ICWA Weekly News 8-1-23
Another Washington professor questions shot mandates in DC hearing, attempts to censor RFK Jr. at censorship hearing, and selective reporting by DOH - what are they hiding?
By Gerald Braude & Melissa Leady
In this newsletter:
Links to resources from July 28th Episode of An Informed Life Radio
Another Washington professor questions shot mandates – Will he lose his job?
Washington Representatives Try – and Fail - To Censor Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in DC Hearing
Washington DOH COVID-19 reports continue to omit data on bivalent booster
No DOH Update at Aug. 9th State Board of Health?
July 28 Episode of An Informed Life Radio - Show Links
Family Courts Force Vaccination
Guests: Tanya Goodman and Patricia Finn.
Tanya describes her fight to protect her child with autism from pressures to vaccinate. Then, Patricia analyzes use and abuse of the 1905 Jacobson Decision and reviews other medical freedom litigation.
UW Assistant Affiliate Professor Criticizes COVID-19 Shot Mandates at Congressional Testimony
Just a month after Washington State University terminated Dr. Renata Moon’s contract for reporting on the harms of COVID-19 shots in children at US Senator Johnson’s Roundtable Discussion last year, University of Washington (UW) Assistant Affiliate Professor Dr. Kevin Bardosh criticized the COVID-19 shot mandates at a Select Subcommittee hearing at the nation’s capital.
The July 26, 2023 hearing, titled “Because I Said So: Examining the Science and Impact of Covid-19 Vaccine Mandates” evaluated the necessity and effectiveness of overreaching COVID-19 shot mandates and looked into the erosion of public trust that stemmed from coercive vaccination policies. This was also covered by Children’s Health Defense: Hearing on Consequences of COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates
The UW faculty web page shows that Dr. Bardosh has no current affiliation with any professional organizations or outside work, although he has worked in the past for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and a large number of other health science agencies. He has co-authored over thirty peer-reviewed publications and has edited two books.
Dr. Bardosh is one of nine authors of the May 26, 2022 analysis in the BMJ Global Health titled, “The unintended consequences of COVID-19 vaccine policy: why mandates, passports and restrictions may cause more harm than good.”
At the hearing, Dr. Bardosh detailed the findings of his BMJ research paper:
“Our analysis strongly suggests that mandatory COVID-19 vaccine policies have had damaging effects on public trust, vaccine confidence, political polarization, human rights, inequities, and social well-being. We question the effectiveness and consequences, of course, of vaccine policy in pandemic response and urge the public health community and policymakers to return to nondiscriminatory trust-based public health approaches. We started the results section of this paper with what is kind of a shocking statement, actually, when you think about it, and I quote ‘Although studies suggest that current COVID policies are likely to increase population vaccination rates to some degree, gains were largest in those under 30 years old, a very low risk group and in countries with below average uptake.’ So the totality of actual data on increases in vaccination rates from mandates and passports does not suggest an overwhelmingly positive impact. For example, a recent study on indoor vaccine passports, found no significant impact on COVID-19 vaccine uptake, cases, or deaths across all nine U.S. cities that implemented this policy.”
Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) pointed out that the divisive rhetoric and coercive tactics employed by public health officials disregarded natural immunity and scientific evidence. Dr. Wenstrup asked Dr. Bardosh, “Do you do you think that ignoring or putting aside infection acquired immunity, natural immunity may have had negative consequences? We weren’t even allowed to talk about it?”
Dr. Bardosh replied:
“I think it showed the American people that the government and our authorities will bold facely lie on camera. It was obvious. In mid 2021, I watched with dismay as the Biden Administration and the CDC said this vaccine will stop transmission. I was looking at the data from Israel and the UK where I have colleagues, and I knew that it wasn’t going to stop transmission because it wasn’t in their data. How did Americans not know this? It was clear, and yet we sort of had this charade.”
Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa) then asked:
“Dr. Bardosh, your paper in the British Medical Journal of Global Health discusses the unintended consequences of the COVID-19 vaccine mandates. The Biden administration imposed several, including the DOD mandate for military service members, the executive order mandate for federal employees and contractors, the OSHA mandate for employers with 100 or more employees, the CMS mandate for health care workers at facilities that participate in Medicare and Medicaid, and the HHS Head Start Program COVID-19 vaccine mandate for which we know young children are at the least risk. Can you highlight the ramifications of these mandates, such as no jab, no jab policies, vaccine passports and social lockdowns for the unvaccinated?”
Dr. Bardosh’s answer:
“There is no doubt in my mind that these mandate policies are going to be responsible for the increase in distrust the next time there’s a pandemic and the mobilization of resistance to a future vaccine in a future pandemic. And I think it’s really shocking, and kind of a little bit sad, that my colleagues in the public health community, who are pro-mandate, don’t understand this.”
Dr. John Joyce (R-Pa.) broke down the arguments in Dr. Kevin Bardosh’s research paper, which focused on the tremendous societal impact of imposing an unscientific vaccine on millions of Americans without sufficient evidence to support the policy decisions:
Rep. Joyce: “Did the COVID vaccine mandates, from your research, from your publication with others, erode civil liberties?”
Dr. Bardosh: “Yes, it did.”
Dr. Joyce: “Did the COVID vaccine mandates fracture trust in public health officials?”
Dr. Bardosh: “Yes, it did.”
Dr. Joyce: “Did the COVID vaccine mandates create financial stress on individuals and families who lost their jobs to the COVID mandates?”
Dr. Bardosh: “Absolutely.”
Dr. Joyce: “Do you feel that the decrease in individuals receiving routine pediatric immunizations for their children, do you feel that is due to the mandates of the COVID vaccine?”
Dr. Bardosh: “Yes, I do.”
Dr. Joyce: “Do you feel that the COVID-19 vaccine mandates have harmed America?”
Dr. Bardosh: “Yes, I do.”
Washington Representatives Try – And Fail - To Censor Robert F. Kennedy Jr. without Doing Their Homework
Six of the ten Washington members of the United States House of Representatives signed a petition to withdraw Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s invitation to appear in front of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, citing Kennedy’s “repeated and recent statements, which spread dangerous anti-Semitic and anti-Asian conspiracy theories amid increased violence targeting both groups.”
The letter from Debbie Wasserman Schultz and directed to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan said, “We request that you rescind your invitation for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to testify as a witness before the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government on Thursday, July 20, 2023.”
The six Washington representatives of the 102 congressmen who signed the petition were as follows:
Suzan DelBene (D), first congressional district
Rick Larsen (D), second district
Derek Kilmer (D), sixth district
Pramila Jayapal (D), seventh district
Adam Smith (D), ninth district,
Marilyn Strickland (D), tenth district
All who signed were democrats. Why didn’t the other Democrats - Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D, 2nd), and Kim Schrier (D, 8th) - sign?
The letter of the petition made the following accusations toward Kennedy:
“Mr. Kennedy has repeatedly and recently spread vile and dangerous anti-Semitic and anti-Asian conspiracy theories that tarnish his credibility as a witness and must not be legitimized with his appearance before the U.S. Congress nor given the platform of an official committee hearing to spread his baseless and discriminatory views. Just last week, a video recording was released in which Mr. Kennedy asserted that COVID-19 was bioengineered to target certain races.”
The referenced video recording was from a July 13, 2023 after-hours campaign dinner at an Upper East Side restaurant and then first published by the New York Post.
The letter went on to state,
“Specifically, Mr. Kennedy floated the conspiracy theory that the coronavirus was purposely bioengineered in a lab to target Caucasians and Black people—but to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.”
The video shows that Kennedy did not say that the coronavirus was “purposely” bioengineered to target these groups. Instead, he said, “We don't know whether it was deliberately targeted or not, but there are papers out there that show the racial or ethnic differential and impact."
CBS News also reported that Kennedy later posted a video statement, saying in part:
"Nobody has suggested that these were deliberately engineered changes and I certainly don't believe that they were deliberately engineered," but calling it "kind of a proof of concept that you can develop bioweapons that will attack certain ethnicities."
This means that the six Washington representatives did not look at the video or read Kennedy’s follow up statements.
The Wasserman Schultz letter goes on to make the following false claim:
“The conspiracies promoted by Mr. Kennedy were made without any basis in scientific evidence, which is not a surprise, since no such evidence exists … By promoting the unfounded notion that scientists are developing bioweapons that can target certain races and exempt others, while referring to Jews as a separate race, Mr. Kennedy is employing a pernicious form of anti-Semitism that has been used for centuries.”
During the dinner in question, Kennedy cited a July 2020 study in BMC Medicine, which reported that, based on ACE2 and TMPRSS2 polymorphism analysis, certain races, as well as people with certain diseases, are more susceptible to COVID-19.
As summarized in the paper:
“We found unique genetic susceptibility across different populations in ACE2 and TMPRSS2. Specifically, ACE2 polymorphisms were found to be associated with cardiovascular and pulmonary conditions by altering the angiotensinogen-ACE2 interactions, such as p.Arg514Gly in the African/African-American population. Unique but prevalent polymorphisms ... in TMPRSS2, offer potential explanations for differential genetic susceptibility to COVID-19 as well as for risk factors, including those with cancer and the high-risk group of male patients.”
The study addressed other racial and ethnic groups:
“Finnish (FIN), and South Asian (SAS) populations is 2–10%, while Amish (AMI) and Ashkenazi Jewish (ASJ) populations do not appear to carry such variants in ACE2 coding regions (Fig. 1b).”
In an Instagram rebuttal with a Rabbi Shmuley, Kennedy explained that, according to this study, ethnic Chinese, Finns, and Ashkenazi Jews were the least susceptible to COVID-19, while people of African descent and Caucasians were the most susceptible.
“This is not a controversial study. Nobody has suggested that these were deliberately engineered changes. And I certainly don’t believe that they were deliberately engineered. But what they are is kind of a proof of concept, that you can develop bioweapons that will attack certain ethnicities, and this should be terrifying to all of us ... and [needs to be] an object of discussion.”
So, the study published in BMC Medicine shows that, contrary to what the letter stated, scientific evidence exists concerning what Kennedy was referring to. For some reason, however, the six Washington representatives did not bother to look for this study before signing the letter.
Washington DOH COVID-19 report omits data on bivalent booster
On July 12, the Washington Department of Health (DOH) released its monthly report, COVID-19 Hospitalizations and Deaths by Vaccination Status. The 18-page report compares COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths for unvaccinated individuals against those who had at least one monovalent booster dose. Oddly, the report does not include any data for the bivalent boosters which have been available since September 1, 2022, painting an incomplete picture of vaccine effectiveness in the state.
The rates of death are thankfully small as admitted in the footnotes. However, the chart fails to include data for the latest authorized bivalent COVID vaccine. Is it disingenuous for the DOH to claim that those who are over 65 and unvaccinated are 1.1 times more likely to die[LT1] [BR2] ? First of all, 1.1 times is a relative risk assessment that is equivalent to saying 10% more likely. Does 1.1x sound more ominous? Further, the data show roughly 2.25 deaths per 100,000 versus 2.1 deaths per 100,000. With a difference that small, one should wonder what the graph would look like if data were included for the other shots being administered.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted emergency use authorization (EUA) for the bivalent boosters on September 1, 2022. On September 2, 2022, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and DOH issued a notice recommending the bivalent boosters for anyone over 12 and removing approval [LT3] [BR4] for the monovalent booster. By December 2022, the WA DOH had stopped recommending the monovalent mRNA booster for any age.
The DOH revamped its report on hospitalizations and deaths by vaccination status in February 2023, removing data on the primary vaccine series and including monovalent booster data. This was done several months after the CDC had removed authorization for the monovalent booster. Each new monthly iteration of the report has continued to compare unvaccinated to monovalent booster data. So as of July, the DOH continues to report on a vaccine that has not been available in 2023 as confirmed on slide 46 from a November 2022 DOH report on boosters.
The reason DOH provided for excluding bivalent booster data is stated in the report: “Information about bivalent boosters is not included in this report in order to avoid confusing the impact of the bivalent boosters with the impact of the monovalent boosters. Individuals who received a bivalent booster after August 31, 2022 are removed from the analyses presented here. Information about the impact of the bivalent boosters will be included in future iterations of this report once a sufficient percentage of the Washington population has received a booster.” (Emphasis added.)
During the July 13 Vaccine Advisory Committee (VAC) meeting, COVID-19 Vaccine Director Heather Drummond shared that 27.4% of Washington residents have received the bivalent booster as she summarized slide number eight (Presentation link). DOH does not define what it considers a “sufficient” percentage or explain why bivalent data would be excluded when more than a quarter of residents (over 2 million) have received a bivalent booster dose.
The number of Washington residents with a bivalent booster exceeds the number of unvaccinated residents. The Washington DOH COVID-19 Data Dashboard shows that 78.9% of residents initiated vaccination, leaving 21.1% unvaccinated. Unvaccinated data are included in the July 12 report as a basis for comparing vaccine effectiveness, again calling into question the rationale for excluding the higher 27.4% bivalent booster data.
A possible reason for excluding bivalent booster effectiveness data might be found in a recent study titled Risk of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) among Those Up-to-Date and Not Up-to-Date on COVID-19 Vaccination by four authors comparing COVID-19 case rates among 50,000 Cleveland Clinic employees.
The study’s figure compared those “up to date” (defined as having received at least one dose of the COVID-19 bivalent booster) and those “not up to date” (no bivalent booster dose). Receiving a bivalent booster was associated with a higher risk of COVID-19 incidence, approximately 25% higher. It is possible that the DOH data on the bivalent booster shows a similar decreased effectiveness (negative efficacy), which they might be hesitant to admit after repeatedly promoting the bivalent boosters since their authorization.
The FDA authorized the bivalent boosters based on preliminary efficacy data from eight mice. There was no clinical data from human vaccine trials available, so initially the DOH was recommending the bivalent booster without any clinical trial efficacy data.
Has the bivalent booster ever been effective in reducing cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in Washington State? Residents may never know. One might wonder if the DOH is simply cherry-picking data for any favorable news about their shots so that they can continue to market them.
At the July 13 VAC meeting, DOH reported that starting this fall, and maybe as soon as September, the FDA will look to approve a new monovalent booster based on the XBB.1.5 variant which has been circulating this year.
Whatever booster the DOH recommends in the fall, they should not promote it without sharing data on all shots—primary series, monovalent boosters, and bivalent boosters.
No Washington DOH Report for the next BOH Meeting
Typically, almost without fail, the Department of Health provides an update report at each State Board of Health (SBOH) Meeting. However, the draft agenda for the Wednesday August 9, 2023 meeting does not include a Department of Health (DOH) update. Instead, a Thurston County Public Health update is occupying the normally used late-morning DOH time slot.
The BOH meeting will be held for the second consecutive time in Olympia. It will take place at the Cherberg Building, Conference Room ABC, 304 15 Ave SW.
The meeting will begin at 9 a.m. The half-hour allotted time slot for public comment will begin at 9:15 a.m. For in-person comment, the board strongly encourages people to sign up with the board by sending an email by 12:00 noon the day before the Wednesday meeting to wsboh@sboh.wa.gov.
For those attending the public attending virtually, they can provide public comment, by signing up through the Zoom webinar link by 12:00 Noon the day before the meeting at the following link: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Hp3s9SX7TTWWzd4HqP2OBw
Written public comments are accepted until 12:00 Noon the Friday before the Wednesday, August 9 meeting. Written comments should be sent to wsboh@sboh.wa.gov. Written comments received after 12:00 Noon Friday will be shared with board members; however, board members may not have the capacity to read or review the comments in advance or during the meeting.
Below is the access information for dial-in phone listen-only mode:
Call in: +1 (253) 215-8782 (not toll-free)
Webinar ID: 822 4533 5009
Passcode: 682856
How far must the needle swing before the establishment sees the errors of their ways?