A senior US Air Force official has sent defense contractors a strongly worded letter over delays to the Vulcan Centaur heavy-lift launch vehicle program – initiated to replace the workhorse Atlas V, which uses Russian-made RD-180 engines. The delay signals the US’s inability even to copy Russian-made equipment, a leading space researcher says.
US Air Force Assistant Secretary Frank Calvelli has sent the heads of Boeing and Lockheed Martin’s United Launch Alliance space divisions an “unusually blunt” appeal highlighting Pentagon concerns over the years-long delays to the Vulcan rocket project.
“I am growing concerned with ULA’s ability to scale manufacturing of its Vulcan rocket and scale its launch cadence to meet our needs. Currently there is military satellite capability sitting on the ground due to Vulcan delays,” Calvelli complained.
“As the owners of ULA, and given the manufacturing prowess of Boeing and Lockheed Martin corporations, I recommend that you work together over the next 90 days to complete an independent review of ULA’s ability to scale its launch cadence to meet” contract requirements, the official urged.
Calvelli expressed concerns about the ULA’s poor flight record to date, pointing out that to meet its contract obligations, it would have to launch 25 missions for the Pentagon by the end of 2027. The alliance, separately bound to launch 38 rockets for Amazon’s Kuiper internet satellite constellation, launched only three missions through 2023.
“Launch is critical to our ability to transform our space architecture. We are counting on Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and the ULA team to be successful in getting critical capabilities into space for our warfighters,” the assistant secretary wrote.
The United Launch Alliance kicked off the Vulcan’s development a decade ago amid a push by Washington to phase out the purchase of Russian-made RD-180 engines used on the Vulcan’s predecessor, the Atlas V, to put satellites into orbit. The Vulcan has a stated launch capacity of 27.2 tons, and an estimated expected cost of $100-$200 million per launch, compared to 8.2-18.85 tons and $1090 million per launch for the Atlas V, depending on variant.
Initially projected to start flying in 2019, the Vulcan program has faced half a decade of delays, owing partly to major issues with the rocket’s BE-4 engines, developed by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space company. The first Vulcan rocket successfully launched in January of this year, but quickly ran into new problems, including delays to the development of the Air Force’s Soviet-inspired Dream Chaser spaceplane.
The program will require a second flight before it can be certified by the Pentagon for use for national security and intelligence collection-related missions, with ULA expecting the program’s second launch to take place sometime later this year.
Calvelli did not elaborate on the nature of his concerns with the Vulcan program, instead shifting the discussion to national security and the US’s strategic competition with Beijing.
“The United States continues to face an unprecedented strategic competitor in China, and our space environment continues to become more contested, congested and competitive. We have seen exponential growth of in-space activity, including counterspace threats, and our adversaries would seek to deny us the advantage we get from space during a potential conflict,” he wrote.
ULA assures that it’s on track to ramping up its rocket production capabilities, with CEO Tony Bruno telling media that the Vulcan “is much less expensive” than the Atlas V with its Russian-made RD-180s, and that future plans to reuse the new, American-made engines will result in “economies of scale” that will make it “cheaper over time.”
Boeing responded to Calvelli’s letter by promising to get “on more of a wartime footing to stay ahead of the threat,” and agreed with the senior Air Force officer’s sense that “a quicker and more reliable launch cadence is critical to meeting that need.”
Rocket Science
The problems surrounding the Vulcan rocket and its engines signal major issues for US space rocket engineering, with the ULA delay demonstrating that American rocket scientists currently can’t even effectively copy Russian engines, much less create safe, reliable engines of their own, says Dr. Natan Eismont, a leading researcher at the Russian Academy of Scientists’ Space Research Institute, told Sputnik.
“There have been attempts to copy RD-180 engines from the moment they were sold to the Americans,” Eismont recalled. From the early 2000s onward, “launches were carried out using the Atlas III, and then a lot using the Atlas V, [which] provided for nearly half of all American launches. This is significant…There were attempts to copy the RD-180 from the start, and to this day they remain just that – attempts. The Americans haven’t been able to create an engine with characteristics close to matching the RD-180.”
Created in the 1990s, the RD-180 is a derivative of the legendary RD-170/171 series of rocket engines, developed in the 1980s by Energomash for the super-heavy Energiya launch vehicle, which was designed to shuttle up to 100 tons of useful cargo into Low Earth Orbit, to launch the Buran space shuttle, and deploy the next generation of space station components, and pieces of large, Moon and Mars-faring spacecraft of the future.
With the Soviet space program curtailed dramatically after the USSR’s collapse, budding cooperation with the US in the 1990s instead led to the development of the RD-180, and the export of over 120 of these engines to the US between 2000 and 2021.
The question of why the Americans have not been able to develop an engine with characteristics comparable to the RD-180, or even copy the Russian-made engine, stems from a problem which has plagued the US going back almost to the start of the space age, Eismont says.
“Efficiency is measured by specific thrust [the ratio of net thrust/total intake airflow, ed.], which for the RD-180 is 400 tons from the Earth’s surface, and 430 tons in a vacuum. These characteristics are generally achievable. But there’s also the specific impulse [a measure of how efficiently the engine generates thrust, ed.] and here, no rocket apart from ours has been able to achieve comparable parameters. Because to obtain characteristics comparable to those achieved by the RD-180, one must use a fairly high level of pressure in the combustion chamber – more than 200 atmospheres,” which can be dangerous if done improperly, the academic explained.
“At the same time, high-frequency oscillations arise,” Eismont added. “The secret lies in determining the moment during testing after which these fluctuations become possible, and immediately turning off the engine at that precise moment. How to do that – what parameters are necessary here, what parameters are acceptable, and how issues can be overcome – it appears that no one apart from our specialists knows this. Simply handing over the engine with all its documentation is not enough. Because there are subtleties in the manufacture of the engine which are difficult to convey using documentation.”
That’s not to say that American rocket scientists will not be able to ever overcome these difficulties, the observer emphasized. They can and will, but doing so “requires a lot of money and time,” and knowledge enough to pinpoint when testing enters the danger zone to prevent the destruction of “very expensive” test equipment.
Solving this issue will be “critical” for the Americans, Eismont believes.
“Here, [the ULA] can turn to [Space X CEO Elon] Musk, where, in general, the same tasks were set, and the company has its own rocket engine. For Musk too, everything didn’t work out straight away or to the end. Here, in general, we can say that Musk has not achieved the required level of reliability. SpaceX’s engine is in fact also an attempt to copy the RD-180… They are probably further along than say Boeing or others involved [in the Vulcan program, ed.]. But nevertheless, he had to come to terms with the fact that he could not manage without accidents. That is, the process turned out to be slower and more expensive than planned,” the academic explained.
Besides documentation, what US rocket scientists are really lacking is specialists, who can’t be replaced by imported engines, technical or even testing documentation.
“What you need are people involved in the project. Who will give the Americans these people? No one,” Eismont said.
This isn’t anything new, the academic recalled, pointing out that the US has had problems with its rocketry programs going back to the Apollo program and the days of the Saturn 5 rocket. “If you look at the technical characteristics of these American engines, they were strikingly worse than those that the USSR had at the time,” he said.
“It’s difficult to say why this was, but the Americans lagged behind here from the start. As for Soviet and Russian engines, they display an exceptional level of reliability. From the time that the Americans purchased these particular engines from us, they have not had any accidents. That is, the entire program was developed and carried out in accordance with the experience accumulated by that time by Energomash. Here, they really are ahead of everyone else.”
Ivan Moiseev, the head of the Russian Institute of Space Policy, echoed Eismont’s assessment regarding the RD-180, telling Sputnik that this is an “excellent” engine, with “not a single failure in over 100 launches.”
“The contract was concluded in 1996 and completed in 2021 – three years ago. Accordingly, the Americans still have some engines, they can still launch the Atlas V,” Moiseev said.
After that, it will be anyone’s guess how the Pentagon plans to get its payloads into orbit, unless ULA get its act together, or Washington pulls the plug on the whole thing and puts all its spacefaring eggs in Musk’s SpaceX basket.
April 30 was the anniversary date when North Vietnamese forces forced U.S. officials to exit Vietnam, much to their chagrin. That was after some 58,000 American men had died for nothing, not to mention the tens of thousands of injured American soldiers and the millions of Vietnamese who were killed or injured as a result of U.S. intervention in Vietnam’s civil war.
To this day, there are those who claim that those 58,000 men died for their country and in defense of our freedoms here at home. Almost 50 years after the end of that sordid intervention, such people continue to operate under severe self-delusion.
North Vietnam never attacked, invaded, or occupied the United States or even had any interest in doing so. Moreover, North Vietnam lacked the military, money, transport ships, planes, and supply lines that would have been necessary to cross the Pacific and invade the United States. If they had been successful in landing a few thousand troops on the West Coast, they would have been quickly massacred by the U.S. military or by well-armed private Americans. All that North Vietnam wanted to do was reunite North Vietnam and South Vietnam and make it one country again — Vietnam.
In other words, North Vietnam never posed a danger to our rights and freedoms here in the United States. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, despite the fact that North Vietnam defeated the United States and won the war, the defeat did not result in North Vietnam’s taking away any of our rights and freedoms. In fact, the irony is that it is the U.S. government — our government — that has destroyed our rights and freedoms.
By the same token, those 58,000 U.S. soldiers who were sacrificed in Vietnam did not die for their country. They died for their government. There is a difference. The government is one entity and the country is another entity. This difference is reflected by the Bill of Rights, which expressly protects the country from the government. Dying for one’s government is not the same as dying for one’s country.
During the war, the U.S. government resorted to conscription, which is also known as the draft. It’s impossible to reconcile conscription with freedom. When a government has to force people to fight in a war, that’s a pretty good sign that that is a no-good, rotten war. If the war were really about protecting our freedom and our country, people wouldn’t have to be forced to fight. They’d be willing to fight voluntarily.
The rotten nature of the war was reflected by the disparate treatment between rich and poor and blacks and whites. The rich white kids were given college and post-graduate school deferments, which would enable them to delay being forced into the military and sent to Vietnam. Another way for rich white kids to get out of being sent to Vietnam was to use political influence to get into a National Guard unit or a Reserve unit. During the Vietnam War, those units were not being activated to be sent to Vietnam. Thus, anyone who was lucky enough or privileged enough to get into those units knew that there was no risk of being sent to Vietnam. The poor were not so lucky. They couldn’t afford college and so they were drafted immediately on graduation from high school. They became the U.S. government’s cannon fodder in Vietnam.
Of course, from the day he was forced into the army, every soldier was indoctrinated into believing that he was being sent to Vietnam to protect our “freedoms” here at home. One irony of this indoctrination was that if black conscripts were lucky enough to make it back alive, the “free” society to which they were returning was a segregated one.
Those who had the audacity to challenge or criticize the war were immediately branded traitors, cowards, or communist lovers or appeasers. That included civil-rights leader Martin Luther King and championship boxer Mohammad Ali. U.S. officials destroyed Ali’s boxing career by ensuring that he was prohibited from fighting at the height of his career. But at least they let him live. They snuffed out King’s life given that they were convinced that he and the civil-rights movement were advance, Fifth Column troops of a communist invasion of the United States.
Unfortunately, North Vietnam’s victory over the United States didn’t result in any fundamental changes here at home. Today, Americans continue to live under a national-security state form of government, an interventionist foreign policy, and an empire of foreign military bases. The Cold War is still being waged against Cuba, North Korea, Russia, and China; ironically, North Vietnam is, at least for now, considered an official friend. The war on communism has been replaced by the war on terrorism and Islam. State-sponsored assassinations, torture, indefinite detention, and military tribunals are still part and parcel of America’s legal system. And so are unconstitutional undeclared wars that sacrifice American soldiers for nothing, like with the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan.
Eight-year-old Ritaj survived for two days under the rubble when an Israeli strike killed her family. Doctors operated on her leg multiple times and ended up amputating it. Now, Ritaj lives in a crowded shelter with her aunt, and she just wants the war to end.
A very telling pair of graphs from Ole Humlum’s Climate4You :
We can debate the reasons for less cloud cover, but generally speaking less cloud/more sunshine leads to higher temperatures. (Certain high level clouds may have the reverse effect, but this is small).
Even the Met Office admitted this a few years ago, in a study they have since buried.
In particular, it is the sun that predominantly heats the oceans. The equilibrium effect on the seas from a slightly warmer atmosphere are so small as to be unmeasurable.
In alarmist world, of course, CO2 is the only driver of global temperatures, so don’t expect them to mention that cloud cover has been a major factor behind global warming in recent decades.
World-famous cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough recently revealed startling figures about the immense earnings doctors received for pushing the COVID-19 injections.
On the Tommy T Podcast, Dr. McCullough claimed that a typical doctor could make an extra $250,000 if they injected a substantial portion of their patients.
More specifically, if a doctor injected 75% of his or her patients at $250 per newly-injected person, that would end up being around $250,000.
Dr. McCullough explained that a full-time primary care physician typically manages a patient panel ranging from about 1,000 to 2,000 people covered by Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield.
When you do the math, factoring in the $250 incentive, 1,000 newly vaccinated people times $250 = $250,000. Some doctors made less; some made more. But the point is that doctors were financially incentivized to inject as many patients as possible.
The question is, was Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield giving doctors jab incentives, or were they being paid to do so by the government?
Most Americans know that political corruption is destroying the United States, which devotes massive resources to expand and rule its empire. The US Constitution was written to keep some power in the hands of the states, who appointed their US Senators, but the 17th Amendment, promoted by American business titans and ratified in 1913, removed this control with direct Senate elections to allow the centralization of power in Washington DC. Repealing the 17th Amendment is a simple idea that would have an immediate impact on the nation as states regain control of the federal government. US Senators would suddenly focus funding on helping people in their state and have little interest in military interventions overseas.
I have completed the initial cleanup of the data posted on the website of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, which lists all suspected Palestinian terrorist attacks during the 23-year, four-month period (i.e., 2000 to April 26, 2024). During this period, the Israeli Government identifies 672 terrorist attacks blamed on the Palestinians. Why do I phrase it like that? Because several of the incidents involve the discovery of dead Israelis with no identified attacker. Here is just one example:
Apr 30, 2013 – Evyatar Borovsky, 31, of Yitzhar, was stabbed to death in a terror attack at the hitchhiking post at theTapuah junction in the northern West Bank.
Maybe it was a terrorist attack or maybe it was a jealous husband. Listing this as a terrorist attack implies a degree of planning and intent that is not supported by the data.
Now here are the really interesting numbers. 105 of the attacks are attributed to Hamas. 58 to Islamic Jihad and 5 to Hezbollah. In other words, only 25% of the attacks are associated with a specific Palestinian group. The remaining 75% are blamed on nameless culprits. The total number killed by Palestinian violence during this 23-year-plus period is 1,455. That is the number of victims listed at the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs site. And, as I noted in my recent article (Hamas is a Third-Rate Terrorist Organization), the Israelis killed 7,065 Palestinians during the same period of time. In other words, the Israelis killed almost five times the number of Palestinians. This may explain why the Palestinians carried out “terrorist” attacks — they were seeking vengeance, retribution.
I am not suggesting that Hamas was a benign actor. Hamas took credit for several bombings, such as the August 9, 2001 suicide blast at a Sbarro restaurant in Jerusalem. There is no excuse for this kind of mindless violence. If someone is wearing a uniform and carrying a firearm, then they are a legitimate target of war. That is insurgency, not terrorism in my view. Others may differ. Killing families sitting down for a meal is not only criminal, but evil. It is wrong when Hamas or Islamic Jihad do it and it is wrong when Israel drops a bomb on civilian housing and wipes out extended families. It appears that Hamas and the other Islamic groups concluded that such acts of violence were counterproductive because the last use of an explosive on a public gathering in Israel was July 18, 2012. It also is possible that Israel increased its security protocols making it more difficult for suicide bombers to infiltrate into Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.
I have attached the spreadsheet to this article. I have not had time to thoroughly organize the data. For example, I would like to get the incident dates into a separate column. I want to identify how many of the victims were military versus civilian. I want to identify the specific group that claims responsibility for the attack. If any of you have the free time and the inclination (and the skill) to convert this database into something more useful as an analytical tool please feel free to take a whack.
Vilifying Hamas as an unrepentant international terrorist group is not fair nor accurate. They share more in common with Native American tribes carrying out attacks on European settlers in the 19th Century in America’s Wild West. It is violence spawned by a fight over land and freedom of movement. Hamas is not in the same category nor league as ISIS and Al Qaeda. Not even close.
One final point of reference. The number of people murdered in Chicago between 2000 and 2023 stands at 13,526. And we don’t call that terrorism. Israel has close to ten million people, while Chicago is a little more than one-fifth the size, with 2,665,000 in 2022. Just keep that in mind.
The essay below was originally published in early July 2022. Version 1.0 of #TheMotherOfAllProxyArmies in Ukraine had been severely attrited, and Version 2.0 would not appear until later in the summer.
Nevertheless, it had already become very apparent that the Russian strategy and doctrine for this war was not at all what the vast majority of western military “experts” expected it to be. And consequently they lacked the capacity to understand what was happening.
For the most part, they still don’t get it.
Somewhere in the neighborhood of half a million Ukrainians (and a few thousand NATO-affiliated “volunteers”) have been sacrificed on the altar of western hubris and military ineptitude. Vast quantities of western equipment and ammunition has been expended — to the point of near-exhaustion in European NATO countries, and acute depletion of American stockpiles.
And yet the doctrine and tactics described in this mid-2022 article have changed only in the sense that the Russians have consistently refined and improved them along the way, even as the US/NATO have effectively learned nothing.
I’ve watched a LOT of drone footage from this war. I’ve seen, from a bird’s eye view, as it were, the design of the field fortifications Ukraine constructed, with NATO guidance, over the course of eight years.
The logic of these miles and miles of fortifications harkens back to the 1864-65 Battle of Petersburg (US Civil War), with a few World War I innovations thrown in for good measure.
It is a logic where victory largely depends on you not running out of men, heavy weaponry, and ammunition — and the enemy being comparatively stupid.
In many ways, the revealed logic of Ukraine’s long-prepared strategy for this war is a reflection of American military delusions and vanities, which multiplied and solidified over the course of the brief and fleeting “unipolar moment”.
Despite not having won a war since 1945, the US military is consumed with the vanity that it has always dominated opposing forces in every conflict.
There is a measure of truth in this perspective. But it is irrelevant. Because, since no later than the Korean War, the US has not faced a peer or near-peer adversary in a high-intensity conflict. The US military has not been, for almost three-quarters of a century, truly tested “under-fire”.
The US has measured its battlefield mettle, for decades, against brave sandal-shod men with AK-47s, RPGs, and a certain savoir faire for constructing IEDs.
But they have never faced anything like Russian artillery or missiles – not even in Hollywood movies or video games.
Consequently, the Pentagon’s self-perception of unquestioned supremacy has served to disinform and corrupt its doctrinal and procurement decisions for multiple generations of its officer corps. For most US generals and admirals, all potential opponents are underestimated.
That said, I believe a great many have now been awakened from their intellectual slumber by the manner in which the Russian armed forces quickly assessed the Ukrainian order of battle, and then professionally adapted their strengths and tactics to decisively defeat it.
The Battle of the Donbass
Here is a brief summation of the Russian tactical approach to the Battle of the Donbass:
Step #1: Advance reconnaissance units (often in force, with dozens or hundreds of drones overhead) to assess the situation; draw fire; relay to commanders raw video and geo-coordinates.
Step #2: With target-correcting drone swarms overhead, relaying real-time strike video, proceed to savage the fortifications with towed and mobile artillery, Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (in gradations of strength and precision), and even horrific thermobaric munitions for particularly suitable targets.
Let smoke clear.
Repeat Step #1.
Still something moving there?
Repeat Step #2.
Repeat Step #1.
Dead bodies everywhere?
Step #3: Send in tanks and infantry to mop up.
Move to next series of fortifications.
And so on and so forth …
This is why Ukraine now suffers hundreds of battle deaths every single day. And why, for months, the Russians have suffered very few casualties — likely as low as a 1:8 ratio, and quite possibly even lower.
Artillery, airstrikes, and precision guided munitions are doing almost all the fighting.
The Fatal Hubris of NATO War Strategy in Ukraine
But back to Ukraine’s apparent strategy for this war, and the apparent US influence on that strategy.
I will preface my commentary on this issue by stating that Ukraine’s fatal blunder was buying into NATO’s over-confident delusion that they (the Armed Forces of Ukraine) actually had a reasonable opportunity to defeat the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation in a high-intensity conflict.
I initially believed NATO military leaders must have had a sober view, far in advance, that their half-million-strong, well-armed, trained-to-NATO-standards Ukrainian proxy army had almost no chance of prevailing on the field of battle against Russia.
But watching drone video of Ukrainian fortifications has convinced me the US military brain trust, in the course of their eight-year-long preparation of the eastern Ukrainian battlefield, effectively disdained the Russian military and its commanders.
Their vanity persuaded them the Russians would mindlessly smash themselves to pieces against an entrenched well-armed force.
Indeed, they were so confident of the genius of their plan that they persuasively encouraged many hundreds of now-killed or captured NATO veterans to “share in the glory” of humiliating the Russians and bringing down the Putin regime once and for all.
They deluded themselves into believing the Russians lacked strategic and logistical acumen, a sufficiently well-trained force, and – arguably the biggest miscalculation of all – sufficient stockpiles of ammo to conduct a protracted high-intensity conflict.
In short, I have come to believe US/NATO commanders actually persuaded themselves that this “Mother of All Proxy Armies” had an excellent chance to soundly whip the Russians in a battle situated in their own back yard.
In other words, they disregarded centuries of European history that they somehow convinced themselves had no relevance to their 21st century aspirations to defeat Russia militarily and take a great spoil of its resources.
But, as is now readily apparent to all objective, knowledgeable military analysts around the globe, the Ukrainian proxy army has been pulverized by a patient, methodical, and significantly outnumbered Russian force, using long-established Russian doctrines and tactics.
Even more revealing is that once-vaunted and universally feared US/UK weaponry – almost all of it actually rather antiquated – has proven to be far less “game-changing” than the pea-brained strategists in Washington and Whitehall mistakenly believed.
Javelins, NLAWs, and Stingers have been exposed as mostly ineffective against their intended targets (tanks, helicopters, and low-flying jets). M-777 howitzers break down after just a few fires. GPS-guided “precision” munitions are routinely jammed by Russian electronic warfare counter-measures.
Worse yet, the inculcation of NATO field doctrines in the minds of the Ukrainian officer cadre has resulted in pervasively inflexible responses to battlefield events that develop contrary to expectations. Consequently, discipline has disintegrated, and improvisation has been paralyzed.
To be sure, if one were to go by the laughable assessments of western think-tank propagandists and their dutiful lackeys in the media, “Ukraine is winning” and “the inept Russian military has been humiliated”.
But more discerning observers around the world know better.
Sober military men in potential adversary countries across the globe see with clarity that Russia has, with one hand tied behind its back, eviscerated the massive, relatively well-armed and well-trained Ukrainian military.
The US/NATO intimidation factor has been forever compromised.
More geopolitically significant, at least in the near future, is that European NATO members can also read the scorecard of this war: they now understand as they never could previously that standing on the NATO side of the field is hardly a guarantee of security.
I am convinced NATO will not survive the results of this war in Ukraine. Sure, they’ll “keep up appearances” for the time being, but there can be no doubt most now understand that siding with a rapidly declining empire is fraught with great risk and minimal gain.
More concerningly, the Chinese have been watching all of these developments with great interest. They are almost certain to be emboldened to act decisively to secure their sphere of influence in the emerging multipolar world.
In a shocking turn, mainstream voices who censored and suppressed conversation around vaccine injury have reversed course, even calling for a “9/11-style tribunal.” Yet they’re “limited hangout” falls short of full accountability or vindication for the injured. Del has a message for Chris Cuomo.
Can pediatricians afford to run their medical practices without the generous kickbacks they receive for vaccinating every child?
Dr. Paul Thomas, a Dartmouth-trained pediatrician, discussed this dilemma during an April 16 interview with Polly Tommey on Children’s Health Defense’s “Vax-Unvax: The People’s Study” bus tour.
“You cannot stay in business if you’re not giving pretty close to the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] [childhood vaccine] schedule,” said Thomas, who ran a general pediatrics practice with 15,000 patients and 33 staff members.
Thomas also addressed the risks and harms of vaccines — including COVID-19 mRNA vaccines — and the importance of boosting our immune systems naturally.
‘We were losing … over a million dollars’
Thomas, author of “The Vaccine-Friendly Plan: Dr. Paul’s Safe and Effective Approach to Immunity and Health-from Pregnancy Through Your Child’s Teen Year,” gave parents in his practice a choice: vaccinate their children on the CDC schedule, vaccinate more slowly by waiting for the child’s immune system to develop or not vaccinate at all.
As more patients refused vaccines, Thomas began to notice the financial impact on his practice.
He and his staff conducted a thorough analysis of their billing records, examining the income generated from vaccine administration fees, markups and quality bonuses tied to vaccination rates.
The results shocked him. “We were losing … over a million dollars in vaccines that were refused.”
He explained that pediatric practices heavily rely on vaccine income to stay afloat, with overhead costs running as high as 80%.
“It is very expensive to run a pediatric office,” he told Tommey. “You need multiple nurses, multiple receptionists, multiple billing people and medical records — it’s a huge operation.”
Three financial incentives for giving vaccines
Pediatricians receive several types of financial incentives for administering vaccines.
The first is the administration fee, which Thomas described as a “Thank you for giving the shot.” He estimated that pediatricians typically receive about $40 for the first antigen and $20 for each subsequent antigen.
“Let’s just say a two-month well-baby visit, there’s a DPT — that’s three shots, three antigens,” he told Tommey, plus “Hib [Haemophilus influenzae type b], Prevnar [pneumococcal], Hep B [hepatitis B], polio, rota [rotavirus] — [that’s] about $240.”
The second way pediatricians profit from vaccines is through a small markup on the cost of the vaccines themselves, though Thomas noted that this is not a significant source of income.
The third and most substantial financial incentive is quality bonuses tied to vaccination rates. Insurance companies offer pediatricians bonus payments for meeting certain benchmarks, typically around 80% of patients being fully vaccinated by age 2.
“I get dinged maybe 10-15% off of those RVUs — relative value units — that are ascribed,” he said, describing the points system used to calculate physician reimbursements.
With his practice’s vaccination rate a mere 1%, Thomas was at risk of losing up to 15% of his overall revenue.
“Really, it effectively means a pediatric practice cannot survive using insurance without doing most of the vaccines, if not all of them,” he said. “And I think that explains the blinders — [why doctors] just won’t go there and look at the fact that these vaccines are causing a lot of harm.”
Neurodevelopmental issues ‘clearly linked to vaccines’
“When you hear the word syndrome, it means we don’t know what it is … [or] what causes it,” Thomas said. “But we actually have a pretty good clue.”
Thomas said six studies examined the correlation between SIDS cases and vaccines. “In one data set, 97% were in the first 10 days after the vaccine. Only 3% were in the subsequent 10 days,” he said.
Other studies showed similar patterns, with 75-90% of SIDS deaths occurring within the first week after vaccination, he said.
“We know without a doubt that things like neurodevelopmental concerns, learning disabilities, ADD, ADHD [attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder], autism [are] clearly linked to vaccines,” he stated. “The more you vaccinate, the more likely you are to have these problems.”
Vaccinated children are more prone to infections and illness compared to their unvaccinated peers, according to Thomas, who published a study comparing the health outcomes of each group.
“It’s the vaccinated who get more ear infections, more sinus infections, more lung infections,” he said. “Any kind of infection you look at, the vaccinated get more.”
‘Healthy adults just “Boom!” — dropping dead’
The risks associated with vaccines extend beyond childhood. Thomas drew attention to the recent phenomenon of “Sudden Adult Death Syndrome” (SADS) following the COVID-19 vaccine rollout.
“We see it on the news, we see it on the ball fields: healthy adults just ‘Boom!’ — dropping dead,” he said. “And that’s all happened since the COVID jabs.”
Thomas expressed particular concern about the mRNA technology used in COVID-19 vaccine development. He pointed out that despite decades of research, mRNA vaccines have never been proven safe or effective.
“When they got to the animal trials, they would vaccinate the rats,” he said. “When they re-exposed those rats, in one study, 100% of them died.”
The COVID-19 mRNA vaccines’ narrow focus on the spike protein is also problematic because it causes the immune system to become “focused on just one thing,” Thomas said.
“When the [viral] organism mutates, those who are vaccinated can’t recognize this new mutation,” he said, recalling how at a family gathering during the pandemic, it was mostly the vaccinated who contracted COVID-19.
Thomas shared a personal story about his mother’s experience with pulmonary fibrosis after receiving three COVID-19 vaccines.
“After her third COVID shot, she started really running out of energy and then getting short of breath,” he said. “Within a month, her lungs [had a] ground-glass appearance.”
“Shedding seems to be happening, and it’s been documented in studies,” he said, explaining that vaccinated individuals can expose others to spike proteins through body fluids and secretions.
‘We can no longer go to our doctors and say, “Fix me”’
Thomas discussed the likelihood of new pandemics being declared in the future, driven by the immense financial gains pharmaceutical companies reaped from the COVID-19 vaccines.
“They made too much money — Pfizer alone made over $100 billion,” he said. “So the power that the public health machinery got to themselves with COVID has to be intoxicating to them.”
In light of this, Thomas stressed the importance of personal health and natural immunity.
“We can no longer go to our doctors and say, ‘Fix me,’ after we’ve trashed our own health,” he said. “So we’ve got to take responsibility for eating right, avoiding stress, getting adequate sleep … [and] boosting our immune system naturally with organic produce.”
Thomas also encouraged people to question public health authorities and make informed decisions about their health.
“I can no longer trust the CDC, the FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration], the NIH [National Institutes of Health],” he said. “Some good people work in these institutions, but the institutions themselves are captured.”
Thomas said that when it comes to vaccines or a new pandemic illness, “They’re the last people you want to trust.”
‘Vax Facts’ book coming soon
Thomas shared information about his upcoming book, “Vax Facts,” co-authored with his partner DeeDee Hoover. He said the book provides an easy-to-read, comprehensive guide to understanding the vaccine issue, regardless of one’s current stance.
“This is going to … allow you to really understand it in an organized, reasonable way why it makes sense now to pause” taking vaccines, Thomas said.
Tommey reminded viewers of Thomas’ weekly show on CHD.TV, “Pediatric Perspectives,” where he interviews pediatricians and doctors who focus on children’s health.
Thomas encouraged viewers to visit his website, Kids First 4 Ever, to learn more about his work and to access coaching services for childhood vaccines and wellness.
John-Michael Dumais is a news editor for The Defender. He has been a writer and community organizer on a variety of issues, including the death penalty, war, health freedom and all things related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
A class action lawsuit against YouTube’s censorship of Covid-era speech on the platform has been allowed to proceed in Canada.
The primary plaintiff in the case which has now been greenlit by the Quebec Superior Court is YouTuber Éloïse Boies, while the filing accuses the Google video platform of censoring information about vaccines, the pandemic, and the virus itself.
Boies, who runs the “Élo Wants to Know” channel, states in the lawsuit that three of her videos got removed by YouTube (one of the censored videos was about – censorship) for allegedly violating the site’s policies around medical disinformation and contradicting WHO and local health authorities’ Covid narratives of the time.
However, the content creator claims that the decisions represented unlawful and intentional suppression of free expression. In February, Boies revealed that in addition to having videos deleted, the censorship also branded her an “antivaxxer” and a “conspiracy theorist,” causing her to lose contracts.
The filing cites the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms as the document YouTube violated, while the class-action status of the lawsuit stems from it including any individual or legal entity in Quebec whose videos dealing with Covid got censored, or who were prevented from watching such videos, starting in mid-March 2020 and onward.
Google, on the other hand, argues that it is under no obligation to respect the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, and can therefore not be held accountable for decisions to censor content it doesn’t approve of – or as the giant phrased it, provide space for videos “regardless of their content.”
But when Superior Court Judge Lukasz Granosik announced his decision, he noted that freedom of expression “does not only mean freedom of speech, but also freedom of publication and freedom of creation.”
Stressing the importance that Canada’s Supreme Court assigns to guaranteed freedom of expression as a key building block in a democratic society, the judge concluded that “If (Google) carries out censorship by preventing certain people from posting videos and prevents other people from viewing these same videos, it thus hinders the free circulation of ideas and exposes itself to having to defend its ways of doing things.”
Google was ordered to stop censoring content because it contradicts health authorities, WHO, or governments, pay $1,000 in compensation and $1,000 in punitive damages to each of the lawsuit’s plaintiffs, an well as “additional compensation provided for by law since the filing of the request for authorization to take collective action, as per the court’s decision.”
As for those who were prevented from accessing content, the decision on damages will be the subject of a future hearing.
NATO has said it “will not compromise” on potential expansion into Ukraine, Georgia, and other former Soviet republics, as this clashes with the “core principles” of the alliance, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters on Wednesday.
The alliance’s response, which Stoltenberg said all 30 members agreed upon, was delivered to Moscow earlier in the day by the US ambassador, alongside Washington’s separate written note.
The US has asked Russia to keep the contents of its response private. … continue
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