Fighting Goliath (part 1)
Minority reports from Prof Norman Fenton
Dear Church Leaders (and everyone else)
Further to this recent post…
This article features someone who has produced multiple minority reports during the covid era…
His work includes being an expert witness in major criminal and civil legal cases:
Along with his colleague Prof Martin Neil — who features in part 2 of this article, available in a few days time all being well — Fenton has written a book entitled Fighting Goliath: Exposing the flawed science and statistics behind the COVID-19 event:
In this recent interview, Fenton discussed the book with YouTuber John Campbell, This post is essentially a transcript of that video, along with additional notes and pictures along the way:
On the nature of the “Goliath” in the title of the book
[John Campbell] Who is Goliath in this context?
[Norman Fenton] Goliath [is] not just the governments like the UK government and the major institutions like the Office for National Statistics and MHRA, and in America the CDC… but also institutions like the BBC and academia generally. Academia was a powerful force in promoting… fear around covid and also in censoring any challenges to the narrative — the official narrative as we call it. That’s who Goliath is.
We were up against all of that, and the book documents lots of personal stories… It’s not just… the hard scientific evidence. There are personal stories of the censorship and… the communication between us and some of those organisations. And it… shows to a certain extent how… bizarre the whole hysteria around covid was, but also how deceptive and at times almost… corrupt… some of those institutions really are.
On the content of the book Fighting Goliath
[JC] Give us the underlying thesis of the book
[NF] The underlying thesis is that covid hysteria — that’s what we call it — was based on massively exaggerated case and mortality numbers, which were created by flawed definitions, easily manipulated data, and inaccurate mass testing of healthy people. And this led to the belief that the only way out of the pandemic and lockdowns was by this almost-mandatory injection of a completely novel vaccine which had had really no real safety testing, and which turned out to be not particularly effective and not particularly safe. And the book is a… scientific record… in chronological order…
[NF] We also started off with a belief that… maybe… the science was correct… maybe these PCR tests were correct… But… we were looking hard at the data early on, and we were seeing, from our analysis of that data, a different story. So we saw that the established narrative was flawed a lot earlier than most people…
I was trying to think of an analogy about this whole thing… a lot of the sickness around the whole covid hysteria reminds me of… when I was very young [and] I used to watch (probably) much too much science fiction, and read it, and I was absolutely convinced that a horrible race of aliens from space were going to invade at any moment. And there was a particular warning sound that I had in my head which I believed meant the imminent landing of one of these spacecrafts. And any time at night I heard or even imagined I heard a warning sound like that I actually felt physically sick. It was a real physical emotion.
I think that many people were similarly traumatised about covid because of… basically a lot of fiction that they were being told about it… Covid was not a pandemic in the sense that people previously defined or understood pandemics to be. Something that is not well-known [which] we document… in the book… is that in March 2020… the [UK government] advisory committee on dangerous pathogens… reached a unanimous decision that covid was not what they classify as a high-consequence infectious disease.
Here is a snapshot from the UK government website in relation to that decision (where HCID = high-consequence infectious disease):
[NF] The very next day, the UK government announced the lockdowns. It’s… strange… Did you know about that?
On the data telling a story very different to that of the official narrative
[JC] …what is impressive is that you took the primary source data way early on in 2020, and you did the analysis yourself rather than relying on this information that the great ones on high filter down to us. Myself and many others have this great, great feeling of being severely let down… this great lack of trust. But it really shows the importance of going back to the primary data… and the primary analysis, and not [necessarily] depending on what other people… say… and you’ve done that all the way through this book.
Do you feel very comfortable that your academic analysis has led to these conclusions, and that you haven’t had some conclusions and looked for the academic fig leaf to cover those? Do you feel that the position that you now have has emerged naturally from the empiricism in the data?
[NF] Yes, because we didn’t come into it with any sort of prior conceived biases. We’re not, neither Martin nor I… virologists or epidemiologists or clinicians in any sense. We were only looking at the data. [And] the data was telling us something different to what the governments were telling us right from the start.
And… what you said [6:30-6:57]… about following accepted guidelines is very interesting because what actually happened very early on, right from the start of this so-called pandemic, was that guidelines that they’d been using for years — and even the guidelines that were supposed to have been prepared for pandemics — weren’t followed.
In terms of the data, the only real “pandemic peak”, where you could see a real peak in excess deaths, actually occurred right at the beginning in March and early April of 2020. Those weird peaks only happened in a number of cities… Bergamo (Italy), London, New York and a few others. And actually, in all of those places, we have come to the conclusion from looking at all the data and looking at all the sources — and Martin has been very rigorous in his contribution to this — that most of those excess deaths there, which of course were mostly in the very elderly, were the result actually of either not following existing guidelines, or following weird strange guidelines.
Such as the document NG163, COVID-19 rapid guideline: managing symptoms (including at the end of life) in the community, which is no longer available on the NICE website, but can be viewed e.g. here (archived version) or here (pdf, c/o this related article).
[NF] So, for example, at that period they decided that they weren’t going to treat bacterial pneumonia which, incidentally, is what people often die of if they've got… one of these types of viruses. It’s not the virus… it’s the resulting bacterial pneumonia that kills them. They weren’t giving people… the normal antibiotic treatment. And of course that led to unnecessary deaths. There was inappropriate use of ventilators and these new end-of-life drugs… And they were actually saying that these drugs — like midazolam — would never normally be given to patients with that symptomology. And yet they were giving it.
And midazolam was killing people. See for example this post from The Daily Beagle:
[NF] So that’s why we believe that those unnatural — even for a pandemic — those incredible peaks that you saw in places like London, New York and Northern Italy… we believe that was a result of the inappropriate response with these inappropriate guidelines to the virus, rather than to the virus itself.
On the fraudulent nature of PCR testing
[NF] And then of course, following on from that, what happened was that you then had this PCR test [where] anybody testing positive was claimed to be a [covid] case… and that was never a reliable diagnostic test for covid. Multiple people who were testing PCR positive didn’t have a novel virus, but were classified as covid cases. And then of course you get these definitions which were driving the hysteria and driving the numbers that were being projected across the TV screens every single minute of every single day. Anybody dying within days of a positive PCR test was classified as a covid death.
I discussed the fraudulent use of PCR testing in this article featuring Kary Mullis, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for his invention of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method”:
Some of Fenton’s work features near the end of that post.
[NF] There’s an analogy here… sort of a thought experiment…
If you imagine that you give a large random sample of the population a token which they have to keep with them constantly for days in order to get a large reward at the end of that 28 days… If they die within 28 days, we can say that they died “with the token”.
Now if you think about the profile of people who died with the token, it’s going to be almost exclusively very old people, because it’s mainly very old people who are dying at any time. And of course the mortality profile of people dying with covid is almost exactly the same as you’d get with the mortality profile of dying with that token. There was no difference… the mortality profile of people dying with covid was just the normal mortality profile.
If anything, actually, even fewer young people were dying of covid than other flu-type viruses. And we’ve got the data from — for example — freedom of information requests coming from both England and Wales, and also from Northern Ireland… We know, for example, in England and Wales [that]… in the first two years when the main covid-defined deaths were happening, less than 5% of the people who were classified as “dying with covid” [had no] existing serious co-morbidity.
But in Northern Ireland, in the whole of the four years, we’ve just discovered that only 275 people in total died from what could be classified as “from covid” or even “covid with pneumonia”. Even when you add pneumonia in, there were only 275 deaths of covid [including] with pneumonia. [And] how many people do you think under the age of 38 in Northern Ireland died from covid…? [The answer is] zero. The youngest person who died from covid… without some other co-morbidity… in Northern Ireland was 38 years of age. So that gives you a feel of this.
The problem is that… it isn’t just [that] everybody… who died within 28 days of a positive PCR test [was] classified as a covid death. They were using the same classification for anyone hospitalised. In fact it was even worse with hospitalisations because if you’d had a positive PCR test [in the] period 14 days before hospitalisation, irrespective of why you were being hospitalised, you were being classified as a covid hospitalisation… [And] bear in mind they were testing everybody in hospital on entry, and every day while they were in hospital they were testing them for covid. And if they came up PCR positive at any time during their stay they were also classified as covid hospitalisations, again irrespective of what they were hospitalised for.
On the fraudulent misuse of statistics in relation to vaccine safety
[JC] Have you got access to all the data you’d like from… the United Kingdom? Is there freedom of data? Do the authorities say, “There you are professor, analyse that for us please…?”
[NF] The UK… we’ve had a lot of run-ins with the Office for National Statistics over the last few years… They are very good… they are considered to be the sort of… gold standard for data collection, and, in particular, medical data collection, in the whole world. People look to them for the type of analysis that they do, and they do have an enormous amount of data. But it’s very difficult to get [from them] what… people have called… the “record-level” data that you need for doing things like determining the effectiveness and safety of the vaccines for example.
[JC] That’s the numbers you actually need to plug into your spreadsheet…?
[NF] That’s right. And so we’re reliant on the data that they’re able to provide us. And they claim that they can’t provide the really detailed data that we need for doing those analyses because it would breach the anonymity of people in the database… They were… one of the only national organisations — to be fair to them — who were producing fairly detailed mortality-by-vaccination-status data.
So nominally they were producing at least summary reports of how many people in different age groups were dying who were never vaccinated, who had one dose, who had two doses etc… But we could never get the data at the level to really challenge the summary conclusions that they were making.
For example, they were making conclusions based on the assumptions that anybody who who tested positive within 21 days of a covid vaccination — their first vaccination for example — they were classified as unvaccinated and similarly people who died shortly after vaccination also in most cases were classified as unvaccinated.
If any vaccine were actually safe and effective, the authorities could release the anonymised record-level data to prove it.
In relation to “people who died shortly after vaccination” I am reminded of the reports on the US Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) featured in this post based on material I originally put together in October 2021:
And specifically this section:
Here is a more recent summary:
And here is an article from the HART group, of which Fenton is a member, with more details:
[NF] And because of those definitions — and incidentally, all of the major studies which claimed high efficacy and safety of vaccines… had those fundamental flaws and systematic biases — what we found was that when you adjusted for those systematic flaws and biases, there was no evidence that the vaccines were effective or safe.
And actually, to the contrary, increasingly, as more and more data was coming out, we were finding that when you did the adjustment in almost all of the different age groups you were seeing slightly higher all-cause mortality in the vaccinated than in the never-vaccinated. And that’s… quite worrying. But the data that they were producing was claiming something else because of these inbuilt biases.
Which is consistent with e.g. this data from US life insurance companies c/o the exceptionally perceptive US analyst Ed Dowd:
On peer-review
[JC] It just shows the importance of going back to the fundamental real data… all the data in here is all published… are you open to peer-review of all this data…?
[NF] The irony about this [is that]… peer-review is… a massively over-estimated thing… I think I was coming to this conclusion a few years even before the… covid years… being an academic myself — I was a professor in a major university — I’ve been coming to the conclusion that… people have a massively exaggerated sense of [the] brilliance of academia.
Academia is not as great as people think it is, and peer-review and the idea that… if you get a paper published in a top-level peer reviewed journal [then it] is high quality science... it isn’t generally. Peer-review is massively overrated. In most cases peer-review is undertaken by mates of the people you know. You’re most likely to get [your work] into a great journal if you’re friendly with the editor of that journal, or you can recommend people to review it who are going to be very sympathetic to [it]. And this has always been the case. I’ve got hundreds of papers in journals, but a lot of the time I know it’s because I had very good relations with journal editors and stuff like that.
And it’s the same for everybody. And you get these little cliques of… scientific disciplines where actually almost nobody outside that clique is able to properly review it. So it always ends up with… people favourable to that opinion [reviewing] it. So that’s… how academic peer-review works.
If you challenge the established narrative in any of these disciplines, and this was the case well before covid of course… you wouldn’t get published. You’d get ostracised from the community. And that’s exactly what happened to us when we first started publishing results of our data analysis which challenged the mainstream narrative.
For the first two months we weren’t challenging the narrative… We were… saying, “Actually we think that the mortality rate is much lower than people are saying.” And that wasn’t… considered to be a particularly uncomfortable challenge, so we had a couple of papers published in major peer-reviewed journals right at the beginning giving that type of message.
But as soon as we came in and were saying things like, “The entire narrative is being driven by… a flawed PCR test which is producing a disproportionate number of false positives, and that, if you want to monitor the progression of this virus, you don’t simply just publish the total number of cases but you’ve got to take account of the number of people you’re testing as well, and the possibility that there’s false positives in here…” wow, that was it.
From that moment on, we never got another paper accepted for peer-review. After the first couple of months… after that… maybe they were reviewing it and rejecting it... [they can] always find a reason to reject it. Eventually they would… never even send it to review. It would automatically be rejected. And we were even getting our papers rejected from the pre-print server which is supposed to publish anything which is non-fraudulent.
So we had a real problem getting this message out. And the sad thing about this — and this is not just us; this applied to everybody who was challenging the narrative — [is that] very early on [in] 2021… when you had the mass vaccine program… from January, February there, we were looking at the early data that the ONS were publishing. And we were seeing these spikes in mortality and the different age groups which the ONS were claiming were occurring in the unvaccinated. But the problem was [that there were] spikes… in the non-covid mortality, so we flagged there was a safety signal right from the start. And [then] there was [an article] in The Times calling us mad conspiracy theorists and stuff like that. So that message never went out.
That article from The Times, which I did not find despite trying several search engines, is featured on the Where are the numbers? Substack here, and snapshots are below:
[NF] And I’ve spoken to vaccine-injured people, people who are quite young, who never ever had any clinical need to be vaccinated… they were people who weren’t given the vaccine right early on — they were too young… the 30/40-year-olds weren’t getting the vaccine until about March, April… and many not until… August, September, October. And they were saying that they got vaccinated, and if… they’d been aware of the kind of concerns that we’d been flagging, and about the fact that there… didn’t seem to any clinical benefit in… younger people having it, they would never have taken the vaccine. So the censorship had real, serious implications as far as I’m concerned.
People like BBC presenter Lisa Shaw:
I wonder when the BBC might make a programme about her…
For context, here is information from the official UK government Yellow Card website for the AstraZeneca covid vaccine (total ~50 million doses) that gives some indication of how “rare” the serious “adverse drug reactions” (ADRs) are:
Bear in mind that, according to this Harvard study commissioned by the US government, “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported” on the US Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System. So the UK Yellow Card figures are almost certainly a very substantial underestimate of the extent of vaccine harm.
According to this 2024 BBC News article, which followed the withdrawal of AstraZeneca’s covid vaccine:
AstraZeneca said it was “incredibly proud” of the vaccine, but it had made a commercial decision.
By way of note, any “evidence” that the AstraZeneca vaccine “saved millions of lives” is based on dubious modelling rather than real-world data.
And for comparison, here is information from the same UK government Yellow Card website for the mRNA-based Pfizer/BioNTech monovalent covid vaccine (~100 million doses):
Again, bear in mind the need to factor in an under-reporting factor.
And the fact that none of the covid vaccines have long-term safety data.
On the lack of evidence for the effectiveness of lockdowns, social distancing and masks
[JC] Had I known then what I know subsequently, there’s no way I would have taken [the covid vaccine] from the risk-benefit analysis that we now understand.
[NF] There’s something else about… the evidence here. It’s not just about the lethalness of covid and the safety and effectiveness of vaccines. Also we looked at things — and again there’s evidence in the book here — on the effectiveness of lockdowns, social distancing and masks. As far as we’re concerned there is no serious evidence that they made any difference to the progression… even of covid cases.
And they caused a lot of harm, particularly to children, as discussed e.g. here:
On the wasting of almost £40 billion on the track and trace system
[NF] As for the UK track and trace system, that program, do you know that cost almost £40 billion… before it was abandoned? And there’s no evidence that that program saved a single life…
To put that almost ~£40 billion into perspective, here is the breakdown of UK government real terms public expenditure (£billions) for 2021-22 and 2022-23:
[NF] A colleague Scott McLachlan did a detailed costing of that, and it’s been accepted… you’ll see official figures of £39 billion… sometimes even more… It was an unbelieveable waste… all the wasted testing... they had this army of people… everybody who went on any trip… they had to come back and stay in their house. There… were armies of people telephoning people to make sure that they were in the house. And you had all this stuff as well as all the massive waste of equipment that was used… it was just a total disaster.
Moreover, according to page 3 of this 2019 WHO document detailing public health measures for mitigating the risk and impact of epidemic and pandemic influenza, contact tracing is “not recommended in any circumstances”
Hmm.
On the “second wave” of covid being basically a myth
[NF] And the other thing that absolutely drove us crazy here was that there was… the supposed massive second wave which happened in the autumn/winter of 2020/2021, so just before the vaccinations were rolled out. That massive second wave was basically a myth. It was just created by the fact that, after the first lockdown ended in the summer of 2020, they started mass-testing — on a regular basis — healthy people: school kids going back to school; anyone going back to work… so you had this mass increase in testing. And because of the rate of false positives you were seeing a mass increase… in [the] number of “cases”, even though most of those were people who never had the virus, who were never ill, never went on to even develop symptoms… but you had this mass increase.
[And] if you look at the graphs — [if] you compare them with the supposed first real wave which happened in March 2020 — [there were] 10-20 times more “cases” in that so-called second wave. But when you looked at independent data, e.g. from the 999 or the 111 service or the ambulance service… you look all that data relating to covid reports and covid symptoms… and there was nothing. There was nothing beyond the normal sort-of-flu-like symptom tiny wave you’d see in any kind of autumn/winter season. And so… none of the independent data was supporting this idea of a serious second wave. There was no evidence of a massive increase at all in people reporting covid-like symptoms. They just weren’t…
You also have another thing… that we report extensively in the book — and again credit to my colleague Martin, because this is something that he was on very persistently, and did an enormous amount of research [on] — was the… mysterious disappearance of flu… and its sudden reappearance at the end of 2022.
On why almost all the countries of the world made the same mistakes at the same time
[JC] Just two more questions… Why did all the countries of the world, according to your thesis here, make the same mistake at the same time?
[NF] A lot of it was down to those initial model predictions by Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College, because for some reason — I don’t want to go into details of why — even though they produced lots of massively exaggerated predictions for previous viruses, they were considered to be the go-to leading experts. And they managed to convince the government in March 2020 that there was going to be this totally uncontrollable number of people hospitalised and dying unless you had this complete lockdown which had never been tried before. And unfortunately, as soon as the British government accepted that, all of the other major… Western governments thought they had to do the same.
[JC] And it’s strange, isn’t it, that particular ideas at the moment are spreading around the world. It’s almost as if there [are] global organisations that are in some way influencing nation states, but of course we couldn’t possibly comment…
[NF] There are some interesting anecdotes. The book isn’t just hard scientific evidence. There’s lots of personal stories of both me and Martin… There’s a personal story how, early on, when I… first realised there was something maybe behind this which was not quite natural… I’d been on a panel which was talking about… how worried should we be about this pandemic. I think it was June 2020. We were right hard into the lockdown but we had… beautiful weather. And there were several other academics on that panel. And what shocked me was how comfortable and… delighted they were with the lockdowns… because they never suffered any of the consequences that a lot of real working people...
[JC] They’ve probably got nice gardens…
[NF] Exactly. And not only that, but… they were… bringing in this whole thing about the climate change narrative. They were saying, “This is really good for the environment because we’re having these reduced carbon dioxide emissions at the moment because of the lockdowns…” People weren’t driving, there [was] no civilian air travel. And they were saying, “This is fantastic… The air is so much cleaner. We need to have these sort of lockdowns on a… semi-permanent basis in order to combat climate change.”
As I discussed in this post…
The concept of Net Zero is based on the idea, supposedly supported by computer modelling, that atmospheric CO2 levels can be reduced by changes in human behaviour.
This is not the easiest of hypotheses to test, but in 2020 we unwittingly conducted a pertinent large-scale real-world experiment. During the covid hysteria, there were relatively few flights, and there was much-reduced travel for work and school in many countries. Industrial activity also slowed significantly, as many workers were required to stay at home.
But from the first graph at this Met Office link, which shows the measured atmospheric CO2 concentrations in recent years, it appears that the draconian policies imposed in 2020/2021 “to combat the virus” had little or no effect.
Moreover, another inconvenient truth here is that, as Australia’s best known geologist points out, no-one has ever shown that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming:
Fenton continues:
[NF] The notion of “The Great Reset”, as in the World Economic Forum/Klaus Schwab book named The Great Reset, which had come out right at the start of the pandemic…
Here is that book, still on sale at Amazon:
[NF] They were using that expression and they were saying, “This is the time for The Great Reset”, And that’s exactly the expression that a lot of politicians were using — leaders of all these Western countries… at the same time. And I was quite shocked by this. It was uncomfortable to me to hear that because I felt, “I don’t believe this” and I’m worried that they believe this.
Here is a video of then-Prince Charles launching The Great Reset in June 2020:
[JC] My personal preference is not to be reset. I’m quite happy the way I am thank you very much indeed. And I suspect that the single mum in a two-bedroom flat with two kids wouldn’t be very happy…
My dad was in hospital for several months in that time — the last illness of his life — and we couldn’t go and visit him…
[NF] That in itself is terrible. I think so many of those earlier deaths… people who were critically ill anyway… a lot of people died early… in particular that peak around late March/April 2020… because those elderly people, who in many cases are reliant on the care of their close family, didn’t get access to that care.
[JC] And the psychological support…
[NF] Exactly.
On what we can learn from the covid era
[JC] A very last question: What do we learn from this? What’s next? What’s your recommendation?
[NF] I’ll just give a couple of key recommendations…
One is that we… should be concerned about… the World Health Organisation and their new guidelines for the “next pandemic”. We should worry about… the type of authoritarian control that they want to impose on us… because of that. But don’t be worried about the “next pandemic”… is it because they want this extra authoritarian control? There are people who think that. But don’t be scared by these people. They fooled us once… don’t be fooled again, because that’s what I think they’re preparing for.
And I guess the other takeaway is this… personal one. Again… back to academia… don’t think that academics [and] also a lot of doctors… authority figures… don’t believe that everything they say is true…
And, of course, read the book…
Fenton’s brief comments on the interview can be found in this short post (which is worth reading).
A review of Fighting Goliath can be found here.
Part 2 of this article, featuring the other author, Martin Neil, is scheduled for Tuesday (24th September).
Over the past few years, I have followed Prof Fenton’s analysis with interest. What he says appears consistent with other credible sources. And his minority reports will, I think, stand the test of time.
As will, I suspect, his analysis in relation to the Lucy Letby case mentioned at the end of the recent Minority reports post that inspired this one.
If you want to explore the work of Prof Fenton and Prof Neil work in more detail, their Substack Where are the numbers? is a good place to start.
Dear Church Leaders articles (some of which, including this one, can also be found on Unexpected Turns)
The Big Reveal: Christianity carefully considered