The most rigorous and comprehensive analysis of scientific studies conducted on the efficacy of masks for reducing the spread of respiratory illnesses — including Covid-19 — was published late last month. Its conclusions, said Tom Jefferson, the Oxford epidemiologist who is its lead author, were unambiguous.

"There is just no evidence that they" — masks — "make any difference," he told the journalist Maryanne Demasi. "Full stop."

But, wait, hold on. What about N-95 masks, as opposed to lower-quality surgical or cloth masks?

"Makes no difference — none of it," said Jefferson.

What about the studies that initially persuaded policymakers to impose mask mandates?

"They were convinced by nonrandomized studies, flawed observational studies."

What about the utility of masks in conjunction with other preventive measures, such as hand hygiene, physical distancing or air filtration?

"There's no evidence that many of these things make any difference."

I am pleasantly surprised to see the mainstream German publication Die Welt openly reporting that clinical trials of the Pfizer Covid vaccine were rife with alleged fraud. What a change!

The article explains that Pfizer unblinded and removed numerous patients who suffered adverse events from the Covid vaccine trial. It also gives examples of Pfizer subjects whose deaths appear to have been covered up. One of the victims described by Die Welt is Pfizer subject C4591001 1162 11621327, whose story I unearthed in July of 2022.

Welt has documents according to which patient no. 11621327 was found dead in his apartment three days after the second dose, apparently a stroke. Patient #11521497 died 20 days after vaccination, diagnosis of cardiac arrest. "According to the current state of science, these two cases would be assigned to the vaccination," says the Berlin pharmaceutical specialist Susanne Wagner, "especially since the U.S. health authority CDC is currently investigating strokes in vaccinated people."

As you remember, Pfizer's investigators implausibly ruled these deaths unrelated.

According to a new study, British toddlers (children between two and five years old) have possibly the worst diet in the world among their age cohort, with the highest rate of processed-food consumption on record. Nearly two-thirds of British toddlers' average calorie intake comes from processed foods, which have been linked to a wide variety of serious health problems - from obesity to cancer, and even autism. Under-5s in the US and Australia hardly fare much better, with 58 percent and 47 percent, respectively, of their calories coming from this garbage. This is a problem throughout the developed world, whether you're in Brazil or Belgium, Pittsburgh or Paris.

Doctors warn, on the basis of a growing body of scientific evidence, that children who consume such diets are likely to go on consuming them for the rest of their lives. Of course, we hardly need scientific studies to tell us that children who pick up bad habits are often stuck with them, to their own detriment and the detriment of those around them. What we really need to know is, why are our children being set up to fail?

Before we go any further, it's worth saying exactly what processed foods are. The easiest working definition is foods that are prepared in a factory, wrapped in plastic and contain ingredients you wouldn't find in a normal home kitchen - things like emulsifiers, stabilisers, humectants (to maintain moisture) and preservatives. In some stores, that would be virtually everything on the shelves.

I read an article by Adam Ellwanger entitles "I Don't Even Lift, Bro" and feel compelled to comment. It essentially casts the behaviors of the author as "moderate" indicating at one point that "moderation is a virtue." I agree with that very much, but I didn't see any defense of moderation within. What I did see was summarized eloquently by William Hunter Duncan thus: An Ode to Mediocrity.

What Adam has done is conflate moderation with mediocrity. By the standards he outlines, he demonstrates he misunderstands the role resistance training has in optimizing health. He doesn't see the utility. This is mind boggling to me. Of all the things you could allocate time and effort to in life, one of the things with the largest magnitude return on investment is resistance training. Let us examine why resistance training is useful.

While the research suggests that natural immunity could be just as good as vaccines at preventing serious illness from COVID-19 infection, the study's authors encourage people to still get vaccinated, to avoid any complications from any initial infections.

Previous COVID infection boosts long-term immunity and lowers the risk of hospitalisation and death at the same level as vaccination, new peer-reviewed research shows.

The study, led by the University of Washington and published by The Lancet medical journal, is said to be the "most comprehensive study to date" on the impact of natural immunity for the disease.

"For people who have been infected with COVID-19 at least once before, natural immunity against severe disease (hospitalisation and death) was strong and long-lasting for all variants (88% or greater at 10 months post-infection)," researchers said.

"Immortalized cells are a staple of medical research, but they are, technically speaking, precancerous and can be, in some cases, fully cancerous..."

Lab-grown meat, touted as the "cruelty-free" food of the future by everyone from the World Economic Forum to Hollywood mega-celebs like Leonardo DiCaprio, may have a fatal problem, according to a new Bloomberg story.

The problem is that the materials used to make the product - "immortalized cell lines" - replicate forever, just like cancer. Which means, in effect, that they are cancer. Although these cell lines are widely used in scientific research, they've never been used to produce food before.

"Immortalized cells are a staple of medical research, but they are, technically speaking, precancerous and can be, in some cases, fully cancerous... [but d]on't worry: Prominent cancer researchers tell Bloomberg Businessweek that because the cells aren't human, it's essentially impossible for people who eat them to get cancer from them, or for the precancerous or cancerous cells to replicate inside people at all."

— Bloomberg BusinessWeek

Industry types are "confident" that eating such products poses no risk — although there isn't any hard data — but it's not difficult to see, even if the products are "proven" safe, how people might be put off by the thought they're eating a glorified tumor.

Documents obtained under Freedom of Information (FOI) request by Dr Melissa McCann reveal that the TGA appears to have hidden numerous vaccine-induced deaths from the public view, including those of two children.

Dr McCann shared the shocking revelation in her address at the Covid Vaccine Conference, hosted by Clive Palmer's United Australia Party over the weekend in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney. The event featured leading ICU physician Dr Pierre Kory, cardiologist and epidemiologist Dr Peter McCullough, and McCullough's collaborator, author John Leake.

Addressing sold out crowds, Dr McCann shared the extraordinary lengths she had to go to to extract causality assessment documents relating to the TGA's investigation of reported deaths after Covid vaccination, which were obtained under FOI request in a process that took six months. Dr McCann lodged the request after seeing an unexpectedly high number of patients coming through her clinic experiencing adverse events after immunisation (AEFIs). She also noticed a high number of serious AEFI reports in the in the DAEN database, including the reported death of a 14 year old in October 2021.

The insidious vaccine debacle may seem to have come out of nowhere, but pharmaceutical and regulatory rot has been growing for decades.

The story of Zantac, the common heartburn medicine, is both awful and good - it's awful because one of the most common drugs on the market may have been causing cancers for forty years. It's good only because the story is finally being told and 70,000 people are suing GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). The "good" here is the hope that some justice might finally be done, and because the public might find out just how ghastly the industrial pharma octopus really is, and how welded it is in the system.

It's time to burn down the unholy empire of Big Pharma and Big Government and start again.

This is not a case of one bad egg in the system, it's the story of a system that virtually creates bad eggs

Glaxo was a little company in the 70s that took one of the most popular drugs on the market, Tagamet, tweaked it enough to patent a "better version", then aggressively out-marketed it, and eventually bought out the companies that made Tagamet to become the $70 billion GlaxoSmithKline giant.

"By 1989, Zantac was worth $2 billion. It accounted for half of Glaxo's sales and 53% of the market for prescription ulcer remedies."

But the common heartburn drug Zantac, or ranitidine, which drove their profits — also broke down into NDMA which is a known carcinogen, and there were warnings of this in 1981 and 1982, but it wasn't until September 2019 that an independent lab tested for NDMA and found it in every sample and at alarming levels. By April 2020 the FDA forced every manufacturer to stop producing and selling the drug altogether. Now, the court cases have started.

Most of the Bloomberg story — which is worth reading in full — focuses on just how badly behaved GlaxoSmithKline have been by hiding the early data for forty long years. But GSK also chose not to do more tests when it should have; it did not try to transport and store the drug in ways the reduced the contamination, and it did not advise the public to take the tablets outside meals. There is no sense that customer health mattered.

To me the bigger question that is never asked, is why drugs like this are not tested by publicly funded groups before they get approval to be rolled out en masse? The tests that were finally done in 2019 are not two-year studies involving thousands of people, they are just lab tests for contamination. What is the point of all the public health funding, the regulatory agencies, and public universities if they aren't used to defend the public?

If the FDA has the legal power to approve drugs or ban them, shouldn't it also bear the responsibility when it gets that wrong?

Under legal cross examination the director of research and development admitted they had known for almost 40 years that ranitidine could degrade under conditions of high temperature and moisture ... .

Equatorial Guinea has confirmed its first outbreak of the Marburg virus, a highly infectious and deadly disease similar to Ebola, following the deaths of at least nine people, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday.

The small Central African country quarantined more than 200 people and restricted movement last week in its Kie-Ntem province after detecting an unknown hemorrhagic fever. Neighboring Cameroon also restricted movement along its border over concerns about contagion.In addition to the nine deaths, Equatorial Guinea has reported 16 suspected cases of Marburg virus with symptoms including fever, fatigue and blood-stained vomit and diarrhea, the WHO said.

Vaccines undoubtedly allowed the country to get back to normal after the coronavirus pandemic, but information about potential side effects is not as well publicised as it should be.

That's the view of the Telegraph Science Editor Sarah Knapton, who spoke to columnists Liam Halligan and Allison Pearson on the latest Planet Normal podcast, which you can listen to using the audio player above.

"I do think there is some sort of link between heart problems and the jab," Sarah told the podcast.