The British Medical Journal has been doing some of the best, well, some of the only investigative medical journalism around the Covid 19 story. A November 2nd story by Paul Thacker details how a former Pfizer researcher is sounding the alert on serious issues with the Pfizer Covid vaccine trials. Read that story here:

What about medical misinformation being spread by the national health agencies? First, CDC’s director, Rochelle Walensky, who tweeted on November 5th.

Masks can help reduce your chance of COVID19 infection by more than 80%

No study was offered to back up this claim. The most reliable data we have is from a gold standard Bangladesh study published in Nature in September which showed a relative risk reduction from the use of surgical masks by 11% - so, she was only 69% off.

On the same day as CDC director’s misleading tweet, November 5th, across the pond in the UK, CEO of the National Health Service, Amanda Pritchard, decided to try to outdo her American counterpart in the lie through your teeth department. She made this statement on national television. “We’ve had 14 times the number of people with Covid19 than we had this time last year.”

On 5 November 2020 there were 10,994. That makes the current figure 1.6 times lower, not 14 times higher as Ms Pritchard claimed.

The NHS has never had fourteen times the number of people in hospital with Covid than it did in November 2020 (which would be roughly 154,000 people).

Get the full facts here

In an online article of October 16th the Economist claimed that In Britain, as in the rest of Europe, 80-90% of those hospitalized with Covid are unvaccinated. It turns out that they were basing this figure on a report by COVID-19 Clinical Information Network (CO-CIN) that was presented to the government’s emergency scientific advisory body, SAGE, in September, with figures linked to earlier assessments.

According to the data from the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) the real percentage of hospitalized un-vacccinated patients at the time of the article was 35%. The Economist has since published a retraction after being taken to task by full fact.org - Read about this story here.

LEGAL BATTLES AGAINST VACCINE MANDATES:

IN SPAIN: A care workers dismissal for refusing to have a Covid injection was overturned in court in Bilbao Spain, El Mundo reported 3 November, on the grounds that it is unconstitutional. Read the story here.

IN CANADA: Canadian National Railway workers are hitting back against the company’s vaccine mandate, sending their employer a letter threatening class action if it persists with the recently announced policy. Read here.

UNITED STATES: A Federal Appeals Court in the US calls President Biden’s vaccine mandate "fatally flawed" and "staggeringly overbroad" arguing that the requirements likely exceed the authority of the federal government. The 5th circuit court of appeals said the mandates raise “serious constitutional concerns.” Read more here.

Access the British Institute of Human Rights guide to Covid 19 vaccines here.

Nothing going on here - episode 5 - Satire