News Round-Up: AstraZeneca Sued Because of Covid Vaccine Damages, UN's Ongoing Fight Against 'Disinfo' and Skewed Claim About 99% of Scientists Backing Anthropogenic Global Warming
News Round-Up: AstraZeneca Sued Because of Covid Vaccine Damages, UN's Ongoing Fight Against 'Disinfo' and Skewed Claim About 99% of Scientists Backing Anthropogenic Global Warming
Every week, the editorial team of Freedom Research compiles a round-up of news that caught our eye, or what felt like under-reported aspects of news deserving more attention.
Over the past week, the following topics attracted our attention:
UK: victims of AstraZeneca's Covid vaccine took legal action.
Anthropogenic global warming – really the consensus among more than 99% of climate scientists?
Complaints of unjustified bank account closures increase in the UK.
The UN's fight against "disinformation": UNESCO also calls for restrictions on freedom of expression.
Sweden struggles with criminals of Syrian origin.
UK: victims of AstraZeneca's Covid vaccine took legal action
Two lawsuits have been filed at a UK court against the drug company AstraZeneca by people whose health or that of their loved one was damaged by the company's Covid vaccine, The Telegraph reports. One of these claims was brought by Jamie Scott, a father of two who received the AstraZeneca vaccine in April 2021 and developed permanent and significant brain injury as a result of a blood clot that has left him unable to work.
The second is brought by the widower and two young children of Alpa Taylor, who died at the age of 35 after receiving the AstraZeneca vaccine.
Among other things, the lawsuits state that AstraZeneca's vaccine was in fact “defective” and that claims about its efficacy were “vastly overstated”. The vaccine was launched in early 2021 and was presented as a "triumph for British science" by Boris Johnson, who was then UK Prime Minister. However, within a month of the vaccine's introduction, it was acknowledged that vaccines can cause serious health problems and the UK suspended the vaccine for people under the age of 40. The fact that vaccine-induced immune thrombocytopenia and thrombosis are very serious side effects and can be lethal in many cases was already recognised then, but the attempt has been to show it as a minor problem. The World Health Organisation (WHO) still says that the AstraZeneca vaccine is safe and effective for all people aged 18 and over and that serious adverse reactions are very rare.
However, calling the side effects very rare is debatable and, in fact, in the UK, these two lawsuits could open the way to further damages claims against AstraZeneca. The Telegraph notes that at least 80 cases are pending with claims totalling around £80 million (€92 million).
As a separate fact, it is worth noting that there was in fact no need to vaccinate people outside the at-risk groups at all, as Covid-19 disease was not fatal to young and healthy people and the vaccines did not stop the spread of the infection. According to a study led by Stanford University medical professor John P. A. Ioannidis, the pre-vaccination infection fatality rate in Taylor’s age group (i.e. ages 30-39) was only 0.011%.
Anthropogenic global warming – really the consensus among more than 99% of climate scientists?
A study published by Israeli scientists at the end of October challenges a consistently repeated claim in the context of global warming that there is a scientific consensus of more than 99% of scientists backing the claim that global temperature rises are due to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Israeli scientists led by Yonatan Dubi, Professor of Chemistry and Physics at Ben Gurion University, analysed a study published in 2021 that made such a claim and concluded that the study was not accurate. In fact, Mark Lynas, the author of the paper under scrutiny, and his co-authors said that they reviewed 3,000 abstracts of papers on the topic since 2012 and could find only four articles that did not support anthropogenic global warming. Adding in the implicitly sceptical papers, there were reportedly only 28 such cases out of 3000. "We conclude with high statistical confidence that the scientific consensus on human-caused contemporary climate change – expressed as a proportion of the total publications – exceeds 99% in the peer reviewed scientific literature," they claimed.
However, Professor Dubi and his colleagues have now presented significant flaws in Lynas’s methodology, analysis and conclusions. Firstly, they criticise the work of Lynas and his co-authors for having a blurred hypothesis that allows for a subjective assessment of the climate papers it was judging. Secondly, a large number of climate papers that are neutral or without a position on anthropogenic global warming are judged by Lynas et al to be in favour of or implicitly supporting the 'consensus'. Dubi et al. also point out that those papers that are in fact 'sceptical' about anthropogenic global warming do not tend to emphasise this in their short summaries, i.e. their position cannot be judged on abstracts alone. "All these lead to the conclusion that the conclusion of the study does not follow from the data," Dubi et al state.
In conclusion, Dubi et al note that the debate about how and how much humans affect climate is important. "It affects many aspects of modern life, and its conclusions will affect major parts of humanity. Clarifying what scientists think about it is indeed important from a societal point of view. However, claims for consensus should be made carefully; we need to understand exactly (and quantitatively) what is the statement that the scientific literature supports and eliminate possible biases and statistical errors in the quantification of the consensus. This matter is too important to be left blurry and subjective,” they state.
Complaints of unjustified bank account closures increase in the UK
The Financial Ombudsman Service, which handles consumer complaints against financial services providers in the UK, has received a total of 1,613 complaints about the closure of bank accounts in the six months from the beginning of April to the end of September this fiscal year, reports The Telegraph. That's 268 cases a month. In the previous 2022-2023 fiscal year, there were a total of 2,708 cases or 225 cases per month.
If the current trend continues, the total number of complaints will rise by a fifth to around 3,200 in the current fiscal year. The data also show that banks have been closing accounts of small and medium-sized businesses without justification.
The rise in complaints may be linked to the summer scandal, when it emerged that British banks no longer wanted to see former United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) leader Nigel Farage as a client. Farage, now a presenter on GB News, said he had been a customer of the same banking group since 1980 but was suddenly told that all his bank accounts would be closed. Other banks also refused to open accounts for him. While the bank that closed the accounts – private bank Coutts owned by NatwWest – initially tried to claim that the issue was not ideological but commercial, it eventually emerged from internal bank documents that the accounts were closed for political and ideological reasons. We have written more about the case here.
The UN's fight against "disinformation": UNESCO also calls for restrictions on freedom of expression
On Monday the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which aims to promote international cooperation in the fields of education, culture, science, information technology and media, published an action plan to regulate social media platforms.
UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay said in a press release presenting the action plan that the spread of so-called "disinformation" and "hate speech" on the internet poses a major threat. "Digital technology has enabled immense progress on freedom of speech. But social media platforms have also accelerated and amplified the spread of false information and hate speech, posing major risks to societal cohesion, peace and stability. To protect access to information, we must regulate these platforms without delay, while at the same time protecting freedom of expression and human rights," she said.
According to UNESCO, their action plan is the result of an unprecedented consultation process within the UN system, which gathered more than 10,000 contributions from 134 countries. The 40-page Action Plan outlines the principles that should be followed, as well as concrete actions that governments, so-called civil society and platforms should take. For example, UNESCO believes that public regulators should be set up around the world to regulate social media. At the same time, these bodies should also cooperate closely with each other internationally to prevent platforms from taking advantage of differences in regulation between the countries. It should also be ensured that 'content moderation' on platforms is feasible and effective in all regions and all languages. The platforms would also be obliged to take more initiatives to educate and train users to develop their critical thinking. In particular, it is proposed that platforms should tighten up their control measures at sensitive moments for societies, such as elections and crises.
According to the press release, many countries, notably in Africa and Latin America, have already informed UNESCO that they are ready to start implementing these measures. UNESCO also plans to organise the first conference of regulators next year.
This is a rather worrying development since we know that under the guise of ‘a fight against disinformation' and 'hate speech', the dissemination of information that is true but, for whatever reason, considered inconvenient or undesirable from the point of view of the authorities, has in fact been restricted in various countries around the world. We have written about such expansion of censorship on several occasions in recent years (see e.g. here and here). The Westminster Declaration in defence of freedom of expression was also published in October and has been signed by several prominent figures in the UK, the US and other countries who are concerned about such restrictions on freedom of expression and are drawing attention to the dangers they pose.
Sweden struggles with criminals of Syrian origin
Dozens of Syrians expelled by the Swedish state after serving sentences for serious crimes committed by them will in fact remain in the country, Remix News reports, pointing to a recent story by Swedish public broadcaster SVT. In total, there are 73 Syrian citizens who should have left the country after serving their sentences, but 52 of them are still in Sweden, as of September 2023. In other words, three out of every four Syrian criminals who should have been deported from the country actually remain in Sweden. In four out of ten of these cases, the same persons have also received a new residence permit from the country. A number of them have also already committed new serious crimes.
Sweden started offering permanent residence permits to people fleeing the Syrian civil war ten years ago. However, the country's migration office has now concluded that large areas of Syria, including the capital Damascus, are safe enough for deportations.
The policy change has been prompted by the brutal violent crimes committed by Syrians. In October 2020, for example, three Syrian citizens beat up a gay couple holding hands in Gothenburg but were not deported after being punished. In 2020, a Syrian man was also convicted in court of raping a 12-year-old girl in a public toilet in the city of Borås. He was also not deported.
Although deportation decisions are now being made, the numbers show that there is still no enforcement.