I write, because I "remember that funny white-haired guy who used to appear so often on their screens, the one who said “I represent science”?"
I think that your take on COVID is really not fair.
I had COVID after the third vaccination (with 81). I was extremely ill during two weeks and weak and sleepy for many weeks. During these weeks I was unable to mount one flight of stairs. Only once in my life had I been equally ill, when I got measles at the age of 26 (its more severe in adults). Its quite possible that I would not have survived COVID without these vaccinations (mortality without vaccination being 20 percent in this age group if I remember correctly, and very low with vaccination).
COVID was a novel infectious agent, - its effect - especially in Northern Italy and Russia were devastating. In the uncertainty of the epidemic many things were tried and perhaps in retrospect (but only in retrospect) one can be less certain about the necessity of masks and lockdowns. Anyway life continued and if harm prevented might have been small, so was any damage from these measures.
The evidence of a beneficial effect of vaccines remains however good. The problem here are the very rare adverse effects, e.g. triggering of multiple sclerosis. I saw such a case and in the light of such observations I would reserve the vaccination to elderly people and the immunologically compromised where advantages must surpass the disadvantages.
Now for the funny white-haired guy: He is of Italian descent like you and one of the most respected immunologists and infectiologists of the world. During almost fifty years he made many landmark contributions especially in autoimmune disease and AIDS. He acted to the best of his knowledge and judgment with courage and decency in the hostile environment of the abominable Trump administration.
That effective vaccines give rise to profits is part of our system and probably one cause for innovation. Planned and dictatorial regimes were and are notoriously inefficient in this respect.
That the status of science is compromised has nothing to do with COVID. Trump decried global warming as a hoax even before. Democracy has the inherent risk to become the government by the less intelligent and decent 51 percent. That they cannot transform it into a dictatorship is only a hope, not a certainty, as exemplified by history.
Lukas, hi. I understand your point. At the time, there were data which clearly indicated that vaccination reduced mortality for aged people like you (and also me, although a little less!). Then, I am not a medical doctor, so I never intervened on whether vaccines harm people or not; that's not my field of expertise, I don't want to play the Dunning-Kruger game. So, vaccinating was a reasonable choice, it may still be, as long as it is a choice.
What I objected, and I still object, is being forced to vaccinate; which is what happened to me. Had I refused, I would have lost my salary and my job. Our prime minister in person said that if you don't vaccinate you are a criminal who kills people, and this I think is a bad case of criminal manipulation. Fauci was not so bad, but I think he was a manipulator, too, even though we share the same Italian descent. His flip-flopping on face masks was a textbook case of manipulation. But that's past and gone. I think we all did what we thought was good to do.
The point of my post is that I was not the only one noting that I was manipulated. Many people did, and the result was the nearly complete destruction of trust in science. Of course, climate denial existed before, but my personal experience is that a lot of smart people were completely turned off about science by their COVID experience. The data also show that the rapid decline of trust in Science started with the COVID story. Whether that was engineered by Arch-Devils from Hell is, of course, a personal poetic license, but it is one of those things that are "as if"
We can fully agree on leaving vaccination to choice. However I still contest that resistance to climate science has much to do with COVID. The report of the Club of Rome 1972 already mentioned CO2 as a problem and was intentionally misrepresented and ignored by the mainstream as you know better than I. James Hansen was ostracised early and the leading German climatologist Schellnhuber in 2015 wrote a touching and alarming book "Selbstverbrennung" (Self-burning) which was sytematically destroyed by the German press. The Paris agreement was clearly a fake deal. COVID did not change anything at this preexisting public blindness to the realities.
Hi Lukas. Your post led me to do some research on the point you make. I think there is ground to maintain that a new round of climate denial was created by the COVID story. Of course, within the limits of how the data can be interpreted. As soon as I can, I'll produce a post on this subject, then I'll be very interested in your comments. The world is complicated, anyway....
I follow you on Substack because most of your writing is deep, considered and insightful. That's especially the case when you make historical parallels. But on the subjects covered here you are a climate change denier and an anti-vaxxers, and therefore a complete moron with regard to modern subject matter. Stick to the past. It's where you belong.
I have now done so. I’m very glad to apologise on the ‘climate change denier charge.’ But am also sorry to have confirmation that you are an anti-vaxxer moron. You have that entirely back-to-front. During ‘lockdown’ corporations saw their enterprises begin to crumble due to lack of labour, and their massively profitable office real estate investments begin to fold, so they hatched a plan to force sick people back to work. They colluded with governments to shut down home working opportunities; they seeded stories about the ‘work-shy’ in the media; they lobbied politicians to remove mask mandates, making public places, workplaces and hospitals more dangerous and infectious. Ultimately, the continuing COVID pandemic was hushed up, never to be spoken of in measured scientific terms again. Millions died as a result. Millions more will die as a result. COVID is virus that destroys the endothelium, thus it affects every organ, including the brain. Every infection brings a new wave of endothelial damage to the body. It never stops. Repeat infections bring about early death from a variety of apparent causes, precisely because the endothelium runs throughout the entire body. Vaccines cannot completely stave off infection, but they can mitigate a good deal of the damage. These are the facts of the matter, and if you cared about science you would have the sense to read some of the vast corpus of science papers that prove what I have just said. Or if you can't be bothered to use your own cognitive filter, query Grok about it, or something similarly lazy.
Well, you have got one thing right. With a little more effort you might understand a few more. One is that using terms such as "moron" you are not making yourself more believable.
I note that you're not addressing the facts I presented. You've built your Substack identity around COVID denial, and it's hard for you to row back. Make the effort. There are plenty of conspiracies to find around COVID, but they are not to do with the reality and seriousness of the virus. Ask yourself, cui bono? You wrote of 'big pharma', but big pharma would have benefitted much more and for a lot longer if government-provided mass vaccination had continued for a lot longer. Instead, it and the vast profits available fizzled out as governments increasingly restricted vaccine availability and the media downplayed COVID's seriousness. Corrupt politicians made vast profits from PPE contracts -- a grift that they could have continued for much longer had COVID not been downplayed and denied.
You have said yourself that governments don't need consumers for a war economy, they just need to keep wars going so that ordnance is consumed constantly on the battlefield. A constantly sick and compliant populace benefits them in this regard, as people are too weak and downtrodden to rise up against the war machine. For warmongering governments and power-mad supra-governmental outfits like NATO and the EU, ordinary consumers are a huge, unnecessary and expensive inconvenience, better dead than draining funds from and standing in the way of the military industrial complex. Thus, they decimated the concept of public health, and gutted its institutions, so people would no longer have them to turn to for any type of treatment or welfare, not just COVID-related treatment.
Governments have turned the fact of COVID to their advantage, not in controlling people with lockdowns or with doctored vaccinations, but in using the opportunity of COVID to cull and quell 'the herd' -- an entirely eugenicist ploy -- by withdrawing vital vaccinations almost completely, by minimising COVID's seriousness, by destroying public trust in science, by cutting off reliable infection-data streams and by smashing public health and welfare institutions. We are seeing the 'fruits' of that with each passing day.
Deny vaccines all you like. It's music to the ears of the malign actors involved, as it obfuscates their true intentions and modus operandi, as I have outlined above. In being an anti-vaxxer, you're assisting in making the world a much less empathetic and much more dangerous place full of weakened people unable to fight anything, including climate change.
I understand that you care a lot about this point, Remontoire. But do you really think this complex issue can be settled in the comment section of a blog? Take it easy. Some complex issues can't be understood in one page, not in 10 pages, nor a hundred. Please, notice that I never wrote anything about vaccines being good or bad. Several analyses I published on this blog were about epidemiological models, which are close to my field of expertise. Only in this post, I mentioned that "Big Pharma" made a lot of money, which is true, although things are not so simple. But this is a satirical post! In general, as I said to Lukas, I don't want to play the Dunning-Kruger game. If you allow me, I might suggest that you avoid that, too!
It's your contention, across several of your blog posts, that COVID's seriousness has been greatly exaggerated and that this amounts to some kind of conspiracy. My comments are not meant to constitute anything like a full refutation of your flawed hypothesis, but to encourage you to put in the effort you now need to expend to satisfy yourself that you have got this badly wrong. I look forward to your future writings, and hope that something I have said here will play a small part in pointing you in a more veridical direction on this important matter.
Interesting (and gratifying!) to see that the COVID debate rages on, even in these Comment pages. I'll avoid the well-trodden ground regarding the shots themselves, and settle for offering the opinion that Dr. Anthony Fauci is, at a minimum, the worst kind of self-promoting government bureaucrat.
Among other readings, as a look into Fauci's past, I'd especially recommend "Inventing the AIDS Virus" by Dr. Peter Duesberg (1992). Fauci and "Doctor" Robert Gallo (who stole Dr. Luc Montagnier's HIV virus discovery) likely killed far more AIDS patients with their repurposed AZT "cure" than they saved, and spiked Dr. Duesberg's career to pay him back for his dissent. Many who survived HIV never forgot what Fauci did; at the time, in the late 70s/early 80s, many of them were on the streets calling for his head. Too long ago, so very few still remembered by the time Fauci pulled an essentially repeat performance when COVID came along. He pushed the repurposing of another leftover drug, Remdesivir, that like AZT, is so toxic it often harms the patient it is trying to cure.
It is not well known that both AZT and Remdesivir were drugs developed for different diseases that they originally failed to cure, and were later pulled off the shelf to "try out" on something else. AZT is so nasty it actually has poison markings on the vials.
Shutting down the site so the other 96% of humanity can share the data they have. The CO2 increase even at this late date is not being shut down tragically. SciFi author PK Dick said reality is what doesn't go away when you stop believing it.
But politically, removing evidence while screaming "FAKE NEWS!" is the same as deleting the future — in more ways than one.
"The biophysical evidence — that is, reality — shows that material consumption and waste production are still increasing with population and GDP growth." — William Rees
Jan Steinman the human population Will grow until 2050 roughly 10% to 20% resource use Will grow until 2060 according to the new updated earth4all study you can find it on the Cambridge science website it is from 4 july 2025
There are lots of studies that say various things, by accomplished scholars on either side.
For perhaps the most pessimistic view, search for Dr. Guy McPherson, who believes there is ample evidence for "NTHE", or near-term human extinction.
There seems to be ample evidence that the "master resource", energy, is already in decline.
Depending on whose numbers you believe, oil peaked in 2018 or so. The US EIA seems to be "cooking the books", including senseless things like ethanol in their measure of "number of barrels of oil" we are producing. Dr. Tad Patzek has determined that ethanol consumes more energy than it produces! So you're counting that energy twice! Ethanol seems to be mostly a farm state subsidy. Art Berman's figures show that a "barrel of oil" contains perhaps only 95% of the energy it contained ten years ago.
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." — Benjamin Disraeli
I write, because I "remember that funny white-haired guy who used to appear so often on their screens, the one who said “I represent science”?"
I think that your take on COVID is really not fair.
I had COVID after the third vaccination (with 81). I was extremely ill during two weeks and weak and sleepy for many weeks. During these weeks I was unable to mount one flight of stairs. Only once in my life had I been equally ill, when I got measles at the age of 26 (its more severe in adults). Its quite possible that I would not have survived COVID without these vaccinations (mortality without vaccination being 20 percent in this age group if I remember correctly, and very low with vaccination).
COVID was a novel infectious agent, - its effect - especially in Northern Italy and Russia were devastating. In the uncertainty of the epidemic many things were tried and perhaps in retrospect (but only in retrospect) one can be less certain about the necessity of masks and lockdowns. Anyway life continued and if harm prevented might have been small, so was any damage from these measures.
The evidence of a beneficial effect of vaccines remains however good. The problem here are the very rare adverse effects, e.g. triggering of multiple sclerosis. I saw such a case and in the light of such observations I would reserve the vaccination to elderly people and the immunologically compromised where advantages must surpass the disadvantages.
Now for the funny white-haired guy: He is of Italian descent like you and one of the most respected immunologists and infectiologists of the world. During almost fifty years he made many landmark contributions especially in autoimmune disease and AIDS. He acted to the best of his knowledge and judgment with courage and decency in the hostile environment of the abominable Trump administration.
That effective vaccines give rise to profits is part of our system and probably one cause for innovation. Planned and dictatorial regimes were and are notoriously inefficient in this respect.
That the status of science is compromised has nothing to do with COVID. Trump decried global warming as a hoax even before. Democracy has the inherent risk to become the government by the less intelligent and decent 51 percent. That they cannot transform it into a dictatorship is only a hope, not a certainty, as exemplified by history.
Lukas, hi. I understand your point. At the time, there were data which clearly indicated that vaccination reduced mortality for aged people like you (and also me, although a little less!). Then, I am not a medical doctor, so I never intervened on whether vaccines harm people or not; that's not my field of expertise, I don't want to play the Dunning-Kruger game. So, vaccinating was a reasonable choice, it may still be, as long as it is a choice.
What I objected, and I still object, is being forced to vaccinate; which is what happened to me. Had I refused, I would have lost my salary and my job. Our prime minister in person said that if you don't vaccinate you are a criminal who kills people, and this I think is a bad case of criminal manipulation. Fauci was not so bad, but I think he was a manipulator, too, even though we share the same Italian descent. His flip-flopping on face masks was a textbook case of manipulation. But that's past and gone. I think we all did what we thought was good to do.
The point of my post is that I was not the only one noting that I was manipulated. Many people did, and the result was the nearly complete destruction of trust in science. Of course, climate denial existed before, but my personal experience is that a lot of smart people were completely turned off about science by their COVID experience. The data also show that the rapid decline of trust in Science started with the COVID story. Whether that was engineered by Arch-Devils from Hell is, of course, a personal poetic license, but it is one of those things that are "as if"
We can fully agree on leaving vaccination to choice. However I still contest that resistance to climate science has much to do with COVID. The report of the Club of Rome 1972 already mentioned CO2 as a problem and was intentionally misrepresented and ignored by the mainstream as you know better than I. James Hansen was ostracised early and the leading German climatologist Schellnhuber in 2015 wrote a touching and alarming book "Selbstverbrennung" (Self-burning) which was sytematically destroyed by the German press. The Paris agreement was clearly a fake deal. COVID did not change anything at this preexisting public blindness to the realities.
Hi Lukas. Your post led me to do some research on the point you make. I think there is ground to maintain that a new round of climate denial was created by the COVID story. Of course, within the limits of how the data can be interpreted. As soon as I can, I'll produce a post on this subject, then I'll be very interested in your comments. The world is complicated, anyway....
I follow you on Substack because most of your writing is deep, considered and insightful. That's especially the case when you make historical parallels. But on the subjects covered here you are a climate change denier and an anti-vaxxers, and therefore a complete moron with regard to modern subject matter. Stick to the past. It's where you belong.
Remontoire, may I respectfully ask you to re-read my post before you call me "climate change denier"? Maybe you read it in a hurry :-)
I have now done so. I’m very glad to apologise on the ‘climate change denier charge.’ But am also sorry to have confirmation that you are an anti-vaxxer moron. You have that entirely back-to-front. During ‘lockdown’ corporations saw their enterprises begin to crumble due to lack of labour, and their massively profitable office real estate investments begin to fold, so they hatched a plan to force sick people back to work. They colluded with governments to shut down home working opportunities; they seeded stories about the ‘work-shy’ in the media; they lobbied politicians to remove mask mandates, making public places, workplaces and hospitals more dangerous and infectious. Ultimately, the continuing COVID pandemic was hushed up, never to be spoken of in measured scientific terms again. Millions died as a result. Millions more will die as a result. COVID is virus that destroys the endothelium, thus it affects every organ, including the brain. Every infection brings a new wave of endothelial damage to the body. It never stops. Repeat infections bring about early death from a variety of apparent causes, precisely because the endothelium runs throughout the entire body. Vaccines cannot completely stave off infection, but they can mitigate a good deal of the damage. These are the facts of the matter, and if you cared about science you would have the sense to read some of the vast corpus of science papers that prove what I have just said. Or if you can't be bothered to use your own cognitive filter, query Grok about it, or something similarly lazy.
Well, you have got one thing right. With a little more effort you might understand a few more. One is that using terms such as "moron" you are not making yourself more believable.
I note that you're not addressing the facts I presented. You've built your Substack identity around COVID denial, and it's hard for you to row back. Make the effort. There are plenty of conspiracies to find around COVID, but they are not to do with the reality and seriousness of the virus. Ask yourself, cui bono? You wrote of 'big pharma', but big pharma would have benefitted much more and for a lot longer if government-provided mass vaccination had continued for a lot longer. Instead, it and the vast profits available fizzled out as governments increasingly restricted vaccine availability and the media downplayed COVID's seriousness. Corrupt politicians made vast profits from PPE contracts -- a grift that they could have continued for much longer had COVID not been downplayed and denied.
You have said yourself that governments don't need consumers for a war economy, they just need to keep wars going so that ordnance is consumed constantly on the battlefield. A constantly sick and compliant populace benefits them in this regard, as people are too weak and downtrodden to rise up against the war machine. For warmongering governments and power-mad supra-governmental outfits like NATO and the EU, ordinary consumers are a huge, unnecessary and expensive inconvenience, better dead than draining funds from and standing in the way of the military industrial complex. Thus, they decimated the concept of public health, and gutted its institutions, so people would no longer have them to turn to for any type of treatment or welfare, not just COVID-related treatment.
Governments have turned the fact of COVID to their advantage, not in controlling people with lockdowns or with doctored vaccinations, but in using the opportunity of COVID to cull and quell 'the herd' -- an entirely eugenicist ploy -- by withdrawing vital vaccinations almost completely, by minimising COVID's seriousness, by destroying public trust in science, by cutting off reliable infection-data streams and by smashing public health and welfare institutions. We are seeing the 'fruits' of that with each passing day.
Deny vaccines all you like. It's music to the ears of the malign actors involved, as it obfuscates their true intentions and modus operandi, as I have outlined above. In being an anti-vaxxer, you're assisting in making the world a much less empathetic and much more dangerous place full of weakened people unable to fight anything, including climate change.
I understand that you care a lot about this point, Remontoire. But do you really think this complex issue can be settled in the comment section of a blog? Take it easy. Some complex issues can't be understood in one page, not in 10 pages, nor a hundred. Please, notice that I never wrote anything about vaccines being good or bad. Several analyses I published on this blog were about epidemiological models, which are close to my field of expertise. Only in this post, I mentioned that "Big Pharma" made a lot of money, which is true, although things are not so simple. But this is a satirical post! In general, as I said to Lukas, I don't want to play the Dunning-Kruger game. If you allow me, I might suggest that you avoid that, too!
It's your contention, across several of your blog posts, that COVID's seriousness has been greatly exaggerated and that this amounts to some kind of conspiracy. My comments are not meant to constitute anything like a full refutation of your flawed hypothesis, but to encourage you to put in the effort you now need to expend to satisfy yourself that you have got this badly wrong. I look forward to your future writings, and hope that something I have said here will play a small part in pointing you in a more veridical direction on this important matter.
Interesting (and gratifying!) to see that the COVID debate rages on, even in these Comment pages. I'll avoid the well-trodden ground regarding the shots themselves, and settle for offering the opinion that Dr. Anthony Fauci is, at a minimum, the worst kind of self-promoting government bureaucrat.
Among other readings, as a look into Fauci's past, I'd especially recommend "Inventing the AIDS Virus" by Dr. Peter Duesberg (1992). Fauci and "Doctor" Robert Gallo (who stole Dr. Luc Montagnier's HIV virus discovery) likely killed far more AIDS patients with their repurposed AZT "cure" than they saved, and spiked Dr. Duesberg's career to pay him back for his dissent. Many who survived HIV never forgot what Fauci did; at the time, in the late 70s/early 80s, many of them were on the streets calling for his head. Too long ago, so very few still remembered by the time Fauci pulled an essentially repeat performance when COVID came along. He pushed the repurposing of another leftover drug, Remdesivir, that like AZT, is so toxic it often harms the patient it is trying to cure.
It is not well known that both AZT and Remdesivir were drugs developed for different diseases that they originally failed to cure, and were later pulled off the shelf to "try out" on something else. AZT is so nasty it actually has poison markings on the vials.
Here's the de facto plan: https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/
But Convicted Felon Cat Meat is shutting that down!
Shutting down the site so the other 96% of humanity can share the data they have. The CO2 increase even at this late date is not being shut down tragically. SciFi author PK Dick said reality is what doesn't go away when you stop believing it.
Environmentally, of course, you are right.
But politically, removing evidence while screaming "FAKE NEWS!" is the same as deleting the future — in more ways than one.
"The biophysical evidence — that is, reality — shows that material consumption and waste production are still increasing with population and GDP growth." — William Rees
Jan Steinman the human population Will grow until 2050 roughly 10% to 20% resource use Will grow until 2060 according to the new updated earth4all study you can find it on the Cambridge science website it is from 4 july 2025
No.
dear ugo when will population collapse happen than ?
There are lots of studies that say various things, by accomplished scholars on either side.
For perhaps the most pessimistic view, search for Dr. Guy McPherson, who believes there is ample evidence for "NTHE", or near-term human extinction.
There seems to be ample evidence that the "master resource", energy, is already in decline.
Depending on whose numbers you believe, oil peaked in 2018 or so. The US EIA seems to be "cooking the books", including senseless things like ethanol in their measure of "number of barrels of oil" we are producing. Dr. Tad Patzek has determined that ethanol consumes more energy than it produces! So you're counting that energy twice! Ethanol seems to be mostly a farm state subsidy. Art Berman's figures show that a "barrel of oil" contains perhaps only 95% of the energy it contained ten years ago.
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." — Benjamin Disraeli