10/11/2021 / By News Editors
STORY AT-A-GLANCE
(Article by Dr. Joseph Mercola republished from Articles.Mercola.com)
August 4, 2021, CNN aired a hit piece on me based on a fabricated report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) — a report that has since been refuted by Facebook itself.1
According to the CCDH,2 I am No. 1 of a dozen individuals responsible for 65% of all anti-vaccine content on social media and should therefore be stripped of my First Amendment rights to free speech and banned from all platforms.
For their first broadcast, CNN reporter Randi Kaye, who wasn’t wearing a mask at the time, tracked me down as I bicycled around my home town to ask me about why I say masks don’t work, and whether I “feel responsible” for the deaths of unvaccinated people — a strange perspective indeed, considering the COVID shots CNN is pushing may have killed more than 200,000 otherwise healthy Americans so far.3
The U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) had as of September 24, 2021, received 15,937 reports of deaths shortly after the COVID injection,4 and a report by Steve Kirsch provides compelling evidence that side effects are underreported by a factor of 41. That means the death toll may be closer to 250,000.
Does CNN regret having lured all of these people to their deaths by refusing to report anything negative about these experimental injections? At the end of that segment (below), Kaye decries the success of my best-selling book, “The Truth About COVID-19: Exposing the Great Reset, Lockdowns, Vaccine Passports, and the New Normal,” refusing to even state its title.
So far, the book has sold more than 250,000 copies, and all proceeds are being donated to the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), the oldest and largest vaccine safety advocacy group in the U.S.
October 4, 2021, CNN aired a follow-up on the book’s success — this time providing its title — while urging Amazon to get into the book burning business rather than being a book seller. Like something straight out of George Orwell’s “1984” newsspeak dictionary, CNN host Anderson Cooper said my book is loaded with “mistruths” about COVID. I guess “misinformation” doesn’t pack the same punch it once did.
They also still referred to me as a “superspreader of misinformation,” even though Facebook has published data showing that between the 12 of us “superspreaders,” we actually only account for a minuscule 0.05% of all vaccine-related content on that platform. As noted by Monika Bickert, vice president of Facebook content policy:5
“… these 12 people are responsible for about just 0.05% of all views of vaccine-related content on Facebook. This includes all vaccine-related posts they’ve shared, whether true or false, as well as URLs associated with these people.
The report6 upon which the faulty narrative is based analyzed only a narrow set of 483 pieces of content over six weeks from only 30 groups, some of which are as small as 2,500 users.
They are in no way representative of the hundreds of millions of posts that people have shared about COVID-19 vaccines in the past months on Facebook.
Further, there is no explanation for how the organization behind the report identified the content they describe as ‘anti-vax’ or how they chose the 30 groups they included in their analysis. There is no justification for their claim that their data constitute a ‘representative sample’ of the content shared across our apps.”
CNN uses the oldest propaganda trick in the book in its latest report. If you just spew out enough derogatory terms about your opponent, people will forget the fact that you provided zero proof to back up your position.
They claim my book is full of “lies,” “misinformation” and “mistruths.” But not a single piece of evidence to back that up is presented. They don’t even provide any specific examples of what these “lies” might be. My book is fully referenced, and none of those references has been publicly disputed or refuted as false.
A journalist accusing someone of lies had better well have proof of those lies. To produce a story without that proof is unconscionable and certainly not representative of honest journalism.
As Kaye mentions, CNN also contacted my publisher, Chelsea Green, for comment on a series of questions. Below are the answers provided by president and publisher Margo Baldwin to CNN’s AC360 producer Stephen Samaniego:
CNN Question: Why did Chelsea Green publish a book so full of misinformation?
Chelsea Green Answer: What misinformation? There is no misinformation as far as we are concerned. I might ask the same thing of CNN and the misinformation it perpetuates about the lab leak origins of the virus: www.cnn.com/2021/03/31/health/lab-leak-coronavirus-theory-comic-book-scn/index.html
CNN Question: Do you feel any responsibility at all for giving an author who is peddling lies about COVID a platform to profit from those lies?
Chelsea Green Answer: What lies? Please elaborate on the lies you are referring to.
CNN Question: Do you feel responsible for contributing to the misinformation that is out there about COVID and the vaccines?
Chelsea Green Answer: No, we feel we are contributing to the truth about COVID, as many other eminent scientists and doctors are also courageously doing.
CNN Question: How much money had the book grossed for Chelsea Green Publishing?
Chelsea Green Answer: I think you can figure that out for yourselves.
CNN Question: What was Dr. Mercola’s compensation for writing the book and how much has he earned from sales royalties?
Chelsea Green Answer: That is confidential information but Dr. Mercola has said publicly that he is donating all his earnings from the book to The National Vaccine Information Center, a nonprofit organization dedicated to vaccine safety.
In a statement accompanying her answers, Baldwin added:
“These are not serious journalistic questions. They are simply attempts by CNN to shut down debate and censor speech. We call it out for what it is: intimidation tactics to be used against anyone who dares to question the narrative that CNN is peddling.
Our responsibility is to the public and to stand up for free and open exchange of information. If you have questions about any of the facts in the book, check out the sources and examine the evidence instead of simply dismissing it as ‘misinformation.'”
In an email response to Baldwin’s request for elaboration on the supposed lies he’s referring to, Samaniego stated:
“There are too many for me provide you a comprehensive list but a few top line ones that stick out …
That the vaccine trials were rigged, that the vaccines are part of unprecedented and dangerous experiment, that a large amount of data suggests that vaccines may be completely unnecessary, vaccines cannot prevent or reduce transmission or infection hospitalization or death. According to the CDC the vaccines are nearly 100% effective at preventing serious disease and death.”
Baldwin replied to this short-list with the following mainstream media links, none of which, by the way, has been accused of being superspreaders of mistruths:
“The trials were designed specifically to succeed. www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2020/09/23/covid-19-vaccine-protocols-reveal-that-trials-are-designed-to-succeed/?sh=21270ac65247
Removing the placebo groups from vaccine trials will prevent accurate data from long term studies from being known. www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/02/19/969143015/long-term-studies-of-covid-19-vaccines-hurt-by-placebo-recipients-getting-immuni
The experiments are continuing through 2027 as the FDA APPROVAL requires Pfizer to submit study results analyzing risk of myocarditis and pericarditis, and risk to long-term infant development in pregnant women. Study results reports will be submitted to the FDA for review on Oct 31, 2025 and May 31, 2027 respectively.
Nearly 60% of gravely ill patients are fully vaccinated, while stating the Pfizer vaccine is just 39% effective. www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/08/grim-warning-israel-vaccination-blunts-does-not-defeat-delta and www.cnbc.com/2021/07/23/delta-variant-pfizer-covid-vaccine-39percent-effective-in-israel-prevents-severe-illness.html.”
The one question Baldwin did not address was whether the COVID shots are even necessary. My next book, which will focus on the so-called COVID “vaccines,” will go into this question in great detail, but the fact of the matter is the shots are, by and large, unnecessary for most people, for the simple reason that most people aren’t at risk of dying from COVID-19.7,8,9,10,11
Data from a Wake Forest Baptist Health study12,13 suggest the overall death rate from COVID-19 is around 0.1%.14 Stanford University’s disease prevention chairman Dr. John Ioannidis has calculated the infection fatality rate as being between 0.05% and 1%, with a median of 0.25%. For those under the age of 45, the infection fatality rate is near zero, and between the ages of 45 to 70, it’s between 0.05% and 0.3%.15,16
Yet another study17 published in the Annals of Internal Medicine put the overall noninstitutionalized infection fatality rate at 0.26%. People younger than 40 have an infection fatality rate of 0.01%, while those 60 and older had a 1.71% risk of dying from the infection.
Now, if your risk of dying from COVID-19 is near zero, even if the injection is 100% effective at preventing death, you’re not getting any benefit since you weren’t at risk of dying in the first place.
This is not rocket science. So, CNN either cannot wrap their heads around these simple data points, or they ignore it because they don’t want you to understand just how small the risk of COVID-19 actually is, and how great the risks of the COVID injections are in comparison. If the latter is true, then they are complicit in the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans, and perhaps hundreds of thousands.
And, there’s more. A number of studies have also looked at the absolute risk reduction provided by the COVID shots, showing they’re near useless. While, at the outset, vaccine makers all boasted very high effectiveness for their COVID shots, independent reviews suggest their claims were massively overstated from the get-go.
As it turns out, they’re all using one of the simplest and oldest statistical tricks in the book: conflating relative and absolute risk reduction. Pfizer, for example, claimed its mRNA shot was 95% effective. How did they get that number? In trials reportedly involving tens of thousands of people, 170 were diagnosed with COVID-19 during the trial.
Of those, 162 were in the placebo group and eight were in the COVID shot group. From this, it is inferred that the shot prevented 154 out of 162 people from developing COVID-19. That’s 95%. However, this is the relative risk reduction. The absoluterisk reduction is actually less than 1%.18
When calculating absolute risk reduction, you compare the frequency of an outcome in the treatment group compared to untreated controls. As a hypothetical example, if 20% of the control group develops COVID-19, compared to just 12% of those who got the jab, then you have an absolute risk reduction of 8%.
That then means that if 100 people got the COVID shot, eight would not get COVID-19. This is the most accurate and helpful way to present data when you want people to be able to make an informed treatment choice; if you want to manipulate and deceive them, you would use the relative risk reduction.
Dr. Ron Brown published a paper detailing the problems with this kind of reporting bias specifically as it pertains to COVID-19 mRNA “vaccines.” In “Outcome Reporting Bias in COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine Clinical Trials”19 Brown calculates the absolute risk reduction for Pfizer’s and Moderna’s injections, based on their own clinical trial data, so that we can compare them to the relative risk reduction reported by these companies. Here’s a summary:20
As noted by Brown, “Reporting absolute risk reduction measures is essential to prevent outcome reporting bias in evaluation of COVID-19 vaccine efficacy.”
In a July 1, 2021, commentary in The Lancet Microbe,21 Piero Olliaro, Els Torreele and Michel Vaillant also argue for the use of absolute risk reduction when discussing vaccine efficacy with the public. They too went through the calculations, coming up with the following:
As you can see, the absolute risk reduction for all of these COVID shots is below 1.3% (and those numbers can only go down as the effectiveness of the shots wane). And, as just mentioned, your risk of dying from COVID-19, provided you’re not ill and living in a nursing home, is around 0.25%.
So, again, if your risk of dying from COVID-19 is less than 1%, and your absolute risk reduction from the COVID shot is right around 1%, that tells us the mathematical possibility of these COVID “vaccines” having a favorable impact on public health is very close to zero.
Hence, stating that COVID shots may be unnecessary for most people is not a lie. It’s a commonsense conclusion that can be verified by anyone, in a number of different ways, using a number of different data sources. Unfortunately, CNN is no longer in the business of relaying verifiable data or facts.
Rather, they’re a propaganda mill for The Great Reset agenda, which needs vaccine passports to be implemented across the world. And in order for that to happen, people need to be convinced that COVID-19 is a lethal scourge that must be prevented, even if it costs us our freedom and the health, lives and livelihood of hundreds of millions of people.
I am donating all proceeds from this book to NVIC to help us protect our rights. NVIC works across all of the US, the are the oldest and most powerful voice we have in defending medical choice. Please help raise awareness by purchasing The Truth About COVID-19 while you can, and increase the visibility on Amazon so others will become aware of this important book before the censors have it banned. Thank you if you already have a copy, it has truly made a difference!
Read more at: Articles.Mercola.com