Martin Zizi, a Belgian professor of physiology residing in California, is a medical doctor with training in cardiology, molecular physiology, public health and biophysics. He graduated from the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain) and went on to teach at various academies in the USA and Belgium. He conducted his post-doctoral research at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and the University of Maryland. Formerly, he was the Medical Chief Scientific Officer and Chairman of the Bioethical Committee of the Belgian Ministry of Defence.
He was one of the founders of the Belgian Veterans Administration and led the scientific expansion of the Brussels Burn Unit. He taught physiology and led three active research programmes at Louvain and in the Faculty of Medicine and Pharmacy at Vrije Universiteit (VU) Brussels, two of Belgium’s premier universities. He performed expert missions for the United Nations as an advisor, and as a bioweapons inspector in Iraq, and acted for the biopharma industry in high-stakes, large-market-value litigations. He is also an official member of the Forbes Technology Council and an entrepreneur in innovative mobile medical technology.
Risky injections of children
This interview concerns Zizi's interactions with European Union institutions in the Covid era. He was the main point of contact for a petition to the European Parliament (progress tracked here) signed by 189 public health and care authorities, doctors and academics from the EU, supported by other professional signatories from non-member states, to defend the constitutional rights of children in accordance with Article 24 of the Charter of EU Fundamental Rights. The petition made a robust case, both in medicine and at law, that the injection of children with Covid products had an utterly unfavourable cost/benefit ratio for them.
Zizi's own description of how the European Parliament's Petitions Committee (PETI) handled the submission, on which this interview expands at length with documentary evidence on screen, is as follows:
To cut a long story short, this EU institution did not have to agree with such a petition—by the way, the right of petition is another EU-granted constitutional right—but they did have the constitutional duty to process it according to their own rules, and hence to hear us, none of which was ever done.
Our petition was closed during the summer recess without even notifying me—again, in breach of their own rules—until it was too late. Our petition was submitted in January 2022, and was closed without much ado in August 2022.
Between September and December 2022, I had numerous exchanges with the European Parliament, their secretarial office, and the Parliament’s Petitions Committee that is in charge of such processes. They stalled, and contradicted themselves. When the EU Ombudsman was asked for redress, the Ombudsman's answer on 11 October was that this closure without a hearing of the petitioners was a political decision, and as the ombudsman is only competent in administrative affairs, our complaint was out of scope.
I am convinced that such egregious handling of a major current issue, where a constitutionally defined due process is not even granted, is a matter of significance.
Zizi's case is that the Petitions Committee mischaracterised the signatories' petition as a mere expression of concern about policy, in order to head off its legal arguments at the pass.
He describes in the interview the strong indications he received that the Petitions Committee was instructed by Margrete Auken MEP, the mother of Danish MP Ida Auken (notorious for her 2016 World Economic Forum article, republished by Forbes, on the abolition of private property by 2030), not to accept the petition. He also outlines tip-offs he has received that the petition was wilfully miscast as "far-right" in order to make it toxic in the eyes of committee members.
"Neil Ferguson is well-known among epidemiologists as a bit of a loony character"
From the half-hour mark, the interview turns to the role of Professor Neil Ferguson's advice in promoting non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), chiefly masks and the rescinding of freedom of movement, in the Covid era. UK Column was focusing on Ferguson's questionable public health science years ago, with its documentary on the British Government's handling of the 2001 foot and mouth disease outbreak, Slaughtered On Suspicion (2014). Zizi says:
This is the gospel of a false religion. If mathematical medicine existed, we would be teaching it at university. There is no such thing. Mathematical modelling is [merely] useful for logistics. That's a useful tool; it's also called smart management. It's also useful for casualty management in catastrophes. But you must not make public policy decisions based on logistics! Logistics is in support of medicine; it's not [meant to be] leading medicine. And what Neil Ferguson and his ilk from Imperial College have been advocating for the past twenty years is is that they lead the effort instead of supporting it.
Regarding the British Government policy of mass slaughter of cattle in Cumbria in 2001, he adds:
I have a fair understanding of this. Since the 1990s, politics has been run by image and communications officers, not by solutions. So it's more important to have the image of a burning pyre, to say, "The Government is doing something good for your health," than to solve the problem. That probably explains the pyres. But there is a public health consequence of this: when you burn the carcases of dead animals, you do it in an incinerator—it's a closed system. If you do that in the open air, the carcases are not burned well, so the virus is still alive and can be lifted. It goes up, and so there are scientific papers about the plumes, of all the spread induced by the foot and mouth disease pyres that would never have happened if this was not the scientific solution—which it wasn't [anyway]. So they made the problem worse, and that's what Neil Ferguson is about. He made the problem worse.
Zizi then applies this "time machine that explains how poor decisions can make a crisis more severe" to the Covid era:
I wouldn't blame politicians for a mistake; a mistake can be forgiven. What I have a hard time forgiving is when you build on a second, third mistake [to make] a lie. That cannot be forgiven easily. Essentially, they made very bad models of SARS–CoV–2 casualties based on fake death rates that were not real, because they used not the correct input. If I put garbage into a model, I get garbage out. I can make a model say anything [...]
What's really striking, and damning too, is that there were several institutions in the UK, for example, making weekly models, and the UK Government, as governments elsewhere, always showed the worst-of-the-worst-case scenario because they thought it would force people into compliance, accepting lockdown. So essentially, that was an unneeded pseudo-solution that was favoured based on shoddy work. And that's why the work at Imperial College was tainted [...]
Neil Ferguson, you are wrong; you are a harbinger of doomsday. Now you throw up your hands and say you made a mistake. No, sir; you need to be accountable for that. You will be famous—but not for your science.
Party whipping undoes everything back to Magna Carta
From the forty-minute mark, Professor Zizi expands upon his apprehension that the "fundamental tenets of democracy" have been lost in the European Union just as much as in China or Russia, particularly through political parties forcing their elected members to vote against their constituents' interests, against the evidence and against their own conscience. The "top-down decision-making cycle" of the present day threatens to cost us our whole freedom. Comparing the wide variety of official Covid responses at state and county level in the USA and the EU, Zizi asks: Can decision-makers split a society into essential and non-essential? Has the divine right of kings been replaced by a divine right of parliament?