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$65 billion in Western ‘aid for Ukraine’ is neither aid nor is it for Ukraine

By Drago Bosnic | May 20, 2022

In recent weeks, much has been said about the political West’s (primarily US) “aid” to the embattled Kiev regime. The US Congress has so far approved or is in the process of approving at least $54 billion to Ukraine. In addition, various reports put the amount of EU “aid” at up to €10 billion thus far, although the actual number is most likely orders of magnitude greater. When put together, this pushes the publicly acknowledged figure to a staggering $65 billion, which is equivalent to Russia’s annual military spending in nominal USD exchange rates.

The number seems rather impressive and may give an outlook that Ukraine will be able to defeat Russian forces. However, the situation on the ground says otherwise. With the political West’s postindustrial economy, their ability to mass-produce affordable and easily replaceable military hardware has increasingly been called into question. Thus, most of the “aid” from the US/EU is essentially a half measure. Throwing money at a problem is highly unlikely to resolve it, as actual situations require genuine, not monetary action.

The amount of hardware Ukraine lost so far is difficult to determine, as both sides provide diametrically opposing data, while independent confirmation from the ground is virtually impossible due to ongoing military operations. However, war footage taken by civilians, alternative media embedded with frontline troops, and soldiers themselves, clearly shows that Ukraine’s losses in manpower and equipment have been massive.

To replace lost hardware, the Kiev regime will require enormous resources. However, this will be quite challenging, as the country’s Military-Industrial Complex has been virtually annihilated by Russia’s long-range strikes. Thus, the regime will need to acquire additional military hardware elsewhere. The political West is the go-to address for this purpose, as Ukraine has been getting NATO weapons for years. Still, this hardware has had a limited impact on the battlefield. To change that, NATO powers decided to ramp up the so-called “lethal aid”.

However, in reality, the prospect of Ukraine getting the promised “aid” is rather grim. An obvious question arises, what will happen to nearly $65 billion? The first go-to address for such a question should be the US Congress. With the lawmaking body trying to fast track the deal, some US congressmen have voiced concerns that corrupt officials would be able to steal the “aid”, as was the case for decades during numerous US invasions across the globe. However, corruption and embezzlement, which geopolitical expert Paul Antonopoulos recently covered in a superb analysis, is the lesser problem in this situation.

Mainstream media have been portraying the political West as if it will be sending actual, physical money to the Kiev regime. However, nothing could be further from the truth. The funds will essentially stay in the “donor” countries. The largest share of those funds will officially be allocated to arming, or rather, rearming the Kiev regime forces. But who exactly, or more precisely, which companies will be producing weapons for the Ukrainian military? It’s safe to assume we all know the answer – the US Military-Industrial Complex, the largest and most powerful arms manufacturing cartel on the planet. Household names such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, BAE Systems, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, to name a few, will be getting the vast majority of those funds.

For instance, the “Phoenix Ghost” drones, manufactured by the California-based Aevex Aerospace and “Switchblade” drones, manufactured by AeroVironment, both designed to strike tanks and other armored vehicles, as well as infantry units. M113 armored vehicle is also being sent and while old, largely obsolete and not in production since 2007, it’s quite numerous, and getting rid of it will make way for the acquisition of its immediate successor, the AMPV (Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle), a turretless variant of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, produced by the BAE Systems.

Another BAE Systems product is the M777 howitzer, a towed 155 mm artillery piece designed for direct fire support. Ukrainian troops are already using them, while recent videos released by the Russian military show some have already been destroyed in battle. Interestingly, the howitzers delivered to Ukraine lack digital fire-control systems.

The much-touted “Stinger” MANPADS (produced by Raytheon) and “Javelin” ATGMs (co-produced by Lockheed Martin and Raytheon) have been sent in the thousands. However, their effectiveness has been questionable at best, despite Western media trying to portray them as supposed “game-changers”. Russian tanks have been filmed surviving up to 7 “Javelin” hits, even continuing to fight, much to the frustration of Ukrainian forces, which have recently been ordered to stop publicly complaining about the lackluster performance of Western weapons.

Raytheon’s AN/MPQ-64 “Sentinel”, an X-band range-gated, pulse-Doppler radar used to alert and cue short-range air defense systems has also been sent. In addition, 40 million rounds of small arms ammunition, 5,000 assault and battle rifles, 1,000 pistols, 400 machine guns and 400 shotguns have been sent to Ukraine, along with more than 1 million grenades, mortars and 200,000 artillery rounds. These deliveries have been completed by early May. The actual number is most certainly much higher as of this writing.

The weapons in question are not changing the strategic balance between Russia and the Kiev regime, but are prolonging the fight, resulting in even higher military and civilian casualties. Also, logistics-wise, having so many different types of weapons creates a lot of problems for the Ukrainian military, which is barely holding together as it is. There are also issues of training and doctrinal incompatibility.

M777 howitzers are immobile when deployed and are designed with air dominance in mind. US troops are supposed to use them from a safe distance, serving as fire support by striking very specific targets during overseas operations, which is completely opposite to what is going on in Ukraine, where the other side (Russia) enjoys air dominance and uses massed artillery to punch holes in Ukrainian lines, followed by massive and well-coordinated armor assaults. Thus, US weapons not only fail in providing an effective counter to Russian troops, but are even getting Ukrainian forces killed, as they are still not accustomed to using them.

And last, but not least, the “aid” provided (and soon to be provided) by NATO countries are essentially long-term loans which will have to be repaid in the following decades. The WWII-era Lend-Lease program for the USSR, estimated at $160 billion in present-day USD, was repaid in full only in 2006. Thus, we can assume Ukraine will be paying off the current $65 billion “aid” for the rest of this century. That is, provided there will be a viable Ukrainian state to do so after the conflict ends.

Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

May 20, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Militarism | , , , | Leave a comment

Damascus Says Areas of Syria Occupied by US Troops Will Soon Return to Government Control

Samizdat – 19.05.2022

The United States and its Syrian Kurdish militia allies control wide swathes of territory in eastern Syria, including areas producing the vast majority of the Arab Republic’s oil, gas and food. Damascus has accused Washington of stealing these resources, and demanded repeatedly that the US withdraw its forces.
The US occupation of eastern Syria will soon be brought to an end, Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad has said.

“The illegal US presence in the Jazira region of northern Syria is reaching its end, and the regions occupied by American forces will soon come under the Damascus government’s authority,” Mekdad said, speaking to Syria’s al-Ikhbariyah TV.

Mekdad called on the majority Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces militias to realize that America would eventually withdraw and abandon them.

The foreign minister said Damascus’s principled support for the Palestinian cause, and its efforts to liberate Israeli-occupied territories in the Golan Heights and southern Lebanon were among the key causes behind the foreign-backed conflict which has rocked Syria since 2011.

“Given Syria’s strong commitment to such positions, as well as its strategic location and great regional influence, hostile nations have been trying to affect the Damascus government’s policies. Having failed in their attempts, they resorted to terrorism and sponsored this menace with billions of dollars,” Mekdad said.

This foreign-backed effort to break up the country has failed, Mekdad stressed.

US forces have occupied oil and food-rich areas of Syria since 2017, entering the country under the pretext of fighting Daesh (ISIS). The Islamist militia rampaged through northern and western Iraq and eastern Syria from 2013-2017 before being pushed back and defeated by an unlikely coalition including the Syrian and Iraqi governments, Iraqi Shia militias, Russia, Iran, Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement, and, at least formally, the United States.

The Biden administration has expressed no intention of withdrawing US forces from Syria, with at least 900 troops and an unknown number of defence contractors operating across ten or more bases dotting the country’s northeast.

Syrian officials and media have accused these forces of guarding oil and gas production facilities, and of escorting convoys of oil tankers and food-laden trucks out of the country into Iraq, while bringing weaponry and supplies for bases in. Unlike his predecessor Donald Trump, who openly bragged about being in Syria to “take” and “keep the oil,” Joe Biden has insisted that the US’s illegal presence in the country is about “preventing a resurgence” of Daesh.

The Syrian army and ordinary residents regularly confront US occupation forces using non-lethal means, including by blocking off local roads and setting up checkpoints to try to stop American armoured vehicles from using them.

May 20, 2022 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Wars for Israel | , , , | Leave a comment

Caught on camera – how Trump was robbed of the 2020 election

By Thomas Lane | TCW Defending Freedom | May 19, 2022

Joe Biden is president of the United States. That is an indisputable fact. But how he got to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is questionable.

The statistical anomalies of the 2020 election alone make Biden’s victory seem dubious. Here are a few, of many, examples:

Donald Trump’s campaign rallies filled stadiums with tens of thousands of supporters; Biden’s campaign events – when he left the basement – hardly attracted a dozen. If these candidates were two musicians, and one was selling out arenas while the other was struggling to fill a little pub, which act would a record company executive bet on becoming a gold-record performer?

For the past ten American presidential elections, 19 counties, often referred to as the ‘bellwether counties’, predicted the outcome of the race. In 2020, Donald Trump won 18 of these counties, but Biden won the presidency.

At midnight on election night, vote counting mysteriously stopped in five states – Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and North Carolina – where Trump had a significant lead over Biden. The next morning, Biden suddenly had more votes than Trump. One is expected to believe that nearly 100 per cent of the votes which arrived during this suspicious pause were for Biden?

Certain that the election was fraught with fraud, Trump and some of his supporters challenged the results of the 2020 election with dozens of lawsuits. But most of the cases were dismissed by judges due to ‘lack of standing’, which is a legal term that states ‘the party has not alleged a sufficient legal interest and injury to participate in the case’.

However, Dinesh D’Souza’s new political documentary, 2,000 Mules, just might give Trump’s lawsuits a leg to stand on.

Using geotracking, a technology which locates the exact position of a person by obtaining data from his or her smartphone or similar devices, Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips of True the Vote were able to expose a couple of thousand mules (people who illegally collected and deposited voting ballots) travelling between pro-Biden campaign offices and ballot drop boxes during the final month of the election season.

Engelbrecht and Phillips then obtained security camera footage of the mules stuffing the drop boxes with ballots. The mules’ activity ranged from just a few ballots deposited in several boxes throughout the month, to nearly 300 mules visiting one box and depositing 1,900 ballots (10x the average) in a single day.

In the most compelling scene in the documentary, D’Souza multiplies the number of mules by the number of their drop-box visits, then multiplies that number by the number of ballots deposited by each mule to get a total number of illegal votes. He does this calculation for each swing state where Biden won, then subtracts the number of illegal votes from Biden’s total. Spoiler alert: Mules concludes that Trump won the 2020 election.

D’Souza and his team have done their part: they have exposed the criminals and the crime. Between the geotracking data and the surveillance footage, they have evidence of over 2,000 people committing felonies. However, their hands are tied because they are mere citizens. As D’Souza concludes in the film: ‘It is time for law enforcement to step in.’

May 20, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Film Review | , | Leave a comment

Big Pharma-funded paper recommends taxing the unvaccinated

By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | May 17, 2022

A new paper published by Oxford University’s Center for Business Taxation discusses – and in the end supports – the idea of a special tax levied on those who decline to be “vaccinated” against “Covid19”.

The paper’s authors argue that a vaccine-related tax would be “justified” because “Taxes on behaviour that is considered undesirable are nothing new.”

And that even if the “vaccines” do cause serious harm to some people…

“some states do adopt policies that can lead to serious harm in exceptional cases when they consider that the benefits outweigh the costs“

Yes, you did read that right.

They go on to suggest all sorts of ways of correcting this “undesirable behaviour”, from straight taxation to tax credits for those who have been vaccinated, to vaccine mandates and compulsory Covid insurance for the unvaccinated (which is just another way of saying “taxation”).

Now, here is where we could – and normally would – break down the article paragraph by paragraph. We would dissect the arguments, include data they ignore, highlight logical fallacies… you know, the usual.

We’re not going to do that today.

We could point out the infection-fatality ratio for Covid “cases” is minuscule.

Or that the so-called “vaccines” don’t prevent either infection or transmission of the alleged new disease called “Covid19”.

We could launch into a legal argument on civil rights, the Nuremberg Code, and medical coercion.

But we’re not going to do any of that.

Because it’s been two years of this, and life is just too damn short. We’ve done it enough, the facts are all there for anyone who cares enough to find them.

Instead, we’re just going to quote the ‘About’ page of the Oxford Center for Business Taxation, with a bit of added emphasis…

The Centre for Business Taxation was formed in 2005 and was initially funded by substantial donations from a large number of members from the Hundred Group. A number of these companies and others continue to support the CBT. Donors during the year were AstraZeneca [and] GlaxoSmithKline Plc

To be clear, the Hundred Group is a lobbying group which works on behalf of the all the members of the FTSE100.

GlaxoSmithKline is one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, and partnered with French giant Sanofi to produce a Covid vaccine which netted the companies billions in supply contracts, despite the fact it is yet to be approved for public use.

If you know anything at all about Covid, you don’t need us to tell you who AstraZeneca are.

The CBT – and therefore the paper – are funded by big business and big pharma.

Do we really need to add anything else?

May 19, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Ex-FBI General Counsel Says Bureau Found No Evidence of Link Between Trump, Russian Bank

Samizdat – 19.05.2022

WASHINGTON – The FBI found no evidence of a covert communications channel between former US President Donald Trump and Russia’s Alfa Bank, former FBI General Counsel James Baker said in a testimony at the trial of Hillary Clinton’s lawyer Michael Sussmann, according to a Fox News report.

Sussmann told the FBI in 2016 that there was a backdoor communications channel between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, which is reportedly linked to the Russian government. Sussmann is being charged with making a false statement in connection with the meeting for allegedly lying about not working on behalf of any clients.

A probe conducted by Special Counsel John Durham alleges that Sussmann was actually working for the campaign of Hillary Clinton, as well as for tech executive Rodney Joffe.

Baker emphasized that the FBI concluded there was no substance to Sussmann’s allegations against Trump and could not confirm there was a surreptitious communications channel, the report said.

The testimony echoes that of FBI Special Agent Scott Hellman, who said on Tuesday during the trial said that the allegations against Trump were found to be untrue, the report added.

The FBI investigated allegations of Trump collusion with the Russian government in a probe run by Special Counsel Robert Mueller starting in 2017. Mueller’s investigation found no evidence of a criminal conspiracy or collusion between Trump’s presidential campaign and Russian officials.

Durham in 2019 was chosen to investigate the origins of the FBI’s probe into the Trump campaign. The investigation has resulted in indictments against Sussmann, as well as Igor Danchenko and Kevin Clinesmith.

May 19, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

Moderna Vaccine Delivered More Risk Than Benefit in Trials for Children 6 to 11, Despite New York Times Positive Spin

By Madhava Setty, M.D. | The Defender | May 17, 2022

Two doses of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine “were found to be safe and effective in inducing immune responses and preventing COVID-19,” according to an analysis of the results of Moderna’s vaccine trial in children ages 6 to 11.

However, a closer look at the analysis, published May 11 in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), finds the trial results showed the vaccine provided meager benefit when compared to risk, and the study was too small to assess serious and known adverse events such as myocarditis and pericarditis in children of this age.

The NEJM paper presented findings from both Phase 1 (complete) and Phase 2 and 3 (ongoing) trials of Moderna’s mRNA-1273 vaccine. Phase 1 results were used to determine an appropriate dose for the Phase 2 and 3 trials.

The authors of the analysis concluded:

“Two 50-μg doses of the mRNA-1273 vaccine were found to be safe and effective in inducing immune responses and preventing Covid-19 in children 6 to 11 years of age; these responses were non-inferior to those in young adults.”

The scope of my analysis below is limited to the Phase 2 and 3 portions of the trial where 4,016 children were randomly assigned to receive two injections of mRNA-1273 (50 μg each) or a placebo.

How effective was the vaccine?

The effectiveness of the Moderna vaccine, as determined by immunogenicity (the ability of the vaccine to elicit an antibody response), exceeded that measured in adolescents in a separate trial.

However, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) maintains that antibody test results should not be used as an indication of immunity.

Moreover, the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biologics Product Advisory Committee reached a consensus in April that antibody levels cannot be used as a correlate for vaccine effectiveness.

The FDA committee’s decision is consistent with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s executive summary of a science brief, released on Oct. 29, 2021, which stated:

“Data are presently insufficient to determine an antibody titer threshold that indicates when an individual is protected from infection.”

Nevertheless, the FDA used immunobridging as a means to justify authorization of the Pfizer vaccine for children ages 5 to 11, as The Defender reported here and here.

If the FDA authorizes the Moderna formulation for children age 6 and under, it would be another example of the agency making a decision that contradicts its own position.

With regard to “preventing COVID-19,” Moderna’s Phase 2 and 3 trials showed no deaths, hospitalizations or severe infections in either those who received the vaccine or those who were given the placebo.

Thus, the trial could not determine the benefit, if any, of the vaccine in preventing these outcomes.

Beginning 14 days after the second dose, 3 of 2,644 vaccine recipients developed COVID-19 (defined as a positive PCR test and a single symptom) compared to 4 of 853 placebo recipients (see Table S26).

Adjusting for the different number of recipients in each of the two groups, 12.4 cases of symptomatic disease would have occurred in a group of 2,644 placebo recipients.

This means that 2,644 vaccinations would prevent 9.4 (12.4 – 3 = 9.4) cases of COVID-19.

Put another way, more than 280 children in this age group would need to be fully vaccinated (two doses) to prevent a single case of non-severe, symptomatic COVID-19 — so 280 is the Number Needed to Vaccinate (NNV), which is the key metric used to assess risk versus benefit as explained below.

The authors of the NEJM paper admitted their findings were limited because too few cases of COVID-19 occurred in this time window. They instead calculated a Vaccine Efficacy (VE) of 88% based on infections occurring 14 days after the first injection.

COVID-19 mRNA vaccine trials to date have all calculated VE starting from the time the product is thought to have maximum efficacy, i.e., 14 days after the second dose. This approach has been criticized as being impractical if not disingenuous as it will necessarily exaggerate the product’s benefit.

However, now faced with a dearth of outcomes, Moderna investigators chose to veer from their prior strategy. Using outcomes from 14 days after the first dose, we can calculate that 56 children need to be fully vaccinated to prevent a single symptomatic infection.

Was the vaccine ‘safe’?

Trial participants were assessed for local and systemic adverse reactions within 7 days of the first and second doses.

In the vaccine group, 94% of children experienced a local adverse reaction after the first dose, and 95% experienced a local adverse reaction after the second dose.

Local adverse reactions include pain, redness or swelling at the injection site or in proximal lymph nodes.

Also, according to the trial results, 58% of vaccine recipients suffered a systemic adverse reaction after the first dose, and 78% suffered a systemic adverse reaction after the second dose.

Systemic reactions include fever, chills, headache, muscle/joint pain, nausea, vomiting and fatigue.

The majority of these adverse reactions were mild. However, 4.1% of the vaccinated children experienced Grade 3 local and systemic reactions after the first dose, and 12.2% of vaccinated children experienced Grade 3 local and systemic reactions after the second dose.

Grade 3 events are serious and interfere with a person’s ability to do basic activities and may also require medical intervention.

Finally, 29.6% of vaccinees (891) reported an unsolicited adverse event.

Unsolicited events are those independently reported by a participant to investigators. There is generally a degree of underreporting of these adverse events because the reporting requires the participant to initiate the report, rather than reply to a survey initiated by someone else.

While solicited (via a survey) adverse events are assigned a grade, unsolicited adverse events are divided into “serious” and “not serious.”

In the Moderna Phase 2 and 3 trials, only three of these unsolicited adverse events were classified as serious. All three were deemed unrelated to the vaccine by the investigators.

However, the study reported only those unsolicited adverse events that occurred with a greater-than-1% incidence.

In other words, with a vaccinated pool of children of approximately 3,000, if fewer than 30 children had a particular adverse event, it was not reported in the trial results (Table S20).

Conclusions

The investigators admit their analysis of the vaccine’s efficacy is limited because of the limited number of cases that occurred during the study.

Nevertheless, they conclude, “… the mRNA-1273 vaccine at a dose level of 50 μg in children was protective against Covid-19 beginning 14 days after the first injection.”

They also wrote:

“These results extend the evidence of the safety and efficacy of the mRNA-1273 vaccine seen in adults and adolescents and provide support for the use of this vaccine to prevent Covid-19 in children.”

But at what price?

If we use an NNV of 56, and considering that 4.1% and 12.2% of vaccinated children will suffer Grade 3 local and systemic reactions, every one case of non-severe COVID-19 prevented through vaccination will result in two Grade 3 local reactions and nearly seven Grade 3 systemic reactions.

Using an NNV of 280 based on outcomes 14 days after the second dose predicts that 11 children will suffer a Grade 3 local reaction and 35 will suffer a Grade 3 systemic reaction for every COVID-19 case prevented.

The risk-benefit profile of this product in this age group should not reassure the public or the FDA.

Moreover, this study was conducted in the summer and fall of 2021, a time when Delta was the predominant strain.

A large observational study from the state of New York conducted during the time Omicron was the prevalent variant demonstrated Pfizer’s pediatric formulation had efficacy that plummeted to 12% within seven weeks.

There is no reason to believe Moderna’s product will fare any better.

Nevertheless, The New York Times, reporting on the May 11 NEJM analysis, highlighted the vaccine’s immunogenic power, running the headline, “Moderna Vaccine Provokes Strong Immune Response in Children 6 to 11.”

Despite the headline, which framed the analysis in a positive light, the Times did admit:

“The trial was not large enough to detect rarer side effects, such as the heart problems that have been observed in other age groups.

“Moderna’s trial measured the vaccine’s power against the Delta variant, and the researchers are still assessing its performance against Omicron. All of the vaccines have proven to be less effective, in all age groups, against the Omicron variant.”

Despite only tepid support from mainstream media, the FDA seems fixated on authorizing this product.

Peter Marks, M.D., Ph.D., director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, recently hinted the FDA would not demand that pediatric vaccine formulations against COVID-19 meet the agency’s own Emergency Use Authorization guidelines requiring 50% efficacy.

Vinay Prasad, M.D., MPH, explained the implications of this potential shift in the FDA’s stance, stating it was “incredible” that Marks would sign off on a pediatric vaccine if it seems to be mirroring efficacy in adults but is less effective against Omicron.

“We have standards for a reason,” Prasad said. The standard chosen by the FDA was “arbitrary and, if anything, I’d argue it was on the low side — 50% isn’t as good as what we wanted.”

“Fifty percent is quite low, and if you have a very low vaccine efficacy […] you can have compensatory behavior that actually leads to a lot more viral spread,” he added.

Though an effective vaccine does not presently exist, finding and authorizing one does not pose a problem if the FDA somehow believes it can redefine “effective” while maintaining a semblance of a regulatory authority.

© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.

May 19, 2022 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

School shutdowns harm children? It’s a bit late to tell us now

By Laura Perrins | TCW Defending Freedom | May 19, 2022

I HAVE an article I want to direct your attention to. It is from our friends at the Guardian, who only now are pointing out the damage lockdown did to the youngest children. 

In this piece we are told: ‘The youngest children have been most affected by lockdowns and closures during the Covid pandemic, with new research finding that the educational progress and social development of four- and five-year-olds suffered severely during their first year at school. Aggressive behaviour such as biting and hitting, feelings of struggling in class or being overwhelmed around large groups of children were among the difficulties reported by teachers.’

It may be new research but it is simply more confirmation of the shocking damage that was officially reported six weeks ago that Kathy commented on at the time on Mark Steyn’s GB News show. It was a cruelty that we witnessed first and reported on at the time, affecting seven- and eight- year-olds too, as reported here.

The Guardian article is worth reading in full, but where was this newspaper at the time? Castigating the teaching unions’ lockdown zealots? No. As you know I was very angry about the lockdown but nothing angered me more than when they closed schools. I could have lived with pretty much any other restriction but closing the schools was an evil, wicked thing to do. It is proven. The government sacrificed children on the altar of Covid. Boris Johnson should have refused to do it and have utterly shamed all those who pressured him to do so, not least the teaching unions as well as the left-wing press.

It is all a bit late in the day now to tell us what we already knew – that closing schools was doomed to cause the serious harm to the poorest and most vulnerable children, as Kathy said on Steyn. The Guardian report, while welcome, is all too little, too late. The damage is done.

May 19, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Bill Gates and the Coordinated Campaign for Nasal Spray Vaccines

eugyppius – May 18, 2022

As we saw a few weeks ago, Bill Gates is subtly annoyed at our SARS-2 mRNA vaccines. They have to be kept cold, which makes them third-world unfriendly. They’re not very good at inducing mucosal immunity, which makes them bad at stopping infection. They require trained needle-wielding “vaccinators”*, which is an extra step that limits uptake. What would please this unelected omnipresent merchant of nuclear-grade charitable benevolence the most, is a nasal spray vaccine, like they had in the movie Contagion. Gates really liked that film. They just snorted the vaccine, and then the virus went away.

Why can’t we have vaccines like they have in the movies, Gates wants to know? Well, perhaps we can.

Two weeks after Gates made his wishes known, a curious guest essay appeared in the New York Times : The Answer to Stopping the Coronavirus May be Up Your Nose. The vaccines are great, says essay author and Yale immunobiologist Akiko Iwasaki. Only, nasal spray vaccines would be even better. Our current vaccines are bad at inducing mucosal immunity. Also, the “barrier … for a needle shot” is probably higher than the barrier for inhaling things.

Iwasaki envisions “potentially over the counter” vaccines that everyone can snort “every four to six months.” She’s also co-author of a preprint, which shows that if you get mRNA-immunised mice to inhale recombinant unadjuvanted spike protein, their mucosal immunity improves. Not for nothing, this is the same approach envisioned by the EcoHealth Alliance lunatics in their infamous PREEMPT grant proposal. There, they fantasised about “develop[ing] recombinant chimeric spike-proteins from known SARSr-CoVs … to boost immune memory in adult bats” and then spraying these proteins into caves for the bats to inhale (p.4).

It’s nice to know that the research program that set off the whole pandemic will now circle back to provide remedies against the pandemic that it caused. This is fine. This is Science.

* To my great delight, Gates actually uses this term.

May 19, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

German Supreme Court rules mandatory vaccination is constitutionally justified

The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | May 19, 2022

Judges in Germany’s top court clearly haven’t looked at the data produced in multiple countries, showing the vaccinated being more likely to catch coronavirus.

In a press release today, the court announced that a case, challenging the obligation to provide evidence of vaccination, had been unsuccessful. The complainants said that the mandates violated their fundamental rights.

Whilst the initial vaccine mandate for all adults was rejected earlier in the year, it was still implemented for healthcare workers in March. This meant that all healthcare workers had to provide proof of full vaccination, recovery from COVID-19 or a small number of medical exemptions. If employees did not provide proof, the health department was to be notified immediately and the individual banned from entering the workplace.

One of the reasons for the case being unsuccessful, given in the judgment, was that interference with the right to physical integrity is constitutionally justified. Basically, the protection of vulnerable people is more important than an individual’s fundamental right.

The judgement admits that COVID-19 is mild for most people but can be fatal for the elderly and vulnerable who also don’t respond well to vaccination. They say that at the time the law was passed, a clear scientific majority assumed that vaccinated and recovered people were less likely to become infected and therefore transmit the virus. It was also assumed that vaccinated people were less infectious and for a shorter amount of time. According to the judgement, expert third parties largely agree that vaccine effectiveness will continue to exist, albeit at a reduced level.

Comically, the judgement states that there is no justification for compulsory vaccination enforced by the state but instead the decision should be down to the individual – they can choose to either give up their previous job or consent to the impairment of their physical integrity. Why thank you, Master, for providing me with two terrible choices. But, every cloud and all that, I suppose it is better than being pinned down and vaccinated. Well, until you can’t pay your rent or buy food for your children and have to steal a cardboard box to sleep on in the street.

Fortunately, the judges concluded that it is ok to breach an individual’s fundamental rights because serious side effects or serious consequences induced by the administration of the vaccine are very rare. And, in any case, they are continuously monitoring and evaluating them. They say that the very low probability of serious consequences of vaccination contrasts with the significantly higher probability of damage to vulnerable people.

They conclude, that the further development of the pandemic, after the law was passed, has not changed anything. Nor have any new developments or better insights.

So there you have it. An individual’s rights can be overhauled if a majority of experts conclude you are a danger to a small group of people. Whilst I can understand and appreciate the need to protect the elderly and vulnerable, this shouldn’t be used as a pretext to remove people’s basic rights.

The majority of health care workers want to protect the elderly and vulnerable, that’s why they do the jobs they do. If they are ill or test positive, they aren’t going to deliberately go and infect someone who is likely to die from Covid – they aren’t pyschos (unlike some of the individual’s making these laws).

Furthermore, the science clearly doesn’t back up what they are saying. You are more likely to catch Covid if you are vaccinated and your viral load is similar, if not the same. There may be evidence showing that you are not as infectious for as long but there also may be evidence showing you can have Covid but aren’t testing positive.

Health Minister Karl Lauterbach welcomed the ruling saying that “the state is obliged to protect vulnerable groups”. He is now off for a meeting with other G7 ministers, despite being in contact with the US health secretary, a day before testing positive for Covid. Rules for thee, not for me.

Clearly, the battle to retain one’s basic rights is still not over in many parts of the world. And if it isn’t completely squashed now, you can be sure it will return everywhere with a vengeance, come the winter.

May 19, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

From the heart of the Covid establishment, the truth about asymptomatic spread

By Hector Drummond | TCW Defending Freedom | May 19, 2022

AN important study into Covid-19 has got very little traction, despite coming from the Covid industry’s favourite university, Imperial College London.

This is likely to be because the study totally destroys the industry’s assumptions about asymptomatic spread.

The other institutions involved in this study are the Vaccine Taskforce and Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), hVIVO (part of Open Orphan plc), and the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust. In other words, this study was conducted by the heart of the Covid establishment.

What did they find? Well, forget all you were told about it taking five to six days to develop Covid symptoms, which was always an unwarranted claim whose main purpose was to imprison whole populations. Even if that had been true, it wouldn’t have provided the justification for the Great Jailing that governments across the world sprang on their people. But it’s not true anyway: ‘Researchers found that symptoms start to develop very fast, on average about two days after contact with the virus.’

In fact, it was less than two days – it was 42 hours.

What’s more (and the Imperial press release makes little of this) the amount of detectable virus in the throat and nose in that 42 hours is small. It’s only after symptoms start that the virus levels really crank up. For the first day there’s pretty much nothing; on the second day levels start to rise, but to nowhere near the levels they reach on subsequent days, after symptoms have appeared.

We can see this by looking at some graphs from the paper (from Fig. 2 – the first graph shows levels in the nose by day, the second shows the levels in the throat).

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01780-9

As the study says, ‘viral shedding begins within 2 days of exposure’.

Bear in mind also that coughing and sneezing send out vastly far more virus particles than breathing. (For the in-depth details, see chapter 3 of my book The Face Mask Cult.) But if you do not have symptoms, you will not be sneezing or coughing. So even if in the last few hours of your pre-symptomatic period your viral load starts to build up in your nose and throat, you aren’t going to be sending that out into the world in any great amount, because you are pre-symptomatic, and so by definition you aren’t coughing and sneezing.

Remember how you were told at the start of spring 2020 that Covid-19 was a unique virus, different from every virus in history, in that it spread wildly from asymptomatic people, which apparently no virus had ever done before, at least not in anything like the way Covid did? Even normally sober writers such as Matt Ridley spread this melodramatic idea, despite the fact that at the time it had little more credibility than your average urban myth. Asymptomatic spread was the basis for locking everyone up – everyone, not just those with symptoms – but it has turned out to be a chimera.

And of course the enforced quarantine periods not only had to be long, they had to be repeated, over and over, because you could never tell if someone was infected and their breath was spreading Covid across whole suburbs and workplaces and factories, even if that person had just come out of a long enforced quarantine a few days ago after a close contact tested positive, and even if that person felt completely fine. They might still have caught Covid for real since they left quarantine, and even now are killing grandmothers by the dozen as they eat their lunch with their friends. Better lock them up again. And everyone else.

Such was the damage inflicted upon society by the asymptomatic hysteria. In theory it could have gone on for ever; the only things that stopped it doing so were, firstly, the public gradually starting to realise that their lives were being ruined for an overhyped threat, and, secondly, the embarrassing lack of solid evidence to show that asymptomatic spread played much of a role in Covid dissemination (or that Covid was unique in regard to the extent of asymptomatic spread).

So there isn’t any point at all in worrying about catching Covid from someone with no symptoms. There also isn’t any point in symptomless people testing themselves all the time. Or ever. Getting Covid from someone who isn’t showing any signs of it will not happen very often, so the social damage caused by requiring people who aren’t ill to take a test vastly outweighs the benefits of testing them (especially when we consider that the benefits of testing are basically nil anyway – billions of tests have done nothing to prevent Covid remorselessly spreading across the world).

In other words, these results tell us (although this was already clear) to stop testing, stop quarantining and stop worrying about getting Covid from people who aren’t sick. And that means shutting down the whole Covid-industrial complex. The world was trashed for nothing.

I should note that the study does say ‘our data clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 viral shedding occurs at high levels irrespective of symptom severity, thus explaining the high transmissibility of this infection and emphasising that symptom severity cannot be considered a surrogate for transmission risk in this disease’.

This may seem to go against what I have said so far, but it doesn’t, as it applies to the period after symptoms have started, not the period before. It is true that once you have symptoms, there is little correlation between the severity of those symptoms and the amount of viral shedding, as Figs. 4e and 4f in the paper show. (‘Viral shedding’, I should note, refers to the amount of virus found in the nose and throat – it doesn’t refer to the amount of virus being ‘sent out’ by the infected person into the surrounding world.) So someone who has very severe symptoms may not have any more virions in their nose and throat than someone who has mild symptoms.

In the two-day pre-symptomatic period, however, it remains the case that there are only low levels of viral load in the nose and throat, as we saw from the graphs above.

Another significant finding from the study was that it took very little virus to infect someone: ‘Participants were exposed to the lowest possible dose of virus found to cause infection, roughly equivalent to the amount found in a single droplet of nasal fluid when participants were at their most infectious.’

This also means that facemask use is particularly pointless. At best masks can reduce the amount of virions breathed in and out by about 10-15 per cent but if it takes very little to infect a person this will achieve nothing. If someone is breathing out 15,000 virions every ten minutes, reducing that to between 13,500 and 14,000 won’t help.

Of course, the study and the Imperial press release didn’t tell you this. All it said about facemasks was that the study emphasised the importance of wearing them over the nose as well as the mouth, because the nose contained higher peak levels of the virus than in the mouth.

Also, as expected, none of the healthy young people in the study developed anything other than mild-to-moderate cold-like symptoms. None of them ended up in a bad way. As we already knew two years ago, this is a disease which does not threaten the vast majority of young people.

For two years now sceptics like me have been telling people to throw away their tests, and to stop isolating healthy people, and to stop worrying whether the people around you in the restaurant are going to kill you, as the scientific evidence doesn’t support this. If you didn’t believe us then, perhaps you will now.

May 19, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

A Primer on the WHO, the Treaty, and its Plans for Pandemic Preparedness

By David Bell | Brownstone Institute | May 19, 2022

The World Health Organization (WHO), whose constitution defines health as ‘a state of physical, mental and social well-being, not merely the absence of disease or infirmity,’ has recently orchestrated remarkable reversals in human rights, poverty reduction, education, and physical, mental and social health indices in the name of responding to the Covid-19 pandemic.

WHO proposes to expand the mechanisms that enabled this response, diverting unprecedented resources to addressing what in terms of history and disease are rare and relatively low-impact events. This will greatly benefit those who also did well from the Covid-19 outbreak, but has different implications for the rest of us. To address it calmly and rationally, we need to understand it.

Building a new pandemic industry

The World Health Organization (WHO) and its Member States, in concert with other international institutions, is proposing, and currently negotiating, two instruments to address pandemics and widely manage aspects of global public health. Both will significantly expand the international bureaucracy that has grown over the past decade to prepare for, or respond to, pandemics, with particular emphasis on development and use of vaccines.

This bureaucracy would be answerable to the WHO, an organization that in turn is increasingly answerable, through funding and political influence, from private individuals, corporations and the large authoritarian States.

These proposed rules and structures, if adopted, would fundamentally change international public health, moving the center of gravity from common endemic diseases to relatively rare outbreaks of new pathogens, and building an industry around it that will potentially be self-perpetuating.

In the process, it will increase external involvement in areas of decision-making that in most constitutional democracies are the purview of elected governments answerable to their population.

WHO does not clearly define the terms ‘pandemic’ and ‘public health emergency’ that these new agreements, intended to have power under international law, seek to address. Implementation will depend on the opinion of individuals – the Director General (DG) of the WHO, Regional Directors and an advisory committee that they can choose to follow or ignore.

As a ‘pandemic’ in WHO parlance does not include a requirement of severity but simply broad spread – a property common to respiratory viruses – this leaves a lot of room for the DG to proclaim emergencies and set the wheels in motion to repeat the sort of pandemic responses we have seen trialed in the past 2 years.

Responses that have been unprecedented in their removal of basic peace-time human rights, and that the WHO, Unicef and other United Nations (UN) agencies have acknowledged to cause widespread harm.

This has potential to be a boon for Big Pharma and their investors who have done so well out of the last two years, concentrating private wealth whilst increasing national indebtedness and reversing prior progress on poverty reduction.

However, it is not something that has just appeared, and is not going to make us slaves before the month is out. If we are to address this issue and restore societal sanity and balance in public health, we need to understand what we are dealing with.

Proposed International Health Regulations (IHR) amendments

The IHR amendments, proposed by the United States, build on the existing IHR that were introduced in 2005 and are binding under international law. While many are unaware of their existence, the IHR already enables the WHO DG to declare public health emergencies of international concern, and thereby recommend measures to isolate countries and restrict movement of people. The draft amendments include proposals to:

  • Establish an ‘emergency committee’ to assess health threats and outbreaks and recommend responses.
  • Establish a ‘Country review mechanism’ to assess compliance of countries with various recommendations / requirements of WHO regarding pandemic preparedness, including surveillance and reporting measures. This appears to be modeled on the UN’s human rights country review mechanism. Countries would then be issued with requirements to be addressed to bring them into compliance where their internal programs are considered inadequate, on the request of another State party (country).
  • Expand the power of the WHO DG to declare pandemics and health emergencies, and therefore recommend border closures, interruption and removal of rights to travel and potentially internal ‘lockdown’ requirements and send teams of WHO personnel to countries to investigate outbreaks, irrespective of the findings of the emergency committee and without consent of the country where the instance is recorded.
  • Reduce the usual review period for countries to internally discuss and opt out of such mechanisms to just 6 months (rather than 18 months for the original IHR), and then implement them after a 6-month notice period.
  • Empower Regional Directors, of which there are 6, to declare regional ‘public health emergencies,’ irrespective of a decision by the DG.

These amendments will be discussed and voted on at the World Health Assembly on May 22-28, 2022. They only require a simple majority of countries present to come into law, consistent with Article 60 of the WHO constitution. For clarity, this means countries such as Niue, with 1,300 people, have an equal weight on the voting floor as India, with 1.3 billion people. Countries must then signal intent to opt out of the new amendments within 6 months.

Once approved by the WHA, these measures will become legally binding. There will be heavy pressure applied to governments to comply with the dictates of the WHO DG and the unelected bureaucrats that comprise the organization, and thereby also the external actors who are influential in WHO decision-making processes.

Proposed WHO pandemic ‘treaty’

The WHO proposes a new ‘instrument’ to allow it to manage pandemics, with force of a convention under international law. This has been formally discussed within WHO since early 2021, and a special session of the WHA in November 2021 recommended it go to a review process, with a draft to be presented to the World Health Assembly meeting in Q2 2023.

This proposed treaty would give WHO powers to:

  • Investigate epidemics within countries,
  • Recommend or even require border closures,
  • Potentially recommend travel restrictions on individuals,
  • Impose measures recommended by the WHO which, based on Covid-19 experience, may include ‘lockdowns,’ prevention of employment, disruption of family life and internal travel, and mandated masks and vaccination,
  • Involve non-state actors (e.g., private corporations) in data gathering and predictive modeling to influence and guide pandemic responses; and in implementing, including providing commodities for, the response;
  • Impose censorship through control of, or restrictions on, information the WHO considers to be ‘mis-information’ or ‘dis-information’, which may include criticism of the measures WHO imposes.

Notably, it envisions the setting up of a large entity within WHO to support permanent staff whose purpose is to undertake and enforce the above measures. This sounds very similar to the ‘GERM’ entity proposed recently by Mr Bill Gates, a wealthy US software developer with major pharmaceutical investments, who is the second largest funder of the WHO and one of a number of ‘billionaires’ who have greatly increased personal wealth during the Covid-19 response.

The proposed treaty would prioritize vertical structures and pharmaceutical approaches to pandemics, reflecting approaches by Gavi and CEPI, two organizations set up in the past decade in parallel to the WHO. It would create another bureaucratic structure on pandemics, not answerable directly to any taxpayer base, but imposing further support, reporting and compliance requirements.

Process, acceptance and implementation

These two mechanisms for increasing direct WHO control of pandemics have strong backing from private sector funders of the WHO, and from many national governments, starting with Western governments who adopted Covid draconian measures. To come into practice they must be adopted by the WHA and then be agreed, or ratified, by national governments.

The proposed IHR amendments modify an existing mechanism. A simple majority of States present at the WHA voting against them at the May 2022 meeting would also reject them, but this appears unlikely. To prevent their application, sufficient individual countries will need to signal non-acceptance or reservations after the coming WHA and WHO DG’s notice of adoption, so probably before the end of November 2022.

With regard to the proposed treaty, a two-thirds majority at the 2023 WHA will be required for its adoption, after which it will be subject to national ratification by processes which vary according to national norms and constitutions.

Funding for the large increase in bureaucracy proposed to support both mechanisms will be necessary – this may be partially diverted from other disease areas but will almost certainly require new, regular funding. Other mechanisms in parallel are already being discussed, with the World Bank also proposed as the home for a similar bureaucracy to manage pandemic preparedness, and the G20 mulling their own mechanism.

It is unclear whether these would be tied into the WHO’s proposed treaty and IHR mechanisms or be presented as a ‘rival’ approach. The G20 task force of the WB and WHO suggest a $10.5 billion additional annual budget for pandemic preparedness is required. With such potential financing on offer, and the promise of building powerful institutions around this pandemic preparedness agenda, there is going to be much enthusiasm and momentum, not least from institutional staff and the global health community in general, who will sense lucrative employment and grant opportunities.

While all this depends on money being available, a refusal of countries to fund may not be sufficient to prevent it, as there is considerable private and corporate interest in the treaty and related proposals. The same entities that benefited heavily financially from the Covid-19 response will also stand to benefit from an increased frequency of similar responses.

Whilst pandemics are historically rare, the existence of a large bureaucracy dependent on their declaration and response, coupled with the clear gains to be made by influential funders of the WHO, raise a strong risk that the bar to declaring emergencies, and imposing human rights restrictions on States, will be far lower than before.

Independent States are not however directly subject to the WHO, and adopting these amendments and treaties will not automatically allow the WHO to send teams across borders. Treaties must be ratified according to national processes and constitutions. If accepted by the WHA, it will however be difficult for individual States to avoid compliance unless they are particularly influential on the WHO itself.

International financial agencies, such as the IMF and World Bank, can also exert considerable pressure on non-complying States, potentially tying loans to implementation and commodity purchase as the World Bank has done for the COVID-19 response.

The IHR amendments also allow measures to be taken such as interrupting international travel that can be economically very harmful to small States, irrespective of the State providing permission. Powerful States that are highly influential on the DG election may also in practice be subject to different levels of implementation than smaller ones.

There seem to be at least two feasible scenarios for preventing the adoption of the two new mechanisms.

Firstly, the populations in democratic donor States, who have most to lose in terms of autonomy, sovereignty and human rights and whose taxes will predominantly fund these institutions, can stimulate open debate leading to decisions of national governments to reject the treaty at the WHA, and/or otherwise refuse to ratify.

Secondly, large blocs of countries could refuse to ratify or subsequently comply, making the treaty and IHR amendments unworkable. The latter is conceivable if, for instance, African nations perceive all this as a form of neo-colonialism that needs to be fought in the name of independence.

Some background on pandemic risk, and the WHO.

What is the risk of pandemics?

WHO records 5 pandemics in the past 120 years:

  • The Spanish Flu (1918-19), killed 20-509 million people. Most died due to secondary bacterial infection, as this was before availability of any modern antibiotics.
  • The 1957-58 influenza outbreaks that killed about 1.1 million people each
  • The 1968-69 influenza outbreak that also killed about 1.1 million
  • Swine Flu in 2009-10 killed about 120,000 to 230,000.
  • Lastly, COVID-19 (2020-22) is recorded by WHO as contributing to the death of several million, but most in old age with other severe comorbidities, so actual figures are difficult to assess. As this indicates.

Pandemics have therefore been rare – once per generation. For context, cancer kills many more people each year in Western countries than Covid-19 at its height, tuberculosis kills 1.6 million people every year (much younger than Covid-19) and malaria kills over half a million children annually (barely affected by COVID-19).

However, as pandemics are very loosely defined by WHO, it Is not unreasonable to assume that a large bureaucracy dependent on pandemics to justify its own existence, and heavily invested in surveillance for new strains of virus, will find reason to declare far more pandemics in the future.

Pandemic response

COVID-19 is the first pandemic in which mass lockdowns, including border closures, workplace closures and prolonged school closures, have been used on a large scale. It is worth remembering that 1969 is remembered for the Woodstock music festival more than the ‘Hong Kong flu,’ a pandemic that targeted young people more than Covid-19. Human rights and economic health did not suffer such declines in any of these prior events.

These new approaches used in the Covid-19 response have resulted in wide disruption of supply lines and healthcare access, increases in early marriage / enslavement of women, mass loss of education of children, and increases in current financial inequality and educational (so future) inequality. Many low-income countries have increased debt and undergone recession, which will reduce future life expectancy, while child deaths have increased, including from former priority diseases such as malaria.

What is WHO, and who owns or runs it?

The WHO (the World Health Organization) was set up in the late 1940s, to coordinate health standards and data sharing internationally, including support for the response to pandemics. It is the main health agency of the United Nations Organization (UN). It provides some support for low-income country health systems where local technical expertise is lacking.

It has country offices in most countries, 6 regional offices, and a global office in Geneva. It is a hierarchical organization, with the Director General (DG) at its head. It has a few thousand staff (depending on definition) and a budget of roughly $3.5 billion a year.

The WHO is controlled in theory by the member nations (most UN members, and a couple of others), on a one country-one vote basis through the World Health Assembly, that usually meets annually. As example, India, with 1.3 billion people, has the same power on the voting floor as Nuie, with 1,300 people. The WHA elects the DG through a 4-yearly vote that is often heavily accompanied by lobbying by major countries.

WHO funding was originally nearly all derived from member countries, who contributed to the ‘core’ budget. WHO would then decide on priorities for expenditure, guided by the WHA. In the past 2 decades, there has been a significant change in funding:

  1. A rapid increase in private funding, from individuals and corporations. Some is direct, some indirect through parallel international health organizations (Gavi, Cepi) that are heavily privately funded. The second largest contributor to the WHO budget is now a private couple in the United States heavily invested in the international pharmaceutical sector and in software / digitization services.
  2. The budget has moved from mainly core funding, to mainly ‘directed’ funding, in which the funder specifies the area in which the funding can be used, and sometimes the actual activities to be undertaken. The WHO therefore becomes a conduit for their funds to undertake their intended activities. Both country private funders heavily use this directed approach.

The WHO therefore retains under overall control of an assembly of countries, but day-to-day priorities are increasingly directed by single countries and private interests. Former strong rules on conflict of interest regarding private sector involvement are less externally obvious now, with WHO working more closely with private and corporate sector entities.

Reference documents:

David Bell is a public health physician based in the United States. After working in internal medicine and public health in Australia and the UK, he worked in the World Health Organization (WHO), as Programme Head for malaria and febrile diseases at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, and as Director of Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in Bellevue, USA. He consults in biotech and global health. MBBS, MTH, PhD, FAFPHM, FRCP

May 19, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Twitter Introduces Policy to Prevent Spreading of Misinformation During Crises

Samizdat | May 19, 2022

Twitter announced on Thursday that it has introduced a new global policy to address the spread of misinformation during crisis situations.

“Today, we’re introducing our crisis misinformation policy – a global policy that will guide our efforts to elevate credible, authoritative information, and will help to ensure viral misinformation isn’t amplified or recommended by us during crises,” Twitter said.

The new approach will help to slow the spread of the most visible, misleading content, particularly that which could lead to severe harms, Twitter said.

The social media company explained it may add warning notices to posts, including those that contain: false reporting that mischaracterizes conditions on the ground of a conflict; false allegations regarding use of force or incursions on territorial sovereignty; false allegations of war crimes or mass atrocities against specific populations; and false information regarding international community response, sanctions, defensive actions, or humanitarian operations.

Strong commentary, efforts to debunk or fact check and personal anecdotes or first person accounts will not fall within the new policy’s scope, Twitter also said.

Tweets that violate the policy will be placed behind a warning notice that informs the reader that the material could be false or misleading, Twitter added.

Adding warning notices to highly visible tweets, such as those state-affiliated media or official government accounts, will be a company priority, according to Twitter.

May 19, 2022 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism | | Leave a comment

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