Programming note: Tomorrow, Wednesday, Mark will be back behind the microphone for our midweek Clubland Q&A taking questions from Mark Steyn Club members live around the planet. That's at 3pm North American Eastern - which is 8pm British Summer Time/9pm Central European.
~The Modified Limited Hangout continues:
AstraZeneca admits for first time its Covid vaccine CAN cause rare side effect in tense legal fight with victims of 'defective' jab
"Defective"? Well, at least they didn't put "victims" in scare-quotes. Oh, wait, they did for this supplementary story:
The AstraZeneca vaccine 'victims': From families losing loved ones to those left with life-changing injuries, the lives ruined by pharmaceutical giant's Covid jab as it admits for first time that it can cause rare side effect
Vaccine victim - whoops, sorry, vaccine "victim" - and a good friend of the Steyn Show Joe Ward passed that headline along to me. Two years ago, whenever I interviewed Joe and other victims of the AstraZeneca jab on GB News, we did as Ofcom required and sought a response from the company. They never once responded - because one of the easiest ways of killing a story under Ofcom's "due impartiality" rules is not to respond at all and thereby make a "balanced" discussion impossible. So every other day we ran stock footage of the AZ corporate HQ and the executive parking lot - and that was that.
But it is remarkable how, as we first advanced on the show way back in 2022, "The Great British Success Story" has shriveled to nothing. If you skim the Daily Mail report, you get the gist:
Health officials first identified cases of VITT [vaccine-induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia] linked to AstraZeneca's jab in Europe as early as March 2021, just over two months after the vaccine was first deployed...
Officials first restricted the jab to only people over 30. They then expanded this to only people over 40 in May 2021...
Further Covid vaccine rollouts have either minimised use of the AstraZeneca jab and/or phased it out entirely...
With health officials not ordering any more doses, this effectively means the jab has all but been withdrawn in the UK.
Boris Johnson's Great British Success Story is gone, leaving no trace but the knighthoods and damehoods disgracefully showered on its various Anglo-Irish-Aussie perps - and (in the case of Dame Sara Gilbert) a celebratory Barbie doll.
...oh, and untold numbers of victims, either crippled or bereaved by a jab they never needed to take for a virus that posed no threat to almost any of them.
You will find, over on the Mail's report, a short video featuring two dear friends of our show - Charlotte Wright and her mother-in-law Anne, who lost a 32-year-old husband and son to the AstraZeneca. It is just a year since we interviewed Anne and Charlotte outside the Coroner's Court - where, to the propagandist media's shame, we were the only camera crew present. Another twelve months have gone by, and the Wright family is as far from real justice as ever. But it counts as progress, I suppose, that they are no longer being automatically silenced by the totalitarian goons of Twitter and Facebook.
Back then, when AZ was declining to respond to our queries, they were nevertheless alert enough to dispatch their lawyers to attend coroners' hearings, such as that for Vikki Spit's beloved Zion. The company's "admission" is best understood as part of that legal strategy, a feint intended to advance their corporate interests and prolong the court battle beyond the plaintiffs' ability to withstand it. AstraZeneca, after all, have very deep pockets: Sir Pascal Soriot is the highest paid pharma exec in Europe; he made over £17 million last year - while Charlotte was getting stonewalled over the government's lousy £120,000 "compensation" and faced losing the family home -which is a nice additional trauma to impose on her orphaned children.
We are now approaching the summer of 2024. AZ has just "admitted" something it and western governments knew in March of 2021. That is over three years ago. What evidence did public-health bodies examine to determine that the jab is "safe and effective" for thirty-one-year-olds but not twenty-nine-year-olds? Oh, no wait: safe for forty-one-year-olds but not thirty-nine-year-olds ...no, sorry, not forty-nine-year-olds ...not no one. And why, a year after the "Great British Success Story" was known to be a crock, were the men and women who inflicted it on the world still being garlanded with knighthoods and Barbie dolls?
This was not just an unfortunate accident, but a corruption of public policy, abetted by a fawning UK media. People should be going to gaol.
~Instead, of course, it is the small number of us who spoke out against the AstraZeneca who have been "convicted" - in my case, by the UK state censor Ofcom. I am appealing that conviction in the King's Bench Division of the English High Court in June.
Many readers have inquired about how to support this latest Free-Speech Lawsuit of the Month, this time over Ofcom's throttling of honest discussion of the Covid and the vaccines. Well, there are several ways to lend a hand, including:
a) signing up a friend for a Steyn Club Gift Membership;
b) buying a near-and-dear one a SteynOnline gift certificate; or
c) ordering a copy of my latest book, The Prisoner of Windsor (you won't regret it - ask Kathy Gyngell).
With the first two methods, one hundred per cent of the proceeds goes to a grand cause - and, in the last, all but the shipping. And, in all cases, you or your loved one gets something, too.
~As for the post-Steyn GB News, well...
Exodus at GB News continues: Pip Tomson becomes third star to quit in just three months - as she leaves show less than a year after joining from GMB
Golly.
One GB News insider told the i newspaper: 'Morale is pretty low. Some nights they are getting only 30,000 viewers at peak-time...'
Seasoned presenters, including economics editor Liam Halligan, are also reportedly set to leave GB News.
Meanwhile, amid earlier chaos at the channel, Dan Wootton left in March. Laurence Fox and Calvin Robinson went last year.
Mark Steyn left last February after the channel threatened to make him responsible for paying any fines from Ofcom.
That last is not the whole story, but it's close enough for Brit-media work.
Still, the departures of Miss Tomson and of Mr Halligan are more revealing than the eviction of the firebrands, for they indicate that, even for the most mainstream and house-trained of media figures, GB News is just a lousy place to work:
The difference between the Aussie chancer Angelos Floppadopoulos and Fox's Roger Ailes is that for its first two decades Fox News had one of the most stable broadcasting line-ups anywhere. Ailes launched with Fox & Friends, Special Report with Brit Hume, The O'Reilly Factor, Hannity & Colmes ...and the years rolled by and they were all still there. The ever more transient line-up at GBN testifies to Floppadopoulos's contempt not only for his presenters but for his ever shrinking audience, too. Sir Paul Marshall and those Dubai hedge-funders are fools for sticking by this guy.
~We thank you for all your kind comments these last grisly couple of months - and thank you especially to all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club, and those old members who've signed up a chum for a SteynOnline Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead. And Mark looks forward to bringing the UK state censor Ofcom into court in a few weeks' time.
