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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
- 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.
- 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:
- WHO constitution: https://apps.who.int/gb/bd/PDF/bd47/EN/constitution-en.pdf?ua=1
- IHR 2005: https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789241580410
- WHO IHR proposed amendments: https://apps.who.int/gb/ebwha/pdf_files/WHA75/A75_18-en.pdf
- EU and proposed WHO treaty: https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/coronavirus/pandemic-treaty/
- WHO WHA Nov 21 Special Session draft report: https://apps.who.int/gb/wgpr/pdf_files/wgpr5/A_WGPR5_2-en.pdf
- WHO (EURO) influenza pandemic definition: https://www.euro.who.int/en/health-topics/communicable-diseases/influenza/pandemic-influenza
- WHO ‘zero draft’ of proposed pandemic treaty: https://apps.who.int/gb/wgpr/pdf_files/wgpr9/A_WGPR9_3-en.pdf
- Review of WHO pandemic definitions: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3127275/
- Unicef on harms from public health response:
- https://data.unicef.org/covid-19-and-children/
- IFF harms from public health response: https://www.globalfinancingfacility.org/emerging-data-estimates-each-covid-19-death-more-two-women-and-children-have-lost-their-lives-result
- BIS on health impact of economic harms https://www.bis.org/publ/work910.htm
- On G20 and World Bank mechanisms: https://g20.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/G20-FHTF-Financing-Gaps-for-PPR-WHOWB-Feb-10_Final.pdf
- WHO pandemic guidelines (includes previous pandemic list): https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/329438/9789241516839-eng.pdf
- Background on evolution of the WHO: https://www.pandata.org/who-and-covid-19-re-establishing-colonialism-in-public-health/
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
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.
Hamas: Victory in Birzeit elections confirms support for resistance
Palestine Information Center – May 19, 2022
RAMALLAH – The Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, congratulated Birzeit University students, student blocs, and the university administration for the success of this year’s student elections that progressed in a democratic atmosphere on Wednesday.
Hamas said, in a statement, that the elections process represents a source of pride for the student movement and the Palestinian people and a success against Israel’s attempts to disrupt Palestinian democratic life.
Hamas also congratulated the participating student blocs and sent congratulations to the members of the Islamic bloc for their great and worthy victory with the students’ trust to represent them in this great scientific edifice.
It noted that despite Israeli targeting, arrests, persecution and ban on activities, the Islamic bloc managed to decisively win the elections.
This clear victory is another confirmation of the popular rally around the option of resistance, which adheres to the principles and national unity in the face of projects of liquidation and compromising rights and coordination with the occupation, Hamas said.
The Movement called on the various student blocs and the university administration to preserve this democratic atmosphere, work together to serve the students and the educational process, and preserve Birzeit as a model of unity and democracy.
The Islamic bloc “Al-Wafaa Al-Islamiya” won a major victory in the student council elections at Birzeit University in Ramallah, which experts saw as the a victory for the resistance option.
According to the elections results, the Islamic Bloc (Hamas) won 28 seats, the Youth Bloc (Fatah) 18 seats, and the Qutb (Popular Front) 5 seats, while the Student Unity (Democratic Front) and Progressive Student Union (People’s Party) did not win any seats.
UK using Cold War’s black propaganda tactics against Russia
By Lucas Leiroz | May 19, 2022
Once again, the West appears to be operating with an old Cold War mentality against Russia. Documents recently declassified by the British government reveal a series of sabotage practices used by the UK during the bipolar era whose similarities to the current relations with Russia seem evident. In fact, sabotage, fomenting hatred, spreading lies and other common tactics seem like a commonplace part of British foreign policy and the current Special Operation in Ukraine is just another target.
Recently, it was revealed that the British government ran a series of secret “black propaganda” campaigns against enemy countries during the decades of the Cold War. Not only the Soviet Union and Communist China were targets of British intelligence, but also countries in Africa, the Middle East and specific regions of Asia. The tactics included various methods of sabotage, from information warfare to the promotion of racial and terrorist tensions, always aimed at promoting the destabilization of rival nations.
Commenting on the case, expert in intelligence Rory Cormac told The Guardian during an interview: “These releases are among the most important of the past two decades (…) It’s very clear now that the UK engaged in more black propaganda than historians assume and these efforts were more systemic, ambitious and offensive. Despite official denials, [this] went far beyond merely exposing Soviet disinformation (…) The UK did not simply invent material (…), but they definitely intended to deceive audiences in order to get the message across”.
An example of how British praxis worked was the extensive and complex action operated to promote tensions between the Soviet Union and the Islamic community. In the second half of the 1960s, the Information Research Department (IRD) forged at least eleven Soviet state media documents exposing the government’s alleged “anger” at the “waste” of Soviet weapons by Egypt during the 1967 Six-Day War. Later, the same department forged documents supposedly originating from the Muslim Brotherhood accusing Moscow of sabotaging the Egyptian campaign, criticizing the quality of Soviet military material and calling the Russians “filthy-tongued atheists” who saw the Egyptians as “peasants who lived all their lives nursing reactionary Islamic superstitions”.
Last year, The Observer had already revealed that the IRD was directly responsible for the massacre of hundreds of people in Indonesia through the spread of lies in a black propaganda campaign in 1965. At the time, the department financed the preparation of pamphlets allegedly belonging to the PKI, then the largest communist party in the non-communist world, which were actually just British false flags. This encouraged anti-communist militias to promote an unprecedented massacre in the country, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of communist militants and civilians. Now, with the new declassified documents, it is possible to see that this was not an isolated episode, but a regular practice in British intelligence services.
In fact, it seems impossible to analyze this case and not correlate in some way to the current Western campaign against Russia, in which the UK seems to be very involved. In a way, it appears that despite the end of the Cold War, the bipolar mentality has never stopped working in the West. Simply, what was once aimed at the Soviet Union is now aimed at Russia.
This is precisely what political analyst Joe Quinn thinks: “The timing of this declassification of the documents is interesting insomuch as it may serve, for some, as confirmation that the West’s geopolitical war against the Soviet Union never really ended, it just continued as a war against the Russian Federation, but without the justification of fighting against Communism”.
The British media has been one of the most active in spreading anti-Russian narratives, fake news and pro-Kiev propaganda. Although most of the work is operated by the private sector, it is naive to think that there is no state incentive for pro-NATO propaganda. The British state – as well as the US and allied nations – has a very deep interest in creating a psychological warfare scenario, so there is a type of clandestine public-private cooperation between the state departments and these media agencies for their common objective to be achieved.
The special military operation in Ukraine is the main reason why Russia is attacked by Western propaganda today. From accusations of war crimes, false flags (like the tragedy in Bucha) to the absolutely unrealistic “analyses” alleging that Ukraine is “winning” the conflict, we have in all these cases examples of how the British media acts in collusion with the interests of NATO, operating old tactics of misinformation and black propaganda against London’s geopolitical enemies.
In this regard, Adriel Kasonta, a London-based foreign affairs analyst and former chairman of the International Affairs Committee of the Bow Group think tank, believes that currently the main interest of British intelligence is to have a public opinion approving the sending of weapons to Ukraine and believing it is strategic, forging data to make it appear that that Kiev is close to “winning”.
“It aims to mislead the domestic audience by convincing them that the ‘special operation’ is not going according to plan and to persuade them that sending lethal weapons to the front by NATO allies contributes to the alleged victories and successful resistance of the Ukrainian side. It is a psychological game, and nothing persuades the naturally peaceful population to support a war in a distant land [more] than the opponent’s alleged low morale and military losses”, says the analyst.
With that, it seems to be clear that there is indeed a blatant anti-Russian campaign going on which aim is to harm Moscow using old and well-known black propaganda and information war tactics. It is essential that the recently declassified documents are released so that Western public opinion is aware of the weapons used by their governments and media agencies against nations that are not aligned with NATO’s geopolitical plans.
Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.
George W. Bush Inadvertently Condemns “Unjustified and Brutal Invasion of Iraq”
By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | May 19, 2022
Former President George W. Bush endured an awkward moment during a speech when he meant to refer to Ukraine but instead condemned “the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq.”
Whoops.
Bush made the error during a speech where he compared Ukrainian President Zelensky to Winston Churchill.
“The decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean of Ukraine,” said Bush.
Freudian slip, much?
Bush blamed his age for the gaffe, joking, “I’m 75,” but his entire presidency was replete with similar such moments.
Bush’s reference to Russia eliminating political opponents from participating in the electoral process can equally be applied to Ukraine.
President Zelensky recently signed a law banning political opposition parties if they are deemed to be “pro-Russian,” a vague smear that could be applied broadly.
He also nationalized all television networks in the country, freezing out any possibility of dissent.
A YouTuber who criticized Zelensky was also recently detained on an international arrest warrant in Spain and faces possible extradition at the behest of the Ukrainian government.
Last month, footage was released of Associated Press accompanying armed men from the Ukraine Security Service as they kidnapped and arrested dissidents from their own homes.
But yeah, Putin bad!
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In Memoriam
Remembering Those Who Died for Our Government
By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | May 28, 2024
Each Memorial Day, countless Americans recite the standard mantra that has been inculcated within their minds from the first grade of the public (i.e., government) schools to which their parents were forced to send them: American soldiers who died in America’s wars died to protect our freedoms and defend our country.
Each Memorial Day, it is worth reminding ourselves that such is simply not the case. American soldiers who died in those wars died for our government, not to protect our freedoms or our country.
And, yes, our government and our country are two separate and distinct entities, a phenomenon reflected by the Bill of Rights, which expressly protects our country from our government. … continue
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