Cassandra Voices

Tag: Nuremberg Code

  • Covid-19 Vaccines: Informed Consent?

    What if I told you that I had a new product – never before used on a population-wide basis – and after coming into use the manufacturer requested that a court compel the authorities to lock away the results of the initial trials from prying eyes for seventy five years?

    This same product is made using E.coli bacteria. Yes, they are the little buggers that can give you the runs, but they are not all bad. These same clever E.coli make strands of genetic material or recipes for a protein that’s actually found on the outside of the virus, Sars-CoV2,a beta-corona virus that in healthy people may give them a bad cold. For others it can prove nasty, but in this unfortunate group of people almost anything can prove nasty. This is the same spike protein that is thought to provoke the worst excesses of the immune response when one encounters a beta-corona virus.

    The genetic material uses a unique substance N1-methyl pseudouridine, a synthetic base not found in nature as one of the letters spelling out the recipe for spike protein production. This substance, we are told, stabilises the recipe and helps the cell produce spike protein for longer. That can be a good thing because we want spike protein, to allow our immune system to react to it and produce protective antibodies for future use.

    That would be all very well if that’s all it did. Pseudouridine, however, produces a phenomena called frameshifting so that the reading of the recipe can go a bit off track. It’s a bit like reading ‘add  4 cups of flower’ and instead adding ‘flour’ to your scone mix. Who knows what you might end up with. Actually nobody knows for sure.

    And that’s not the only problem with letting E.coli make products for humans. E.coli have their own agendas. They are living creatures and not machines. They are under evolutionary pressure to disseminate their genes. One of the ways in which they do so is by packaging them into a little envelope called a plasmid and ejecting it out into the world. This is the process used to make the mRNA for the Covid vaccines, only the bacteria don’t just follow the recipe. They are artists and so embellish and improvise and sneak their DNA into the end product.

    Now the manufacturer assures us that they are one step ahead of these fiendish creatures and have managed to remove most, but not all of this foreign material. The manufacturers have in the past few years caught a break from the regulators who once upon a time said that the DNA from bacteria had to be so low that it was measured in picograms. It’s now measured in nanograms, which is one thousand times greater!

    They reassure us that this tiny amount – albeit one thousand times greater than was previously permitted – is broken down by the immune system. The immune system doesn’t like ‘naked DNA,’ i.e. DNA free-floating in the body. What if it’s not naked, but contained within the lipid nanoparticle, and it enters the cell with the rest of its encapsulated material?

    If the DNA passed on to us humans from our E.coli cousins were to confer the ability to photosynthesise, I’d gladly accept the reduction in my food bill, but what does the bacterial DNA code for?

    But its ok, or at least the manufacturers tell us it is. The level of DNA set by the FDA is what the manufacturer says is in their products. They’ve tested them and the various regulatory bodies believe them. Fingers crossed behind the back etc etc.

    Several independent researchers, however, noticed the crossing of fingers trick and had a look for themselves and found a lot more bacterial DNA. Now who do we believe?

    If that isn’t bad enough something else in the vials, and I don’t understand why it is there. This wasn’t presented to the FDA in the original application for licensing as ‘it was considered to be a non-functional part of the plasmid.’ Its presence has been disputed by some regulatory bodies and researchers, but is now actually recorded in the manufacturer’s literature.

    This substance is Simian virus 40, not all of the virus, just a portion called a promoter/enhancer sequence. In another incarnation this same substance – genetic material from a monkey virus – facilitates the entry of genetic material into the nucleus and hence the genome of the individual treated. This is the desired aim in this other incarnation, but is it the desired aim in the Covid vaccines? If not then why is it there?

    Authorities have sought to reassure those asking questions about SV40 that it is a ‘naturally occurring virus’. Somehow telling me that I am to be injected with a portion of genetic material from a virus that infects monkeys doesn’t reassure me.

    Let us speculate for a moment on the ramifications if this genetic sequence did facilitate the entry of the vaccine genetic material into our genetic material. If it was a heart cell or a liver cell nothing might happen. That genetic material may never again be expressed in the lifetime of that individual especially if they were elderly, wherein cellular activity, like most other activities, is slowed right down. If, however, the genetic material is incorporated into a sperm cell, what then? It could theoretically be transferred to the next generation through a baby with rapidly growing cells. What then?

    Pseudouridine is a synthetic substance not found in nature. Will we have then created semi-synthetic life forms or trans-humans? And just to stretch this concept to the point of being almost ridiculous, who owns the genetic material? Does the manufacturer have any proprietorial rights over the trans-human creature? When I discussed this with ChatGPT it gave me a long winded explanation as to why this is a complex medicolegal area, but it didn’t say ‘no’.

    Maybe I’m over-reacting. Maybe N1-methyl pseudouridine, bacterial plasmid DNA and fragments of SV40 will do me no harm. But what about the lipid nanoparticle?

    Surely a fatty bubble couldn’t do us harm, or could it?

    Once again, regulatory authorities dispute that there is substantial risk to us humans. They deny the amount of DNA, whether the DNA can incorporate into our genome, whether the mRNA can incorporate into our genome, significance of the SV40 fragment and the potential side effects of synthetic lipids.

    The title of this essay is ‘Informed Consent.’ At the time that these products where given emergency use authorisation they were still technically experimental and given the abundance of unanswered questions I would say they remain experimental.

    The 1947 Nuremberg Code, formulated after the trials of the Nazi doctors stresses the concept of informed consent before an experimental medical procedure is carried out on a human being. What percentage of the 70% of the world’s population who received these products can say that they gave ‘informed consent’?

  • Notes from a Segregated Island

    Your antennae are up months before it comes. You’ve gotten to the point where, if Leo Varadkar says something won’t happen, you brace yourself for its certain announcement, in good time.

    When the axe finally falls, you’re on holidays in Donegal in July, and the uncomfortable reality sinks in that the house and the rain-sodden outdoors will have to do you, pubs and restaurants will have to wait. Because you’ve long known that the game that’s made its way onto your table – one of freedom by way of the barcode – is one you won’t play.

    There are many quiet tears across the country, many tummies in a familiar pattern of churning, as a new breed faces an uncertain dawn. They’re greeted, at best, with a wall of silence, at worst with opprobrium and unflinchingly entitled judgement.

    The air of suspicion they have increasingly felt around them, in a quietly charged atmosphere that has made it harder to be in the thick of things, even among some cherished family and friends, has become solid and tangible.

    And yet the day is like any other, the view from the window just the same. Nothing but a simple QR code and a biddable hospitality sector, understandably desperate to re-open its doors, signals the birth of a new Irish underclass.

    Considered Thinking

    Research shows that people have many reasons for declining a medical intervention. These are mainly born out of considered thinking: medical history and experience, including vaccine-injury; research and knowledge of what is right for their own body; the practice of natural healing modalities as a first recourse to health.

    Gym membership cancellation rates at the recent extension of medical segregation to that sector suggest that those who have a strong investment in their wellbeing through exercise may assess the risk/benefit of Covid-19 vaccination in a different way to those who may be more vulnerable to Covid’s worst effects.

    There is no one-size-fits-all. Such is life. If we believe that this turns a vaccine-free person into a walking biohazard, perhaps we have bought into fear over an inspected view.

    We are now some twenty-two months into a pandemic that has fundamentally shifted the course of our existence. It is fitting to ask whether, along with a potentially very serious virus, we have also been visited by a kind of collective trauma, stemming from news streams delivering non-stop daily scrutiny of Covid-19, along with rolling curtailments of our lives and those of our children. Never before has an idea of safety been so rigidly attached to a single concept: being Covid-19-free.

    Serious Illness

    I don’t make light of Covid-19. I know what a serious illness it can be, particularly for those who are older or have underlying vulnerabilities. However, in a new world characterized by fear and caution – surrounded by visual reminders that something frightening is in our midst – I believe that something vital to a healthy society is being dangerously side-lined: the checks and balances necessary to healthy democratic governance.

    We are in the process of enshrining into law a piece of primary legislation, the Health and Criminal Justice (Covid-19) (Amendment) (No.2), granting the extension of extraordinary emergency powers to Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly, powers that prior to Covid-19 we never could have countenanced handing over to the State.

    These extend the medical segregation that has become normalised in society, where the paradoxically named “immunity certs” – granted after double vaccination to access supposedly inviolable freedoms – are widely seen as a reasonable and proportionate response to pandemic times, rather than a human rights’ issue in urgent need of inspection.

    Do we wish to live in a world where a person can be stripped of their basic freedoms because of their private medical status? A world where the unproven threat of asymptomatic transmission is greater than the threat of authoritarian, technocratic rule?

    (One where, in perhaps the greatest twist of all, those who have retained their “privileges” are of course no less immune from the Covid transmission chain.)

    Do we wish to be part of a society where, for instance, a medically vulnerable person who is not suitable for vaccination is left out in the cold – because GPs currently have no authority to grant meaningful medical exemptions?

    Do we want to raise our children in a world where a person who exercises their right to informed consent, as enshrined in every human rights in healthcare covenant since Nuremberg, can be readily pegged as plainly reprehensible?

    Sins of the Past

    In Ireland, we are thankfully now alert to the impacts of the sins of the past – where the “othering”, for instance of women and children in mother and baby homes, was an accepted thing – yet are we willing to face uncomfortable truths about our present?

    At this moment, we have effectively “othered” a cohort who are subject to a particular kind of derision. Ireland’s vaccine rollout, which sees the highest level of coverage in the EU, has not transpired into the panacea promised. Despite this, we see blame at times verging on incitement to hatred publicly levelled at those who choose not to or cannot, due to medical reasons, avail of this medical intervention. The failure of the medicine is somehow the fault of those who didn’t take it.

    Even as reputable medical journals caution against stigmatising the unvaccinated, the vaccine-free are relentlessly pegged as the scapegoat of this difficult episode, where goalposts keep shifting and promised remedies fail to deliver. Those in power conveniently use this to deflect from their own failures.

    “Anti-vax”, a dehumanizing, broad brushstroke term, has become common parlance. Nothing short of a creeping obsession has developed towards a group stigmatised with this label, among some of Ireland’s most trusted, supposedly liberal media commentators, and among some of our most powerful political voices.

    Terminology that casually stigmatizes people has the twin impacts of eroding human dignity while effectively silencing dissent and debate – two essential tools of a functioning democracy. And if the ensuing social media outcry was anything to go by, many found it chilling to witness Minister Donnelly level this term at a fellow deputy in the Dáil chambers, for presenting peer-reviewed scientific information.

    Taking one for the Team

    While we can casually cast blame, without evidence, upon the cohort who didn’t “take one for the team”, those who should actually be answerable almost two years in operate without meaningful scrutiny from either a critical media or political opposition. And here, I believe, is where we should all be looking to.

    We have empowered Minister Donnelly to strip some seven per cent of the Irish population of their basic social and civil rights. If this legislation extends until its “sunset” of June 2022, we will have placed a minority of Irish society at the back of the bus for almost one year. And who knows how much longer they’ll even be allowed to travel on the bus? If past form is anything to go by, we might then expect another piece of similar legislation to follow it.

    I struggle to understand how all this is compatible with a liberal democracy. As medical segregation and the removal of human rights flourishes across Europe, and our social credit becomes increasingly tied to barcode-accessed living, at what point do we begin to seriously look at the potential harms of this brave new world, for which we are hard at work laying down the building blocks?

    A medical officer having the power of detention over you, in an undefined “designated place”, if you are merely suspected of having Covid-19, is not democracy. Coerced medication is not democracy, and the championing of Covid Certs by Leo Varadkar, on the basis that it drove up vaccination rates, only celebrates this lapse.

    When does Emergency Phase End?

    Decision-making that impacts everyone in Ireland, taken by a group of eight middle-class, middle-aged white men, who fail to represent the cross-section of Irish society, including those most vulnerable to the effects of lockdown – working-class people, women, and other minority groups – is not democracy.

    Almost two years in, it no longer holds for our government to act as if we are in the emergency phase of the pandemic. This ongoing abuse of emergency legislation and power is causing untold damage to the communities trying to stay afloat around it.

    There is evidence aplenty now to begin an assessment of the broad impacts of pandemic measures, and this must be done with independent expertise provided by those who have not been at the helm. The bigger picture must now come into view. We need to properly consider the economic, social/cultural and in the context of overall healthcare.

    I believe, special attention must be paid to Covid-19 policy impacts on our young people. Strategies need to be rebalanced towards carving out a future that allows us to respond proportionately to the threat of Covid-19, while maintaining people’s human and civil rights, their entitlement to dignity and privacy, and ending a nasty division that has crept in with terrifying stealth, in a time of crisis.

    We need solidarity regardless of medical status. Please stand with me to reach out to your political representatives to insist they convey our call to reject segregation and division, and to demand checks and balances from a government that many increasingly see as being power-drunk at Ireland’s wheel.

    Ciara Considine is a book publisher, singer-songwriter (Ciara Sidine), civil rights activist and mother of two, living in Dublin.

    This article was first published in A Mandate Free Ireland, a weekly campaign newsletter, on 13 December 2021 (Click here to subscribe: https://tinyurl.com/2p8kvmw7).
    Featured Image: Daniele Idini