has in turn sponsored applicants for these Fellowships.
In 2007, a team of three malaria-focused researchers, including Killeen, received nearly $20 million in funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
As of 2019, Killeen was still publishing malaria research funded by Wellcome Trust and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
PROFESSOR KINGSTON MILLS
Mills is Professor of Experimental Immunology at TCD. He has said that vaccinating the entire Irish population is needed to generate herd immunity for Covid-19.
In 2016, Mills began work on a €28 million project to find a vaccine for whooping cough.
Benefactors included the EU, the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries & Associations, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
This year, Mills was on the team awarded €4.8 million by the Irish government, seeking to design effective Covid-19 vaccines.
PATRICIA KEARNEY, of the COVID-Zero campaign, received a Wellcome Trust Fellowship back in 2003.
GABRIEL SCALLY, also promoting COVID-Zero, has been funded by Wellcome Trust and employed by WHO.
Top WHO donors include Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Vaccine Alliance.
CONCLUSIONS
No hard conclusions this time, I'm afraid. Instead, I'm going to offer you some advice.
As you sit in the ruins of your economy and your formerly free society, and you wonder what comes next, apply some Roman wisdom and ask yourself the question: cui bono?
PS: Here's a bonus for my UK audience.
Devi Sridhar has worked for the World Economic Forum, Wellcome Trust and IHME - a creation of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
And she's linked with Global Health Governance - also funded by Wellcome Trust.
Coincidences? You decide.
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These are the most important things I've learned, and which I apply in my day-to-day routine.
If everyone did these things, their lifestyles would be transformed:
1) assign every dollar (or pound, or euro) a specific job. Like a person, if money is left idle, it will get up to no good.
Do this every month with a written budget, preferably using an app that links to your bank accounts so that your transactions automatically show up there.
2) plan for your major expenses such as cars, holidays, and household improvements.
Putting cash aside for them every single month means not having to go into debt for them later (or liquidating your long-term investments, which is almost as bad).
The incoming auto-enrolment system in Ireland sounds horrible:
- a quasi-mandatory system, reducing take-home pay even more for employees.
- even higher costs for employers.
- a huge new govt subsidy for pensions (how can they afford to do this but not to cut income tax?)
1/5
- govt subsidies are applied equally regardless of tax bracket, so a pension becomes another form of income redistribution.
- money gets locked up in the system for 40+ years.
- new central processing authority to administer it, creating more unnecessary civil servant jobs.
2/5
- the existing PRSI deduction was already supposed to provide a decent pension. But there will be no change to PRSI.
- there will only be FOUR investment funds to choose from, for the entire country! An amazing lack of choice. Maybe let people invest their own money?
3/5
Ireland's "Commission on Taxation and Welfare" has triggered outrage with alleged proposals to reduce inheritance tax relief, raise diesel duty, etc.
As with NPHET, the likely purpose of COTW is to float bad ideas, so that government can see which ones are viable.
A short🧵.
Media reports have disclosed the alleged proposals from COTW, but have said almost nothing about who or what COTW is. The ordinary reader is left wondering who to blame for all of the bad ideas.
This is where I come in with a relevant link and a summary.
We can now calculate Ireland's death rates for every age group and for every year up to and including 2021, with the help of freshly released CSO figures and the CSO's population estimates.
I've done this. Some interesting results:
👇👇👇
Firstly, Covid-19 coincided with Ireland's 85+ population achieving their lowest ever death rates in each of the past two years.
An amazing result in the circumstances:
The results are only slightly less positive for the grey-haired 65-84 cohort.
Three out of the four categories here had a small increase in 2021 over the prior year.
But 2021 was still safer for every category in this cohort compared to 2018: