Light in the dark: Wolfgang Wodarg

Sandra Ferrante & Juan Peris-Mencheta

January 27, 2021

This is the first of a series of ALO entries entitled "Light in the dark" in which we recover the voices of scientists silenced by the institutions of the current scientific hegemony; our modern Galileos. Men and women who are risking their professional careers, their prestige and surely also their lives to reveal the lies and fabrications and to denounce the dogmas upon which the New Normal has been built in the wake of the Covid 19 phenomenon.

By way of introduction

"Sun, stand still over Gibeon and you, Moon, over the valley of Ayalon!" This biblical phrase supports and synthesizes the scientific debate of the 15th and 16th centuries. What would happen to the authorised source of truth in the midst of the fundamentalist Counter-Reformation if it were the Earth and not the Sun that were in motion? Being an incontrovertible source of scientific data, all of the Bible's content had to be true, and its deniers were therefore worthy of judgment and, at the very least, excommunication. On the basis of this geocentric dogma, it was not difficult to eliminate, by way of the Inquisition, the heliocentric theses formulated by Copernicus and Kepler and defended by a vehement Galileo. The latter was censored, prevented from teaching by 1616 for relating his astronomical observations, and twenty years later he was forced to renounce his convictions and writings.

Now, what would happen today if in the inaugural year 0 of this pandemic era, it turned out that there had been no excess mortality and that, if there had been in certain countries and certain periods, this could not be associated with the disease called Covid 19, based on verifiable and testable evidence? Would it even be possible to doubt in the current state of the collective imagination a "truth" so heavily promoted by scientific, political and media centres and so manifestly assumed without effective resistance by a majority of the global population that is confined and masked, with all its rights restricted? Well, the truth is that today there is a minority of scientists (considerable and growing) who have raised critical voices against the official pandemic narrative (OPN, hereinafter), and who have expressed their discrepancies both through conventional media and the new social networks (YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp ...) . Curiously, the latter have been and are: 1) discredited by the defenders of the OPN as a source of information contrast; 2) used by these same operators to spread their attempts to discredit dissidents; 3) left as the last and only resource of expression available to the dissidents, having been denied any participation in the mainstream media, and 4) at the same time censored by the owners of those platforms on the grounds that these dissenting voices are not true and that they would likely cause harm to societies and their health systems.

The truth is, however, that none of these dissident scientific discourses 1) has called to disobey the unfounded measures adopted by governments, despite being dissenting, 2) have been based on unofficial and/or controversial data, 3) have been integrated into the decision-making of any country 4) have been incorporated in a standardised way in the conventional media sphere. 

It is also evident and true that the so-called bloc of dissent is absolutely heterogeneous at all levels (social classes, educational levels, professional fields, ages, ideologies, creeds, administrative origins ...) and that within this dissent there is enormous diversity that operates with completely different motives (foundations) and degrees of scepticism. It is also true that the dissident scientific discourses (firmly distinguished from those derived from social ideologies, groups and people without any scientific training) proceed from a genuinely rational and scientific attitude. Additionally, these discourses are far from being as unitary as claimed by those who live directly or indirectly from the new Covidian dogma. We could in fact and before presenting our first dissident figure (Wolfgang Wodarg), venture to anticipate some lines of what would be a typology of scientific scepticism towards Covid 19, since there are moderately sceptical attitudes and highly sceptical attitudes towards the OPN and / or of any of its components, and then directly rebellious attitudes of everything narrated and acted upon by the public powers and supra-governmental organisations. Just to account for some dissident attitudes from across the range, we recover some of the most relevant:

• scientists who deny, in the absence of verifiable purification and isolation processes, the existence of a new pathogen, although they do not deny the occurrence in March, April and May of 2020 of a peak of mortality in some countries; 
• scientists who do not doubt the existence of a new pathogen, but do doubt the existence of a new disease, distinguishable from other pre-existing ones both in clinical pictures and in the few autopsies carried out internationally; 
• others who do not doubt the existence of the virus or the disease, but who radically question the alleged zoonotic origin of it; 
• those who, without doubting the disease or the virus, question the extraordinary lethality of this new disease and, therefore, the lack of proportionality in the measures adopted for the entire population;
• those, such as the man we present in this first entry in the series, who do not (at least publicly) reject the existence of C19 or a new pathogen, but rather focus on its political and business-oriented over-hyping, as well as upon the inconvenience of the responses operated, which would be more harmful to people and societies than the threat against which these measures are deployed;
• those who, irrespective of the existence or otherwise of Covid-19 and Sars Cov 2, search for other explanatory causes of the mortality spikes that have been detected at certain times and in certain countries...
  

The typology we are pointing to is not exclusive among the subtypes it presents and is by no means complete, but it sufficiently accounts for a heterogeneity that cannot be reduced to one category (denialism), as the totalising media crudely claim. We note that, far from starting from common assumptions and findings, the only thing these sceptics share are two elements: firstly, their requirement for more data, more voices to be heard, more light to be shed, and more freedom to contradict. And secondly, the fact that all of them have been or are despised, censored and/or disqualified and persecuted by the supporters of the OPN, in what can already be considered as a true Tribunal of the New Inquisition which, since May has attempted to establish an informative sanitary cordon, and close all possible argumentation, all controversy and therefore all scientific and social debate. This closure has not occurred because the sceptical or denialist theses of Covid 19 have been refuted, nor because of a victory by the hegemonic scientific discourse (manifested by the OPN). Rather, it has built its dominance in the absence of a contender.

That is why we open this space for voices, reflections and debate. Because amidst the current dogmatic obscurity, it is important to keep in mind, to know and to at least understand the arguments of those people who, despite having renowned and impeccable scientific and professional careers, have been excluded from any debate or decision-making process, their voices silenced and their professional prestige and personal dignity attacked for simply questioning the official truths of the moment. If there is anything more worrying about this dark time than the impacts of the anti-sanitary, anti-scientific, anti-social and anti-economic measures that Western countries are applying, it is without a doubt what is happening to Truth and to the foundations and freedom of science.

Wolfgang Wodard, the scourge of the pharmafias

Wolfgang Wodarg was born in 1947. He practiced as an internist and pulmonary physician, specialist in hygienic and environmental medicine, as well as in public health and social medicine. After his clinical work, he was among other things a public health officer in Schleswig-Holstein for 13 years, at the same time as a professor at universities and technical schools and chairman of the Expert Committee for the protection of the environment related to health in the Schleswig-Holstein Medical Association. In 1991 he received a fellowship to study epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA. As a member of the German Bundestag from 1994 to 2009, he was initiator and speaker at the Research Commission "Ethics and Law of Modern Medicine", a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, where he was president of the Subcommittee on Health and vice-president of the Committee on Culture, Education and Science. Since 2011 he has worked as an independent university professor, doctor and health scientist and was a volunteer member of the board and head of the Transparency International Germany health working group until 2020. Throughout his career both as a health professional and as a politician and public official, his main concern has revolved around the quality of health and the necessary independence of science with respect to the chrematistic interests of the pharmaceutical industry, and considering how to make the right decisions. Consistent with this and in his role as the highest representative of the Health Commission of the Council of Europe, in 2009, he started the Research Commission on the role of the WHO in H1N1 (swine flu) in Strasbourg, where he remained as a scientific expert after leaving Parliament (1). Wodarg denounced the lack of scientific rigor in Imperial College's alarmist projections and the World Health Organization's reliance on conditional funding for the pharmaceutical industry. Subsequently, many doctors and scientists joined the complaint in what became known as the “Tamiflu scandal” [2; 3].

“We have had a mild flu and a false pandemic set up by Big Pharma and the WHO. This is one of the biggest medical scandals of this century."  These surprising and forgotten phrases, pronounced by our protagonist exactly 11 years ago, summed up what happened with the so-called "Swine Flu" of 2009. The outbreak of swine flu (H1N1) came five years after the also famous outbreak of the "avian flu" (H5N1), an experience that served to generate a memory and a reflection of the States in the face of the possible reissue of that first event: this is what is known as positive priming (priming) by repetition, a basic technique of political propaganda and marketing. Wodarg explained this preparatory logic in an interview with the newspaper La Voz de Galicia: “It all started with bird flu in 2005, when the WHO began to prepare its plan against it. The industry pledged to produce vaccines if governments agreed to buy their entire production in the event that the WHO declared a pandemic. So, they prepared their business for the next five years. In June 2009, the WHO chose a mild influenza outbreak that had been observed in April in Mexico, to pull the trigger and declare that it met the criteria for declaring a pandemic that had just been approved." And in this simple way, the big pharmaceutical companies (Glaxo, Novartis and Bayer, mainly) secured "huge profits", while countries, including the United Kingdom, "squandered" their meagre health budgets, vaccinating millions of people against a relatively mild disease. At that time, Spain purchased 37 million doses of influenza A vaccines and 3 million antiviral treatments [4]. Other countries did the same: in Germany 50 million doses of these vaccines were bought, of which only 10% would have been used; the UK stockpiled the drug worth $ 710 million for 40 million treatments; The United States spent $ 1.3 billion to store Oseltamivir (Tamiflu) for 65 million doses. India also multiplied its stocks by 10. Its sales increased 84% with Oseltamivir during the 2013 flu season in the United States.

The Council of Europe, the Strasbourg-based "senate" responsible for the European Court of Human Rights, passed a resolution proposed by Dr. Wodarg calling for an investigation into the role of pharmaceutical companies. The text of the motion drafted by Wolfgang Wordarg as chairman of the Subcommittee on Health and signed by 13 other members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe was as strong as it was unequivocal:

“To promote their patented flu drugs and vaccines, pharmaceutical companies have influenced scientists and government agencies responsible for public health standards to alarm governments around the world. They have squandered scarce healthcare resources on ineffective vaccination strategies and have unnecessarily exposed millions of healthy people to the risk of unknown side effects from insufficiently proven vaccines. The "bird flu" campaign (2005/06), combined with the "swine flu" campaign, appears to have caused great damage not only to some vaccinated patients and public health budgets, but also to credibility and responsibility of important international health organizations. The definition of a serious pandemic should not be under the influence of drug sellers. The member states of the Council of Europe should call for immediate investigations into the consequences, both at national and European level."

Wodarg's disclosures and whistleblowing was ratified years later by a scientific study signed by Indian researchers, entitled "The Tamiflu fiasco and lessons learned", in which the adverse effects of an ineffective drug with a proven toxicity not reported by the manufacturers, but which passed all approval processes of the international health authorities, and several national ones. Dr. Gupta and his co-authors speak of a multisystemic failure of the regulation and control system of medicines:

“Oseltamivir (tamiflu) has been identified as a classic case of multiple and linearly aligned errors and omissions; in which rigged tests, targeted disclosures, and a favourably-timed pandemic disease have secured windfall profits for drug companies. We have to devise ways and means so that wasteful exercises like this are kept to a minimum, and patients are not forced to take drugs of dubious risk-benefit ratio ”[5].

As at present with the purchase of drugs from Pfizer and Moderna, countries at that time were prepared to anticipate mass purchases through emergency procedures. The Tamifú scandal did not go unnoticed by Spanish society, and was even disseminated through a channel with substantial reach, such as CNN+, then led by Iñaki Gabilondo.

It is a multimillion dollar business but also something much more worrying: an episode of massive pharmacological iatrogenesis from which it seems that we have learned nothing, since the scheme has been repeated again in a rudely identical, although amplified way; the declaration of a pandemic by the WHO (even though the virus had not been isolated and purified to analyse its pathogenicity and when the supposed disease was located in two countries) was followed by a whole media bubble of over-hyping that caused a hospital collapse due to the social panic that it unleashed; a political-administrative overreaction to adopt the most restrictive measures ever implemented with this extensiveness and level of intensity. And finally, there is a vaccination race, with countries massively purchasing these experimental gene products, even prior to their emergency authorisation, and without sufficient guarantees on safety and efficacy (the adverse effects that we see daily are overwhelming).

In a recent interview, the main elements of which we repeat here, Dr. Wodarg [6] states that we are witnessing the same alarmist and fraudulent model of the avian flu (2003) and influenza A or swine flu (2009) pandemics, except that the stakes and complexity are even greater than in those years. According to the renowned epidemiologist, Sars Co-v 2 together with other coronaviruses are responsible for between 5 to 15% of the symptoms of respiratory infections and act together with other viruses, such as influenza or rhinoviruses, year upon year. The severity of the symptoms that any of these viruses can produce is obviously linked to the patient's immune status. Hence, in people over 80 years of age and, especially, in the presence of other diseases, the situation can be aggravated. However, the doctor insists that practices such as the use of respirators or high doses of hydroxychloroquine, antivirals and corticosteroids could have produced more lethal conditions than those of the virus itself. Many people wonder, as does the interviewer, why, if coronaviruses are not new, is the current situation so different from previous years? According to Dr. Wodarg, two key elements converge to explain this: the panic spread by the mass media and the generalized use of PCR tests whose formulation, elaboration and protocols have been left to the discretion of each manufacturing laboratory. How is it possible to trust some statistics on infections that are being fed based on tests so heterogeneously produced and applied? Additionally, the lower the prevalence of the disease (as is currently the case), the higher the proportion of false positives (that is, people who test positive for PCR while healthy). The tests are useful in people with symptoms to indicate what type of virus is present (e.g., coronavirus, influenza or adenovirus), as long as they are done carefully. If, as happens in Germany, 1.5 million tests are carried out each week, it is practically impossible to process so many tests adequately, and what the epidemiologist calls "a test pandemic" occurs. ALO has already given sufficient notice here, here and here of the evidence that invalidates detection and diagnosis with the cardinal test of PCR.

The lurch towards technocratic totalitarianism

But in addition, the absolute lack of evidence and scientific rigour in diagnosis, the absence of a minimum standardised protocol for hospital treatments, the imposition of indiscriminate pseudo-sanitary measures (masks and confinements) and measures restricting human rights in general (mobility, meeting, association, demonstration, right to work and right to access standardised public services) all occur as a kind of decree, with the total absence of debate. In the words of our German epidemiologist: "the State has decreed that we all agree with the pandemic...the mass media have suspended the debates and say the same thing, exactly the same, just like the governments."

Even though the profiteering from the pandemic is enormous, there are clear signs that the goals are not solely financial. For this reason, Dr. Wodarg, calls our attention to recent publications of the World Economic Forum, coinciding with the statements of the President of the European Commission, Dr. Ursula von der Leyen, on the existence of a Trilemma to combine three elements that are not simultaneously compatible: nation states, democracy and globalisation. In this framework, the pandemic would make sense by displaying its ability to stop practically everything and facilitate the implementation of globalist plans in the style of "The Great Reset", by tycoon Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum [7]. Such a reboot could lead humanity to a dystopian reality similar to the one already experienced in countries like China, where control of citizenship and intrusion into people's privacy is extreme and completely normalised. If this model was enlarged, hyper-globalisation and widespread digitalisation would allow the planet to be governed as a large company, putting at risk one of the main mechanisms of anti-authoritarian regulation that we have, democracy, and positioning science as an instrument of human subjection (and not of emancipation), undermining our rights and above all condemning future generations to a life without autonomy and without dignity. 

Faced with this picture, the question of what can we can do is all the more urgent. For Dr. Wodarg, one of the rare public figures who has dared to question this episode of human history and its handling by the world's political and scientific players, the possible answers lie at different scales of intervention. Thus, on the one hand, the protection of our elders and the most vulnerable can and should be met at the local or community level, with sufficient resources and with due proportionality and funding. And, on the other hand, scientific knowledge and the approach to global public evils can only occur in the global sphere and always through more (and never less) democratic participation. The population has the duty and the right to be able to count on evidence and take charge of its problems, without having to entrust its resolution to the exclusive and opaque performance of experts who are rarely accountable. In that acting locally and thinking globally and always expanding human freedoms and capabilities, the key to navigating globalization with minimal success seems to continue to lie. Those who seek today from the highest spheres of power and outside of public scrutiny and control, to remove the population from the decisions that affect them and that shape their future, are not only wrong, but will have to bear the consequences of their autocratic and unscientific behaviour.

 

References

1- El Consejo de Europa investigará a la OMS por anunciar pandemias falsas. Infosalus. 26/01/2020. Disponible en https://www.infosalus.com/actualidad/noticia-consejo-europa-investigara-oms-anunciar-pandemias-falsas-20100126103200.html

2- Casado, S. El escándalo del Tamiflu. 28/04/2014. Disponible en https://www.huffingtonpost.es/salvador-casado/el-escandalo-del-tamiflu_b_5185894.html

3- La verdad sobre Tamiflu: poca eficacia y muchos intereses. 11/04/2014 Disponible en https://www.ocu.org/salud/medicamentos/noticias/tamiflu

4- Herrero, R. El Gobierno compra 37 millones de vacunas contra la gripe A y tres millones de tratamientos antivirales. Heraldo 11/07/2009. Disponible en https://www.heraldo.es/noticias/nacional/el_gobierno_compra_millones_vacunas_contra_gripe_tres_millones_tratamientos_antivirales.html

5- Gupta YK, Meenu M, Mohan P. The Tamiflu fiasco and lessons learnt. Indian J Pharmacol. 2015;47(1):11-16. doi:10.4103/0253-7613.150308; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4375804/

6- Burunat, P. La Era de las pandemias con Wolfgang Wodarg La entrevista del año. 23/11/2020. Disponible desde el 27/12/2020 en: https://lbry.tv/@pedroburunat:3/La-Era-de-las-pandemias-con-Wolfgang-Wodarg-La-entrevista-del-a%C3%B1o:6

7- The Great Reset Initiative. Foro Económico Mundial. 24/09/2020. Disponible en: https://www.weforum.org/great-reset

 

Translation: David Montoute

Original en castellano: https://abrelosojos.xyz/uncategorized/luces-en-la-penumbra-wolfgang-wodarg/