Total Tyranny: We’ll All Be Targeted Under the Government’s New Precrime Program
By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead | The Rutherford Institute | May 19, 2021
“There is now the capacity to make tyranny total in America.”― James Bamford
It never fails.
Just as we get a glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe, there might be a chance of crawling out of this totalitarian cesspool in which we’ve been mired, we get kicked down again.
In the same week that the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously declared that police cannot carry out warrantless home invasions in order to seize guns under the pretext of their “community caretaking” duties, the Biden Administration announced its plans for a “precrime” crime prevention agency.
Talk about taking one step forward and two steps back.
Precrime, straight out of the realm of dystopian science fiction movies such as Minority Report, aims to prevent crimes before they happen by combining widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, precognitive technology, and neighborhood and family snitch programs to enable police to capture would-be criminals before they can do any damage.
This particular precrime division will fall under the Department of Homeland Security, the agency notorious for militarizing the police and SWAT teams; spying on activists, dissidents and veterans; stockpiling ammunition; distributing license plate readers; contracting to build detention camps; tracking cell-phones with Stingray devices; carrying out military drills and lockdowns in American cities; using the TSA as an advance guard; conducting virtual strip searches with full-body scanners; carrying out soft target checkpoints; directing government workers to spy on Americans; conducting widespread spying networks using fusion centers; carrying out Constitution-free border control searches; funding city-wide surveillance cameras; and utilizing drones and other spybots.
The intent, of course, is for the government to be all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful in its preemptive efforts to combat domestic extremism.
Where we run into trouble is when the government gets overzealous and over-ambitious and overreaches.
This is how you turn a nation of citizens into snitches and suspects.
In the blink of an eye, ordinary Americans will find themselves labeled domestic extremists for engaging in lawful behavior that triggers the government’s precrime sensors.
Of course, it’s an elaborate setup: we’ll all be targets.
In such a suspect society, the burden of proof is reversed so that guilt is assumed and innocence must be proven.
It’s the American police state’s take on the dystopian terrors foreshadowed by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Phillip K. Dick all rolled up into one oppressive pre-crime and pre-thought crime package.
What’s more, the technocrats who run the surveillance state don’t even have to break a sweat while monitoring what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, how much you spend, whom you support, and with whom you communicate.
Computers now do the tedious work of trolling social media, the internet, text messages and phone calls for potentially anti-government remarks, all of which is carefully recorded, documented, and stored to be used against you someday at a time and place of the government’s choosing.
In this way, with the help of automated eyes and ears, a growing arsenal of high-tech software, hardware and techniques, government propaganda urging Americans to turn into spies and snitches, as well as social media and behavior sensing software, government agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports aimed at snaring potential enemies of the state.
It works the same in any regime.
As Professor Robert Gellately notes in his book Backing Hitler about the police state tactics used in Nazi Germany: “There were relatively few secret police, and most were just processing the information coming in. I had found a shocking fact. It wasn’t the secret police who were doing this wide-scale surveillance and hiding on every street corner. It was the ordinary German people who were informing on their neighbors.”
Here’s the thing as the Germans themselves quickly discovered: you won’t have to do anything illegal or challenge the government’s authority in order to be flagged as a suspicious character, labeled an enemy of the state and locked up like a dangerous criminal.
In fact, all you will need to do is use certain trigger words, surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, drive a car, stay at a hotel, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious to a neighbor, question government authority, or generally live in the United States.
The following activities are guaranteed to get you censored, surveilled, eventually placed on a government watch list, possibly detained and potentially killed.
Use harmless trigger words like cloud, pork and pirates. Use a cell phone. Drive a car. Attend a political rally. Express yourself on social media. Serve in the military. Disagree with a law enforcement official. Call in sick to work. Limp or stutter. Appear confused or nervous, fidget, whistle or smell bad. Allow yourself to be seen in public waving a toy gun or anything remotely resembling a gun, such as a water nozzle or a remote control or a walking cane, for instance. Stare at a police officer. Appear to be pro-gun, pro-freedom or anti-government. Attend a public school. Speak truth to power.
Long before Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden were being castigated for blowing the whistle on the government’s war crimes and the National Security Agency’s abuse of its surveillance powers, it was activists such as Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lennon who were being singled out for daring to speak truth to power. These men and others like them had their phone calls monitored and data files collected on their activities and associations. For a little while, at least, they became enemy number one in the eyes of the U.S. government.
Yet as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, you don’t even have to be a dissident to get flagged by the government for surveillance, censorship and detention.
All you really need to be is a citizen of the American police state.
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president The Rutherford Institute. His books Battlefield America: The War on the American People and A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State are available at www.amazon.com. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
Pentagon to surveil social media of US Service Members
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim the Net | May 19, 2021
The new US administration is reportedly planning to reverse course on a previous policy not to spy on members of its own military by monitoring political opinions they express on social media.
In the past, this type of surveillance was not used out of fear that it might infringe on service members’ First Amendment rights, but now that the Biden administration is making combating “domestic extremism” one of its main narratives, that is changing.
According to The Intercept, which said it had access to relevant internal Defense Department documents and spoke to a source with direct knowledge, a pilot program is in the works to continuously screen behavior on social media of the members of the military, looking for any concerning signs, in the context of opinions espousing domestic extremism.
According to the same source, the Pentagon plans to outsource this job to a private surveillance company – most likely Babel Street – and thus bypass the First (and Fourth) Amendment.
Babel Street is already selling controversial products to US law enforcement, who use its services as a method of circumventing government requirements, like warrants. Babel Street buys and sells massive amounts of phone location data, and some of the previous clients have been the Secret Service and US Special Operations Command.
The latest pilot program seems to be developed far from the eyes and the ears of Congress. Don Bacon, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said that so far they had heard nothing from the Department of Defense (DoD) “that would confirm this story.”
However, an email from the House Armed Services Committee sent later said it was their understanding that the DoD intends to use social media screening as an additional vetting tool, rather than one for ongoing surveillance.
“That said, Secretary Austin has been clear about his intentions to understand to what extent extremism exists in the force and its effect on good order and discipline. We look forward to hearing the results of the stand down and the Department’s plan to move forward,” the email said.
Meanwhile, neither Babel Street, nor Bishop Garrison, who is behind the project, have commented about it. Garrison is a senior adviser to the defense secretary and head of an extremism steering committee, who has drawn attention for what has been described as a purge of Trump supporters from the military. In 2008, he is said to have authored an opinion piece that referred to free speech as “digital black plague.”
Facebook hints its “Oversight Board” could expand to other social platforms
Facebook has its sights set on more censorship domination
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim the Net | May 19, 2021
Facebook is seen as trying to promote the self-regulating model known as its Oversight Board as a success story that could become a standard for other similar platforms.
There were indications of an ambition to turn the Oversight Board into a bigger, more widely-encompassing regulatory body in a letter CEO Mark Zuckerberg penned in 2019, announcing the Board and saying that while it would initially deal with a small number of contentious cases, Facebook hoped it would in time expand to include “more companies across the industry as well.”
More recently, discussing Facebook’s decision to ban President Trump, VP of Global Affairs Nick Clegg did not disagree with his boss’s initial sentiments around the Oversight Board.
“Who knows, maybe in the future it could either be the germ of an idea that is then taken up in statutory regulation or it could be something that could operate for more companies than just for Facebook,” Clegg said.
One of the members of the board, Rachel Wolbers, said the body hopes to do such good work that “other companies might want our help.”
Officially, the Board has commented to say that while the model of “online governance” they are testing here might prove useful to others, their focus is currently on Facebook and Instagram.
And while the signs are there that Facebook would like to at least set the tone and become a leader in the censorship and moderation “standard” for social media – or just toot its own horn as doing this highly controversial work well – those other companies, its competitors, have so far remained silent, and that includes YouTube, Twitter, and Reddit.
One reason some observers give for this is that they “like their autonomy and have different rules” – but there is also the issue of how such an idea might be brought to life technically, given the different platforms and appeals systems currently in place.
There are examples of entire industries self-regulating to introduce agreed upon rules, like the gaming industry. But those who see the idea of the Oversight Board as a far fetched role model for others say that its own existence is “still controversial.”
The J&J Covid-19 vaccine is being manufactured by the anthrax vaccine company. This is its history
By Dr Meryl Nass, MD | May 19, 2021
Emergent BioSolutions will be in the spotlight today during a House Select Subcommittee Meeting on the Corona Virus Crisis, today at 10:30 am. It can be watched here.
Below, I provide the backstory aka checkered past of this company.
DOD created a plan to vaccinate its service-members against many biowarfare threat agents in the 1990s. At the time, of the bioterrorism vaccines that were being considered, only anthrax and smallpox vaccines had licenses. Anthrax vaccine was chosen to initiate the program in March of 1998.
The first 2 million doses of anthrax vaccine came from a stockpile that had been made for the US army by Michigan’s state vaccine lab (Michigan Biologics Products Institute). What became known in November 1997, after the FDA performed an inspection, was that most of the army’s 11 million dose stockpile of anthrax vaccine, stored at the Michigan lab, was multiply expired, had been redated, and was contaminated, with visible bacterial and fungal growth in some of the lots. FDA immediately shut down the anthrax vaccine factory, and quarantined 9 million of the 11 million existing doses. Unfortunately, FDA allowed the Defense Department to use 2 million doses, which it did over the next two years.
The Conclusions from FDA’s 1998 and 1999 inspection reports of the facility can be read here.
The Michigan state lab was a massive affair with many buildings on a campus in downtown Lansing. It produced a large variety of vaccines and blood products for the state of Michigan. However, over the years the state had not made the required repairs and updates. After the 1997 FDA inspection, Michigan had to repair the place or close it. Michigan decided to sell, and looked for a buyer.
The former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral William Crowe, heard about the sale. He had come to know the el Hibri family when he was Ambassador to the UK. The el Hibri’s had purchased anthrax vaccine from the UK government laboratory at Porton Down just before the Gulf War, and resold it to the Saudi government at a 100x markup.
Crowe and the el Hibri family joined with several of the lab’s officials, and the newly formed group purchased the lab. The purchase price was about 19 million dollars. Admiral Crowe was given a 13% share in exchange for his role as Chairman of the Board, risking none of his own funds. Much of the cost was later paid by the transfer of vaccines to the state of Michigan.
The new company, formed in the first half of 1998, was named Bioport. It chose to focus on its sales of anthrax vaccine to the Army. However, the new company was deeply concerned about potential liability for the lab’s products. The purchase was delayed until the Secretary of the Army signed an indemnification for injuries that might result from use of anthrax vaccine in soldiers, and it also indemnified the company against claims if the vaccine failed to provide the expected protection against anthrax. The state of Michigan had also been indemnified by the Army to produce the vaccine. But from its 1970 licensure until 1998, almost all the anthrax vaccine had only been used in animal experiments.
After FDA had shuttered the anthrax vaccine plant for manufacturing defects, the Army paid to bulldoze and then rebuild the factory in 1999. But even after it was rebuilt, FDA withheld its approval, and the plant lay idle.
Meantime, the 2 million doses that FDA had failed to quarantine were injected into 500,000 military service-members between 1998 and 2001. Many thousands became ill. An official report on the program, quoting unnamed government officials, claimed that 1-2% of recipients had developed permanent disabilities. The military vaccinations were mandatory, and refusers were punished with a court martial or loss of a month’s pay and performance of extra duties. Nonetheless, seeing the injuries sustained by their colleagues, many refused.
In 2001, the anthrax vaccine label, a legal document that describes what is known about the product, listed the CDC’s definition of Gulf War syndrome as a possible adverse effect of the vaccine. (It has been removed from the current label.)
Five Congressional hearings were held throughout 1999 on different aspects of the anthrax vaccine program by the House Committee on Government Reform and National Security (now known as the House Committee on Oversight and Reform). Additional hearings held by other Congressional committees also touched on the vaccine program. The Government Reform and National Security Committee wrote up its findings in a report titled Unproven Force Protection. Its June 30, 1999 hearing dealt specifically with Bioport and its sole source contracts.
Despite this, Bioport has been very successful. Although the Pentagon was considering an end to the anthrax vaccine program in the summer of 2001, the sudden appearance of the anthrax letters after the September 11, 2001 attacks breathed new life into the vaccine program and turned Bioport’s fortunes around. DHHS Secretary Tommy Thompson announced in November 2001 that the anthrax vaccine plant would finally receive an FDA approval and begin production. At the end of January 2002 that is what happened.
But that was not the end of Bioport’s problems. Soldiers challenged the legality of the vaccine’s license in federal court. It was learned that while there had been efficacy testing of an earlier version of the vaccine, the current vaccine formulation had never undergone either efficacy or safety testing in a clinical trial. Aware of this major omission, FDA had withheld the issuing of a “final rule and order” for the anthrax vaccine for over thirty years.
The soldiers prevailed on the legal issues, and First District Court Judge Emmett Sullivan rescinded the vaccine license in 2004, based on the company’s failure to prove efficacy or meet basic FDA standards for licensure.
Unwilling to bow to judicial authority, the Defense Department rolled out a backup plan. A new regulatory authority had just been created, the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). An EUA was slapped on the unlicensed anthrax vaccine, and DOD quickly restarted its mandatory vaccinations. (There was no emergency: the issuing of an EUA required only the potential for an emergency.)
The attorneys for the soldiers took the case back to court, and Judge Sullivan ruled that even if an experimental medical product received an EUA, it was still investigational and could not be mandated. The law required that EUA products be offered with informed consent. To receive an EUA (unlicensed) product, the recipient must be apprised of the risks and benefits of the product, be informed of alternatives to the product, and no coercion in any form could be applied. Ergo, no mandate.
FDA waited about 18 months, and then issued a full license for Bioport’s anthrax vaccine, although there were still no efficacy data. FDA instead claimed that a 1950’s era trial of a very different anthrax vaccine was sufficient for licensure, even though that trial failed to show benefit against inhalation anthrax.
When the soldiers and their attorneys challenged the licensing decision in court, the next judge ruled in favor of FDA on the basis of “deference”—meaning that FDA could ignore its own regulations when making a determination on safety and efficacy, with or without acceptable data. In 2006 mandatory vaccination restarted.
Bioport then shed its old skin in an attempt to leave its baggage behind. It renamed itself Emergent BioSolutions. Its vaccine had been renamed BioThrax.
Emergent BioSolutions (EBS) then branched out, buying other companies, primarily those making other sole source biodefense products. The military continued to mandate anthrax and (in 2003) smallpox vaccines for service-members. Eventually EBS purchased the smallpox company as well, and the cholera and typhoid vaccines used in the US.
A 2010 report on Emergent BioSolutions, written by Scott Lilly for the Center for American Progress, was titled, “Getting Rich off Uncle Sucker.” It revealed 300% profit margins, unique for a government contractor.
The company’s business plan was to rely on insiders to sell sole source biodefense products to the US government, most of which were stockpiled and never used–inking contracts with multiple federal agencies, including CDC, DOD, NIAID, the State Department, ASPR and BARDA.
In 2012 EBS got one of three DHHS contracts to house a so-called Center for Innovation in Advanced Development and Manufacturing (CIADM) that could be used to produce pandemic or biodefense products in the event of emergencies. With this grant EBS purchased and expanded what became its Bayview factory in Baltimore. The CIADM contract essentially guaranteed Emergent a big role in any future pandemic response.
Emergent acquired the maker of Narcan nasal spray, the opioid overdose antidote. Soon FDA began recommending to prescribers that they write a Narcan script whenever they wrote a narcotic script, just in case. States started buying large quantities for free distribution. Sales rose 600% after EBS bought the company.
Under the Trump administration, retired Air Force Colonel, physician and biodefense consultant Robert Kadlec was appointed to the position of Assistant Secretary of DHHS for Preparedness and Emergency Response (aka ASPR). Kadlec had also been a consultant and business partner of EBS’ founder and chairman Fuad el-Hibri. Kadlec had omitted this information from the required disclosures for Senate confirmation. Once confirmed as Assistant Secretary, Kadlec was able to transfer responsibility for the National Strategic Stockpile (containing the US stockpiles of pandemic remedies, masks and equipment) from the CDC to his own agency. Kadlec then gave multiple sweetheart deals to EBS, until the value of EBS’ contracts with ASPR exceeded those of every other contractor.
ASPR Kadlec was blamed for cancelling a federal contract to make N95 masks while buying more and more anthrax and smallpox vaccines, pre-Covid.
Covid-19 presented a huge opportunity for Emergent BioSolutions. EBS received $628 million from DHHS to retool its CIADM factory. It inked additional contracts with the Astra-Zeneca, Johnson and Johnson, Novavax, Providence Therapeutics and VaxArt companies to provide bulk manufacturing of their vaccines in its Baltimore facilities. Altogether its pandemic contracts were worth about $1.5 Billion. It was slated to manufacture 9 separate medical products to address Covid-19, all designed by other companies.
But there were serious potential problems.
While it had a storied Board of former federal officials, Emergent BioSolutions had never brought a single product to market. Its expertise was in contracting and acquisitions, not production. It had a history of production failures, and had demanded that the federal government bail the company out, or else the sole source products the company provided would become unavailable. Some of this was detailed in the Congressional report Unproven Force Protection. Entering the pandemic, EBS was still making the same mistakes it had been guilty of twenty years earlier:
- EBS sold and continues to sell nerve gas auto-injectors to federal agencies which have been defective and are not licensed. According to the law, these products can neither be produced in the US nor sold here. Instead, Emergent manufactures them in Germany and restricts its sales to US embassies overseas.
- In July 2020, the Soligenix company requested arbitration against Emergent BioSolutions, claiming a loss of $19 million, because EBS had manufactured its experimental ricin vaccine, used in a human trial, which failed to meet specifications.
EBS did not have an active workforce in Baltimore. On September 30, EBS held an online job fair which it titled “Warp Speed Careers Event.” The event sought to recruit 300 employees. Yet EBS had begun inking vaccine contracts 5 months earlier, and could have hired and trained a workforce that was ready to go when FDA gave it the go-ahead. Instead, doing things on the cheap, EBS hired late, failed to provide adequate training to its employees, and experienced a spectacular series of production failures. Many millions of doses of its Johnson and Johnson and its Astra-Zeneca Covid vaccines had to be dumped. J and J missed its 20 million dose quota for the end of March, and FDA, despite repeated inspections, would not give the plant an authorization so its products could be used.
Despite this, somehow millions of doses produced in the unauthorized plant were shipped to Canada, the European Union, South Africa and Mexico. The EU, at least, used the product. How did that occur? We don’t know. Did any get distributed in the US? We can’t be sure none did.
On April 4, 2021, EBS announced it would receive an additional $23 million from DHHS for new equipment to use in the manufacture of Johnson and Johnson’s Covid-19 vaccine.
As of last week, EBS was facing another lawsuit from its shareholders, and its stock price had fallen to $60 from the peak on February 12 of $125 per share. However, Emergent CEO Robert Kramer exercised his stock options in January and February, near the stock’s peak, earning himself over $7 million dollars in profit.
In summary, EBS, despite considerable manufacturing shortcomings, has been extremely successful at obtaining government contracts and earning huge profits. But its products have repeatedly been unreliable. The company has managed to turn failures into success, especially when its products, like civilian stockpiles of anthrax and smallpox vaccine, and nerve gas auto-injectors, are stockpiled but not used.
The public has only gradually been learning that the vaccines it thought were being produced by huge Pharma companies Astra-Zeneca and Johnson and Johnson were in fact being manufactured by the anthrax vaccine company, Emergent BioSolutions. How did it come to pass that the federal government, and these established pharmaceutical companies, bet the farm on EBS’ production of Covid-19 vaccines?
Never have so many become so blinded to the truth
By Nicholas Orlando | Conservative Woman | May 19, 2021
THERE was a time in the not-too-distant past when our freedoms were predicated on the vulnerable being vaccinated. This was the limiter which justified the continuation of draconian measures into winter after Christmas was stolen. Christmas was stolen to save January. November was stolen to save Christmas. They told us in October that if we didn’t lock down then we would face 4,000 deaths a day. A number they knew at the time to be a gross overestimate. They used it anyway.
We now know unequivocally that we are victims of this government’s unethical psychological campaign of coercion. We know many loved ones believe their relatives’ deaths were falsely certified as Covid deaths on presumption and not evidence. And that a quarter of recently attributed deaths were not caused by the virus. I am still incredulous at the statement ‘deaths of any cause within 28 days of a positive Covid test’ as the caveat to daily reported figures.
We have simply lost our minds.
Of course no one wants to get Covid. Like any seasonal flu it has the potential to be nasty. But it remains a relatively insignificant virus for the vast majority of the population. Despite an average death age for the disease (82) higher than population life expectancy (81), we have been forced to endure an endless campaign of mendacious claims and impositions justified with empty promises.
Now the end of the long and ‘irreversible’ roadmap (which has for several months been at odds with the once solid claim of ‘data not dates’) is being re-framed before our eyes with Sage claiming the possibility of 10,000 hospital admissions per day in July and restrictions continuing beyond June 21.
The justification for this new round of official caution, the ‘Indian variant’, has been promulgated with several weeks of distressing media imagery. Just a few weeks before a similar stream of distress was being transmitted from Brazil.
For those who want to balance the BBC’s scenes of mass graves in Brazil and funeral pyres across India, it may be worth researching these countries’ Covid deaths per million to gain some proportion.
For many of us the past six months has been psychological torture. Endless days of winter isolation leading to a half-life in spring. A persistent sense of atrophy has remained with the dull ache of forced containment. Small businesses placed into induced comas. The nation’s cultural treasures kept under lock and key. Human connection severed. Life’s potential suppressed.
If you are buying into the official narrative you are rewarded with a sense of moral vindication. Your sacrifice is for a greater national good. It’s bad manners to question the motives and morality of what has taken place. Or to entertain the idea that taking an unlicensed medical treatment may not be okay.
If, like me, you are uncertain about the jab for perfectly sensible and personal reasons, you may be preparing for the extraordinary reality that access to your ‘normal’ life, including the things you love, be it cultural, social or leisure, may soon be off limits. You may be wondering if your job is going to be at risk. And whether you will again be allowed to travel abroad.
The Covzealots are now rounding on those of us they label with ‘vaccine hesitancy’. We are determined to be a risk, so it seems fair game to consider people like me to be selfish, idiotic, anti-vaxxer-conspiracy-nuts. The ramping up against us has the signs of becoming a persecutory campaign.
For what it’s worth, I’ve spent eight years of my life in various volunteering roles. Supporting the elderly, the mentally ill and young people. I’m as fallible as the next man. But I’m not going to take lectures on morality because I won’t be bullied or coerced into compliance by the state.
If you are observing the official narrative, you have seen the pattern. You were well prepared for the approaching about-turn on restriction easing. You were prepared for the forthcoming drive to vaccinate children (I was shocked when they announced the recommendation for pregnant women) with a medical device which remains in its trial phase.
The propaganda bomb, created with sophisticated psychological techniques, deployed throughout the media and driven forwards by state activists in the press, has been designed to rattle even the hardiest among us. For many, the commonplace week or two of coughs, aches and sneezes has become the existential terror of ‘is this really it?’
Whilst I understand the power of fear, I cannot grasp how so many fellow citizens have become so blinded. There seem to be two branches of the same pro-Covid narrative playing out within the mainstream: willingness to excuse ‘Boris’ and therefore lend sympathy for his government’s vaccine nationalism, or anger at his incompetence, that enough wasn’t done at the outset, so the endless spiral of restrictions is necessary (according to the ‘experts’). Either way they work together to support compliance.
Before the Iraq war, I was shouted down for questioning an agenda where so many things did not add up. The dodgy dossier latterly proved doubters like me to be correct. The same people are shouting at me again. Many supposedly astute individuals seem to want to lend good faith to another state operation being supported by Tony Blair.
I wonder if those amongst us going along with a monumental attack on truth, freedom and individual liberty would see through the shoddy claims of the government Covid salesmen were they lent the autonomy to be the ‘rational actors’ Sage planners had originally determined the population should be treated as? We will never know.
Politifact backtracks on the origin of SARS-Cov-2, yet smears remain uncorrected
By Meryl Nass, MD | May 18, 2021
Here is Politifact quoting me from the film Plandemic, which Politifact then disputed by citing a March 17, 2020 Nature Medicine article, which I had mentioned in the film as being bogus:
“I feel quite convinced that this was a laboratory designed organism.” — Dr. Meryl Nass, internal medicine specialist
POLITIFACT August 18, 2020: Research shows that the virus could not have been created in a lab. An article published March 17 says the genetic makeup of the coronavirus, documented by researchers from several public health organizations, does not indicate it was altered.
Now, it seems, many have awakened, after being spoon-fed an analysis of the facts by Nicholas Wade, and realized the Nature Medicine paper makes absolutely no sense.
Here is what Politifact says now, May 17, 2021:
Some scientists have argued that the lab-leak hypothesis deserves to be taken much more seriously than it was earlier in the pandemic, and that dismissals of it as conspiracy theory were premature. Claims of complete certainty on either side remain unfounded.
No mention, of course, of Politifact’s previous smear of me and the movie. All the fact-checkers piled on me last August, as I described in a blog post, for saying the origin of Covid was a lab. Where are the rest of them now? Do the rest of the fact-checkers correct their facts?
Do the social media platforms that banned the movie resurrect it?
Not worried about the jab? You should be
By Harry Dougherty | Conservative Woman | May 19, 2021
THE problem with the Covid-19 vaccines is that we simply do not have enough information about their side-effects, and no one should be shamed (especially not by the President of the United States) or have their lives restricted for having this reasonable, wholly unselfish concern.
Such information does not exist at all for under-18s. The small-scale trials were designed only to test the vaccine on adults. Yet, largely because of media hysteria which has been recently accompanied by outright incitement, local officials have taken it upon themselves to start vaccinating 17-year-olds, citing the bogeyman ‘Indian variant’ in our midst.
The vaccine nudgers in government and the media, aided this week by a multi-million-pound YouTube ad campaign to persuade young people to get vaccinated, deliberately miss the point about the supposedly ‘extremely rare’ side-effects of these experimental vaccines, which include fatal blood clots in some cases.
The trouble is that if our ‘brilliant’ scientists knew nothing about the blood clots when the vaccine was first administered to citizens in December, what else don’t they know about?
Last week, the British regulator MHRA reported 41 new cases and nine more deaths as a result of one of these side-effects, a particular kind of clot known as cerebral venous sinus thrombosis alongside low platelets or thrombocytopenia. To date, there have been 209 cases and 41 deaths reported in the UK for the AstraZeneca vaccine alone. The first were reported in January.
According to an analysis of published MHRA data by Dr Hamid Merchant, a total of 532 ‘blood system events’, including 20 deaths, came through the UK’s Yellow Card system relating to the AstraZeneca jab between January 4 and March 14. There were thousands of non-blood-related reports besides.
Let’s recap on the public guidance regarding the AstraZeneca vaccine. First we were told ‘this vaccine is safe, get vaccinated.’ Then they said, ‘the benefits of this vaccine outweigh the risks, get vaccinated.’ Then the goalposts were moved further: ‘The benefits of that vaccine outweigh the risks if you are over the age of 30, but get vaccinated.’ And now, ‘the benefits of this vaccine outweigh the risks if you are over 40, but get vaccinated, or else!’
If this is how much ‘the science’ has changed in a few months, what will ‘the science’ be a year or two from now? What will we know in the future that cannot be established now? Scientists have not begun to discuss other fatal adverse reactions to have emerged, most significantly the neurological ones for which the AstraZeneca trials were paused.
If countries such as Denmark and Slovakia can suspend the rollout of a vaccine as a precaution, why are individual citizens stupid or callous if they decline the vaccine as a precaution?
In the United States, the government has recorded more deaths after Covid vaccinations than from all other vaccines administered in the country between mid-1997 and the end of 2013, as was reported by Tucker Carlson on Fox News earlier this month. Nothing to see here, of course.
Any reasonable government would have at the very least stopped blackmailing people into getting vaccinated by now. Instead, they have the brass neck to demand that we put our lives in their hands as if we owe it to them. Coerced vaccination is not merely mandatory vaccination, it is mandatory trust, both in government and in ‘the science’, whatever that is.
It is worth reminding those with short memories that tobacco was ‘safe’ for decades. The scientific community promoted smoking not only as safe, but healthy. They were, of course, assisted by celebrities, some of whom would later become senior politicians. And for some 50 years, the overwhelming majority of people were dumb enough to believe it. Who could have guessed that inhaling tar into your lungs twenty times a day, every day, for years, might be bad for your health? We see grim warnings about heart disease, lung cancer and infertility on cigarette packaging today only because scientific outliers of yesterday eventually overwhelmed the consensus with evidence.
More recently and more relevant to the present fiasco, the swine flu vaccine, Pandemrix, was declared safe by regulators in 2009. It was safe, for most. But for some 1,000 people, most of whom were not at any significant risk from swine flu, the vaccine triggered narcolepsy, a crippling chronic sleep disorder that leaves sufferers unable to stay awake. It was only after it was too late for them that the authorities conceded there was a link between Pandemrix and narcolepsy.
One of the victims of Pandemrix, 23-year-old Katie Clack from Peterborough, committed suicide in 2014 because her narcolepsy left her with ‘no quality of life’.
In 2018, the progressive news website Buzzfeed published a powerful feature about NHS workers who had their lives and careers ruined by the side-effects of the swine flu vaccine. Nurse Meleney Gallagher, who now has narcolepsy, told Buzzfeed: ‘I was pressured into it.’
That was in a different era. Earlier this month the same website published a slavish article with the headline: ‘15 anti Vaxxers who were roasted on the internet.’
If history is anything to go by, the idiots out there who think it’s acceptable to bully their vaccine-hesitant friends, colleagues, strangers and even close family are going to look very silly ten years from now.