On Vaccines, Censorship and Pandemic-era Lies. A View of Swedish Scientists.

While Sweden stood out positively among other countries for its softer Covid policy, as there was much less coercion, the pandemic-era talking points are still deeply embedded in Swedish society.

"Safe and effective". Dr. Jonathan Gilthorpe, cell and molecular biologist from the UK who now lives and works in northern Sweden, considers this endlessly parroted slogan of coronavirus vaccines to be the biggest lie of this pandemic. "They are not safe. They never were safe. They were never tested to be safe. And they were never effective. They never stopped transmission," he says, listing the reasons. "I never knew a single person in my life who had been injured by a vaccine before this. I know many now," he adds.

Vaccine damage is something that in Sweden, as in many other countries, is not talked about in good company. Doctors and hospital nurses do not talk about it, health officials and scientists do not talk about it. Nor do other people talk about it much. "There is this culture of silence as we call it in Sweden. You don't talk, you don't say too much about things that aren't 'right'," Gilthorpe says. Many are afraid to speak out. For example, medical professionals or scientists fear being labelled a conspiracy theorist by their own colleagues. That would mean problems at work, including a potential loss of the job. At the same time, many still believe in the talk of "safe and effective" vaccines that protect them – even though data to the contrary is publicly available. "All the evidence says this is the most damaging medical treatment ever unleashed on humanity," Gilthorpe says.

Cell and molcular biologist dr. Jonathan Gilthorpe says the biggest lie of the Covid pandemic was to say the vaccines were and are “safe and effective”.

He cites the example of his letter to his colleagues, expressing concerns about the effects of mRNA vaccines. These vaccines make the body produce a spike protein which is very similar to a protein essential for the placental development during pregnancy. According to Gilthorpe, he noted quickly how the risks involved could lead to infertility or child loss. He then wrote about it to five of his colleagues, only one of whom eventually replied, saying that the similarity between the body protein and the artificial spike protein was not actually that great, and that the manufacturers certainly did not want to harm anyone. "At that point I realized that nobody is really interested in talking about this," he says.

Gilthorpe, together with his Canadian colleague Michael Palmer MD, have highlighted the composition of mRNA vaccines and the research of  Dr. Kevin McKernan who has shown that their quality is not up to the mark. In fact, they are 'contaminated', i.e. they contain DNA that should have been purified away from the mRNA in the final product. The question involves many intricate details, but to generalize, Gilthorpe and Palmer have described how this, among other problems, constitutes a significant cause of concern for health problems once these vaccines are injected.

“It's a crime I can't forgive”

While many scientists find it more comfortable not to investigate such issues and avoid talking about them, Gilthorpe does the opposite and talks about what worries him. Covid also worried him initially. Information about the disease was scarce, as was the data. He recalls how going into the shops, he, like many others, was afraid that someone might infect him with the deadly virus. It was clear that people were getting sick, needed hospital treatment, and some died. News flow about it was incessant.

However, after the first wave had passed, it became clear that the disease primarily affected people at risk, such as the elderly or people with other co-morbidities. The average age of Covid deaths in Sweden was 84, while the average life expectancy is 82. "So this meant that people that were really affected by the disease was a small subset. Then nothing made sense any more. Continued testing, more restrictions coming in instead of just letting the disease spread, which it already had, if we are honest," Gilthorpe says.

He considers the lockdowns of entire societies and the incitement of fear to be the second most devastating effect of the pandemic policies, next to vaccination, which have left a deep wound. At the snap of a finger, people's businesses and other enterprises, as well as normal life, were destroyed. At the same time, people were told to stay away from each other under the threat of force and they were obliged to wear masks – even school children who were never at risk from the disease to begin with. "The impact on children, children's mental health, children's wellbeing – that's a crime that I can't forgive," Gilthorpe says.

Cross country training at Palo Alto High School, California, US, February 18th 2021. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Malcolm Slaney.

Wearing a mask, says Gilthorpe, does more harm than good to the body anyway. "Especially in the social context of children, you know, with high CO2. And I have actually worked on oxygen levels in the body and how having low oxygen might be one factor that can lead to motor neurone disease," he says. That's why he deliberately avoided wearing a mask himself.

Banning the use of other medicines

After an initial shock about the new virus, psychiatrist Sven Román came to a similar realization as did Gilthorpe. Quite early on, he noticed that the mortality rate was being exaggerated, sometimes by up to 30 times. "I said from the beginning that we should do what we have always done – protect the vulnerable groups, the elderly. But the rest of the people can live as they want," he says. Román says that Sweden did indeed manage to behave sensibly during the first 7-8 months of the pandemic, but after that, he says, they too made a series of wrong and strange decisions. For example, they should have thought about treating the sick, among other things, with the “notorious” anti-parasite drug ivermectin. However, people who talked about this medicine risked being called anti-science conspiracy theorists. Yet in reality, this drug has a real effect against Covid, and studies have proved this.

Quite a similar pattern was observed with all other possible treatment options, such as hydroxychloroquine which is used for malaria, but also hormone and oxygen therapies. Even the fact that the cases that resulted in most severe outcomes were in correlation with low levels of vitamin D was not discussed and not taken into account in treatment planning.

Román explains that in Sweden, doctors were banned from treating Covid with ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine under the threat of losing their license or facing other penalties. At the same time, however, there was talk of safe, effective and absolutely necessary vaccines. Román says that these vaccines were not really necessary for anyone, especially if attention had been paid to possible treatments. Now we are witnessing serious side effects and harms of these vaccines, and deaths caused by them, and yet it is still not advisable to discuss this publicly, he adds.

Censorship working effectively

Public debate on such 'inappropriate' topics is being restricted and obstructed. In the past, Román was a regular contributor to specialist publications as well as major media outlets such as Dagens Nyheter. Now he is simply not published. Opinions that have been declared 'false', i.e. that question 'official' talking points, are not welcome and their authors are persona non grata in the mainstream media.

Psychiatrist dr. Sven Román says only the 'official' talking points are welcome in the Swedish media when talking about Covid.

Critical doctors and scientists have had to rally themselves. In 2021, Román was one of the founders of the Swedish association Läkaruppropet (The Physicians' Appeal) and is its chairman. In October 2020, three world-renowned medical experts and epidemiologists, Professor Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University, Professor Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University and Professor Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, had published their famous Great Barrington Declaration, calling for common sense and a return to a normal way of life in relation to Covid. The founding of Läkaruppropet was precisely a response to this call, aiming to put forward similar common sense views in Sweden. Román says they collected 5,000 signatures on their declaration in two weeks, but the mainstream press has thus far said nothing about their existence.

Gilthorpe is also a member of the Läkaruppropet association. Together with Román and other colleagues, they have written on a number of issues such as the problems related to vaccines.

Investigating the fall in the birth rate

One of their recent topics has been the drastic drop in the birth rate and its possible link to the Covid vaccination. Román says that Sweden's birth rate has been down for the past 14 months, 9% lower than it was expected to be – a staggering fall, the biggest on record. Exactly the same thing has happened in many other countries – in Finland, for example, the birth rate fell to its lowest level in 250 years. Estonia is also breaking negative records in this statistic. According to Román, this is why the sharp drop in the event can be observed in many countries – i.e. 9 months after the start of the vaccination, it has taken a plunge. Of course, there may well be another reason for it, but why should the mass vaccination that took place at the same time be dismissed as a plausible cause? "We must investigate this, but now we can't even ask the questions. So that is ridiculous," he says.

In any case, in Swedish society it is not much talked about and nobody wants to have a dialogue with Läkaruppropet. Instead there are various labels that are being stuck on them. Román says that in January, after they had held a big international conference in Stockholm to discuss the pandemic policies and vaccination, one of the politicians called them anti-vaccine and pro-Kremlin. In other words, her claim was that there is nothing to discuss with them. This is probably a familiar label and tactic to many, and one that can be seen in many areas nowadays in place of debate and arguments. With regard to Covid and vaccines, what makes this absurd is the fact that Russia, in implementing its so-called pandemic policy, did not act any differently from other countries – it similarly implemented direct vaccine coercion and planned for a system of vaccine passports to block unvaccinated people from accessing a number of public services.

The fact that going against the tide can lead to cancellation is something that immunologist and virologist Ann-Cathrin Engwall, PhD, knows very well. She says she was recently expected to give a scientific presentation on the functioning of the immune system, mRNA vaccines and their potential side effects. As she has strongly questioned the necessity of mass vaccinating against the coronavirus, her presentation was opposed by a colleague with whom she has co-published scientific papers in the past. Engwall says this is actually nothing new for her, as she also opposed the need for mass vaccination during the 2009 swine flu pandemic, and her cancellation has been ongoing ever since. "It affected my career, it affected a lot of things, so I had nothing to lose anymore, to be honest," she adds.

“Never give vaccines to pregnant women”

Thus, at the beginning of the pandemic, Engwall was mainly concerned with reassuring people and trying to calm their fears by her own means, i.e. posting on social media. "A lot of people felt they weren't being given the right information, so I decided I had to do it," she says. In a short time she had already 15 000 followers. As she has been careful about what she posts, she hasn't been directly censored on social media. However, she has been the subject of several complaints to the authorities, alleging that her actions put people's “lives and health at risk”.

As an immunologist, Engwall says that mass vaccination against coronavirus was generally counterproductive and could only have been of benefit to very old people at the very beginning. But she doesn't think that the mRNA technology in the present form is an appropriate technique to use for protecting healthy people against common colds or flus. A vaccine of this kind enters the body cells that produce spike proteins and these cells will activate the immune systems T-killer cells that will attack them and cause tissue damage in the body as well as inflammatory problems, she explains. And as the vaccine spreads through the body, it can attack organs ranging from the brain and nervous system to the ovaries, sperm, heart or liver. It can cause a variety of problems which can also flare up later. There's also a lot of talk about an increase in cancer cases at the moment, she says, and here too there may be a link to the same vaccines. "This is all something that should be evaluated before a drug is given to so many people," Engwall says.

Immunologist and virologist Ann-Cathrin Engwall, PhD, says vaccines are never given to pregnant women unless neecessary for their own lives.

She adds that vaccination of children and pregnant women has been her main opposition. "When I studied immunology, we were told, that you should never give vaccines to pregnant women, if it's not necessary for their own lives. And the reason is, it can harm fetus and you can get spontaneous abortions, early births and so on," she explains. In the case of Covid vaccines, however, the opposite was the case – pregnant women were advised to get vaccinated, on the grounds that it would also protect the baby.

Another big lie

However, one of the worst lies during the pandemic, according to Engwall, has been the claim that immunity from the vaccines is superior to natural immunity. In fact, the opposite is true and has been true all along. Vaccination for someone who has had the disease is also to be deemed unnecessary and could be disadvantageous since the risk for side effects becomes increased, she says. The fact that immunity from previous infection is effective and vaccination is not necessary in such case has been witnessed by several studies. For example, one study in June 2021 clearly showed that individuals with a history of SARS-CoV-2 were very unlikely to benefit from Covid-19 vaccines. A study published in Lancet in February this year also concluded, after reviewing data from 65 trials in 19 countries, that previous exposure confers strong immunity to the disease.

Engwall also confirms that it is not possible in the current atmosphere to debate these issues openly, as one might in real science. "We are not given a platform to present our arguments, we are ignored. This is especially true for those who have the education. If anyone is singled out, it is someone who has some very bizarre theories that are then easy to refute," she says. According to Engwall, this situation also fuels self-censorship among scientists – they don't speak out, out for fear of losing their position and funding for research.

Román points out the same, saying that most of the research funding in medicine comes from pharmaceutical companies and this has been so for decades. Nobody wants to bite the hand that feeds them, he says.

Gilthorpe says the same. According to him, in academic journals, the truth is that if you write an article that does not acknowledge the current narrative, or objects to it too strongly, it will generally not be published. He cites an example from the United States – economist Mark Skidmore, a professor at the University of Michigan, tried to find out the extent of the vaccine damage in the society. Skidmore is an expert in conducting surveys and designed a survey for this study. Out of 2,840 people who took part in the survey, 34% said they knew someone who had experienced a significant health problem following the vaccination. 22% of respondents said they knew someone who had had a serious health problem following the vaccination. Based on the survey data, Skidmore estimated that the number of vaccine-induced deaths in the United States could be as high as 278,000. At the same time, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates this at 19 476 deaths.

Skidmore's work was initially published in the prestigious scientific journal BMC Infectious Diseases, but it was eventually withdrawn because of opposition. According to Gilthorpe, this may even have benefited the work by getting more attention. So sometimes the public can benefit from zealous censorship. Although this is probably rare.