Wikipedia and the War on Science: Bret Speaks with Norman Fenton
Bret speaks with Norman Fenton on the failure of academia and our medical system that Covid has revealed. They discuss how Wikipedia, the greatest encyclopedia to date, has become a political weapon, and how big an issue this actually is.Find Norman at his website: https://www.normanfenton.com/Find Norman on Twitter: https://twitter.com/profnfenton?s=20&t=zC_ddM-x2Y7I_vEddufszA*****Find Bret Weinstein on Twitter: @BretWeinstein, and on Patreon.Please subscribe to this channel for more lon...
A group of students, you know, went to the head of school and said, you know, we're not going to be, we refuse to be taught by this misinformation anti-vaxxer guy.
And even though it's a compulsory module, we demand to be moved to another module.
I mean, you can never believe this has happened.
And the fact that I don't get supported by, you know, the The students are the ones who, you know, apparently are in the right to be concerned about this, you know, the lack of support, the lack of support.
I mean, not just that, but the lack of support for what, you know, the kind of nonsense I've had to put up with throughout this has been, it's just, it's remarkable.
You just realise that there's nobody in academia, you've got a few close colleagues who you trust, right?
But beyond that, you absolutely know that you're not going to get any support.
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast.
I am very excited today to be sitting with Professor Norman Fenton of Queen Mary University, London.
He has a PhD in mathematics.
He is Professor of Risk Information Management in the Department of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science.
Did I get that all right, Norman?
That's right, yeah.
Well, welcome to Dark Horse.
I should say, there's a lot more to say about your credentials and qualifications, but if I were to try to be exhaustive about it, it would take up all the time we have.
So I'm not going to do that.
But suffice it to say, people can check out your CV on your website.
We will put a link to that website.
And probably we should also say, I don't think it plays an important role, but you also exist in a business context.
And so just in the interest of full disclosure, do you want to say anything?
Yeah.
So I'm director of a company called Agena, which specializes in software for risk management using probabilistic Bayesian methods.
Yes.
And I was going to say that you are, is it fair to say that you are a Bayesian in your approach?
Yes, yes, very much.
Not by, you know, not starting from that point, but, you know, because I, you know, I became a Bayesian because we were looking at trying to quantify uncertainty for problems which there wasn't a lot of data.
And the only way to get any kind of quantified risk assessments was to combine data with knowledge.
And that's where the Bayesian approach came in.
And when we then started to look at that as a method, we used these causal Bayesian network models.
And that's A lot of our research, including a lot of the data analysis that we've done on COVID, has been using those causal Bayesian network models.
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So that's a beautiful way of describing it.
I hope I caught it.
It was that you were combining data with knowledge.
Yeah.
And that that requires a Bayesian approach.
And in particular, causal knowledge, to help explain biases, missing data.
So it's all about looking for explanations.
It's not just your classical number crunch, which is what most statisticians do.
We're looking for causal explanations, why the data is what it is.
So this is going to be a little bit challenging since most of the Dark Horse followership is probably listening on audio.
We're not going to do any visuals here and they would be important if we were going to do an exhaustive explanation of the Bayesian approach.
But just to take one reducto ad absurdum.
If you had a test for smallpox that was 99% accurate in the positive direction and you gave it to a random person in Los Angeles today and they came up positive, that would not say they had a 99% chance Of having smallpox because smallpox, as far as we know, is not anywhere in circulation.
The percentage of the population that has it is zero.
So you would have to be very skeptical of that positive, even though the test itself might be chemically very effective at detecting smallpox.
Yeah, in that case, it could be like 99.9% accurate.
I mean, the key thing is, this is where people get, in fact, even with During the COVID debate with the false positives on the PCR testing, it's a very relevant question.
Of course, Bayes comes in here.
It's all about, it's, it's, it's all very well having a small probability of a false positive.
So you might, it might only be, you know, well under 1% chance that if you don't have the disease, you don't have the virus, smallpox in your example, that you'll wrongly test positives.
It's, you know, it's 99% of the time when you, when you don't have it, it gives you the right answer.
Right, so it seems like it's really accurate.
But of course, if the incidence rate is, let's say, one in a thousand, of course, a smallpox is even lower, but just let's suppose with COVID, it's one in a thousand, right?
What that means is that in a thousand, if you take 10,000 people, right, only about 10 of them We'll have the disease, but of the other 990 or whatever, you're going to get this 1% false positive rate.
So you're going to get about 99 of those who don't have the disease testing positive.
So you've got about 110 testing positive of whom only about 10 genuinely have the disease.
So the probability that you've got the disease having tested positive is actually less than 10%.
Right.
And that's what people get wrong.
This has been such a problem to explain this route.
So people are saying, we know that the false positive rate for PCR testing is less than 1%.
It's only 0.3%, you know, less than a third of a percent.
So how can you turn around and say that a lot of people who are asymptomatic and test positive haven't got the disease?
It's rubbish.
But of course, no, we know that we know from empirical data, we've actually got data.
On asymptomatics and whether or not they're testing with false positives or not.
And like over 80% of them who tested positive did not have a virus.
They really were false positives.
Wow.
Well, I must tell you one of the things that Heather and I scratch our heads about all the time is that we are, what, two and a half years into this pandemic and the testing is still so crude and our understanding of what it implies is So poor.
How can that possibly be?
Well, I think that the testing was always part of creating the narrative.
I mean, look, how did I first get into trouble, as it were?
How was I first labeled a spreader of misinformation during this whole thing?
It was actually when the mass testing started in the UK in the late summer of 2020.
And that was mass testing of asymptomatic people, for whom we knew that, you know, a high proportion weren't going to be having the virus.
But they were reports, they started to report, they were, as always, just reported case numbers.
So you look at the government dashboard and you see this increasing number of case numbers, right?
And a case is just a positive, someone testing positive on a PCR test, right?
So I'm looking and saying, hang on a sec, This is going right up, but actually it's the amount of testing that's going up.
So let's just divide.
Let's perform the radical act of simple division.
We'll divide the number of cases by the number of tests.
And when you do that, you see, actually there wasn't much of an increase.
Flat.
Yeah.
That radical act of simple division is what cast me as a spreader of misinformation.
And from that point on, that was the end of my sort of academic credibility as far as the accepted academia is concerned.
Well, this is one of the things that's so upsetting to me is that, yes, that radical act of division, doing it per capita and discovering that your trend was an artifact An obvious artifact of the fact that you were doing more tests.
I mean, let's take my reducto ad absurdum.
If we were to play that same game with smallpox today, and we were to start testing people for smallpox with a highly accurate test, with a very low false positive rate, right?
And we were to, let's say we set out to test the entire population.
Well, you and I both know what that would look like.
We would see the number of cases of smallpox detected.
Yes, the more it goes up.
Right.
And the fact is the actual number of cases would be zero throughout, but the number of apparent cases would be accelerating.
And we know what the news narrative would be.
Yeah, absolutely.
The problem is that as much as it is difficult to understand Bayesian priors and all of the things that go into a proper analysis, The error that you are describing is one any high school student of probability ought to understand perfectly well.
So the idea that our public health apparatus got it wrong stretches the bounds of credulity.
How could they have missed when capita analysis was necessary?
We've done, long before this whole COVID thing, we were also involved in some of the studies which looked at why people get this kind of reasoning wrong.
And it's not just us, there's been various studies in here.
So there's lots of studies.
Which show that, you know, very highly intelligent people, even people with quantitative knowledge, people who have kind of like scientific degrees, don't get this simple point, okay?
And, you know, I've also been involved in a lot of legal work, and this whole thing amounts to what's called the prosecutor's status in law, where they mix the probability of the evidence, the probability of the evidence given the hypothesis, they confuse the probability of the hypothesis given the evidence.
It's basically the same thing as what we've been discussing here, which is the assumption that that one over 100, that the 99% accuracy is the 99% chance that you don't have the disease.
Anyway, the point is, they get it wrong.
I've spoken with the top, the most brilliant judges, for example, on this.
And try to give, and we give, you know, what I think is a very simple, like visual explanation, just doing it with sort of, you know, stick men.
You show that the sort of argument I gave before, but actually showing it so you can really see.
And they say, and they'll say things like, it doesn't matter how many times you, you say, I still, I still think is wrong.
I still think that.
Right.
I think you're wrong in your conclusion.
The rational Bayes answer is wrong, according to them.
Right.
It's really a question, you know, I don't know that the right Bayesian environment exists developmentally for us to develop the correct intuitions, but I think many of us have looked at the Monty Hall problem, for example, and thought, I get it.
But wow, does that feel wrong every time I go through it?
You know, it just it just feels off.
Let's let's talk for a second about the prosecutor's fallacy, which it's been many, many years since I've thought about it.
But I think I remember it.
And again, I think a reducto ad absurdum is probably useful.
Right?
If you have somebody arrested running from the scene of a crime with the murder weapon in hand, and you test their DNA, and their DNA matches to a one in a million level of probability DNA found at the scene, that is indeed very strong evidence that they committed the crime.
On the other hand, absent that evidence, if you went out into the population and tested everybody's DNA and found somebody who was a very good match, that's incredibly weak evidence because there will be people in the population that match at all of these loci.
Just by happenstance.
And they didn't commit the crime.
There will be multiple of them.
So you can't say that it's evidence against one.
And so, you know, the prosecutor might come in and say, look, this is DNA evidence.
The chances that it's wrong is, you know, less than one in a million.
Right.
On the other hand, it's very much like the smallpox.
Exactly the same.
And what's more, they do it all the time, even though, interestingly enough, there was in the UK, the I don't know, it's like in America, but in the UK, judges are I don't know.
to be on the lookout for it, and they're supposed to stop any lawyer or expert witness making an assertion, which amounts to the prosecutor's facts.
It's supposed to be struck off.
The problem is they don't know it when it's done.
And I've been-- I can't tell you how many times I've seen it done, or at least-- yeah, I mean, it still happens all the time.
So the prosecutor, you know, that's why it's called the prosecutor's fallacy, will say, well, you know, the chances of, the chance that this man is innocent, given this evidence, is one in a million.
No, the chance of getting this evidence if he's innocent is one in a million.
But, you know, if there's 10 million possible suspects, then he's actually only one of 10 who could have been, you know, had that safe action DNA.
Right.
Okay, well then this raises what I think is the most uncomfortable question in all of COVID for me, I think.
Maybe not quite, but when I look at what took place over the course of the last two and a half years, I am left with the following conundrum.
It appears at first blush to be a case of massive incompetence with respect to our response.
But when I look in detail, I see that not only did we get everything wrong, but we got everything backwards.
If you did exactly the opposite of what you were told in each and every case, You would have actually been doing almost exactly what you should do, right?
You know, they shut down the beaches.
Where should you have been?
Oh, beach would have been a great place to be.
If you'd stayed at the beach for the whole pandemic, you'd have been safe, right?
Yeah.
So, you know, go home.
And don't come back to get medical treatment until you're already very sick.
No, you should treat from the first hint that you have been in contact with COVID, let alone come down with it.
And going home is exactly what's going to infect the people who are trapped with you there, right?
So we can go down the list, you know, should you take, should you count on a repurposed drug?
No, stay away from those things.
They're very dangerous.
What you should do is take this immunosuppressive injection that we call a vaccine, right?
Well, that's going to make matters worse, right?
The very nature of the vaccine is so narrowly targeted that it actually appears to have selected for a proliferation of variants.
So if I go down the list, We can identify 10, 12 places where we were told something very definitive about what we should individually do and what we should collectively do.
And each one of them was the inverse of the right answer.
Now, my contention, if it had been one decision, then incompetence could explain how you would get the opposite of the right move.
But if it's 10, 12 different decisions, and we got the inverse of the right answer in every case, the probability that that happens through incompetence is vanishingly small.
Yep.
Yeah, I agree.
And I always think that there was a...
You know, there was motive behind it.
I mean, you know, we're called conspiracy theorists for mention the word, you know, mention the words the Great Reset, but that was said right from the beginning.
This is the opportunity for a Great Reset.
In fact, do you know the first time I heard that expression?
I wasn't really well tuned into this, these things.
A lot of people were tuned into it well before me and I wasn't, right?
The first time I was, I got really frightened about this and realised this is not what, this is, you know, it's not a coincidence, it's not just a freak that they're getting all these things wrong, was when I actually was invited onto a panel of people who were involved supposedly with the early COVID research, because we'd already, right from the beginning, we published a paper where we'd, funnily enough, we'd already picked up on the fact that the infection fatality rates were exaggerated.
Right.
And so we did a Bayesian analysis.
I think we were the first to publish a peer-reviewed paper on that.
And so at that point, that was not considered to be too disrespectful.
It wasn't considered to be too out of sync with the narrative.
So I was at that point invited on to quite a few things, sort of local things in the UK.
I was on this panel with experts and Every one of the experts on that plan, there were three others, me and three others, and they all mentioned this great reset.
They said, this is, they all said, it's fantastic because this was actually when the lockdown was really hard after two months.
It was early June 2020 in the UK.
We'd been locked down solid for over two months at that point.
And they were saying, it's fantastic, you know, because this is great for the environment.
This is, this is exactly what we need.
They specifically said for, for climate change, and this is, and they were saying things, this is the opportunity to completely reset.
And they said, you know, they said Klaus Schwab's words, this is the opportunity of the great reset.
All the other speakers said it.
I was shocked.
I was completely, you know, that's when I realised this is, you know, I said, right, I said from the beginning of fairly soon after that, which I got a lot of flack for, that These COVID lockdowns seem to me to be a precursor for the climate lockdowns.
And you know, that's, I think that it's, it's all fits into that.
Everything that was done and is being done in the name of COVID fits into that kind of like agenda 2030 narrative.
Well, I must say, you know, I'm open to that possibility.
I'm not quite ready.
I see a number of things that could explain it.
Um, you know, Some of them, yeah, there's a conspiracy hypothesis here to be certain, but a mundane one, right?
You could get to an absolutely upside down prescription for personal and public health If you decided for whatever reason that you wanted to deliver the maximum number of injections, you know, and that could be for simple reasons of economic profit, right?
If you decided that delivering injections was the objective of the exercise, then everything else follows, actually.
Now, I'm not saying that that is what happened, but I'm saying that as between that hypothesis and a great reset that is driving these things, it's hard for me to sort between them because they both predict the same thing.
Well, I'll tell you why I don't think it was the vaccine narrative driving it then.
I'll tell you why, because my view was that it actually wasn't a conspiracy in the sense of a small number of powerful men deciding this was the way we were going to go, but the fact that all of the key influences Right.
We're bought in.
We're already bought into that idea that we need to do something drastic.
We need drastic changes to society.
Right.
To tackle this whole climate change.
You know, they call it a catastrophe or emergency or whatever.
Right.
They're so bought into that.
And that was indeed, you know, these other people on the panel and many other academics and people like, do you think about all the people who are advising the governments, right?
I mean, take people like Neil Ferguson, in the UK, Neil Ferguson, Susan Mickey, who made major contributions on, you know, Neil Ferguson, you know, obviously, where he was the one with the ridiculous Prescriptive predictions on the number of deaths.
And Susan Mickey is the communist who was advising the government on the on how to control, you know, this behavioural control, all that type of thing.
You know, she's now been appointed as head of the World Health Organization behavioural insights team.
Anyway, that's another thing.
But all of those people and throughout government as well.
And I'm sure it was the same or US a bit different at that time.
But certainly the UK was people were taking their We're seeing what was happening in the UK and doing the same, very much.
And everywhere you looked were the same clique of elitist academics, with this worldview that you need much greater control.
Over what people are doing in order to confront this, you know, potentially catastrophic, as I would call it, this catastrophic climate change problem.
And so I think that was that was driving it.
And the vaccine and then, you know, the vaccines became after that.
Yeah.
OK, that even more convenient.
We can keep people, you know, locked down for them.
It meant they could keep people locked down even further and longer until the vaccines came around.
So those people certainly weren't into, they had no interest in vaccines from the profit angle.
It was simply, it absolutely fitted their agenda for sort of continual control and lockdown.
So there are a number of topics we should hit on here.
I should tell you, I do have real climate concerns.
I feel certain that we are being misled with respect, you know, the models are obvious nonsense, but I do believe that there is a It's a potentially lethal problem to humanity lurking in the form of frozen methane in the Arctic.
And the problem is what we have is a very polluted academic environment.
So we can't really sort out how big a threat it is and how close we are to a threshold.
So, you know, I want to be careful that we don't assume there is no problem just because corrupt people are using the threat to manipulate us, which they clearly are.
So, I don't know what you think about that, and I don't know, frankly, how deeply you've delved into the question of climate change.
Well, the funny thing is, I co-presented a BBC documentary called Climate Change by Numbers in 2015 with Hannah Fry and Professor Sir David Spiegelholtz, and that's an interesting experience in itself.
Now, because of There were supposed to be three mathematicians to look at the numerical issues surrounding climate change.
I was supposed to be the one looking at the probabilistic statements and models.
They chose us because we'd supposedly never had any thoughts before, never commented on climate change and were supposed to be independent.
But because it was the BBC, it wasn't at all independent.
I came in fairly open-minded, and I left that programme as a complete sceptic, because I saw the total corruption of science.
I can't speak about everything, because I was under some sort of agreement where I can't speak completely freely about what went on there, and there are some things which I think are quite Okay, but this actually strikes me as a perfect case for a Bayesian, right?
You and I can both look at the academic environment and say, well, I know what's going to happen here because you've got A group of people who are convinced that we have an emergency, and therefore anything you publish that suggests the emergency might not be as serious as we think, it might not be progressing as rapidly as we think, those people are going to be shunned.
They'll be destroyed.
That's going to leave you an intense structural confirmation bias inside of climate science, right?
But what that leaves you with is no information about the reality.
It does not leave you with evidence that there's no problem.
I get that.
My approach has been, they keep telling me that we're going to have an ice-free Arctic.
So far, we don't have an ice-free Arctic.
That tells me that they are ahead of the curve.
I was told that Kilimanjaro was going to be free of glaciers.
They're retreating, but it's not free of glaciers.
Likewise, Glacier National Park.
Still has glaciers.
So all of these things tell me that I am being misled about the speed.
But then on the other side, the fact, I don't know of a challenge to the idea that there is a tremendous quantity of frozen methane in the Arctic.
And the question is, At the point that we unleash the chemistry, the atmospheric chemistry that makes methane an intense warming agent is straightforward, doesn't depend on a model.
Right.
And so the question is, do we reach a threshold where we release enough methane You release methane, it causes a slight warming, that backs the ice cap back a bit, that releases more methane, so you get a positive feedback.
And that question about whether or not we reach a place with the frozen methane in the Arctic, that the glacial retreat that we can see, that doesn't depend on anybody's model, predicts that we will reach a point at which suddenly this will no longer be even uh, controllable in principle by human beings.
I worry about that.
And I worry that the biggest threat to us is the corrupt academic environment that makes it impossible to address that question objectively.
Yeah, no, I get what you're saying.
The problem is I fundamentally don't understand the notion that humans... Of course, I'm not disputing that there may well be serious, you know, climate change isn't a real thing, but the notion that humans, that we as humans, you know, by driving electric cars instead of petrol cars are going to stop that is insane.
It's just insane to me.
Yeah, it is.
And you know, I must tell you, I don't think, you know, when I hear the solutions that are being offered by those who claim to be in the know, I'm unimpressed that they know nearly.
I mean, it's rather like the COVID response.
I just don't believe these people understand the problem well enough to address it.
That said, you know, if it were me, I would have my foot on the gas with respect to fusion power, because with fusion power, we do begin to get a you can take an electric world, you can plug it into fusion.
So if we build an electric world ahead of time, right, it doesn't save the world.
But if you then discover viable fusion technology, you can plug your electric world into the fusion technology that does make a huge dent.
And also, with fusion, you can pull carbon out of the atmosphere if that's what you need to do, right?
Nothing else is going to provide enough power for us to do that.
So, from my perspective, you know, it's like repurposed drugs and COVID, right?
The right solution is just not on anybody's tongue, right?
Or, you know, those few who are, are heretics.
And so that tells me the whole system is corrupt and putting us in danger by, at the very least, running out the clock.
Yeah, yeah.
But let's move back towards COVID and the reason that I was inspired to invite you on Dark Horse All of a Sudden, which was a piece that you... I've now forgotten where you... Was it Substack?
I just do it on my, I've got a Wix blog.
That's, I mean, my, my webpage is Wix.
I just put a blog on your webpage.
I've also got it on.
Yeah.
A couple of, I've got a couple of blog, blogger and I've got a blogger account.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well that's old school.
Yeah.
I know.
And I just got around to doing Substack.
Yeah.
It's just that I, I feel that if you Substack, then people start thinking, Oh, he's in this for the money.
That sense of that.
So just want to keep, you know, Sure, although you could do your Substack for free if you wanted, which is more or less what you're doing.
Even just when you go on it, you've still got a message which sort of suggests that you might need to subscribe and I don't know.
Yeah, I mean, I get it and I very much appreciate that you want to broadcast the message that you're not doing this for the money, you're describing things as they are.
But in any case, the content of your piece was about a topic that has become unfortunately near and dear to my heart, which is the corruption of Wikipedia.
As you know, and as you mentioned in your article, Heather and I have been libeled by Wikipedia pages that ostensibly describe our role in the world from relatively early in the pandemic, at least, you know, early in the public health campaigns against repurposed drugs and for these transfection agents, which we are calling vaccines for some reason.
Um, but in any case, uh, I have not known the effect of having one's Wikipedia page accuse you of spreading misinformation, uh, is huge.
And I would also point out quite unmeasurable, right?
And just to, to lay this out from my personal perspective, before we get to, uh, what's happened to you and what you discovered about what's going on at Wikipedia.
YouTube demonetized Dark Horse.
The sword that people see sticking through the counter behind me signifies the sword of Damocles hanging over the podcast.
And basically that, in the space of one hour, they demonetized both our channels and knocked out more than half of our family income.
I believe they probably were going to shut down the channel, and I think I probably got in the way of that by talking about this on Joe Rogan's program, which alerted people to the hazard of censorship at YouTube.
But in any case, This demonetization by YouTube, of course, puts us in the predicament of having to keep a roof over our children's heads and all of those things in other ways.
Now, what are those other ways?
For people, you know, we were professors.
That was a very secure, we thought, form of income.
At the point that madness drove us from our professions, we Generated accidentally this alternative way of feeding our family.
It worked well.
Then YouTube, with a couple of moves, got in the way.
The next way to fund is to go through our viewers who YouTube has behind-the-scenes influence over.
Who gets to see the channel, how many of them there are, etc.
Who gets unsubscribed.
Without taking any action.
But most importantly, we can seek advertisers to sponsor the podcast.
But for an advertiser trying to decide what to do to gain some exposure for their product, They're of course going to go to our Wikipedia pages.
And to have our Wikipedia pages accuse us of being dangerous spreaders of COVID misinformation, therefore obviously endangering human lives, that's not something advertisers want to mess with.
So the question of Given a private, unaccountable, non-transparent system at YouTube combined with a out-of-control mechanism at Wikipedia, the ability to disrupt somebody's capacity to earn is staggering.
Yeah.
Right, and that's before we get to just the simple fact of the reputational damage and what effect that has on interacting with people in the world.
So, all right, what did you find?
What happened to you and what did you find about what's going on at Wikipedia?
Yeah, so what happened to me was that I was I was about to give evidence in a, funnily enough, in one of the, I think it's claimed to be the first case of The first case brought against a government, a national government, on COVID mandates, which has actually got to court.
It's in Jakarta in Indonesia.
And I was an expert, brought in as an expert witness on the data supporting the vaccine efficacy and safety.
So I was scheduled to give this evidence and about a week before, I was going to give the evidence.
The lawyers on our side said, do you realize that Wikipedia is saying it's got you down as under COVID-19 misinformation?
And it had a statement there, which I don't know if I should maybe, I can read out what it was.
It basically says, In March 2021.
So it says under the heading COVID-19 misinformation in March 2021, Fenton was one of several academics who put their name to a document seeking to persuade the British government not to pass COVID-19 legislation, blah, blah, blah.
And it's then quotes people saying it was ridiculous.
The vaccines in question had an established safety profile.
We showed a blatant disregard for the facts, irresponsible in the extreme.
Now, Whether or not, let's put aside whether the claims that they said we made were true or not, I never signed, that was simply, that whole thing was false.
It was based on a highly misleading Times article that had been published in March 2021 by the science editor called Tom Whipple.
And it was this idea that I'd signed this document claiming that it actually said that the vaccines, they claimed that the vaccines were causing the second, that the vaccines were causing the second wave of deaths, which was happening at the time.
And that I'd signed a document, basically presented it, you know, convincing the government and legislation.
No such thing happened.
I never signed.
There was no such thing happened.
What it was based on was this misleading report as follows, right?
I happen to be one of quite a large number of people who are on this heart group, which is basically a group of I can't remember what it says, but it's a group which has, right from the beginning, attempted to put, let's say, a more rational narrative on the, you know, look at the, you know, look at the COVID data from a more rational viewpoint than what we're being presented by the governments.
You know, people would call us a group of sceptics, I'd say, but it's, you know, various, you know, we've got There's a broad, quite a cross section of people there.
We've got very, very senior clinicians, pathologists, data scientists, et cetera, psychologists, a whole group of people.
And what happened was that, actually, I didn't even know about this, because it's not like we somehow all sit around discussing everything that we're going to do.
And I'm not one of the leaders.
I'm not one of the organizers or anything like that.
But basically, they put out just a compendium of papers.
A compendium of nine, I think it was 13 or whatever, over a dozen papers, which covered various things, right?
One of which was a paper by a statistician called Joel Smalley, where he'd simply raised, he'd simply shown that there appeared to be a spike in the deaths It's a spike in all-cause mortality after the vaccine program was rolled out.
And he simply raised the issue saying, well, look, this needs to be, this is something which you need to, you need to look at.
So there was one paper, not off by me, I was not the author of any paper in that report.
So my name, this idea that I signed a document, you know, this is simply an incredible lie.
My name was simply listed on the inside cover as one of the many dozens of members of R.
Right.
And they transmuted that into... They transmuted that to me signing a document which was saying that the vaccines were causing this second wave of injuries.
So that was the, that's the basis of what the, and this, you know, the statement that was in Wikipedia about me, which I hadn't, I mean, I was, I didn't even, I hadn't looked at my Wikipedia entry for years.
It's not something I thought about, but then to be told just before you're going to give evidence, you know, as an expert witness in a case that Wikipedia is saying that you're a spreader of misinformation, right?
And you're claiming wrongly against all the evidence that, you know, that the vaccines are causing these sort of mass deaths, which, you know, it was never saying anyway.
And even the article was never saying that.
That was the thing.
The article never said it at all.
It was just ridiculous.
Now, as it so happens, From the lawyers in the case, kind of like managed to turn this... I mean, I didn't do anything about it.
I thought, I don't edit.
Right, what can you?
I can't get, I'm not going to get people to try and go in there.
And the lawyers were sort of quite comfortable with it because they wanted to actually show, at the beginning of my evidence, that this was an example of what happens to people who actually do present a counter-narrative, that they get these lies about them spread on Wikipedia.
So hold on, I have to interrupt you here and just make one point.
People who have viewed a lot of Dark Horse will remember that Heather and I on one of our live streams covered a paper by Christine Benn in which it did show That there is an increase in all-cause mortality for people who got the mRNA-based vaccines.
The reverse is true.
There is a slight benefit to the DNA-based adenovectored vaccines.
But I just want to point out that not only were you libeled and a simple lie told about you, you having signed a document that you did not sign, but the content wasn't misinformation.
Exactly.
I mean, that's a separate, exactly.
That's a lot of the things that were actually said there.
Of course, yeah, we've also done work on looking at all-cause mortality after the vaccination.
And what we can certainly conclude is that there is certainly no reduction in all-cause mortality in the vaccinated compared with the unvaccinated.
Well, I would also point out, I would also point out, as long as we're here, that this is a measure in which the mortality likely to go up with time.
In other words, vaccines have only existed for a year and a half, and so what we're looking at is that so far we've seen an increase in deaths, but to the extent that people might die five years, ten years after these vaccinations as a result of some interference with their normal physiology, then those numbers would climb.
So We can simply say that there is already evidence of an increase in all-cause mortality, which ought to be an alarming fact to anybody interested in whether or not this mass vaccination campaign was ill-advised from the get-go, which it clearly was.
But the numbers we're looking at are conservative because it's still early.
Yeah, yeah.
And there is absolutely a concern about the safety.
And so I would actually, you know, although I never signed that document at the time, we didn't know any, we didn't really know anything at the time.
And that article was simply, it was actually the imagination of the editor of The Times into what he was interpreting, what was said.
And interestingly enough, in his article, this is the other thing, he never ever linked to the actual Hart documents.
So people couldn't even see what was said.
They were only getting his interpretation, his misinterpretation of what was said, which then, you know, you then get these other people on Wikipedia then using what, and they themselves put another interpretation of what his interpretation of what was said.
And you get this, you get this nonsense.
Okay.
So, The interesting thing then is that, so I didn't know anything about it and, you know, whether it, the extent to which it compromised me in my expert evidence, I don't know.
It may have, it may well have done, because people still do look at, you know, they still do look at Wikipedia.
But there was a development after that, right, where I realised just how bad I got the tip off.
Right?
About a set of editing that started to go on then, with this Wikipedia, because I think I might have mentioned it, I can't remember if I mentioned it on Twitter, so obviously some people did start to look at, people who do this sort of stuff, did start to look at what was going on, right?
And what we found out was that one editor had tried to at least insert the following statement that Fenton denied under oath that that statement of Wikipedia was true.
Right, so that was inserted.
That got immediately removed by, so there's one guy, this, this, I mean, it's not, it's not doxing because it's actually open.
It's not like he's, it's a guy called Alex Brown who goes under the wiki editor name of Alex Broon, right?
Who I found out later was like very, very well known.
And he was involved in the, in, you know, in the, uh, the nonsense put on your, um, Wikipedia page.
He was one, a key one there.
And he's been, he's been key in a lot of these people, you know, Malone, Makala, he's been involved, you know, in, he's, yeah, he's trashed, he's tried to trash a lot, a lot of people.
He then, he removed, he has this rise, he's, he's an admin.
I mean, none of these things that I know anything about what it is, but he's got these admin rights where he can just, you know, he'll just delete it.
And if people start putting it in again, he'll just block those people.
And that's basically what was happening.
So he just deleted that one where someone just put in a factual statement, which you can see on video.
There's actually video evidence of me under oath in the court saying that I denied that those accusations were not true.
So he just stated a fact and that wasn't allowed to be This was not Alex Brown.
This was somebody else attempting to produce a simple, factual statement that you had said under oath that you didn't, which, had that been in your Wikipedia entry, would have caused anyone reading it to understand, ah, there's controversy over whether or not this did or did not take place, and that you yourself had said under oath that you didn't.
Obviously, you would not want to risk perjury if you had, in fact, signed this letter, so it strongly suggests something might be wrong with that claim.
So that got deleted.
And then there were a few, what then happened was that there was another guy, someone else, actually tried to fix it completely by trying to give the background of what the Hart document actually said.
So he'd gone in there and edited it.
By giving the full history about this Times article and how the Times article got changed over time and how it didn't represent what was said in Hart.
And basically, every time that was put up, Alex Brown, within seconds, within seconds, this guy, even though it doesn't matter any time of day, you know, Or if it's, if it's like three in the morning or five in the morning, you know, when he gets up, he'll have deleted it.
Right.
So this was going on.
So it was kind of like a war going on.
And this went on apparently a few times, at which point Alex Brown simply blocked that person.
They simply blocked them.
So they're not allowed to do, they're not allowed to do anything.
We're trying to introduce a simply factual corrective statement into... And that's the way they work.
Now, there is a kind of an interesting outcome, which where maybe I've done better than you, incidentally.
I mean, I've been looking at... I mean, some of the things I looked at your... There's this very interesting thing, which I'd like to maybe come on to, because with you, I notice it says,
That David Gorski, and of course, I know, you know, any sort of sceptics, anybody with any kind of, who's done any sort of reasonable work in sort of challenging narrative, will have come under the, you know, will have been attacked by David Gorski, right?
We know that, right?
We know this guy, right?
And I noticed it says, David Gorski described Weinstein as a prominent COVID-19 contrarian and spreader of disinformation and one of the foremost purveyors of COVID-19, you know, disinformation, blah, blah, blah.
I mean, so, yeah, so that's the kind of thing.
He, so he, I think works, he must also work with this, this guy, Alex Brown.
In fact, do you know that there's, are you aware that there's an article which claims that, which is, you know, on,
Which I found on, you know, just on the internet by search, which claims that Gorski himself is a kind of like a master Wikipedia editor and has been for a number of years, going under the name of, he's denied it but very weakly, under the name of, I'm just going to get it up here, of Marcel, did you know that?
I did not know that.
You should look that up because then you can see how extensive.
He's clearly a very powerful force in creating the fictional counter-narrative that is so destructive.
And he clearly must work with people like this Alex Brown, right?
I mean, that's the other thing.
What is Alex Brown on his own webpage?
He's a retired computer programmer whose PhD was in English.
Yes.
What the hell is this guy?
This guy is the gatekeeper now of most medical information on Wikipedia.
How does that work?
It's even worse than that because We all understand that there is something marvelous about an actually encyclopedic encyclopedia.
The ability, it is an incredibly powerful, enlightening force, a democratizing force, to have a source that you can go to.
It's not perfect, it's never been perfect, but the idea that if I want to know You know, whether Brontosaurus is likely to have been strictly vegetarian in nature.
There's a very good chance I can go to Wikipedia and find out that answer in short order, right?
Or if I want to know something about atomic orbitals or anything, if I want to know something about what a cumulonimbus cloud is.
Yeah.
So we all have been trained that this library of Alexandria to the 10th power is at our fingertips, but how powerful is it to have the library of Alexandria Have a mechanism whereby if you need a particular person's reputation destroyed, we can arrange that, right?
Now, this all, of course, raises the question, who this Alex Brown is?
Is he motivated?
Is he just personally confused about COVID and he's a zealot?
Is he motivated by some conflict of interest that we can't see?
And, you know, then we get to this even more difficult problem.
I knew that I was being libeled by Wikipedia, but what is there to do about it?
Because Wikipedia has Section 230 protection here in the United States, which means that because it is a platform rather than a publisher, at least by the formal definition, it is not responsible for what is there.
So somebody who wishes to libel you and has the wherewithal to become a powerful editor of Wikipedia has the ability to insert into the equivalent of our library of Alexandria, extremely destructive false information about you, extremely destructive false information about you, which at the very least will cause people who don't know anything about you to throw up their hands and not know what to think.
It's going to cause people to stay away from you because they just don't want to get involved.
That's that's incredibly powerful and nobody is legally responsible for it at Wikipedia because of the the vague relationship between Wikimedia, the entity that provides the service and the people the entity that provides the service and the people who actually write the entries.
So somehow this has to be fixed because there's nowhere to go.
But the thing is, as I think I mentioned in my article, Jimmy Wowsers, the owner, he knows, he's been alerted to this particular problem, this particular problem of this one editor, Alex Brown, on numerous occasions.
And he's recognized it.
He's actually responded to tweets about it.
And has done nothing.
He's fully aware of the problem.
He knows it's a genuine problem.
He knows that people, he must know that people are being libeled.
And yet, he allows it to happen.
Why?
He can do it.
He can stop this guy just like that.
Why doesn't he?
Well, I guess I would work from a different angle.
And I would say, in a world with any functional tools whatsoever, we would be in a very different place with respect to something like COVID.
The reason that we ended up where we are is that the tools to derail anyone who simply evaluated the evidence and came to the logical conclusion that there was something wrong with the idea, that we had no drugs available to treat it,
That there was something wrong with the idea that these transfection agents were vaccines in the first place, that they were safe enough to contemplate a mass vaccination campaign, that they were effective at controlling COVID in any meaningful way.
The evidence is clear enough, and so the only way To maintain the feeble narrative that we have been incessantly sold is to have a power tool for dealing with skeptics as they arise, right?
Becoming a skeptic in this case is as simple as reviewing the evidence.
That makes you a skeptic.
If you're an honest broker and you review the evidence, you are welcome to the club of the skeptics, right?
So you have to be able to deal with everybody who enters there.
And what's more, you have to be able to punish them.
Right.
And even if you can't stop a Malone or a McCullough or a Weinstein or a Fenton, you can use them as cautionary tales, right?
When somebody, even if somebody knows that I'm no liar and that I've been very good at predicting things about what took place during COVID, when they see what has happened to my Wikipedia page and they imagine, oh no, What would I do?
They don't want any part of it.
It's a massive deterrent.
It is an incredibly powerful weapon for controlling the effective belief of civilization and the amount of power there would be hard to overestimate.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So you think that, in fact, are you therefore saying that that Jimmy Wells is maybe is bought into the narrative himself to such an extent that he thinks it's actually a good thing that this is that this is happening?
Well, I don't know.
And the problem is we don't know with any of the people who are behaving paradoxically whether they are doing so because... I mean, look, you know, psychology is complex.
Some people may be genuinely frightened by what happens if they follow the evidence where it leads, and they may then, due to the cognitive dissonance, rationalize to themselves That the mainstream narrative is more or less in the ballpark, that the skeptics are out over their skis, whatever it is.
So, you know, an honest broker who was easily frightened Might find themselves in the wrong camp.
Somebody who was easily persuaded by financial incentives or other kinds of opportunities might find themselves in the wrong place.
We have no way of knowing, you know, what is a Gorski?
I don't know.
Um, it could be any one of a number of things, right?
He could be, uh, you know, in it for, in it for the lulls.
I doubt it.
He's too dedicated.
You know, he could have financial conflicts of interest.
I don't know.
But, um, but all I can say is the evidence is out of phase with many people's behavior, whom, who you would expect to have, uh, Stepped up.
And I think, in some sense, what has happened to people who have evaluated the evidence and spoken openly about it is the causal factor.
Right?
Why does a guy like Jimmy Wales allow this to take place on Wikipedia?
You would imagine that this is his baby.
He would defend the objectivity of Wikipedia to the fullest extent possible.
Why would he not?
Well, it may be that he, like everybody else, is concerned about his reputation and his legacy and all of that, and that this seems like not a hill he wants to die on.
Yeah, no, I think you're probably right there, yeah.
In terms of the motivation of these people, I actually don't think, you look at someone like Alex Brown, I mean, I don't think he's in it for that, I don't think he's in it for the money.
I think he's an ideologue, you know, he goes back, you look at his stuff over years, he thinks he knows, he thinks he's saving, these people think they're saving the world.
Some of them do.
They think they're saving the world from people like us.
Well, the problem is there's another explanation.
So my field is biology, but I take a complex systems approach.
And so there are a lot of ways you can end up with a particular behavior.
And one of them that I worry about is what I call freelancing.
So if there is an incredibly, let's just take a cartoon version.
I'm not saying that this is what's going on, but let's imagine for a second that what was driving the garbage public health narrative was really pharma profits, pure and simple.
Okay?
Repurposed drugs don't make profits.
These transfection agents that we call vaccines are very profitable.
Mandates make them even more so.
So let's imagine that's what was driving the nonsense.
Well, very powerful forces have literally hundreds of billions of dollars at stake in that question, right?
If the repurposed drugs work and the transfection agents are dangerous and or ineffective, hundreds of billions of dollars will not end up in certain pockets.
That's very powerful.
So then the question is, well, what if I'm nobody in particular?
And I detect that there are hundreds of billions of dollars out there hoping that the world will become persuaded of certain things.
And so all I do is I just start innovating.
I see how I make nonsense arguments.
What I've been pointing out is sophistry.
I engage in sophistry in which I defend the safety of the transfection agents, right?
I defend their efficacy.
I come up with clever arguments against this, that or the other study that seems to cast doubt on them.
And I put it into the world and I see what happens, right?
And the point is, Maybe some wealth finds its way to me.
Maybe suddenly I find myself being followed by large numbers of people.
If you imagine freelancers trying to figure out whose boots are worth licking, right?
You're absolutely right.
Those people get big followings.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They end up rising in the world.
And so in a world like that, I don't know what to do.
I've seen analyses of David Gorski that raise questions about conflicts of interest.
I'm very curious about them, of course.
What to do about Alex Brown.
I've never heard of the man until I read your article.
As you weren't aware that he'd been responsible for a lot of your stuff.
Right.
I mean, you know, as you say, I don't check my Wikipedia page, right?
And then somebody alerts you and you go and you're like, oh my God, wow, that's terrible.
Yeah.
So I do think we have to worry about what I'm calling freelancers, which are people who may not have official conflicts of interest, but who have discovered that if they say things that are very pleasing to powerful forces that are eager to shape the narrative that good things happen.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, that's, that's, that's a very, that's, that's a very good point.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah.
And there's that, but that's it.
On this whole COVID thing, there is a, it's a relatively small clique, you know, on Wikipedia, on Twitter, on whatever, who are always in there.
I mean, I, you know, and there are everybody, I mean, everybody, you know, would have been attacked, you know, by Gorski, by people like Health Nerd, a guy called Alice McAlpine, a guy called Kyle Sheldrick, I don't know, you probably, you know what I mean?
And some of the stuff's been appalling.
I mean, and they've even, they try, they really try and destroy people.
I mean, do you know what happened, for example, with the Paul Maric?
Absolutely, with Kyle Sheldrick, who... Exactly!
I mean, that was incredible, you know, suddenly, because they don't like what What he's saying on things like Ivermectin.
They suddenly start digging up old papers like that and coming up with these ridiculous accusations of fraud.
Here you have an incredibly decent doctor, highly decorated, who is You know, who goes to work and saves lives.
That's what he does.
And he's being slandered for outright fraud that obviously did not take place.
That is in the mind of Kyle Sheldrick, who misunderstood what he was reading and, you know, hyperventilated about it.
He thinks he's a statistician and doesn't understand sort of basic statistics.
I mean, and that's the problem is in this freelancer category I'm talking about, that's a feature, not a bug, right?
You've got a lot less to do if you understand statistics well.
But if you don't, then you have all sorts of room to engage in sophistry and to destroy people's lives and reputations.
You have to be unscrupulous too, which is apparently a common feature of people.
But in any case, OK, so what happened next in your story?
You know, so the interesting thing is I seem to have been successful where you guys, well maybe you haven't tried, I don't know, but because I put out this detailed description of what happened, a description of why the statement that had been attributed to me and had been a misinterpretation of a misinterpreted article, and it was clear that that was the case.
There's no dispute because you can go and look at the Hart document and you can see that it even said that it had some disclaimer even that any statements or expressions in the papers is not representative of Hart as an organisation.
All of that was clear.
And I think the pressure may be that in the end, you must have given up because they took the whole COVID-19 misinformation segment out of my Wikipedia page.
As I looked at it just a few days ago, it had gone.
Amazingly.
Well, you know, I think you're right.
I haven't tried to do anything about it.
In part, I just haven't been certain what to do.
As you say, I'm not deeply familiar with how Wikipedia is.
I don't know anything about the internal politics or the mechanisms.
Obviously, Section 230 creates a major obstacle to using the courts as they would obviously be rightly used in this case.
You know, it's effectively a loophole that has to be fixed in our legal structure because, you know, Alex Brown can libel using the megaphone of Wikipedia and his ability to shut down anybody else's protest of his misinformation.
So I haven't known what to do.
My hope is that actually Jimmy Wales will look at this podcast.
And he will think very carefully about the fact that he has here, Jimmy, let me talk to you directly.
Actually, if you're watching this, I want to tell you something about my grandfather.
My grandfather was.
He was a wonderful guy.
His name was Harry Rubin.
And he held a lifelong conviction that if people could manage to see past their mundane day-to-day interests, that we would be capable of great things.
And that although the market created wonderful things, it was not the only mechanism for the production of tremendous value.
And shortly before he died, I showed him Wikipedia, right?
I opened up my laptop and I said, I want to show you something, Harry.
Take a look at this.
You were right.
This is the greatest encyclopedia in the history of the world by orders of magnitude.
And it was not generated by the profit motive.
This was crowdsourced.
It ain't perfect, but wow, is it better than the next nearest competitor by an incredible degree.
So I showed him that.
I was very pleased to let him know before he died that that instinct of his was borne out by something as marvelous as Wikipedia.
For Wikipedia now to be guilty of outright libeling people who dared simply to talk to the public about what was in their own interests in the instance of a frightening emerging pandemic is appalling.
There is no way that you should be allowing Wikipedia to be used in that way.
Even if we were wrong, just simply report the facts accurately.
Libeling us is unacceptable, and the fact that it may be protected by Section 230 is irrelevant, right?
This is the Library of Alexandria.
And if it can't be fixed, then it has to be replaced.
Because at the moment, what it's doing is it's sitting in the niche of the great global democratizing encyclopedia.
And it is preventing us from putting together something else that will do the job if Wikipedia refuses to.
So look, it's line in the sand time.
Either fix the damn thing so it is not possible to destroy somebody if you're a freelance editor who decides they have a perspective that they want to turn into a fact, right?
Either fix the damn thing or get the hell out of the way.
Because we need something that does the job of Wikipedia.
And the fact that founders like Larry Sanger believe that it can't be fixed, well, that's a challenge to you.
It is time.
It is time to fix this mechanism.
And, you know, maybe Wikipedia 2.0 is the answer.
Well said, yeah.
All right.
So, what else should we talk about?
Actually, there's a funny thing I picked up.
With regard to the original Times article, there's something quite amusing I thought I'd share with you.
Let me just bring this up.
So, the original Times article, Not the online version, but the print version.
Of course, they can't change that, right?
That was particularly ridiculous because the heading of it was, academics back bizarre claim that jabs may kill.
I mean, that in itself, with hindsight, is quite an amusing statement.
But do you want to know something even funnier?
It's a double page spread that this article was in, massive spread.
It came out on, I'm looking at Tuesday, March the 23rd.
And the top headline, right across the top, you know what it says?
It says, Oxford vaccine, that's the AstraZeneca, 100% effective against severe COVID in US trial.
Right.
That's the headline, right?
How wrong could that be?
But here's an interesting thing.
Your American viewers might not be aware about this whole thing.
I mean, how much do you know about the history of what happened to the AstraZeneca vaccine throughout the world?
Very little.
I look forward to hearing.
Right, so the AstraZeneca vaccine, of course, was produced at Oxford, and they claim, oh, it's not for, unlike Pfizer and Moderna, it's not for profit.
This is, you know, this is gonna, this is the UK, you know, UK's brilliant research scientists saving the world, you know, without any sort of profit modes.
That's the way it was sold.
And you know, the woman, is it Sarah Gilbert, who was one of the prominent scientists involved, she got a Damehood, Very soon afterwards and a sort of standing ovation at Wimbledon Centre Court in June of that year.
Right.
So that's the sort of context of it.
And when the vaccines first came out.
Almost everybody in the UK was getting AstraZeneca, A, because it was British, B, because it was actually, even the stuff I'd heard about, because of the slightly different style of vaccine it was, even I thought, well, maybe it's not going to, it's not potentially as dangerous as the Pfizer technology.
So there was that aspect of it.
And so that's what people, everyone was getting that.
Okay.
And so this was going on until June, until about July of that year.
Then suddenly, of course, there'd been stories.
Stories were already coming out about severe adverse reactions with the blood clots, and there was actual reports of deaths, right?
And, you know, there was a BBC presenter, you know, the coroner actually recorded it as AstraZeneca, Vaccine-induced death.
So these stories were coming around and you were hearing things like in other European countries, they certainly were stopping giving it to anybody under the age of 30 and stuff like that.
Well, the interesting thing was in the UK, there was never and has never been any public announcement about what happened to AstraZeneca, right?
But as early as, I think it started, I think that I went to my GP Right.
And asked the question about AstraZeneca, I think it was in, it was either, might have been August 2021, 2020.
So this is, you know, right now, August 2020, what's happened, you know, what's happened with AstraZeneca?
Oh, no, we're not giving that any, we haven't got that anymore.
What do you mean you haven't got it anymore?
We're not being given it.
There are no supplies of it anymore.
Or is it because supplies have run out or whatever?
To cut a long story short, The reason why they've not made any formal announcement is because to all intents and purposes, it has been completely withdrawn, but they won't say it because the way around it is that they claim that you can still ask for it.
You can go to your GP surgery or you can go to one of the clinics and say that you want to have the AstraZeneca vaccine and it will be supplied to you.
But the fact that most GP surgeries don't have it anymore, And, you know, very few doses are being given, you know, gets them out of the fact that they don't have to admit that this has been a catastrophic disaster.
It was a catastrophic disaster.
And, you know, that whole fanfare about, you know, this was Britain saving the world, you know, it stops the embarrassment.
About it.
And you know that most many countries in Europe, it absolutely is the fact that they really have banned it.
Right.
So Britain officially hasn't banned it, but it's all intents and purposes.
That's just to say if that's just to say facts.
It has shadow banned it.
Yeah, effectively, yeah.
Yeah, which is fascinating.
I mean, and the number of games that are obviously being played, I don't know what to make, frankly, of the AstraZeneca fiasco.
I don't know what to make of the interaction between the mRNA vaccines here in the U.S.
and the adenovector DNA-based vaccines.
I certainly have been struck by the number of independent failures and errors in the basic model by which the RNA vaccinations function, right?
The fact that they were heavily stabilized with I don't know what to make.
They had no targeting mechanism.
So at the point that we discovered that they were circulating in the body, that ought to have set off alarm bells.
But in any case, I don't know what to make.
I don't know how much of the battle over which vaccine is really a corporate battle taking place as if it was a scientific battle.
Well, that's an interesting, very interesting point.
Because when I've raised this thing about the AstraZeneca, people, the defenders say, ah, no, AstraZeneca's still, you know, should be, should have been much more widely available.
It's just because, you know, as they got muscled out by Pfizer, you know, the Pfizer, you know, Pfizer, Moderna muscled them out.
So that's, that's the kind of, that's the other argument to sort of, That's the saving grace argument, which the no-doubt government ministers will probably, if you actually got them to speak about it, they never do.
But if you did, they would probably give you some messaging like that.
But can I ask you a question here?
It's quite interesting.
One of the other reasons why they were, in the UK, they were saying AstraZeneca's science better than Pfizer was this thing that Pfizer Had to be stored at some bizarrely low temperature, minus 70 degrees.
And that was a major problem for the way that vaccines were distributed and given in the UK.
Well, apparently, whatever happened to that requirement?
Because as far as I know, that's suddenly no longer...
They no longer have that requirement at all.
It's just stored anywhere.
I remember, but only vaguely, some sort of revision in that claim very early in the distribution of these things.
Again, I don't know what to make of any of this.
What I know is that Pfizer seems to have won out And that's the exact inverse of what should have happened when the competitor was Johnson & Johnson, a vaccine that I still have concerns about, but on multiple different levels, from the fact that it's one shot rather than two, that because it's DNA and not RNA, the pseudo-uridine fiasco has not affected it,
And the, you know, this one's hard to explain, but the problem with the mRNA vaccines, one of them, is that the lipid nanoparticles that are used to get this into cells are, this is effectively a pseudovirus, right?
The lipid nanoparticles are taking the place of the nucleocapsid But because they are not the product of evolution, they are completely haphazard with respect to what cells they enter.
That's not true for a virus like an adenovirus.
An adenovirus has an ecology of its own.
It has a logic.
And so it doesn't really have any reason, as far as I know, to invade your heart cells because it can't spread from there.
And so the idea of using A virus as a vector, while it sounds scary, is far safer, as far as I would guess, than using a completely arbitrary mechanism like lipid nanoparticles.
And so, in any case, The fact that Dr. Ben and her group has found an all-cause mortality benefit with the DNA-based and an all-cause mortality harm from the RNA-based vaccines fits what Heather and I predicted.
We said, look, none of this The thing that set us off, the thing that caused us to join the skeptic community here, was that we were told that these vaccines were safe and effective.
Yeah.
There's, you know, safe means you know that they don't do harm, and there's no way they could have known that it didn't do harm two years out, five years out, because they hadn't existed long enough.
So we knew that that had to be a lie.
We didn't know what sort of lie it was.
What we said was, none of this is safe because it's all too new.
We don't know what the effect is.
But in terms of the relative safety, the adeno-vectored vaccines are likely to be a lot safer.
And if we had to take one, that's what we would do.
That's what we said.
And it turns out that that is now borne out by the data, at least with the J&J.
And I do wonder about the AstraZeneca.
I mean, the thing is, though, that all of the evidence now is pointing to certainly no evidence.
Even if we avoid saying how harmful they might be, which, as you said, there's certainly no evidence that they're safe, right?
And for Pfizer, there's definitely no evidence that they lead to a decrease in all-cause mortality, right?
But the fact that it's now even There's no dispute.
I mean, people might dispute those, but there's no dispute about the fact that it doesn't stop infection transmission and the fact that all the evidence points to increased transmission amongst people who are vaccinated.
Why is this still going on?
Why are there demands for continual boosters?
You know, if it's not, I mean, is it is it now?
Are we at the stage where the push for that is not so much the profit?
I mean, there is obviously there's going to be the profit factor in there.
But do you think there's also this notion that they want to kind of like eliminate the control group for fear of what might happen with the safety profile?
I worry very much about this.
Their their fervor to vaccinate to transfect i should i should be disciplined about that their fervor to transfect people for whom there is clearly no rational argument young healthy people did not need these things no matter what and the desire to inoculate them is bizarre and
And one possible explanation is this issue of the control group.
I would also point out, I don't know what happened with AstraZeneca.
Maybe the AstraZeneca shot is as dangerous as you were led to believe.
On the other hand, if the AstraZeneca shot has the same relationship to the Pfizer and Moderna shots that Dr. Ben found with all-cause mortality and the relationship between the J&J and the Pfizer and Moderna, then
Obviously, there's a statistical comparison to be done between people who got the one version and the other.
And if, for example, the stabilization of the mRNAs using pseudouridines in every uracil location, if that turned out to be a massive error that caused a tremendous amount of harm, That comparison would show it to you.
So, who knows?
I wish we... we need institutions that are capable of asking these questions.
We need skeptics who are empowered and we just don't have it.
The trouble is, I mean, again, I can tell you some of the manipulations, the mechanisms in the UK which are sort of prolonging, let's say, or justifying the Continuation.
A lot of it comes from, we've done a lot of work on these statistics, which are on vaccine surveillance statistics from the Office for National Statistics.
And there's a massive controversy about this, and we've raised these concerns and they've not really been, they've not accepted.
So I don't know if you're aware of it, but I can just give you a very brief synopsis about what the problem is.
So the problem is that all of their data, First of all, it's based on a somewhat biased sample.
It's based on all people who were in the 2011 census in the UK, in 2011, and who are registered with a GP in 2019.
So it's a subset of the population.
They're making all these estimates about the proportion of unvaccinated in the population based on that.
It's nothing like an exhaustive subset for a start.
Right, so that's their data, right?
But they're getting information.
So obviously, they've got data on deaths, and they're supposed to have accurate data on vaccination status of everybody there.
But of course, what we know is happening, I'm sure there's something that you'll be aware of as well, is that Whether or not someone is classified as vaccinated or not, or one dose, two dose, three dose, whatever, is susceptible to, let's say, significant manipulation.
Some of it deliberate, some of it not.
So in the case of, we know that for any of the effectiveness studies, They'll say, well, you can't consider the vaccine to be effective until you've had it for two weeks.
Anybody who gets COVID in that time, we don't count them as a COVID case.
You've got this unbelievable built-in bias where you're guaranteed, even with a known placebo you're given, you'd get a statistical artifact that shows very high efficacy.
I have not understood that.
It's a pure statistical artifact.
You get that.
Similarly, if you get delayed reporting, you get the same thing.
But the same thing happens with deaths, and this is really bad.
So they will say, they'll claim, no, if someone has had the vaccine and dies 24 hours later, no, we classify that as a vaccinated death.
No, we know that doesn't happen.
We know that most of the people who die shortly after the first dose are classified as unvaccinated.
We know that most of the people who die shortly after The second dose classified as one dose.
You get this, again, this misclassification.
And that misclassification is skewing all of their data, right?
To the extent that we actually, and also we know, right?
So that skews any results they claim about safety and efficacy.
Because they claim, well, no, the data is showing that it is both safe and effective.
But we also showed That, A, it couldn't be true, because actually what happens is that when you look at their own data, you do a plot of what happens with all caused non-COVID deaths shortly after the rollout of the vaccination, you get this bizarre thing whereby the unvaccinated get a peak in non-COVID deaths when the vaccination programme is rolled out.
So somehow, when you're vaccinating a whole load of people, all those who aren't getting vaccinated are suddenly dying of non-COVID diseases.
Well, that proves that there's a misclassification.
And, you know, they came with this ridiculous idea.
We challenged and we spoke to them about it and said, oh, well, that's the that's the healthy vaccine effect.
We proved that couldn't be the case by looking at looking at historical data.
But they're still maintaining it.
But now the big thing is they've got this all the data is based on a bizarre, literally a bizarre underestimate.
of the proportion of people who actually aren't vaccinated in the UK.
So they claim that only 4 million, which is 8%, of UK adults are unvaccinated.
Now, if you underestimate that proportion, and that's the denominator in all of your effectiveness and safety things, and obviously, you're going to massively exaggerate the effectiveness and safety of the vaccine, which is what they're doing.
Well, we've challenged them on this.
Other government agencies So the same UK government, another agency called the United Kingdom Health Security Agency, is saying that over 20% of adults are unvaccinated.
There's a big difference from 20% and 8%.
If you're using that as a denominator, everything switches.
With the UK HSA denominator, you get in every single age group, you get an increase, a significant increase in all cause mortality.
So let me understand.
If they're more unvaccinated than are being allowed for certain calculations, then the fact that they are not experiencing an increase in negative health effects that are downstream of the vaccine.
Effectively, the vaccines are borrowing some of the health of unvaccinated people.
Exactly.
To increase the appearance that they are safe.
That's exactly it.
Simple as that.
I've done loads of podcasts in the last two weeks because there was a BBC2 documentary called Unvaccinated, which funnily enough was hosted by Hannah Fry, who was my co-presenter when I did my BBC documentary.
But she's gone on since then to be very famous.
She's now the face of science in the UK.
So she did this program called Unvaccinated, which is the most biased Unbelievably biased program.
They got seven unvaccinated people and tried to basically convince them over a week to get vaccinated.
It was supposed to be objective.
They were supposed to give them arguments both ways and find out why they weren't vaccinated.
But it was a nice, biased thing.
They brought in the experts who they failed to declare These people like Pfizer, that strong association with Pfizer.
These are the experts.
So all that anyway.
But the interest, you know, it was really interesting.
I picked up on this point that is at the start of the program.
The reason I pricked my ears up about it, first started blogging about it, is because they were making this claim about only 8% unvaccinated, and they were trying to claim this is some tiny, fringe, crazy minority.
And I knew that figure was wrong.
I knew that was based on this wrong ONS data.
So I started to raise a concern straight away.
But the program, and they actually basically, to be fair, they changed the headline on one of their articles, which was advertising the program.
They took that That 4 million or 8% off the headline, but it was still a key feature of the programme.
The programme started with Hannah Fryer saying, despite this great vaccination programme, there's still 4 million UK adults who are unvaccinated.
Making out that was far too big a number.
Right.
But you know what she said?
This is incredible.
And I then checked out and I looked at the source for this.
She said that in preparation for the programme, the BBC had done their own large survey, representative survey of over 2,500 UK adults.
And they found that 600, well, it was actually, which was 24%.
And actually we looked at the source data for this study.
It really was a very good survey.
It was actually 26% unvaccinated.
And that's a big sample.
That's a big sample.
In fact, you know, using sort of standard statistical arguments, that means the probability that the true number is less than 20%.
unvaccinated is effectively zero.
So there really are over 20% unvaccinated, contrary to what is the basis for all of these safety and efficacy claims. - You know, the whole COVID evidentiary picture is just, it's like a hall of mirrors, right? the whole COVID evidentiary picture is just, it's like a You are looking at something and you have no idea whether it's an actual something or a created something or a misinterpretation of something.
But the, let's put it this way.
COVID is a complex problem.
It's not this complex, right?
We have hundreds of years, frankly, of work figuring out how you analyze things.
We've gotten good at analyzing for simple patterns like, you know, if you had this treatment, are you more or less likely to die over X period of time?
That's not a difficult problem.
So the fact that we can't get anything right We can't say things definitively because the entire thing has been reduced to some kind of bizarre team sport.
It's unreal, right?
It's not this hard.
Get some smart people, put them in a room, immunize them from bad consequences, and have them talk about how you would figure out where we are and what to do about it.
Yeah, but it's not going to happen, is it?
It's too late.
It's too polarized, yeah.
No, no, they've committed themselves.
Because if we were to do that, it would reveal the level of, at the very least, indifference to human death and suffering.
What do you think about people like Deborah Birx coming out now and saying they knew all along that they were basically lying about the effectiveness of the vaccine?
I mean, isn't that going to wake people up?
It doesn't seem to have done, actually.
Well, I have to tell you, I see these things and I often have less of a reaction to them than other people do, because at some level, I mean, I think it's just been obvious that there is at least a group of people who have risen to the heights of power who are very, very comfortable with lying.
Well, comfortable at a level that you have rarely met anyone who could do it.
You know, I mean, Fauci, I think, is top of this list.
That's for sure.
The ease with which he tells what he must know are fictions is incredible.
And so if you imagine that that's one of the skills that puts you in a position of power under our system, then this becomes less surprising.
And, you know, I mean, I guess your question is a good one.
Will it wake other people up?
Yeah.
I hope so.
And I actually think that we in the skeptic community have misplayed our hand a little bit because the biological reality is You may have been misled by these people.
You may have done things that have compromised your health.
But this is cumulative.
The sooner you stop listening to the people who are giving you bad advice, the better off you will be.
I'm not telling you who those people are, but I am telling you that we have a mechanism for knowing who they are.
And that mechanism is science, which means that predictive power is the guide, right?
People who have done a good job of predicting what was going to happen, those are people worth listening to.
Could they be lucky?
Every so often, but you can't be continually lucky, right?
You can't predict a complex system with a high degree of accuracy if you don't have a good model.
For what's taking place.
And if people have predicted abysmally, stop listening to them.
They're just... either they're corrupt or they're... You know there's a problem here again, from the scientific credibility angle.
I'll tell you what it is.
It's this whole notion of peer-reviewed, you know, published peer-reviewed papers, right?
Because then they'll say, they'll take what you said, right?
Okay, well, let's go to, let's go to the established, what is the established science?
What, you know, what are the credible, what are the generally credible sources?
Well, people think, well, it's the peer, you know, it's got to be these peer-reviewed papers.
Well, you know, this whole thing has been corrupted, but again, most people don't.
Incidentally, this is another interesting thing about Wikipedia here.
They will argue that they will only cite And of course, it's all nonsense because they do it as they feel fit.
They'll change this, but they'll claim that, again, they'll reject anything that one of the skeptics says.
If it's not published and you can't have that, that's not in a peer-reviewed journal, right?
or that's not in a peer reviewed journal, right?
Well, it's got to the stage now where you know that, I mean, forget about the well-known instance, like with, you know, I mean, my colleague, I'm close colleague of Jessica Rose, and she had this paper with Peter McCullough that was published, but then completely mysteriously withdrawn.
And there's a few other examples like that coming out now.
And that sort of made the news where they're basically trying to get perfectly respectable Um, papers which seriously challenge, you know, the safe and effective narrative.
They're getting them withdrawn, so they won't appear in peer-reviewed publications.
But beneath that, you've got to think of the massive stuff, you know, stuff that we've done, colleagues of mine, which doesn't even get to the stage of being peer-reviewed.
My name now is on a paper It will not get, it will be immediately returned and they won't say, because of my name, they'll immediately say it's of not sufficient interest, the journal or it's out.
But you know it goes worse, it's worse than this because you know that there are the art, the You've got these pre-print servers, like MedArchive and Archive.
They won't allow my papers either.
So I'm on a list.
The one place I put them is Researchgate, because there's absolutely no screening process there.
Which is curious, that's actually funded by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, but that's a separate thing.
But so far, we've been able to put stuff On ResearchGate, right, without any problems.
And it certainly gets a massive number of reads, our papers there.
But if I now go to MedArchive or iQIVE, they have a screening process, which they claim is to, there's obviously some automated process or whatever, which looks at whether it's in scope or whatever, or whether there's plagiarism.
I can understand that because they can check whether it's a plagiarized.
So I can understand that.
Right.
But mine, what happens after three days, they'll come back and say something like, out of scope is the normal one.
And that's ridiculous because nothing is out.
It's clearly in scope and nothing should get rejected there.
So my name is in the screening algorithm.
It's triggering, right.
And then the problem is, so first of all, any place that you could Logic, correct analysis of the evidence is a threat to whatever it is that is driving this.
Whatever it is.
And therefore, If it's the peer-reviewed journals, they will be captured.
If it is the pre-print servers, then they will be manipulated, right?
If it is podcasts, then they will be demonetized and struck from YouTube.
So the basic point is, look, you're searching for a venue, and the thing knows that the one thing you can't be allowed to have is a venue, right?
Heather and I have said many times on our podcast, That peer review is not the same thing as review by peers.
That the public has been lured into a belief that peer review is some sort of mechanism important to science.
It is no such thing.
Any scientist worth their salt wants their work reviewed by peers, but the system of peer peer review, the secret non-transparent system, is a mechanism of control and it is not serving science, it is serving power.
So the hard part for people to stomach is that if something is powerful enough, I mean look, we know that pharma manipulates journals, that it manipulates departments, that it manipulates fields.
We know that it does, that it's well studied.
The idea that it Do we think it stopped doing that during COVID?
Do we think it's doing it at a normal level?
Do we think it stepped it up?
We never have that conversation.
We simply pretend that it's on the same team trying to cure COVID as the rest of us.
And at the point you recognize that The major medical associations, that most doctors, that most all universities, as far as I know, that the major journals, that all of these things have landed on a team.
That team has a narrative.
You, as a member of the public, can know that that team is spouting nonsense.
I mean, let's put it this way.
If effective means you need four doses in less than two years and it still doesn't control contraction or transmission of the disease.
If that's what effective means, what does safe mean?
Right?
Right?
Effective obviously doesn't mean effective.
I'm thinking safe might not mean safe either.
So at the point you realize somebody's telling me, oh yeah, this is safe.
You should get it.
And that person will You know, they didn't do very well with effective and I can tell that myself because I'm being told I need my fourth dose, right?
At that point, I'm not saying this is a good thing, but I am saying at that point, you should stop listening to the people who told you it was effective because they were wrong.
They have not acknowledged that they were wrong.
They haven't explained how that happened or what you should think now, right?
You should not listen to them and you should say, well, it would be great if there were an institution or a publication I could go to That would tell me the truth, doesn't exist.
So maybe I should start looking around for people who have left a record of what they've thought over the course of the pandemic.
And I should start looking for people for whom that record suggests that they do understand what's going on.
Right?
That's funny.
It's very difficult for them to find, you know, you go on a Google search and you're not going to be, you search for, you know, your name, you'll get to the dis, you know, you'll get the disinformation.
You'll find out that I'm a notorious spreader of mis-dis and mal-information.
I mean, the whole, the way, I mean, this is another thing we haven't touched on, but I mean, and you've, of course, your own experience, you know, bears this out even before COVID, is the, is the, is how academia, which, you know, was traditionally supposed to be, you know, all about free speech, you know, progressive standing up for, I mean, you know, you know, standing up for the disadvantaged and confronting the, you know, big tech and big, I mean, how have they suddenly, how have they,
I mean, it was happening before COVID, but with COVID especially, how have they suddenly been completely, almost, I would say 99% captured, even, they've just totally Being in this sort of, you know, this, this, this, you know, this, this narrative of we have to have control.
We have to, we have to censor anybody who disagrees with them.
We've got to ostracize those people.
We've got to humiliate them.
I mean, where is the traditional academic, you know, progressive liberal idealism?
It's completely banished.
Right, and in parallel, where is the Hippocratic Oath?
Exactly, for the clinicians.
Yeah, that seemed to have gone out the window, yeah.
Right, so, you know, I used to say back before COVID, When people would ask me about academia and what we could do to save it.
And my feeling is, well, A, some of us have been shouting about this for decades.
This is not a new problem.
And the fact that it is now so clear that everybody can see it doesn't mean, you know, this is now the point of, you know, you've had COVID for a week and you want to know what to do about it.
And the answer is, well, you should have started treating it on day one, same thing for academia.
Now, We have to switch analogies here a little bit, but the basic point is, look, academia is like your family dog after it's contracted rabies, right?
The right way to think about it is not, that's the family dog.
The right way to think about it is, oh my God, that animal has rabies, right?
You're going to need a new dog and that other dog has to go.
And I don't know, you know, I would not have let the situation get there, but we're there and it doesn't make any sense to pretend otherwise, but it's clearly totally captured.
And yeah, I mean, look what happened to you, Evergreens.
I mean, that was, you know, that's nothing.
I mean, that's happened.
That's, you know, that kind of thing is, you know, is happening to a lot of people.
I mean, you know that I, I'd never, ever had a complaint about my teaching anywhere until this whole thing started.
And, you know, before I even, you know, before I even gave my, you know, I do this master's module to a big class at 260 students or so, a group of students, you know, went to the head of school and said, you know, we're not going to be, we refuse to be taught by this misinformation, anti-vaxxer we refuse to be taught by this misinformation, anti-vaxxer guy.
And even though it's a compulsory module, we demand to be moved to another module.
I mean, you can never believe this has happened.
And the fact that I don't get supported by, you know, the The students are the ones who, you know, apparently are in the right to be concerned about this.
You know, the lack of support, the lack of support.
I mean, not just that, but the lack of support for what, you know, the kind of nonsense I've had to put up with throughout this has been, it's just, it's remarkable.
You just realize that there's nobody in academia, you've got a few close colleagues who you trust, right?
But beyond that, you absolutely know that you're not going to get any support.
Well, it's interesting, especially with this subject, because although a lot of the stuff that we do does have this sort of complex Bayesian stuff, but actually Most of the data analysts, most of the stuff we've been revealing, anyone with a sort of basic understanding of statistics, not even high school level, but just basic statistics will know, could point out the problems.
And yet, where are the top statisticians and other mathematicians standing up?
Absolutely silent or actually criticizing us.
Which has to be based in fear.
It is, because I have had a small number of very, very senior, very, very top-rated statisticians contact me privately and say they understand what I'm doing, they support it, but they can't speak out because it'll be the end of their careers.
I mean, I can only really do it because I'm at retirement age.
It would have been difficult for me.
So I would probably have been just as much a coward as then.
If this was 15 years ago, I don't know.
Well, this is why I don't hold back with analogies like rabies.
It's not a good thing that your dog has rabies, but rationalizing about it is going to make things much worse.
So yeah, I don't know.
I'm shocked.
As shocked as I am at academics, I'm even more shocked by the doctors.
Yeah, yeah.
Right.
This is basic Nuremberg Hippocratic Oath stuff.
But the thing is, lots of them, it's like they've not taken, it's not that they know that they're doing wrong, they don't, it's just that they are simply Getting the mainstream information.
They're not attempting to find out themselves, are they?
I've challenged doctors on this.
You're a computer science guy.
Here's my contention.
You're right.
The doctors do not know they are doing harm.
But That is on the user's side.
In other words, the amount of work that doctors have to do to avoid the information that they're doing harm is substantial.
So I really think Whatever it is that we are up against, whatever is spreading the real misinformation and advancing this incredibly wrongheaded narrative, that thing, smartest thing it ever did, was force the hand of the doctors early.
Right?
Because the point is, to To revert to recognize what is taking place also means to acknowledge the harm you've participated in already.
And I think that's a very high bar.
And I'm still shocked that doctors aren't crossing it in large numbers.
But nonetheless, I think it is easier to double down on a narrative.
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
I think you're right.
Yeah, you're right on that.
No doubt about it.
Yeah, it's really tragic.
But nonetheless, here we are.
It's 2022.
Our institutions have, I mean, look, they were captured.
Now the degree to which they were captured is revealed to us, if we will simply look at it.
And everything from medicine to academia to Wikipedia, all of these things are playing.
And mainstream media, of course.
Mainstream media maybe went first, but it's captured across the board.
Academia went first, actually.
Well, academia, the rot began probably in academia, certainly in the 90s we saw hints of it.
I think it was stuff before then.
Oh, well, that may be.
I certainly saw it in the 90s in college.
But in any case, yes, all of the institutions are infected by this particular pathology and the danger to us couldn't be greater.
So as unpleasant as it is to look that reality in the eye, it's far safer than ignoring it for another who knows how long.
Yeah.
This isn't going to get better until we look at it.
Unfortunately, you're correct in that, Alastair.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, this has been a marvelous discussion.
I want to thank you for your courage and for, in particular, I want to personally thank you for exploring the question of what was going on at Wikipedia.
Even if nobody does anything, it was, you know, Looking at your Wikipedia page libel you in such vicious terms, it is very much the experience of being gaslit, right?
And to know something, to know the name of parties involved behind the scenes, to know how it unfolds, it's heartening and I hope it leads to positive change.
Yeah, and I hope your message to Jimmy gets through, yeah.
I hope so, too.
All right, well, thank you for joining us.
Where can people find you who are interested in... Easiest place is normanfenton.com because that's got the links to my Twitter and YouTube and blog and that kind of thing.
Great, and also your YouTube has some wonderful explanations of Bayesian logic, among other things, with graphics that are easy to follow.
So if you're curious about how Bayesian thinking works and what role it played in this conversation, I strongly encourage you to go look at those.
