Covid in Norway: Lies for Christmas Edition
'News' from the Frontiers of Public Health--Behold the Spectacle of Officials Contradicting Themselves within 2 Paragraphs
Oh my, public health officialdom is at ‘it’ once more. Today, I’ve got two brief, if awesome absurd, news items from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (IPH) for you, dear readers.
As always, translations, emphases, and bottom lines mine.
IPH Contradicts itself on Jabs Twice within 4 Paragraphs
In the first ‘news’ piece, public health officialdom warns of family reunions due to ‘increased infectious pressures around Christmas’. What is meant by this, of course, is nothing ‘news-worthy’ at-all:
The influenza outbreak will continue [nothing new here, also, the seasonal flu isn’t doing an ‘outbreak’] to increase in the coming weeks and this winter's corona wave persists [see, nothing ‘new’ here either]…
‘It is still important that the elderly and people in risk groups who have not yet been vaccinated take both the flu and corona vaccine as quickly as possible’, says Are S. Berg, department director at the Institute of Public Health.
He will also remind you of the infection control advice now that we are entering a time with a lot of socialising and an influenza epidemic [see, the flu was ‘downgraded’ to an ‘epidemic’ within two paragraphs] in full swing.
‘Many will now attend Christmas parties, be close to each other indoors and meet across generations. At the same time, it is important that we remember to take into account people who may become seriously ill as a result of respiratory infections. This particularly applies to infants, the chronically ill and the elderly’, says Berg.
I’ll spare us all the rest of this nonsense, but I will give you this gem of lunacy:
Antiviral treatment can reduce the risk of serious illness. People at particular risk of serious illness can, together with their doctor, assess the need for antiviral treatment of Covid-19 and influenza as early as possible in the course of the illness.
So, we’ll learn that ‘elderly and people in risk groups who have not yet been vaccinated take both the flu and corona vaccine as quickly as possible’—are we allowed to ask about what these jabs actually do now?—and then we’ll move to ‘antiviral treatment can reduce the risk of serious illness’ within yet another two paragraphs.
In addition, the IPH has now ‘learned’ that ‘early treatment’ is something that is a good thing to do. Better late than never, I suppose, but isn’t this what we should have done from, say, the beginning of the WHO-declared, so-called ‘Pandemic™’?
But, wait, there’s ‘more’ to consider:
Elderly and Unvaccinated Hit Hardest
Winter's many respiratory infections will continue to increase for a few more weeks, and will probably only reverse in early January [oh my, here’s to seasonality]. After that, it will go down rather slowly in January and February. Hospitals and municipalities must be prepared for more admissions both with corona and influenza in the future…
‘We see that it is the elderly and people who have not taken the corona vaccine this autumn who are admitted to hospitals with complications as a result of Covid’, says Berg.
At this point, we’ll briefly interrupt this Boxing Day service to play a Pfizer ad. Kidding.
Note that Mr. Berg is a notorious, if premeditated, spreader of ‘disinformation’ here: while I don’t wish to call him a liar on whatever numbers the IPH cites, I’ll just mention two things here:
For Norwegian public health officialdom, you don’t need a positive test to be counted among those who are hospitalised ‘for/with Covid’; same with ‘Covid-associated deaths’, another entirely meaningless category that derives its meaningless-ness from the same sleight-of-hand.
As regards the other outrageous lie peddled here, keep in mind that the IPH considers everyone who didn’t get yet another jab after 1 Sept. 2023 as ‘unvaccinated’; this, too, renders the above statement by Mr. Berg borderline insane.
Please read up on these two considerations here:;
One other thing to consider is the ‘vaccination uptake’, and here, the IPH’s most recent report shows the following numbers (hope):
Vaccination against influenza: 1.12m doses have so far been sent out to the vaccination program and at least 418,000 doses to the private market. As of 17 Dec., there are 1,242,921 vaccinated persons registered in SYSVAK. As of 17 Dec., 63% of the 65 and over age group had been vaccinated this season. Among individuals in a risk group, vaccination coverage is respectively 32% and 7% for the age groups 18-64 years and 0-17 years…
Vaccination against Covid-19: The age group 65 years and older, as well as younger people who belong to a risk group, are recommended a new booster dose this autumn. As of 17 Dec., 53% in the age group 65 years and older have been vaccinated since 1 Sept. 2023.
The source of the following two charts is here (pp. 49-50, respectively):
We learn: calls to ‘get vaccinated as quickly as possible’ is public health-speak for ‘we didn’t jab nearly enough people’. Perhaps more people are ‘learning’…
IPH to Increase Public Health Centralisation
As much as I’d love pointing out these inanities, we must also consider one other aspect now. Former IPH Director-General Camilla Stoltenberg (yes, the sister of NATO’s chief clown who was Prime Minister when she got that position) has recently resigned her commission and will become chief of NORCE, a Bergen-based ‘innovation incubator’ (whatever that means).
Her replacement will be someone else (I forgot the name, but I don’t think this matters) who will continue all policies set in motion earlier in the best worst manner of the permanent administrative state. Hence, no need to look her up.
What matters more is the push to centralise everything related to ‘healthcare’, public or not, with the IPH. Here are the main points from a recent news item:
The IPH will have new tasks from 1 January. Health registers are centralised within the institute, and the Cancer Register is moved from Oslo University Hospital (OUS) to IPH.
As a result of the government's decision to reorganise the health administration, IPH will be bigger and will have new tasks and responsibilities from 1 January. The institute will be strengthened in several areas.
The aim of the government is to have more clarified roles and distribution of responsibilities between the various agencies. See also ‘Reorganisation of the health administration: Changes in the health legislation’ (via regjeringen.no).
So, now we know: this is a classical example of failing upwards.
What ‘competences’ will be centralised with the IPH?
The Norwegian Patient Register (NPR), the Municipal Patient and User Register (KPR), and the Egg and Sperm Donor Register (including the Mother and Donor Code Register) are transferred…to the IPH. The precursor to the Municipal patient and user register IPLOS is also being transferred to IPH.
The Health Data Department and Health Data Service are transferred from the Healthcare Directorate. Health data service is a national service for making available health data from Norwegian health registers. The website helsedata.no will also be transferred to IPH.
These changes are, of course, praised in the highest possible terms by IPH:
‘We have great faith in gathering and strengthening the work with the health registers as it is now done. The goal is both to make it easier to collaborate across areas, and not least to get better at sharing health data with the rest of society in a good way’, says Acting Director Gun Peggy Knudsen.
Changes here also imply changes elsewhere; some employees will be transferred to other agencies, with the most important change looking to be the following:
Responsibility for method assessments of medical products (medicines, vaccines, and medical equipment) is centralised in the new Directorate for Medical Products (current Norwegian Medicines Agency until 31 December 2023).
Responsibility for vaccine procurement is being moved from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health to the Directorate for Medical Products.
The Medicines Agency (Legemiddelverket) will be now changed into something else, incl. the procurement of jabs. They’ve done such a stellar job, hence this surely reads like a promotion, eh?
That’s not all, folks, though:
Interpretation of regulations and formal authority tasks within infection control and environmental medicine will be brought together in the Directorate of Health. The same applies to government functions, implementation functions and responsibility for register analyses and statistics within the field of health and care services and the broad field of public health.
- Several colleagues will no longer be with us after the New Year. Some have been with IPH for many years, others shorter. I would like to thank you for the important efforts you have made for IPH’, says Acting Director Gun Peggy Knudsen.
One last word about these changes, courtesy of Ms. Knudsen:
On 1 January, information will essentially be where it has been before, both in terms of registers, statistics and publications. We will inform on relevant websites when we make changes and move content beyond 2024, so that it will be easy for users to find what they are looking for.
Finally, bloating the IPH will ‘require’ more ‘offices in several places in the country’:
As part of the changes, IPH will also have offices in several locations in the country, both at Tynset, in Trondheim, and at Montebello in Oslo, in addition to the offices IPH already has in Bergen and Oslo. IPH has also been given a workplace in Levanger as a result of the opening of a national competence environment for the health center and school health service on 6 December.
So, that’s one IPH location for every 800-900K of Norwegian residents. Since they already ‘managed’ the WHO-declared, so-called ‘Pandemic™’ in a remarkably absurd way, let’s ask ourselves: what could will go wrong?
Bottom Lines
More digitalisation of ‘health care’, more surveillance of ‘infectious diseases’, and more taxpayer money (last year saw an all-time record of tax receipts) will be wasted on public health officialdom.
The shake-up was a long time coming, and if you’re interested in the particular backstory, please refer to the four-part series on the ‘lessons learned’ from the WHO-declared, so-called ‘Pandemic™’ from spring 2022 (all content linked in the post below):
As a public service, here’s some excerpts from what I wrote on 5 May 2022:
Here’s the key conclusion (p. 449):
We further conclude that a contingency system based on the principle of sectoral responsibility (where each sector must assess its own risk and vulnerability), fails when no one has taken responsibility for assessing the sum of the consequences for society as a whole. We also found that the government had carried out risk assessments in each sector without anticipating how the risks in each of the sectors affected each other.
Two findings, then: first, there were too many sous-chefs, hence the menu didn’t work out. In other words, soon the authorities will instal a new Office of the Chef, which will lead to further centralisation. Secondly, that second sentence is an indictment of the government’s management capabilities, which further underscores the perceived need to ‘professionalise’ and centralise decision-making, i.e., take these important things out of the government’s hands and confer them to unelected appointees. Bottom line: brace for more, not less, technocratic authoritarianism, all in the name of the public good.
To drive this home, the Commission criticised the government’s centralised micro-management, which lead to ‘complications’ that further affected the various items listed (and which I won’t repeat here, but you may go here to my second part of this series).
The Commission holds that too many issues were brought to the government’s attention, thus so many of these issues were then handled under temporal constraints. (p. 449)
In other words: government overplayed its hand, engaged in micro-management, and they did so in a hap-hazard manner.
We believe this meant that the government did not pay sufficient attention to how the pandemic could develop, and how future developments should be handled. (ibid.)
Translation: consequently, government was driving on sight, albeit with limited visibility. Presentism at work, so to speak, and no-one thought about what to do the day after tomorrow.
Centralised decision-making under temporal constraints meant that the government did not make full use of the established crisis management system. (ibid.)
Curiously enough, the Commission has first declared that no contingency planning was in place, and now the Commission holds that government made up stuff as they stumbled along. To me, the main question is: do we want these bumbling morons to be in charge of, you know, anything?
They told us what they were going to do, and now they are doing it.
Pay attention to these press releases and reports; the future according to these people and their ilk is as obvious as it is visible before us:
‘One Health’ (from the IPH’s website):
'One Health' is an approach for designing and implementing programmes, policies, legislation and research where multiple sectors communicate and work together to achieve better public health outcomes.
'One Health' is an approach for designing and implementing programmes, policies, legislation and research where multiple sectors communicate and work together to achieve better public health outcomes.[i] WHO also states that a One Health approach is particularly relevant for working areas like:
food safety,
the control of zoonoses, diseases that transmit between animals and humans, such as influenza, rabies and Rift Valley Fever
in combating antibiotic resistance, when bacteria mutate after exposure to antibiotics and become more difficult to treat.[ii]
Oh, look, the WHO is here, and they wish to ‘design…legislation’, which, by definition, is the exclusive right of, well, the legislature.
In Norway, the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (NIPH) collaborates closely with other organisations like Norwegian Veterinary Institute and Norwegian Food Safety Agency, in order to achieve better outcomes in prevention and investigation of infectious diseases outbreaks. In cooperation with the Norwegian Directorate of Health, the NIPH provides advice to Ministries (Ministry of Health and Care Services, Ministry of Climate and Environment and Ministry of Agriculture and Food) on development of better policies and legislation within public health.Â
Our One Health Approach does not stop there, the NIPH also works towards regions and local health services (municipal medical officers) as well as internationally building sustainable partnerships in Europe, European Agencies (ECDC, EMA and EFSA) and beyond with other important global stakeholders (WHO, FAO, OIE).[iv][v]Â
We shall, therefore, talk more about the corrupting influence of these ‘important global stakeholders’ in the future and what their malign influence means.
In the meantime: don’t fall for the IPH’s disinformation.
Key phrase/word is of course "can".
If they said "will" they would be liable to say "how much" and also "what's the process" and "how do you know that".
I "can" use my chainsaw to mow the lawn. I wouldn't, but that's not the same in legalese and semantics - it's amazing to me that A) officials engage in word-games worthy of the worst american-style shysters/14-year old autistics and B) that the majority of people don't read what's actually stated but instead read some kind of assumed meaning and intent.