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.
How the CDC is manipulating data to prop-up “vaccine effectiveness”
New policies artificially deflate “breakthrough infections” in the vaccinated, while old rules continue inflating case numbers in the unvaccinated.
By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | May 18, 2021
The US Center for Disease Control (CDC) is altering its practices of data logging and testing for “Covid19” in order to make it seem the experimental gene-therapy “vaccines” are effective at preventing the alleged disease.
They made no secret of this, announcing the policy changes on their website in late April/early May, (though naturally without admitting the fairly obvious motivation behind the change).
The trick is in their reporting of what they call “breakthrough infections” – that is people who are fully “vaccinated” against Sars-Cov-2 infection, but get infected anyway.
Essentially, Covid19 has long been shown – to those willing to pay attention – to be an entirely created pandemic narrative built on two key factors:
- False-postive tests. The unreliable PCR test can be manipulated into reporting a high number of false-positives by altering the cycle threshold (CT value)
- Inflated Case-count. The incredibly broad definition of “Covid case”, used all over the world, lists anyone who receives a positive test as a “Covid19 case”, even if they never experienced any symptoms.
Without these two policies, there would never have been an appreciable pandemic at all, and now the CDC has enacted two policy changes which means they no longer apply to vaccinated people.
Firstly, they are lowering their CT value when testing samples from suspected “breakthrough infections”.
From the CDC’s instructions for state health authorities on handling “possible breakthrough infections” (uploaded to their website in late April):
For cases with a known RT-PCR cycle threshold (Ct) value, submit only specimens with Ct value ≤28 to CDC for sequencing. (Sequencing is not feasible with higher Ct values.)
Throughout the pandemic, CT values in excess of 35 have been the norm, with labs around the world going into the 40s.
Essentially labs were running as many cycles as necessary to achieve a positive result, despite experts warning that this was pointless (even Fauci himself said anything over 35 cycles is meaningless).
But NOW, and only for fully vaccinated people, the CDC will only accept samples achieved from 28 cycles or fewer. That can only be a deliberate decision in order to decrease the number of “breakthrough infections” being officially recorded.
Secondly, asymptomatic or mild infections will no longer be recorded as “covid cases”.
That’s right. Even if a sample collected at the low CT value of 28 can be sequenced into the virus alleged to cause Covid19, the CDC will no longer be keeping records of breakthrough infections that don’t result in hospitalisation or death.
From their website:
As of May 1, 2021, CDC transitioned from monitoring all reported vaccine breakthrough cases to focus on identifying and investigating only hospitalized or fatal cases due to any cause. This shift will help maximize the quality of the data collected on cases of greatest clinical and public health importance. Previous case counts, which were last updated on April 26, 2021, are available for reference only and will not be updated moving forward.
Just like that, being asymptomatic – or having only minor symptoms – will no longer count as a “Covid case” but only if you’ve been vaccinated.
The CDC has put new policies in place which effectively created a tiered system of diagnosis. Meaning, from now on, unvaccinated people will find it much easier to be diagnosed with Covid19 than vaccinated people.
Consider…
Person A has not been vaccinated. They test positive for Covid using a PCR test at 40 cycles and, despite having no symptoms, they are officially a “covid case”.
Person B has been vaccinated. They test positive at 28 cycles, and spend six weeks bedridden with a high fever. Because they never went into a hospital and didn’t die they are NOT a Covid case.
Person C, who was also vaccinated, did die. After weeks in hospital with a high fever and respiratory problems. Only their positive PCR test was 29 cycles, so they’re not officially a Covid case either.
The CDC is demonstrating the beauty of having a “disease” that can appear or disappear depending on how you measure it.
To be clear: If these new policies had been the global approach to “Covid” since December 2019, there would never have been a pandemic at all.
If you apply them only to the vaccinated, but keep the old rules for the unvaccinated, the only possible result can be that the official records show “Covid” is much more prevalent among the latter than the former.
This is a policy designed to continuously inflate one number, and systematically minimise the other.
What is that if not an obvious and deliberate act of deception?
Netanyahu Warns Biden Not to Get Involved
But Biden gives Israel more weapons even as Gaza is bleeding
By PHILIP GIRALDI • Unz Review • MAY 18, 2021
An interesting recent article by international lawyer John Whitbeck suggests that the billions of dollars that the United States gives to Israel annually is not technically “foreign aid” as the Jewish state is as measured by per capita GDP the 19th wealthiest in the world, ahead of countries like Germany. It is, instead “tribute,” which is defined as the “payment made periodically by one state or ruler to another, especially as a sign of dependence.”
That the United States has surrendered key aspects of its national sovereignty to Israeli control has been observed by many. Whitbeck dates the submission to the events surrounding the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty in June 1967, in which 34 crewmen died and 172 were injured in an attempt to sink the ship and kill all the crew. To protect Israel, President Lyndon B. Johnson and his Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara initiated a cover-up that has persisted until this day. The unavenged killing of large numbers of US servicemen has signaled to a series of Israeli governments since that time that they could do anything to Washington without any consequences, including spying on its benefactor, involving Washington in its own wars, and exploiting the US Treasury as its own resource.
The United States has favored Israel above all other nations while a series of Republican and Democratic administrations have accepted that the US is the junior partner in the relationship virtually without demur, culminating in the unprecedented Barack Obama arrangement whereby Israel would receive $38 billion over the course of ten years, automatically and with no conditions placed on the Jewish state’s actions vis-à-vis American regional interests. And now, with the bloodletting continuing unabated in Gaza, Honest Joe Biden has agreed to “sell” the Israelis $735 million worth of new weapons to replenish their arsenal.
Whitbeck’s analysis is convincing, but one might also see a more personal element in how Israel has achieved dominance. Any American politician who seeks to object to the “most favored nation” status of Israel is likely to get unelected the next time he or she has to run for office. The list of the fallen includes Senators Chuck Percy and William Fulbright as well as congressmen Paul Findley, Pete McCloskey, Cynthia McKinney and James Traficant. The key to defeating incumbents in electoral office was and is money and the power and access that it buys. Israel and its supporting cast of 600 pro-Zionist Jewish organizations have billions of dollars to play with and they also include in their ranks co-religionists and other bought sympathizers who control the editorial and news content of America’s printed, television and radio media. Those congressmen who make a show of strongly supporting Israel are rewarded with campaign donations, a friendly media and a virtual lock on reelection. Those who do not are “disappeared.”
The last president who successfully made Israel back down was Dwight D. Eisenhower, who compelled Israel, France and Britain to cease their attempt to seize the Suez Canal from Egypt in 1956. George H. W. Bush was the most recent president to try to pressure Israel, when he refused to guarantee loans that Israel intended to use to expand its illegal settlements, a move which Bush correctly perceived as being bad for US relations through the region. The media subsequently piled on Bush when he ran for a second term, discovering that there was something “wrong” with the economy, which was not true. That and other contrived stories led to Bush’s loss to safely Zionist Bill Clinton. Bush’s son George W. learned the lesson from his father’s loss, even failing to investigate the possible Israeli role in 9/11 so as not to irritate his masters in Tel Aviv. W also acquired along the way a throng of neocon Jewish advisers at the Pentagon and National Security Council who were the architects of the disastrous Iraq War and the Global War on Terror (GWOT) which still plagues us to this day.
Israel’s power to control developments in the United States has recently been manifest in its ability to influence government decision making even down to the state and local level. An increasing number of public schools now have mandatory holocaust education, which, in Wisconsin for example, includes both grade school and high school levels and also applies to private schools. Also, thirty-three states now have laws punishing citizens who promote or participate in boycotts of Israeli products, the non-violent so-called Boycott Divestment and Sanction (BDS) option. Many states have special trade agreements with Israel that are designed to benefit the import of products and services from the Jewish state without mandating any reciprocity while the federal government likewise allows Israel to bid on contracts, including those relating to defense, intelligence and national security.
The Israelis take advantage of their easy access to US infrastructure by spying on both the American government and on private organizations that it considers to be unfriendly. Last year a number of electronic intrusion devices were discovered near federal buildings in Washington. They were planted by the Israelis but nothing was ever done about it. One also recalls how Israeli snoopers were recording White House phone calls under Bill Clinton, some of which were conversations with Monica Lewinsky, at the time potential blackmail material.
Another part of the Zionist game plan is the aggressive use of the anti-Semitism label to silence critics as well as the exploitation of the so-called holocaust with its assertion of perpetual victimhood of the Jewish people to create eternal sympathy for Israel. Of course, it helps to have a media willing to support such nonsense rather than expose it for what it is, but that is what having gross overrepresentation of Zionists as media owners and editors is all about.
All of which brings us to the present, in which an Israeli terror campaign against the Palestinians which has included removing families from their homes and marches through the remaining Arab parts of Jerusalem by angry mobs of armed settlers chanting “death to Arabs” while also calling for “burning” and “hanging” the local residents. The Palestinians have finally had enough and are fighting back and the Israeli armed forces have characteristically responded by attacking targets including apartment buildings in Gaza, killing numerous children.
And a bit of context is necessary. Israel has for many years denied the Palestinians basic human rights while also stealing their homes, land and water. Houses and even villages have been demolished and an estimated millions of productive olive trees burned or destroyed. Palestinians are not free to travel in the West Bank, are arrested and held in prison for no reason, including children, and are shot with no consequences for the Israeli army or police shooter.
US media attempts to portray the violence taking place currently as some kind of even-handed struggle, which it is not. Israel has had control of the historic Palestine for more than fifty years. It has the most powerful military in the Middle East and the Palestinians are basically unarmed, hitting Israel with “rockets” that are largely home-made and ineffective as demonstrated by the disparity in the casualty count. Human Rights Watch, which has been timid about how it treats Israel, has finally reported with stacks of evidence how Israel is an apartheid state that commits numerous human rights violations and occasional war crimes, just as it is doing right now. The intention of all this is to make the life of Palestinians so miserable that they all leave. Israel would prefer not to have to do the job by killing all of them, a route nevertheless endorsed by a number of leading Israeli politicians, but would much prefer that they go voluntarily.
The fact is that the United States enables Israeli behavior by cravenly heeding Netanyahu’s warning not to interfere. It has already blocked several resolutions in the United Nations Security Council to stop the fighting because they are too critical of Israel. The fact that Washington, like a broken record, continues to voice support of Israel the perpetual victim even when it is clearly the aggressor is shameful. If you want to know just what kind of country we Americans now live in, Jen Psaki, White House press spokesperson has provided the answer. She has announced that our government’s position on the ongoing violence in the Middle East is that “The president’s support for Israel’s security, for its legitimate right to defend itself and its people, is fundamental and will never waiver. We condemn ongoing rocket attacks by Hamas and other terrorist groups against Jerusalem.”
Excuse me, but even some minimal compassion for dead Arab children seems to be missing in Biden’s statement, though its ruthlessness inevitably is exceeded by Donald Trump’s bleat “When I was in office we were known as the Peace Presidency, because Israel’s adversaries knew that the United States stood strongly with Israel and there would be swift retribution if Israel was attacked. Under Biden, the world is getting more violent and more unstable because Biden’s weakness and lack of support for Israel is leading to new attacks on our allies. America must always stand with Israel and make clear that the Palestinians must end the violence, terror, and rocket attacks, and make clear that the U.S. will always strongly support Israel’s right to defend itself.”
Donald Trump’s “peace presidency?” Does he include his attacks on Syria and his assassination of a senior Iranian official? Another wannabe with GOP presidential aspirations Florida’s Ron DeSantis, self-designated as “Israel’s governor,” puts it another way, “Hamas is a terrorist organization and Israel has the right to defend itself against terrorist attacks.” Is this a Monty Python sketch? Israel was attacked and is defending itself? Time to wake up America. Israel the victim is preparing a genocide and the fact that no one is Washington is willing to say “no” gives it a green light to go ahead. The blood will be on our hands this time around as Joe Biden and company could have made the decision to stop the developing madness over the past month by putting pressure on Israel to stop the home expulsions and riots by settlers, but clearly that did not and will not happen. And when it all blows up and maybe tens of thousands will die, we will likely hear the same noise coming out of Washington: “Israel has a right to defend itself.”
To conclude with another comment by John Whitbeck relating to his desire to see the United States reclaim its sovereignty would be appropriate. He writes “For many years, I have had a recurring but thus far unrequited dream: Someday, during a Senate confirmation hearing, a nominee will respond to demands to… pledge allegiance to [Israel] with a simple affirmation of pure and genuine patriotism: ‘Senator, with all due respect, I owe my allegiance to the United States of America and to no other country. If you have a problem with that, don’t vote to confirm me.’”
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org
Steven Crowder gives YouTube legal notice, intends to seek injunction against deplatforming
By Tom Parker | Reclaim the Net | May 17, 2021
Comedian Steven Crowder has announced that last Thursday (May 14, 2021), his company, Louder with Crowder LLC, gave a legal notice to YouTube announcing its intent to file a lawsuit and seek an injunction to stop YouTube deplatforming his channel.
Crowder has one of the most popular conservative channels on YouTube with more than five million subscribers. However, over the last few months, YouTube has removed his videos, demonetized his channel, and most recently, suspended him from uploading or live streaming for two weeks.
“Once we hit the new year and a new president ascended, the landscape of social media shifted in favor of the left,” Louder with Crowder’s editor at large, Courtney Kirchoff, noted in a blog post announcing the legal action against YouTube. “Democrats took control of the presidency and now have control of both houses of Congress. As such, YouTube and other Big Tech platforms feel emboldened, with very few lawmakers standing in their way.”
In a video about the legal action they plan to take against YouTube, Crowder and his lawyer Bill Richmond discussed how the channel is now just one strike away from being deleted after receiving a warning strike and two hard strikes this year.
The warning strike was issued on a coronavirus lockdown anniversary video where someone in the studio said “young children are more likely to die of the flu than COVID.”
The statement reflects Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) statistics but YouTube deemed the video to be in violation of its “medical misinformation” policy.
“It is tantamount to saying that no conservatives or people who cite the CDC and believe that relevant information like young children have a different immune response to COVID than the standard flu, and it is significantly less lethal to young people but more lethal to old people, which we’ve always talked about, YouTube is saying anyone with that point of view is not welcome on this channel, on this platform, I guess,” Crowder said when discussing this warning strike.
The first hard strike was issued on a March 29 video where Crowder provided examples of a vote being cast from a fake address in Nevada in 2020. YouTube deemed this to be “content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. presidential election.”
Crowder said he didn’t make any such claims and described this first strike as “investigative journalism being a violation of the policy if someone doesn’t like it.”
The second hard strike was issued on a May 10 video where Crowder described the Columbus police shooting of Ma’Khia Bryant as “an example of a justified police shooting” that was “necessary to save the life of someone who is in the process of being stabbed.”
According to YouTube, this video violated its rules around “content reveling in or mocking the death or serious injury of an identifiable individual.”
Crowder noted that Big Tech platforms allowed posts that were favorable to Bryant and critical of the police officer to remain up. But when he challenged the criticism of the police officer and argued that the shooting was justified because she had a knife in her hand and was about to swing at another girl, his video was removed and he was suspended.
“That means that the lie is allowed and the truth is not because the truth is simply from a point of view which is impermissible,” Crowder said.
“It’s an incredible indictment of how YouTube enforces its policies and, and really the reason why we’ve had to give the notice, serve the notice of moving for an injunction, to prevent the deplatforming,” Richmond added.
Richmond continued by discussing how he and Crowder’s team are concerned about YouTube actively looking for violations that aren’t actually violations and explained that this is why they’ve moved forward with this injunctive notice which will request immediate relief to protect the existence of Crowder’s YouTube channel.
“This is something that concerns every person who values any type of democracy,” Richmond added. “What they’re saying is ‘these ideas are so dangerous that we can’t address them and rebut them, we can’t criticize them, we just have to extinguish the opinions entirely, we have to eradicate these opinions from the planet because we can’t deal with them.’ But the reality when everyone looks at this is, this is a comedy show that takes on important issues. Commentary, politics, issues that are facing everyone in every part of the nation in the world. And we have to be able to talk about them.”
How Bill Gates & Big Pharma used children as “guinea pigs”… and got away with it
Young tribal girls were lied to, treated as “human guinea pigs” without parental consent by a Gates-backed NGO
By Bernard Marx | OffGuardian | May 18, 2021
We’ve seen a lot of India in the news recently. A lot more than we usually do. There’s an apocalypse of sorts going on there, if the popular media is to be believed. But as is often the case, these reports are devoid of any context or perspective.
While the world’s media can’t get enough of India today, in its rush to support a narrative of terror about Covid-19, twelve years ago when there was a real story going on there, the world’s media was nowhere to be seen.
SOME BACKGROUND
In 2009, a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) funded NGO carried out unauthorised clinical trials of a vaccine on some of the poorest, most vulnerable children in the world. It did so without providing information about the risks involved, without the informed consent of the children or their parents and without even declaring that it was conducting a clinical trial.
After vaccination, many of the participating children became ill and seven of them died. Such were the findings of a parliamentary committee charged with investigating this wretched affair. The committee accused the NGO of “child abuse” and produced a raft of evidence to back up its claim. This entire incident barely registered on the radar of Western media.
PATH (formerly the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health) is a Seattle based NGO, heavily funded by BMGF but which also receives significant grants from the US government. Between 1995 and the time of writing (May 2021), PATH had received more than $2.5bn from BMGF.
In 2009, PATH carried out a project to administer the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine. The project’s aim was, in PATH’s own words, “to generate and disseminate evidence for informed public sector introduction of HPV vaccines”. It was conducted in four countries: India, Uganda, Peru and Vietnam. Another Gates-funded organization, Gavi, had originally been considered to run the project, but responsibility was ultimately delegated to PATH. The project was directly funded by BMGF.
Significantly, each of the countries selected for the project had a different ethnic population and each had a state-funded national immunisation program. The use of different ethnic groups in the trial allowed for comparison of the effects of the vaccine across diverse population groups (ethnicity being a factor in the safety and efficacy of certain drugs).
The immunisation programs of the countries involved provided a potentially lucrative market for the companies whose drugs were to be studied: should the drugs prove successful and be included on these countries’ state-funded national immunisation schedules, this would represent an annual windfall of profits for the companies involved.
Two types of HPV vaccine were used in the trial: Gardasil by Merck and Cervarix by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). In this article, we are going to examine PATH’s trial of Gardasil in India.
It’s worth noting here the relationship between BMGF and one of the companies whose drugs were being tested. In 2002, BMGF had, controversially, bought $205m worth of stocks in the pharmaceutical sector, a purchase which included shares in Merck & Co. The move had raised eyebrows because of the obvious conflict of interest between the foundation’s role as a medical charity and its role as an owner of businesses in the same sector.
The Wall Street Journal reported, in August 2009, that the foundation had sold its shares in Merck between 31st March and 30th June of that year, which would have been around the same time that the field trials of the HPV vaccine were starting in India. So for the entirety of this project (which was already in operation by October 2006), right up to its final field trials, BMGF had a dual role: as both a charity with a responsibility for care, and as a business owner with a responsibility for profit.
Such conflicts of interest have been a hallmark of BMGF since 2002. When Gates was making regular TV appearances last year to promote Covid-19 vaccination, giving especially ringing endorsements of the Pfizer-BioNTech effort, his objectivity was never brought into question. Yet his foundation is the part-owner of several vaccine manufacturers, including Pfizer, BioNTech and CureVac.
HPV VACCINE
HPV vaccine aims to prevent cervical cancer. Gardasil had been launched successfully by Merck in the US in 2006, but its sales suffered after a series of articles in American medical journals had judged that its risks outweighed its benefits. Especially damaging was an analysis of reports made to the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) about adverse reactions to Gardasil.
This analysis was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) on August 19th 2009. The 12,424 adverse reactions which had been reported included 772 which were considered serious, 32 of which were deaths. Other reported serious side effects included autoimmune disorders, venous thromboembolic events (blood clots) and Guillain-Barré syndrome.
In the same edition of JAMA, Dr. Charlotte Haug, then editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association, wrote,
Whether a risk is worth taking depends not only on the absolute risk, but on the relationship between the potential risk and the potential benefit. If the potential benefits are substantial, most individuals would be willing to accept the risks. But the net benefit of the HPV vaccine to a woman is uncertain. Even if persistently infected with HPV, a woman most likely will not develop cancer if she is regularly screened. So rationally she should be willing to accept only a small risk from the vaccine.”
Dr. Haug also noted, “When weighing evidence about risks and benefits, it is also appropriate to ask who takes the risk, and who gets the benefit”, in a clear dig at Gardasil manufacturer Merck.
Merck’s attempts to promote Gardasil had been controversial. Dr. Angela Raffle, one the UK’s leading experts on cervical cancer screening, described Merck’s marketing strategy as “a battering ram at the Department of Health and carpet bombing on the peripheries.”
Dr. Raffle was concerned that the push to mass vaccination would harm the successful screening programme which had operated in the UK since the 1960s.
“My worry is that the commercially motivated rush to make us panic into introducing HPV vaccine quickly will put us back and worsen our cervical cancer control programme.”
Professor Diane Harper
Professor Diane Harper, then of Dartmouth Medical School in New Hampshire, had led 2 trials of the vaccine and was adamant that Gardasil could not protect against all strains of HPV.
When Merck launched a huge public relations campaign in 2007 to persuade European governments to use the product to vaccinate all the continent’s young girls against cervical cancer, she said:
Mass vaccination programmes (would be) a great big public health experiment…. We don’t know a lot of things. We don’t know the vaccine will continue to be effective. To be honest, we don’t have efficacy data in these young girls right now. We’re vaccinating against a virus that attacks women throughout their whole life and continues to cause cancer. If we vaccinate girls at 10 or 11 we won’t know for 20 to 25 years whether it is going to work or not. This is a big thing to take on.”
So at the time that PATH was carrying out its trials in India, Uganda, Peru and Vietnam, Gardasil was a controversial vaccine: its safety, efficacy and Merck’s attempts to promote it were being questioned, not by “anti-vaxxers” and “conspiracy theorists”, but by the international medical establishment and the respected mainstream media.
THE GIRLS OF KHAMMAM
Children of the Koya tribe, Khammam
Khammam district, in 2009, was a part of the eastern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh (boundary changes made in 2014 mean that today Khammam district belongs to the state of Telangana). The region is predominantly rural and is considered to be one of the poorest and least developed parts of India.
Khammam is home to several ethnic tribal groups,with some estimates putting its tribal population at about 21.5% (approximately 600,000 people). As is common for indiginous people throughout the world, the tribal groups of Khammam suffer from a lack of access to education. Consequently, their level of literacy is of a standard considerably lower than that of the region as a whole.
Some 14,000 girls were injected with Gardasil in Khammam district during 2009. The girls recruited for PATH’s project were between 10 and 14 years of age and all came from low-income, predominantly tribal backgrounds. Many of the girls did not reside with their families; instead they lived in ashram pathshalas (government-run hostels), which were situated close to the schools the children attended.
Professor Linsey McGoey, of the University of Essex, later stated she believed girls at ashram pathshalas had been targeted for the project as this was a way of:
“side-stepping the need to seek parental consent for the shots.”
Although we have seen a lot of India in the news recently, coverage of this country and its affairs is usually low-key. Despite being home to almost one fifth of the world’s population, reporting on India is sparse.
Few of us are aware, for example, of its abysmal history of health and safety or its long-standing tradition of corruption in government.
Such failings have been taken advantage of by unscrupulous profit-seekers for decades. Western media only reports on the consequences of these actions when their magnitude is too great to ignore.
We learned that up to 7,000 people were killed and more than half a million were injured after being exposed to deadly methyl isocyanate gas, following a gas leak at the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal. But we learned nothing in the years leading up to it of the culture of poor standards and disregard for regulation which was ultimately responsible for the disaster.
So it was typical that PATH’s project to administer and study the effects of the HPV vaccine went unheralded in the West. Typical, too, that the same was true in India itself: the Indian media is no more renowned for its reporting on tribal groups than the Western media is for its coverage of Indians.
Despite concerns expressed about the project in October 2009 by Sama, a Delhi-based NGO that advocates for women’s health, the matter remained absent from India’s news.
Members of the advocacy group Sama
This project, then, couldn’t have been more off-the-map had it taken place on the moon, and it remained so for several months until, early in 2010, stories began to filter out from Khammam that something had gone terribly wrong: many of the girls who had been involved in the trials had subsequently fallen ill and four of them had died.
In March 2010, members of Sama visited Khammam to find out more about the emerging stories. They were told that up to 120 girls had experienced adverse reactions, including epileptic seizures, severe stomach ache, headaches and mood swings. The Sama representatives remained in Khammam to investigate the situation further.
The involvement of Sama finally brought the matter to the attention of the Indian media and, amid a barrage of negative publicity, the Indian Council of Medical Research (IMCR) suspended the PATH project.
At this point the Indian Parliament’s Standing Committee on Health began an investigation into the affair.
On May 17th, Sama produced a damning report highlighting, among other things: that the trials had been promoted as a government immunisation programme and not a research project, that the girls had not been made aware that they could choose not to participate in the trials, and that parental consent had neither been asked for nor given in many cases.
The report stated that:
“Many of the vaccinated girls continue to suffer from stomach aches, headaches, giddiness and exhaustion. There have been reports of early onset of menstruation, heavy bleeding and severe menstrual cramps, extreme mood swings, irritability, and uneasiness following the vaccination. No systematic follow up or monitoring has been carried out by the vaccine providers.”
Sama also disputed the Andhra Pradesh State Government’s claim that the deaths of four of the girls who had participated in the trials had nothing to do with vaccination.
THE PARLIAMENTARY COMMITTEE
Parliament House, seat of the Parliament of India, New Delhi
The wheels of bureaucracy are slow to turn. It was more than three years later, on 30th August 2013, when the report of the Indian Parliament’s Standing Committee on Health was finally published. Although many had expected the report to be a whitewash, it was anything but: it made for shocking reading.
The report excoriated both PATH and the IMCR, concluding that the “safety and rights of children were highly compromised and violated.” The committee found that PATH, despite operating in India since 1999, had no legal permission to do so. It noted that although the organisation had finally received a certificate from India’s Registrar of Companies in September 2009, this certificate itself was in breach of the law.
The report stated that:
“PATH… has violated all laws and regulations laid down for clinical trials…. its sole aim has been to promote the commercial interests of HPV vaccine manufacturers…. This is a serious breach of trust… as the project involved the life and safety of girl children and adolescents who were mostly unaware of the implications of vaccination. The violation is also a serious breach of medical ethics.This act of PATH is a clear cut violation of the human rights of these girl children and adolescents. It is also an established case of child abuse.”
The committee charged that PATH had lied to it and had attempted to mislead it during the course of its investigation and recommended that the Indian Government report PATH’s violations of human rights to the WHO, UNICEF and the US Government.
The report declared that PATH’s whole scheme was a cynical attempt to ensure ongoing profits for Merck and GSK.
“The choice of countries and population groups; the monopolistic nature, at that point of time, of the product being pushed; the unlimited market potential and opportunities in the universal immunisation programmes of the respective countries are all pointers to a well-planned scheme to commercially exploit a situation. Had PATH been successful… this would have generated a windfall profit for the manufacturers by way of automatic sale, year after year, without any promotional or marketing expenses. It is well known that once introduced to the immunisation programme it becomes politically impossible to stop any vaccination.”
It went on:
“To achieve this end effortlessly, without going through the arduous and strictly regulated route of clinical trials, PATH resorted to an element of subterfuge by calling the clinical trials ‘Observational Studies’ or ‘a Demonstration Project’ and various such expressions. Thus the interest, safety and well being of subjects were completely jeopardized by PATH by using self-determined and self-servicing nomenclature which is not only highly deplorable but also a serious breach of the law of the land.”
Samiran Nundy, editor emeritus National Medical Journal of India
These charges were echoed by leading voices in India’s medical community. “It is shocking to see how an American organization used surreptitious methods to establish itself in India,” said Chandra M.Gulhati, editor of India’s influential Monthly Index of Medical Specialities, “(this) was not philanthropy”.
Samiran Nundy, editor emeritus of the National Medical Journal of India and a long-standing critic of corrupt practices in health, did not mince his words:
“This is an obvious case where Indians were being used as guinea pigs.”
The standing committee’s report was also highly critical of the relationship between PATH and members of several of India’s health agencies, highlighting multiple conflicts of interest.
On the issue of informed consent, the committee confirmed the allegations made by Sama to be true, finding that the majority of consent forms weren’t signed by either the children or their parents, that many consent forms were postdated or not dated at all, that multiple forms had been signed by the same people (often the caretakers of the hostels the girls lived in) and that many signatures didn’t match the name on the form. It found that parents had not been given information on the necessity of vaccination, its pros and cons or its potential side effects.
No insurance was provided for any of the children in the event of injury and “PATH did not provide for urgent expert medical attention in case of serious adverse events.”
Further, PATH seriously contravened Indian health regulations by carrying out a clinical trial of a drug on children before first conducting a trial of the drug with adults as subjects.
Regarding the girls who had died, the committee criticized PATH, Indian medical authorities and the Andhra Pradesh State Government for summarily dismissing the link between their deaths and vaccination without conducting thorough investigations. By 2016, some 1,200 of the girls who had been subjects in the two HPV vaccine trials in India were reporting serious long-term side effects, more than 5% of the total cohort of 23,500. By then, the total number of deaths had risen to seven.
A DEATHLY SILENCE
This appalling breach of medical ethics and human rights went almost completely unmentioned outside India. The Indian Parliament’s Standing Committee on Health had literally accused an American NGO of child abuse, providing extensive evidence to support their charge, yet practically no mention of this was to be found anywhere in the Western media.
Popular science publications Nature and Science each contained a brief article about the debacle, but neither goes into any detail about PATH’s legal and ethical breaches. While the Science article is at least slightly critical, the Nature piece gives more space to a rebuttal of the charges by PATH director Vivien Tsu.
The way in which media around the world is funded by BMGF, and how this affects reporting about BMGF and the organisations it sponsors, deserves its own article. But it’s worth mentioning here that the BBC has received a total of $51.7m from BMGF, as of May 2021, and The Guardian has received $12.8m.
The Guardian, for all its claims to give a voice to the most vulnerable in the world, stayed curiously silent about the young girls of Khammam. That is, except for one article, published in October 2013, about six weeks after the release of the standing committee’s report.
The article was written not by one of the girls or one of their parents, not by one of the women from Sama who had advocated on the girls’ behalf, not even by one of the Indian parliamentarians who had been charged with investigating the affair.
No. It was written by an American man called Seth Berkely. Berkely is the CEO of Gavi, another BMGF funded health behemoth.
Seth Berkley, CEO GAVI
Berkely used his forum in The Guardian to claim that the girls who had died after being vaccinated in Khammam had committed suicide. Speaking about the 14,000 subjects involved in the trials, he said, “it would have been unusual if none of them went on to kill themselves.”
Compassion wasn’t the only element missing from his article. Not once did Berkley address the multiple breaches of law and ethics which had occurred or the role of PATH and that of his employers, the Gates Foundation, in his dismissal of this iniquity.
The Guardian began receiving funding from BMGF in August 2010. Prior to that arrangement, in 2007, the newspaper had published two separate articles which were critical of the lobbying tactics used by Merck to promote Gardasil and which questioned the efficacy of its use in mass vaccination programs.
Subsequent to their arrangement with Gates, all coverage by the Guardian of this drug (and of HPV vaccination in general) has been positive.
HOW THINGS TURNED OUT
BMGF headquarters, Seattle
The Indian government was reluctant to take any of the measures recommended by the committee. After all, there were huge amounts of money being made available to the state, institutions and individuals from organisations like PATH.
So no official reports of human rights violations were ever made by the Indian government to the WHO, to Unicef or to the US government, as had been recommended by the standing committee.
However, in 2017, it announced it would no longer accept grants from BMGF for its Immunisation Technical Support Unit, an organisation which provides “vaccination strategy advice” in relation to an estimated 27 million infants. Nevertheless, the Indian government continues to accept the foundation’s grants in other areas.
Merck, and their HPV vaccine Gardasil, have done very well since the dismal events recounted in this article. The Khammam scandal never really affected the company, due to a lack of awareness about it outside India. In 2018 alone, Gardasil sales amounted to more than $3bn, thanks to its inclusion on immunisation schedules around the world, and its launch that year in China.
PATH has never been better. Just like Merck, the lack of reporting about what happened in Khammam meant the organisation didn’t suffer. Since 2010, it has continued to receive huge funding from BMGF and, to a lesser extent, the US Government. During this period, BMGF has provided PATH with more than $1.2bn in funding.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has continued expanding its web of influence. Describing the organisation’s practices around the time of the events outlined here, Jacob Levich said:
“In essence, BMGF would buy up stockpiled drugs that had failed to create sufficient demand in the West, press them on the periphery at a discount, and lock in long-term purchase agreements with Third World governments.”
The foundation has since moved on to even more lucrative pastures. The Covid-19 pandemic has really pushed BMGF to centre stage. Gates himself has seen his public profile and political influence grow to an extent that would have been unimaginable even in 2019.
Despite his lack of either scientific qualifications or an electoral mandate, he regularly presses the need for mass global vaccination with products made by the companies he owns, using platforms given to him by the media outlets he funds.
And the girls of Khammam?
Well, those poor children and their plight wasn’t even widely known outside of India back in 2010. To say they had been forgotten would be to imply that anybody knew about them or cared about them in the first place.
Bernard Marx is the pseudonym used by a writer and teacher based in Ireland. Bernard’s areas of interest include history, politics and popular music. You can read more of his work at Notes from the New Normal
Bill Gates and the world health juggernaut
By Karen Harradine | Conservative Woman | May 11, 2021
BILL Gates’s company Microsoft has changed our lives. It turned him into one of the richest men in the world and allowed him to turn philanthropist. His endeavour began in 1994 when he established the William H. Gates Foundation, soon to be followed by the Gates Learning Foundation in 1997. He merged the organisations in 2000 creating the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (GF). After the couple transferred $20billion of their Microsoft stock to the GF it became the largest charitable foundation in the world and over the next twenty years the most powerful charity in the world. Its endowment as of 2019 was $50billion.
The GF made its first donation to the World Health Organisation (WHO) in 1998. Soon after Gates pledged a further $750million to set up the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (Gavi), the stated aim of which is to increase immunisation rates in low-income countries, with the WHO and the UK amongst its original founders and donors. Last year Boris Johnson pledged Gavi £1.65billion over five years at the June 2020 Global Vaccine Summit replenishment conference, which the UK hosted. Six months later Johnson met Gates and pharmaceutical bosses to discuss Britain’s vaccine rollout and future pandemic plans.
The GF holds a permanent seat on Gavi’s board. Gavi’s core partners today are the GF, the WHO, Unicef and the World Bank, with the GF giving Gavi $4.1billion since its inception. Gavi is also the fifth largest funder of the WHO, giving $355.4million last year. With the WHO, Gavi dominates global vaccination campaigns including the Covid-19 vaccine rollout.
The GF continues to donate to the WHO. Its 2020 financial contribution was over $573.5million.
The WHO’s list of top 20 donors for the two-year budget cycle of 2018 and 2019 shows the GF coming second only to the US (their $893million donation accounting for 20 per cent of the WHO’s budget) with a $531 million donation (equal to 12 per cent of WHO’s budget). The GF and Gavi together outstrip all single country donations, except that of the US.
In 2017 the GF became an official partner of the WHO. The GF’s influence over the WHO is well-documented and the two organisations are near-synonymous.
Since its inception the GF has given $54.8billion to a multitude of organisations. It has expanded globally, opening offices in Beijing in 2007 and London in 2010, and funding works in 135 countries. A letter from President Xi Jinping to Bill Gates, which you can read here, suggests Gates’s closeness to the Chinese Communist Party.
Donations from billionaires over the past 25 years have extensively bolstered the GF’s finances. Between 1994 and 2018 Mr and Mrs Gates donated $36billion of their own money, and in 2006 Warren Buffet pledged $30billion.
Eight years after establishing Gavi, Gates stepped down in 2008 as Microsoft CEO to commit more of his time to his foundation. By that time the GF was the largest charitable foundation in the US, and questions were being raised even then about its long reach in shaping US government health policies. After going into financial partnership with the GF, the publicly funded US National Institutes of Health (NIH) shifted their focus from the health and welfare of American citizens to global health. Concerns about the power, complexity and lack of accountability of GF, and Gates’s potential – effectively now realised – to become WHO’s largest donor continue to be articulated.
In 2010, with Warren Buffett, the Gateses launched Giving Pledge, a vehicle through which the very wealthy could donate to charity. To date there are no public details of who donates what through Giving Pledge, though this endeavour has turned into a tax haven for billionaires.
The GF is also a co-founder and funder of CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations), as influential as Gavi but less known. CEPI is a Norwegian venture which invests in vaccines and is also funded by the Indian and Norwegian governments, the British-based Wellcome Trust and the World Economic Forum. Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust and member of Sage, sits on the CEPI board. In 2017 Gates said that the world was unprepared for pandemics and that CEPI’s investments in ‘DNA/RNA vaccines’ would mitigate that. Both the GF and Wellcome Trust have pledged to fund CEPI with $100million annually from 2017 to 2022.
In March last year, after Covid-19 spread globally, Gates stepped down from his position on the Microsoft board of directors, citing his desire to concentrate on Covid-19. A month later, the GF pledged to make Covid-19 vaccines available to 7billion people (the global population was estimated at 7.8billion last year). In December, the GF committed $1.75billion to develop Covid-19 tests and vaccines. The GF is now the self-appointed leader of the global response to Covid-19.
The initial endeavours of the William H. Gates Foundation to support scientific research and local charities have morphed into a global juggernaut with unaccountable power. Vast amounts of money are being channelled according to the thoughts, passions and prejudices of one man with questionable judgment.
In 1998, Gates was hauled before the US Senate to answer questions about Microsoft’s anti-trust practices. His demeanour while giving testimony was dishonest and arrogant. His performance is disturbing to watch, captured in this clip (from 1 minute 29 seconds) where he rocked repeatedly in his chair and insisted he didn’t understand the word ‘concern’.
When the WHO was formed as an intergovernmental organisation, it would have been unimaginable that a private foundation could have such influence or set the global health agenda. Though awareness of the GF’s influence over the WHO and Gavi is growing, what is less well documented is its extensive reach closer to home and its control over British science, medicine and public health. This I will be reporting on in the coming days.
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70 Neocons Petition Congress To Effectively Allow Israel To Say When The US Should Attack Iran
By Damian Lataan | January 10, 2014
Seventy senior Israeli-centric neoconservatives have written an open letter to Congress imploring them to do more to ensure Iran complies with the conditions of any agreement finally reached with the P5+1 over Iran’s nuclear program.
While the neocons are ostensibly asking Congress to ensure compliance, it is clear that their real aim is to convince members of Congress to support the bill currently passing through the Senate which calls for tighter sanctions against Iran in the event of any waywardness on Iran’s part.
The neocons are eager to see the bill currently passing through the Senate with enough support to make it veto-proof, not so much because they are concerned about Iran’s so-called nuclear weapons program – there’s still not a skerrick of hard evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons program – but, rather, because embedded within the bill is this clause:
… if the Government of Israel is compelled to take military action in legitimate self-defense against Iran’s nuclear weapon program, the United States Government should stand with Israel and provide, in accordance with the law of the United States and the constitutional responsibility of Congress to authorize the use of military force, diplomatic, military, and economic support to the Government of Israel in its defense of its territory, people, and existence…
Essentially, the clause is an automatic trigger for the US to attack Iran at any time the Israelis choose to launch a first strike – regardless of whether President Obama is in favour or not.
Partial list… continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- ‘Heinous crime’: Iran denounces Israeli assassination of 4 Iranian diplomats in Lebanon
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- World cannot remain silent as US and Israel attack ‘heritage of humankind’: Iran
- Emirati billionaire rebukes US senator over call for Gulf states to join war with Iran
- Op. True Promise 4: Iran’s missile blitzkrieg dismantles US war machine in West Asia
- Aramco CEO warns ‘catastrophe’ imminent if Strait of Hormuz remains shut
- What If Iran Says No?
- Trump Threatens to ‘Hit’ Iran ‘Twenty Times Harder’ Over Strait of Hormuz Oil Flows
- Spare the hypocrisy: Baghaei slams Ursula’s support for US
- If Americans Knew
- Israel Decided the War, But Trump’s America Fights and Pays the Bill
- Conscientious Objector Group: Phone ‘Ringing Off Hook’ As Huge Mobilization Underway
- U.S. support for Israel continues to plummet, despite media’s best efforts
- Threats and missiles fly, death tolls soar in Iran, Lebanon, Gaza – Not a ceasefire Day 151
- Lebanon: Israel’s White Phosphorous Use Risks Civilian Harm
- Corporate Media Go All Out To Support The US-Israeli War On Iran
- US-Israel war on Iran is creating a steady growing number of amputees
- Israel planned this war on Iran for 40 years. Everything else is a smoke screen
- The wrong question about the war in Iran
- ‘Your Tax Dollars Being Used to Raise Your Gas Prices’: US-Israel Bomb Major Iranian Oil Depots
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study Documents A 20-Year Pause In Arctic Sea Ice Decline – Driven By Internal Variability
- Wake-up Call: Survey Shows Majority Of Germans Now Favor Postponing Climate Targets!
- Televised! Leading German Political Candidate Tells Schoolchildren CO2 Makes Sun Hotter!
- New Study: A Century Warming Of 1.1°C Is ‘Commonplace’ And ‘Not Unusual’ During This Interglacial
- New Study: ‘Internal Noise’ And Volcanic Forcing Can Trigger 10-15°C Warming Within Decades
- Glaciers Worldwide Are Suddendly Surging, Experts Blame Warming!
- Surprising Discovery: Sahara Is Greening…Billions Of Trees Where Once Thought To Be Barren
- New Research Reaffirms Clouds, Aerosols, And Surface Solar Radiation Are ‘Driving The Climate System’
- Germany: Electric Car Catches Fire At Charging Station, Sets Off Local “Inferno”, Widespread Damage
- New Study: Canada’s New Brunswick Was 1°C Warmer Than Today During The Medieval Warm Period
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