Updates (Mar 2025)
Lake Erie's ice; assisted suicide developments; Merck’s HPV vaccine; breaking the silence; Enoch Burke; other comments re what John Lennox said; presidential quotes
Dear Church Leaders (and everyone else)
Below are the updates for March, featuring developments in the context of previous articles etc.
A warm welcome to new subscribers, a big thank you to readers sharing articles — and of course to everyone for reading.
Lake Erie’s ice
I was interested to see this 2025 data for Lake Erie’s average ice cover:
Lake Erie, on the US-Canada border, is the eleventh largest lake on earth. The red line is the historical average. The black line shows 2025 to date.
Assisted suicide developments
Further to this post…
…the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill has been going through its committee stage. I had lost track of the number of safeguards voted down, but Dan Hitchens recently put out this “updated and possibly still incomplete” list:
I noted this exchange between MP Danny Kruger and the Bill’s sponsor Kim Leadbeater:
[Kruger] She says the GMC state that doctors have an obligation to raise the treatment options before them, and I think she thinks that this [assisted suicide] is a treatment option. So surely the obligation is on doctors to raise assisted dying in all cases where it may be an option for the patient. Does she agree that doctors should offer assisted dying when that treatment may be appropriate for the patient? [Emphasis added]
[Leadbeater] I agree… under the provision of the Act that the doctor will have a duty to lay out options available to the patient if they meet the eligibility criteria. Absolutely. That’s the whole purpose of the Act.
[Kruger] I am very grateful… she gave me a very clear answer. I just wanted to be totally clear that we understand each other. So she is saying that every doctor facing a terminally ill patient — and therefore someone who is eligible under the Act — should make clear to them that they have the option of an assisted death.
[Leadbeater] That is the purpose of Clause 4, that the doctor has to lay out the options available to the patient.
And also this contribution from Leadbeater:
Whilst the Act is very clear that it only applies to terminally ill adults over the age of 18, in that they would have to be over 18 to make the first declaration, it’s not clear that the initial discussion could not happen with someone under the age of 18. And whilst we shouldn’t prohibit open conversation with terminally ill young people and their families — as this creates openness and transparency and safeguards and provides much-needed support at which most of us could only imagine must be the most difficult time of anyone’s life — I think it should be made clear that the actual assisted dying process cannot be embarked upon unless someone is over the age of 18.
Hmm. We’ve come a long way from Matt Hancock’s “Don’t kill your gran”…
For more details on recent developments, see e.g. this recent update from the UK Medical Freedom Alliance:
Merck’s HPV vaccine
Further to this post detailing how my own views on vaccines have evolved…
…and the talk on covid vaccine DNA contamination by Kevin McKernan featured in this section of last month’s updates, I was intrigued to see this from Maryanne Demasi re Merck’s HPV vaccine Gardasil:
This chart (source)…
…reminded me of the various historical vaccine data featured in the book Dissolving Illusions discussed in this post…
…in which the authors use public health records to show that the number of people dying from various diseases had fallen to very low levels before the relevant vaccines became available.
As to Gardasil, Demasi’s Substack also has these related articles:
EXCLUSIVE: Internal emails reveal Merck’s negligence in Gardasil safety testing
Court Documents Reveal “Undisclosed” Adjuvant in Gardasil vaccine
FDA ignored residual DNA fragments in the Gardasil HPV vaccine
Breaking the silence
As to the so-called covid vaccines, further to these posts…
…and the story of Brianne Dressen featured here in December’s Updates post…
…this book has finally been published:
A review can be found here.
And on a related note…
UK GP David Cartland — whose whistleblower testimony can be found here — has continued putting out a series of videos entitled Breaking the silence:
The UK Medical Freedom Alliance has some similar testimonies — along with various other videos — here:
And I also noticed this comment from UK cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra about autoimmune conditions:
I was pretty okay after the initial [covid] vaccine [but] about a year and a half after… I developed psoriasis, an autoimmune condition linked to… depression, and I wasn’t sure what was going on.
And there’s a brilliant doctor in Malibu [California], a very well-known established gastroenterologist called Sabine Hazan. And she did some published research, which is pretty extraordinary and a bit scary, but we need to talk about it… She found that, three years after taking the covid vaccine, a very important bacteria in the gut called bifidobacteria — a very important part of the gut microbiome, it’s a good bacteria — after three years, went down to zero.
Now why that’s important is that bacteria is very important for health. It’s important for producing neurotransmitters like serotonin. So a lot of people might be suffering from anxiety and depression because of a vaccine they had two or three years ago. She… called me up and said, “Aseem, you have the exact signature of someone who’s vaccine injured because your bifida is zero.”
And I’ve had this resistant problem for… coming up to a year and a half. I’ve still got depression. It’s mild, but it’s still debilitating at times. And I see other doctors I speak to are saying they’re seeing an explosion of autoimmune conditions.
Enoch Burke
I was reminded of these posts…
…and this cartoon from last month’s update…
…in the context of recent developments re Enoch Burke, a teacher in Ireland.
I recommend this article, not least for its succinct summary of the story so far:
For those unfamiliar, I’ll attempt to summarize the story. Enoch Burke is a teacher here in Ireland who, in 2022, refused to use a transgender student's preferred pronouns citing his Christian beliefs. This led to a dispute with the school, which placed him on administrative leave. Burke violated a court order barring him from entering the school during the suspension, resulting in his arrest and subsequent imprisonment for contempt of court.
The controversial aspect is that Enoch continues to be arrested because he continues to go back to the school, violating the court order. So far, he has been in prison twice, most recently from September to December 2024, and apparently could now owe the Irish government upward of €193,000.
At the time of writing, this was among the most recent mainstream media articles I could find:
I am reminded of Rev Dr Bernard Randall in England (the whole press release is worth reading):
Other comments re what John Lennox said
Further to this post…
I was interested — and grateful — to see these replies:
I have had no comment from the host church.
Presidential quotes
And finally, further to these posts…
…and this recent article…
…featuring these striking words attributed to Denis Healey, former UK Defence Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer…
World events do not occur by accident. They are made to happen, whether it is to do with national issues or commerce; and most of them are staged and managed by those who hold the purse strings.
I was intrigued to find several similar quotes apparently from 20th century US presidents:
Theodore Roosevelt — “Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.”
Woodrow Wilson — “Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men’s views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt — “In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.”
John F. Kennedy — “The very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society... For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence.”
Bill Clinton — “There’s a government inside the government, and I don’t control it.”
For the Clinton quote, I found it interesting to compare and contrast the results for searches on Google and DuckDuckGo (and various other search engines) with those on Yandex:
Dear Church Leaders most-read articles
Some posts, including a version of this one, can also be found on Unexpected Turns
The Big Reveal: Christianity carefully considered as the solution to a problem