Neil Oliver: Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you

Sometimes I wonder if I’m paranoid. Sometimes I wonder if being paranoid isn’t a good thing, in these troubling times.

Pharmaceutical giant Johnson and Johnson – the maker of one of the Covid 19 vaccines – is facing thousands of lawsuits in the US from people claiming its baby powder caused their cancer.

For decades, according to a Reuters news agency investigation, Johnson and Johnson knew their product was sometimes contaminated with asbestos – a substance that can cause cancer – but the company kept that information from industry regulators and the public.

This week Reuters claimed Johnson and Johnson had also investigated the option of shifting the liability from the lawsuits to a separate, newly created subsidiary company which could declare bankruptcy and so limit the impact of any damages resulting from the lawsuits.

Long before the baby powder lawsuits, Johnson and Johnson had faced other legal actions alleging harm caused by other products.

As I said at the beginning, Johnson and Johnson is the company behind one of the Covid 19 vaccines – and millions of doses of their offering have been injected into millions of people.

Carcinogenic asbestos in baby powder. Plans to off load the problem to a subsidiary company, so as to declare bankruptcy and limit the hit from any damages. A history of seeking to keep from the general public, unfavourable information about their products.

Some people are suspicious about the safety of a vaccine from the same company. It is important to stress this is not just about Johnson and Johnson. Far from it.

Many people are hesitant, at least, about ALL of the vaccines pushed by ALL of big pharma.

Two years ago I had barely heard of Pfizer, Moderna, Astra Zeneca and others. Now their names are as familiar as those of characters from the movies.

Across the world, governments have accepted indemnity so that companies producing the vaccines don’t have to pay compensation in the event of any harm done.

And yet people hesitant about vaccine safety are dismissed and vilified as swivel-eyed, tin-hat-wearing conspiracy theorists.

Just being hesitant about vaccine safety and asking questions about products destined for their bodies … for wanting to wait and see what long term research might reveal … reasonable people are made targets for shame and abuse, sacked from their jobs. Lives ruined.

Careful, now – people will say we are paranoid …

The Europeans Medicines Agency is investigating reports of changes to women’s menstrual cycles, attributed to the vaccines, and suggestions of associated effects on fertility. No one can yet know the truth of it – and yet scarcely has the topic even surfaced on mainstream media.

Paranoia – that’s all it is, apparently. Paranoia, pure and simple.

It is useful to know that, in the USA, once a government accepts a vaccine for use for all children – and it must be ALL children – then that country’s government accepts, in perpetuity, which is to say forever, all liability for the consequent effects, good or ill, of that vaccine. From that moment on – the moment when the needles go into the arms of babies, the companies producing those products are off the hook. And not just in relation to effects on children, but for effects on recipients of every age.

Paranoid? Moi?

Pfizer – another of those companies, behind another of the vaccines, has been testing the efficacy of a two-doses in babies aged from 6 months old to 5 years.

It appears two jabs is not enough, however. Now, according to the New York Times, they are assessing the efficacy of three doses administered to the same age group.

In March, the first 10,000 pages of Pfizer’s data relating to their vaccine are due for release in the US by the Federal Drug Administration – despite the company having gone back to court twice in hopes of blocking release of said information.

Round and round and round we go … where she stops, nobody knows …

According to the Evening Times newspaper in Glasgow, Public Health Scotland is to stop publishing data on Covid deaths and hospitalisations-by-vaccine-status over concerns such information is misrepresented, and I quote, by anti-vaxx campaigners.

Let’s have a look at the facts, shall we, the facts the Scottish government would prefer were not published: during the four weeks up until February the 4th this year, 478 Scots died and had Covid registered on their death certificates.

Of them – checks notes – 417 out of the 478 had been fully vaccinated. Let us be clear, as we do like to say these days, 87 percent of those that died of or with Covid, in Scotland, in the four weeks until the 4th of February, were fully vaccinated.

But the Scottish Government would prefer you didn’t linger over that thought, far less contemplate any significance it might have in the long, murky story of this present emergency … now two years old and counting.

Three weeks to flatten the curve … Save Our NHS … we’re all in it together …

But that’s plainly enough of that – no more such data are to be offered up for public consumption lest they be, and I quote again, “misrepresented by anti-vaxx campaigners.”

And then there’s Canada. Poor old Canada, that is home to family and friends of many of us. The increasingly puffy and pasty prime minister Justin Trudeau – looking more and more like a waxwork dummy left too close to a radiator – has clutched, desperately, drowning man that he surely is, at emergency powers.

He evidently fears the truckers, and their wives and their little ones, and their freedom protest, and so feels as vulnerable as a desiccated sandcastle facing the incoming tide.

His dad, Pierre, invoked similar powers. But in the old man’s case it was in the face of actual terrorists who, among other things, had kidnapped politicians in pursuit of an independent socialist state of Quebec.

Petit Justin, he of the B-movie actor looks, has taken up the same authoritarian stick – empowering himself to do whatever he wants in order to get his own way – in the face of families minded to put up bouncy castles, to offer free food for the people of Ottawa, and to invite them to relax in pop up saunas.

Protesters, politely asking for the return of their rights – the right to go to the cinema with their kids, to go out to a restaurant, to earn a living, all without a mandated vaccination – are seen softly singing the Canadian national anthem.

But a politician with a taste for black face called them racists and fascists. His police stole their food and fuel. In the past hours his myrmidons have trampled people – including a woman on a mobility scooter – under the hooves of their heavy horses.

Lesser Trudeau has gone to war against peaceful men, women and children. And also dogs. US media are reporting that if you are a trucker defying his will, your pets will be seized and “relinquished” after eight days – which is being interpreted as plans to put those animals down.

All of this is happening right now in Canada, our sister nation, and yet word of condemnation from any of our leaders on this side of the Atlantic, including Boris Johnson, comes there none. I suspect this is because they are, all of them – Johnson, Macron, Ardern and more – cut from the same bolt of cloth and waiting to see how brother Trudeau gets on.

There is, shamefully, precious little coverage of the violent suppression of Canadian people, on any legacy media.

Three weeks to flatten the curve, we were told, two summers and a thousand years ago. Now it’s time to trample peaceful protesters and take their dogs. Trudeau is freezing citizens’ bank accounts too, helping himself to control of the hard-earned cash of freedom-loving people.

And yet while Trudeau does what he likes, the leaders of the West remain silent, diverting attention elsewhere, to Ukraine for instance. Canada has metamorphosed into something between a banana republic and a totalitarian regime on our leaders’ watch and none has raised so much as an eyebrow. Shame on Justin Trudeau, spoiled brat. And shame on the rest of them.

People ought not to fear the power of governments. Governments ought to fear the power, the righteous power of their people.

It’s all about a virus, apparently, a virus causing an illness from which almost everyone recovers. A virus whose victims are, on average, over 82 years old, older than average life expectancy.

Let us never, ever forget that fact – that fact from which all else has grown like poisonous weeds. It’s for the greater good, we’re told. We’re all in it together, we’re told. Now hand over your wallet and your dog and kneel down with your hands behind your back.

One day you’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy.

In Austria it’s illegal to refuse the vaccines. Ruinous fines are in play there for those protecting bodily autonomy. In Germany, Italy, Greece, France and other European countries, the lives of the unvaccinated are being made increasingly impossible.

The lives of the vaccinated are hardly what they once were either. And don’t let’s get started on the prison islands of Australia and New Zealand.

Clap for carers, they said. 15 million jabs to freedom, they said. It feels like we blinked then, and suddenly it was sack the filthy vaxx dodgers … except, oh, wait, no, let’s not … for now.

In Canada it’s accept the mandate or we’ll freeze your bank account, lose your dog and trample you under the hooves of horses … because of a respiratory virus from which almost everyone recovers.

So, here’s the thing. Here’s the thing that haunts me, that I won’t drop and that won’t go away:

Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.