Open Letter to Those Not Yet Opposed to Vaccine Passports - Part II – The dominoes of delusion
Open Letter to Those Not Yet Opposed to Vaccine Passports - PART II – The dominoes of delusion
Part I of this letter warns that the Covid crisis has induced a mass delusional psychosis in which all the conditions for totalitarianism are being rapidly fulfilled. In part II I attempt to expose the delusions society is operating under through the age-old expedient humans have relied on for survival – being able to smell a rat.
Science is a method that, when applied transparently, brings us closer to the truth. Covid, however, seems to have reduced it to a crude battle between kung-fu styles, with the advocates of each proclaiming theirs to be the best. Both sides can’t be right, and the truth will gradually out through a combination of real-world evidence and a scientific process restored to its original depoliticised aim.
That process is well underway and can be accelerated by puncturing the delusions that have induced a mass psychosis with a simple truth: the peddlers of the apocalyptic narrative don’t believe their own story and nor do they have any faith in the measures they advocate. If you were more receptive to this possibility, wouldn’t you also begin to question the wisdom of cleaving to a narrative sold to you by people who don’t believe it themselves?
Science will be mentioned mainly in reference to the abandonment of widely held scientific principles or to point out how it has been used in a contradictory way by the authorities. Real-world data will be referred to only to highlight the disconnect between the authorities’ true beliefs and the official terror inducing narrative – a narrative that has allowed them to pass decrees that, in any other circumstances, would have had the country asking whether ministers were reading from the script of a South Park episode satirising the most inept form of tin pot dictatorship.
The main dominoes of delusion are:
The Covid apocalypse is nigh
We had to lock down
We must wear masks to control transmission and infection
We must mass screen the population by testing healthy people
Vaccines and vaccine passports are the only way out
The Covid apocalypse
On 19 March 2020, three days before the UK’s first lockdown, the government, through Public Health England, downgraded the assessment of Covid’s threat by removing it from the list of High Consequence Infectious Diseases (HCID). It stated that Covid was “no longer considered to be a high consequence infectious disease (HCID) in the UK” and cited as the main reason “more information … about mortality rates (low overall)”. If that downgrade was an error, they’ve had 18 months to correct it and haven’t. So, we must assume they still believe Covid is not an HCID.
When you look at the government’s definition of an HCID and then realise that Covid’s removal from that list means that it doesn’t measure up to any of the HCID criteria – such as acute infectiousness, high case fatality rate, no effective prevention or treatment, requires individual and population system response – you’ve got to ask why we pressed pause on civilisation.
The government’s assessment before lockdown wasn’t wrong because it is now backed up by the real-world evidence, which tells us that the average age of a Covid-labelled death is 81 for men and 84 for women, the same as the average age of death in the UK – in other words, when you’ve reached the age at which the actuaries expect you to die, then Covid, along with flu and pneumonia, is just one of many illnesses likely to kill you. I’m not denying younger people have died of Covid but the overall survival rate across all age groups is 99.85% and rises to 99.997% for the 0-19yr age group. I’d like to think that most elderly people would be the first to ask whether we should have found some way to protect them without punishing everyone else.
The UK government’s Chief Medical Adviser stated at a press conference on 11 May 2020 (at the height of the first wave) that a significant proportion of people will not get this virus at all, at any point in the epidemic. He added that, “of those that get symptoms, the great majority, probably 80%, will have a mild or moderate disease which might be bad enough for them to have to go to bed for a few days but not bad enough for them to have to go to the doctor. An unfortunate minority will have to go to hospital but the majority of those will just need oxygen and will then leave hospital and then a minority of those [that go to hospital] will end up having to go to severe and critical care and some of those sadly will die. But that’s a minority. It’s possibly 1% or even less than one percent overall and even in the highest risk group this is significantly less than 20%. The great majority of people even the highest risk groups if they catch this virus, they will not die.”
Unfathomably, the question that didn’t get asked at the briefing after hearing this statement was, “Why, then, are we burning down the house?”
A year later in April 2021, Britain’s Chief Medical Officer expressed the view that Coronavirus should now be treated like flu.
To quote Lionel Shriver, never in the history of viruses has a virus been so oversold.
Neither before, during or after any of the Covid waves did the government think the apocalypse was nigh. Nor does the precautionary principle justify trashing the livelihoods of thousands of business owners, stopping children from going to school and creating a 5.6m NHS waiting list, to name only a few of the disastrous consequences. Oh, but lockdowns prevented a far worse outcome than the one which unfolded, I hear you say. See next delusion below.
So why did the government enact and follow through so doggedly on such disastrous policies? You don’t have to answer that question in the next five minutes. But simply acknowledging that it is a valid question to ask means you can smell a rat. And if the people driving the Covid apocalypse narrative never believed it and still don’t believe it, why do you?
We had to lock down
The decision to lock down was criminally negligent and had to have been known to be from the outset.
To appreciate how deranged the lockdown experiment is, imagine the following scenario. On returning from a holiday in an exotic land, you begin to feel unwell and visit your doctor complaining of flu-like symptoms. On hearing the location of your holiday, your doctor assumes the worst – that you have contracted an illness unlike any seen before and for which there is no cure, even though the virus causing the illness falls within the family of coronaviruses long familiar to modern medicine.
Your doctor, in a state of panic (the last thing you want or expect from a doctor), prescribes a drug, found through a google search, that was invented by a 14-year old during a high school science project. The drug has never been subjected to clinical trials and has never been considered for use by any respectable medical licensing authority let alone approved by the national drug licencing authority or by the professional body that governs the doctor’s conduct.
Everyone understands that, even if you were lucky enough not to suffer harmful side effects from your doctor’s reckless experiment, he would be liable to sanctions from his professional body. If you were to suffer harm, criminal proceedings against the doctor would almost certainly be a forgone conclusion.
Not only does the above analogy align with the recklessness of the worldwide lockdown experiments but it is naïve to assume that highly qualified public health professionals at the WHO and here in the UK did not understand the significance of advocating population-wide interventions without the slightest grounding in science.
The lawyers and qualified experts who wrote this letter to leading intelligence agencies understand this only too well because they understand that the WHO along with national public health agencies are societies’ collective doctors. I’m not asking you to read the copious studies that condemn lockdowns as purely destructive tools with no benefits to show. I am asking you to adopt a degree of scepticism based on an understanding that lockdowns were never part of the national pandemic preparedness plans for infectious respiratory illnesses because there was no scientific basis for even considering them. Resorting to an intervention for which there was no medical or scientific evidence was an unmistakable act of gross negligence.
The opinion of the legal and medical professionals who wrote this letter to leading intelligence agencies is:
“The conclusion [to lock down] by the world’s foremost public health body was, at best, criminally negligent.”
In October 2020, the WHO backtracked on its criminally negligent advice when Dr David Nabarro, the WHO's special envoy on COVID-19, publicly urged world leaders to stop using lockdowns stating:
“Lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer.”
Too little, too late. Having understood that it should not have been opened, the WHO could not shut Pandora’s lockdown box. If there is any justice left in the world, public health ‘experts’ should be put in the dock to account for the prolific harms unleashed.
Compounding the recklessness of launching into lockdowns in the manner of a drunk driver veering off the road is the dogged avoidance of a serious cost/benefit analysis discussion, both before and after the fact. The absurdity of refusing to engage in a discussion of cost/benefit is eloquently dealt with by Glenn Greenwald but, with hundreds of billions spent on various Covid measures, NHS waiting lists in the millions, lost livelihoods for thousands of small and medium sized business owners, mental health spiralling downward, increased drug addiction, damage to school children’s development and education – to mention just a few of the costs – it’s understandable why a government keen to avoid discussions about negligence and liability would want to avoid the subject of cost/benefit.
And no, things would not have been far worse without lockdowns, as the government has half-heartedly tried to claim. The lockdown placebo controls of countries/regions which didn’t lock down – Sweden, Belarus, Tanzania, and Florida from September 2020 – had mortality outcomes no worse (and in many cases better) than the UK. The efforts to diminish the findings of studies done on the significance of these sane approaches are both futile and desperate. Sweden happened and the humans living there aren’t that different to us. Sweden and the other lockdown non-compliers tell us that we knowingly veered away from the other fork in the road that was signposted ‘Sanity –> This Way’.
Why would you still believe that lockdowns work when they were, for good reason, excluded from the professional public health handbook of proper responses to infectious respiratory illnesses? Do you smell a rat?
We must wear masks
Like lockdowns, mask-wearing in the general population was understood by the WHO and national public health bodies to be, at best, ineffective in checking the spread of respiratory flu-like illnesses. And like lockdowns, that sadly didn’t stop governments from mandating a non-evidence-based intervention.
At the beginning of the saga the WHO believed there was no evidence that wearing a mask in the community prevented healthy people from picking up respiratory infections including Covid-19.
Three weeks before the UK’s first lockdown, the UK’s Chief Medical Officer advised that: “In terms of wearing a mask, our advice is clear: that wearing a mask if you don’t have an infection reduces the risk almost not at all. So we do not advise that.” [bold emphasis added.]
Then, with absolutely no new hard evidence to change that assessment, politics trumped science when masks were legally mandated on public transport in England on 15 June last year and then on 24 July in shops.
However, long after masks had become de rigueur around the world, the WHO in December 2020 stated (download the pdf) as part of its guidance on masks in the community setting:
“At present there is only limited and inconsistent scientific evidence to support the effectiveness of masking of healthy people in the community to prevent infection with respiratory viruses, including SARS-CoV-2 (75). A large randomized community-based trial…found no difference in infection with SARS-CoV-2 (76). A recent systematic review… concluded that wearing a mask may make little or no difference to the prevention of influenza-like illness”. [bold emphasis added]
Having admitted that there is zero evidence for masking in the general population, the WHO then contradicted itself by proceeding to issue guidance for mask wearing in community settings:
“Despite the limited evidence of protective efficacy of mask wearing in community settings, in addition to all other recommended preventive measures, the GDG advised mask wearing in the following settings…”. [bold emphasis added]
Again, as in the case of lockdowns, the idea that the world’s foremost authority on public health would say, “Well this doesn’t work but let’s do it anyway and to hell with the potential health downside”, should create a pile of negligence lawsuits to bury the WHO, and whoever blindly followed them, in paperwork for the next 50 years. And if that is the only way to stop the WHO from being a menace to humanity, we should all welcome it.
To reiterate: an individual may take whatever precautions he or she deems fit to protect themselves and be it on their head should things go wrong. But a professional public health authority (international or national) funded by taxpayers for the sole purpose of advocating public health policy may not advocate interventions that are not grounded in solid evidence since to do so amounts to playing fast and loose with the public’s health.
It is therefore non-controversial to brand this as criminal negligence in legal terms.
My point again is this: If the public health bodies have clearly stated that they don’t believe there is sound medical evidence for the use of masks in community settings, then masks are political props, not health aids. If masks are not health aids, there is certainly much we can say about their psychological impact. At a group level they act as reminders of how afraid the government would like us to be and our compliance signifies whether or not we agree with the government’s ‘nudge’ to be more afraid. If the government reintroduces stricter mask rules this autumn, they will be a ‘nudge’ to dial up the fear. If we comply, we are agreeing with the government’s instruction to be more afraid.
That agreement, which in reality has no health benefit attached, is a powerful unconscious signifier of how far the government can go in the roll-out of other restrictions. But if we acted in accordance with the WHO and national public health’s true beliefs about mask efficacy by not wearing them, the government would know that we know what they know. The game would be up. That is not to say we would be denying Covid. We would simply be sending a powerful message: we know what works and what doesn’t, so don’t treat us like fools. This is a powerful message to send if we still want to retain our freedom.
Mass screening of the population – testing healthy people
Never before in the history of respiratory illnesses have healthy people been seriously considered to be vectors for disease spread. Quarantining the sick, not the healthy, was the long-established core scientific principle in management of infection and transmission. And yet before it had been established that this virus was displaying any worrying new transmission mechanisms that had not been seen in previous coronaviruses, it was decided that asymptomatic spread was a threat. Fear, the lubricant applied to all Covid measures, was leveraged yet again to get healthy people to line up in droves to get tested.
The absurdity of accepting this unproven paradigm was illustrated at the height of testing mania when people were standing in long queues to be tested despite the government’s constant messaging that proximity to strangers was akin to dicing with death.
The WHO confirmed that asymptomatic spread was not a consideration when it stated in a media briefing in June 2020: ‘Based on our data, it seems unlikely that an asymptomatic carrier will transmit the infection to someone else. We have a number of reports from other countries. They monitor asymptomatic carriers, their contacts, and do not detect further transmission.’ It then inexplicably denied its own evidence backed statement by rowing back on this the next day, not on the basis of new evidence or the statement being incorrect but simply due to political pressure.
Asymptomatic spread was ruled out in an article in the British Medical Journal by Professor Allyson Pollock, where she wrote: ‘A city-wide prevalence study of almost ten million people in Wuhan found no evidence of asymptomatic transmission.’
The testing pillar of the official Covid narrative is so mired in dirt that even a brief overview of its murkiness should provide many reasons to view Covid as a casedemic not a pandemic.
The Corman-Drosten PCR Covid testing protocol was submitted to the medical journal, Eurosurveillance, on 21 January 2020 and published the next day on 22 January. Of all 1,595 publications at Eurosurveillance since 2015, not one other research paper was reviewed and accepted in fewer than 20 days. It could not have been subjected to any meaningful peer review and the paper’s many flaws were highlighted in a retraction request submitted by a team of experts led by molecular biologist Pieter Borger.
Drosten, one of the key authors of the paper failed to report his conflict of interest as the editor of the publishing journal. Another author, Olfert Landt, failed to disclose in the original publication that he was CEO of the company making the test kits. This was subsequently declared in revised papers.
Despite publication of the protocol on 23 January 2020, the first test kits were shipped on 10 January 2020. Even more mystifying is that a viral genome sequence was released for immediate public health support via the online community resource virological.org on 10 January, raising the obvious question: how could kits have been ready for shipping on the same day the genome sequence was made available?
On November 20, 2020 an appeals court in Portugal ruled that ‘the PCR process is not a reliable test for Sars-Cov-2, and therefore any enforced quarantine based on those test results is unlawful’. In evidence, the court cited a scientific paperwhich found that up to 97% of positive results could be false positives. To this day, this monumental ruling remains unreported in the UK mainstream media.
A stunning below-the-radar admission by the CDC in July 2021 was that the test in its current form was not based on a quantified virus isolate. In other words, the specificity of the test to the actual SARS-COV-2 virus is highly questionable. In the CDC’s own words: “no quantified virus isolates of the 2019-nCoV were available for CDC use at the time the test was developed” (page 40 of the FDA link).
Putting aside for a moment the fact that the test was not based on a quantified virus isolate, PCR testing becomes increasingly unreliable when used as a general population screening tool. That’s because its accuracy relies on the prevalence of disease in the population. The more widely it is used as a screening tool in healthy people, the smaller the degree of disease prevalence in the population tested and the greater the number of false positives it generates. The inventor of the PCR test never intended it to be used as a diagnostic tool, let alone a mass screening tool.
The degree to which sample material is amplified in the test (the cycle thresholds used) also makes it highly manipulable or susceptible to error. The WHO admitted as much when it issued this warning about cycle thresholds in December 2020. There has been little or no transparency in the disclosure of cycle thresholds by government approved testing labs throughout most of the pandemic.
The key statistics used to dial up or down the never-ending cycle of restrictions and fear are cases, hospitalisations, and deaths, all obviously underpinned by this dubious PCR test. Once hospitalised, a sick person, regardless of the reason for admission, is tested for Covid – repeatedly until they leave. Increased severity of any condition correlates with a longer stay in hospital, which correlates with an increased number of tests thus increasing the likelihood that a false positive result will eventually be generated. Then add into that mix the criteria for classification of a Covid death as death from any cause that occurs within 28 days of a positive test result and you can see how any scientist with a sceptical bone in her body would question the degree to which case and death numbers are being falsely inflated.
Here in the UK an FOIA request to a hospital Trust in Birmingham forced that hospital to admit that, of the reported 81 deaths ‘with Covid’ that had occurred in that hospital, only 2 (2.47%) were attributable to Covid alone. 97.53% of victims had underlying conditions. The over-reporting of Covid deaths has been recognised in mainstream media sources. An October 2020 FOIA request to the UK’s ONS revealed less than 10% of the official “Covid death” count at that time had Covid as the sole cause of death.
Dr Kary Mullis, the biochemist who won the Nobel prize for inventing the PCR test, was openly critical of its abuse stating: ‘It’s just a process that is used to make a whole lot of something out of something. It doesn’t tell you that you are sick and it doesn’t tell you that the thing you ended up with was going to hurt you or anything like that.’ Are you prepared to overrule him in favour of the hapless buffoon Matt Hancock, the then Health Secretary who decided that wasting billions on testing healthy people while leaving the sick to rot at home would be a prudent use of taxpayers’ money? Do you smell a rat?
Vaccines and vaccine passports are the only way out
Our enormously intelligent and complex immune systems have been evolving for somewhere in the region of a million of years. Every respiratory illness that has ever swept through a population has ended with something called herd immunity – enough of the hale and hearty getting ill, recovering, becoming immune to the pathogen and creating a wall of immunity too big to allow the virus to do any further significant damage. The virus inflicts just enough damage to spur our collective immune systems into action but not so much that it wipes us out leaving itself with no host in which to propagate. A duet that leads to each living with the other in endemicity.
And yet with the proverbial flick of a switch, the WHO re-wrote science without any evidence to back up its new position.
In around November 2020, herd immunity became something achievable only through mass vaccination, despite a vaccination campaign having never been part of ending any previous influenza-like epidemic in history. No explanation was given as to how humanity had avoided extinction prior to the advent of vaccines, but our million-year-old human immune system was unceremoniously sidelined in an overnight website update. To say that this is problematic for the integrity of science is an understatement.
But, if Big Pharma is going to replace the role of my immune system in beating a virus, the least I expect from them is a statement that their vaccines will do what my immune system used to do before it was unceremoniously usurped – namely, prevent infection and transmission of the pathogen after exposure to and recovery from the pathogen. It is important to understand that the Covid 19 vaccines were never intended to pass this basic test of a vaccine.
A kind of swindle was perpetrated in which the public hype ahead of the roll-out created the impression that the vaccines would do all the good things that the public expects of vaccines. But lost amid all the noise were some not very visible ‘small print’ warnings that should have lowered our expectations significantly.
Peter Doshi at the BMJ was not alone when he sounded an alarm bell in October 2020, pointing out that:
“None of the trials currently under way are designed to detect a reduction in any serious outcome such as hospital admissions, use of intensive care, or deaths. Nor are the vaccines being studied to determine whether they can interrupt transmission of the virus.” [bold emphasis added]
He also pointed out that the trials were designed to evaluate only mild illness.
Before rolling out the vaccines, the NHS concurred with the manufacturers’ implied limitations of their products, declaring in its vaccine leaflet that “we do not yet know how much it will reduce the chance of you catching and passing on the virus”.
So, if Big Pharma and the government knew, before they were rolled out, that the vaccines didn’t stand much of a chance of preventing infection and transmission, the next question is: how have things panned out?
The BMJ’s senior editor (the October 2020 alarm bell ringer), citing a whole host of problems including waning immunity, remains unconvinced of the justification for the FDA’s full approval of Pfizer’s Covid vaccine on 23 August.
Public Health England’s real-world data on vaccine effectiveness shows that, in the over 40 age group, the vaccinated are disproportionately more likely to catch and therefore transmit Covid than the unvaccinated – in other words the vaccine is having a negative effect on infection, which isn’t just ineffective, it’s blowback. Let’s be clear that it is a fallacy to attack the significance of the PHE data on the grounds that the higher number of cases in the vaccinated is simply a reflection of the highly vaccinated population. This common lazy dismissal is not valid because, as I have stated by using the word ‘disproportionately’, the analysis of the data for purposes of effectiveness adjusts for the proportion of vaccinated versus unvaccinated and finds that the vaccinated are disproportionately over-represented in the case data.
The hysteria being whipped up over vaccine passports is ostensibly about protecting the vaccinated from the unvaccinated, which is irrational in itself because if the vaccine works, those vaccinated don’t need protection from anything or anyone. But, based on PHE’s new data, it now appears that the unvaccinated need protection from the vaccinated.
Robert Peston, referring to this new PHE information, tweeted about his own personal experience of being vaccinated and subsequently getting Covid. For me, more interesting than Peston’s tweet were some of the replies from those who have had a similar experience. Many were along the lines of: “thank gawd you/we were jabbed because it would’ve been much worse otherwise.” We need to talk about this because this is an irrational and yet common response to the got-jabbed-and-still-got-Covid phenomenon.
Recall that the government acknowledged before lockdowns that Covid was not a High Consequence Infectious Disease, and this has been confirmed by the statements made by the Chief Medical Officer and the real-world evidence on Covid’s low mortality rate – 99.85% of people survive, with the vast majority of those developing only mild symptoms. On this basis alone, there is a very high probability that the illness would have been a relatively trivial and very temporary health set-back, without the vaccine. So, remaining rational and working within the paradigm of what vaccines generally purport to do, we should really be asking why so many people are catching and getting ill with Covid after the jab. Instead, we see a disturbing number of people celebrating the wonders of the jab despite suffering from the illness it’s supposed to prevent. This is not rational.
Mass vaccination as a public health policy strategy was intended to reduce the burden on the NHS and allow society to ‘get back to normal’. However, a few mainstream media reports are now warning that the vaccines have failed to deliver on this strategy. As if to underline this vaccine failure while simultaneously illustrating how the mainstream media amplifies insanity by making it seem normal, we have an Orwellian admission in a Reuters article that begins with a seemingly innocuous statement. It conveys a warning that “relying largely on vaccines without other measures could put unsustainable pressure on hospitals”. But at no point does it challenge the fact that vaccines were supposed to be the intervention that obviated the need for “other measures”.
Can’t score a goal? Just shift the goalposts! Vaccines have now become an additional measure to the two (masks and lockdowns) that should never have happened anyway because they were criminally negligent. The open admission of failure comes when the article admits that, despite 81.3% of people over 16 having received two vaccine doses, the chair of the British Medical Association is screaming out for “additional infection control measures”:
“With high rates of [Covid] infection, we need additional infection control measures if we’re to keep the health service afloat this winter.” [Emphasis added]
‘Additional infection control measures’ being code for lockdown, a societal grenade. To summarise: In locking down to protect the NHS, a backlog so huge has been created that the NHS cannot get through it concurrently with the normal winter respiratory illness season. It wants to keep locking down even though lockdowns are the surest way to worsen the waiting list and contribute to the premature deaths of people on it. In essence, the NHS has dug a hole for itself so deep that it can’t climb out. So, it has decided to just keep digging. And just in case all of this wasn’t irrational enough, vaccines, which haven’t provided much relief to the NHS covid burden, are going to be coerced through vaccine passports.
A brief note on Covid vaccine safety. Like all medical treatments, vaccines come with risks. A total of 1,183,600 suspected adverse reactions including 1,632 fatal events associated with the vaccine have been recorded by the UK government’s Yellow Card Scheme as of 1 September 2021. The MHRA itself estimates that only 10% of serious reactions and 2–4% of all reactions are reported using the Yellow Card Scheme (2nd page of the linked report). Where there is risk, there must be choice. Vaccine passports remove this choice. Being made to face the risk of serious injury and even death without a free choice is medical tyranny. Many liberals on the left have called for a zero Covid policy which has been proven to be a fool’s errand in places like New Zealand. How do they reconcile this aspiration with an explicit acceptance of deaths from a coerced vaccine?
My point again, to be deliberately tedious, is simply this: if the vaccine manufacturers never intended for them to prevent infection and transmission from the get-go and your government knew this, isn’t it time to wake up from the delusion that these vaccines were ever going to be the only way out? And if fully vaccinated people can get and transmit Covid, why are they being given a passport and privileges? With vaccine passports clearly serving the sole purpose of restricting freedom and punishing those who have made a choice that we once regarded as a basic human right, why would you walk blindly into them? Do you smell a rat?
Summing up all the delusions
Every stage in the crisis has been marked by massive contradictions between what the government believes would be a rational, calm and professional course of action and the actual course it has decided to take. And in the case of vaccines, there is a massive contradiction between what the public expects from an effective vaccine (stop infection and transmission) and what the vaccine manufacturers and the government knew and told us to expect, which is basically not much. Adding insult to injury, the government now wants to force you to show your vaccination status to gain rights of participation in society, rights previously taken for granted by every law-abiding citizen.
If you are starting to smell a rat, what should you do now?
“The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie.” - Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
In Part III I’ll discuss the awful consequences of scapegoating and how far down that deadly road we have already travelled. I’ll present a case for why vaccine passports will detonate our free society and I will argue that the only way back from the brink is to unequivocally trash them.