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Iran, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Oman to form joint naval force under China auspices: Report

Press TV – June 2, 2023

A Qatari website has reported that Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman are to form a joint naval force under China’s auspices towards enhancing maritime security in the Persian Gulf.

Al-Jadid carried the report on Friday, saying China had already begun mediating negotiations among Tehran, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi aimed at reinforcing maritime navigation’s safety in the strategic body of water.

Back in March, Beijing successfully mediated talks between Tehran and Riyadh that led to the Persian Gulf littoral states’ signing of a deal enabling the restoration of their diplomatic ties.

According to observers, the Persian Gulf states’ consent to Beijing’s mediation in such sensitive matters serves to indicate China’s growing influence in the region as opposed to Washington’s waning clout.

Since the 1979 victory of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, the Islamic Republic has invariably opposed foreign meddling and presence in the region, asserting that the regional issues have to be addressed by the regional players themselves.

The latest instance of the opposition came last Friday when the commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Navy categorically dismissed the US military’s presence in the Persian Gulf under the pretext of securing the maritime region.

Rear Admiral Alireza Tangsiri said only Iran and other regional countries would ensure the security of the Persian Gulf and there was no need for the US and other countries to be present in the waterway. “If we back down against the enemy, it will definitely dominate us and we have no choice but to stand and resist, which is the path to the victory of our nation,” he said.

UAE quits US-led naval force

The UAE has, meanwhile, announced quitting a United States-led naval force.

On Wednesday, the website of the Emirati foreign ministry said Abu Dhabi had withdrawn from the Joint Maritime Forces that operate in the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf.

The ministry said the Emirates had decided to ditch the naval coalition following an extensive evaluation of its security needs.

Analysts say Abu Dhabi has chosen the withdrawal in line with its ambition to diversify its security relationships.

June 2, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , , , | 1 Comment

Federal Government Funds $4.7 Million Grant — Led by Merck Consultant — to Increase HPV Vaccine Uptake…

… By Improving How Providers ‘Announce’ the Vaccine

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | June 1, 2023

This is the first in a two-part series examining federal funding for behavior modification approaches to increase uptake among teens of the human papillomavirus vaccine.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is funding a scientist who also is a paid consultant for Merck to conduct research on how to increase teen uptake of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, documents obtained by Children’s Health Defense (CHD) via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request revealed.

Merck manufactures Gardasil, the only HPV vaccine available in the U.S.

Documents show that the National Cancer Institute (NCI) at the HHS in 2021 awarded a $4.7 million, five-year grant to the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill.

The grant’s principal investigator, Noel Brewer, Ph.D., a psychologist and professor in the Department of Health Behavior at the UNC Gillings School of Public Health, consults for Merck and is also the recipient of commercial research grants from Merck, Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).

The HHS grant builds on Brewer’s previous industry and HHS-funded research investigating different “research-tested interventions” intended to reshape the behavior of physicians and patients by “improving” the ways providers “announce” the vaccine to potential recipients, in order to get more teens to take the HPV vaccine.

The grant is focused on further developing “Announcement Approach Training,” which involves having providers skip the step of discussing with families in “open-ended conversation” whether or not they want their child vaccinated for HPV and instead “presume” the family wants the vaccine and announce the child will receive it as if it were a routine part of the office visit.

Brewer and others’ previous research has shown this method reduces the time a provider needs to spend talking with their patients and increases vaccine uptake.

Other projects funded by the grant consist of conducting randomized controlled trials to see how best to get clinics and clinicians to implement this approach to increase HPV vaccine uptake, according to the FOIA documents obtained by CHD.

One trial investigates how clinics can rework their “standing orders” — the protocols for all practitioners — to standardize how clinicians talk to their patients, for example, using the announcement approach, or to otherwise change the nature of doctor-patient interactions.

Another trial investigates how financial incentives affect providers’ willingness to strongly recommend the shots. A third trial tests whether training by “trusted messengers” works to better alter provider behavior.

The overall project will compare the effectiveness and cost of the different methods and model them in rural areas, which typically have lower HPV rates.

U.S. government awarded more than 50 grants worth $40 million to increase HPV vaccine uptake

The $4.7 million grant to UNC was by far the largest awarded by the HHS to increase HPV vaccine uptake, however, it was not the only one.

CHD’s search of USAspending.gov identified more than 50 grants totaling more than $40 million awarded by the HHS to universities, healthcare systems and departments of public health to increase HPV vaccine uptake.

Two of the smaller grants came from the U.S. Department of Defense rather than HHS.

All of the grants — awarded since 2009, with most awarded since 2016 — fund projects either to test or to implement different methods to change people’s behaviors at the community, provider and patient level with the goal of getting more young people to take the shot.

Some of the more recent grants also focused on increasing HPV uptake by combating “misinformation” on social media.

This approach to vaccine uptake is part of a larger turn in American healthcare toward applying lessons from behavioral economics, like “nudging” to healthcare.

“Nudging” figured prominently during the COVID-19 pandemic and was heavily utilized by governments and public health officials throughout the world to implement restrictions and countermeasures.

Economist Richard H. Thaler and legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein defined the concept in their bestselling 2008 book — “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness” — as a method that “alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives.”

Thaler and Sunstein presented nudging as a technocratic solution for tricky policy issues involving a perceived need to encourage, in a “voluntary manner,” policies or measures that would otherwise be unpopular.

The strategy made its way into public health long before COVID-19, with Big Pharma, regulatory agencies and doctors applying this behavioral approach to the clinic, trying to “nudge” patients toward desired choices by changing the “choice architecture” they are operating in so that they would choose differently.

Providers directed to ‘presume’ families want the vaccine

Over the past several years, much research has been dedicated to studying how “nudge” strategies can be applied to vaccine uptake, particularly the COVID-19 vaccine.

A study posted in BMJ Global Health in 2021 called for further research into whether methods such as the “Announcement Approach” could effectively “nudge” people to take vaccines.

The documents related to the $4.7 million HHS grant obtained by CHD include detailed proposals for the randomized controlled trials in the “Improving Provider Announcement Communication Training” project, which investigates this approach.

The university webpage shows a total grant of $11.7 million, which appears to include administrative overhead costs.

The broader project is divided into four sub-projects, each led by a different faculty member with Brewer as the lead investigator.

Much of Brewer’s professional work is dedicated to increasing HPV vaccination uptake. He chairs the National HPV Roundtable, which brings together medical associations, nonprofits, health insurance providers and pharmaceutical companies, with funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to raise HPV vaccination rates.

He also advises the World Health Organization, the CDC and other organizations on “vaccine communication.”

Brewer is also a consultant who has served on different paid Merck HPV advisory boards since 2011 and has been a general consultant for the company since 2019.

According to his curriculum vitae, he has given numerous talks at Merck events on how to increase HPV vaccine uptake.

Merck awarded Brewer more than $500,000 in grant funding to study HPV vaccine uptake and he received more than $400,000 from Pfizer to study how trainings might improve physician perceptions and recommendations of the HPV vaccine. He has also received funding from GSK.

He is a member of HHS’s National Vaccine Advisory Committee working group on the HPV vaccine and his website says he was a paid advisor to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

The FOIA documents included support letters from Brewer’s colleagues celebrating how Brewer had “already changed the national landscape for increasing HPV vaccination.”

Brewer and his colleague Melissa Gilkey, Ph.D., associate professor of Health Behavior, developed “Announcement Approach” training specifically for the HPV vaccine and in this project are conducting randomized controlled trials to determine how best to put the approach into practice.

The research premise is that provider recommendations are key to increasing uptake of the HPV vaccine, but that providers either don’t recommend the vaccine — in part because they know parents have doubts about it — or don’t use the most effective method, “presumptive recommendation,” rebranded here as Announcement Approach, to make their recommendation.

A “presumptive recommendation” is made when the provider does not offer the option of not taking the vaccine to the family, thereby limiting the landscape of available choices.

This method directs the provider to act as if the family has already decided to vaccinate their child — to “presume” they want to be vaccinated — rather than opening space for dialogue or conversation around the vaccine.

Brewer et al.’s previous research that found training doctors to give announcements rather than have conversations with their patients, where they might raise more questions, led to higher rates of vaccine uptake.

Brewer’s team found clinics that used the presumptive or announcement approach had a 5.4% increase in uptake and physicians had to spend 40% less time discussing the vaccine with families.

The grant documents provide an example of the announcement approach:

“Announcements should indicate that HPV vaccination is part of routine care …

“We recommend that announcements 1) note the child’s age to establish what follows as part of routine care; 2) say the child is due for several vaccinations (noting the diseases prevented, not the vaccine names); and 3) say that the child will receive vaccines today.

“An example of a presumptive announcement is, ‘Now that Sophia is 12, she is due for 3 vaccines. Today, she’ll get vaccines to prevent meningitis, HPV cancers, and whooping cough.’”

For “hesitant parents” who don’t submit to the HPV vaccination with the initial approach, the provider should “connect and counsel.”

To do this the provider:

“1) connects with the parent by showing empathy and confirming the parent’s main question without reinforcing misinformation; and

“2) counsels the parent using a research-tested message and encourages them to vaccinate today.”

According to the grant proposal, “Messages in the counsel step increase parents’ intentions to vaccinate in our prior randomized experiments (e.g, ‘This vaccine is one of the most studied medications on the market. The HPV vaccine is safe, just like the other vaccines given at this age.’)”

If parents decline same-day vaccination, the team member makes a note in the patient’s chart and addresses HPV vaccination at the next visit.

In an observational study, the “announcement” or presumptive method was associated with an increase in parental vaccine acceptance but also with reduced satisfaction in the clinical experience.

The participatory or conversational format — where providers offer the full range of options to patients and dialogue with them about it —showed the opposite pattern.

HPV vaccine generates profits for Merck and HHS, which funds the grant

Brewer receives research funding from both Merck and HHS/NCI, both of which stand to gain financially from increased HPV vaccine uptake.

Merck — the only producer of HPV vaccines in the U.S. since GSK pulled Cervarix from the U.S. market in 2016 — generates billions annually from Gardasil sales. It reported sales of $4 billion in 2020, despite the challenges of the pandemic.

Sales jumped to $5.7 billion in 2021. And with expanded production and global uptake, Merck anticipates “very strong sequential and year-over-year growth for Gardasil.”

The National Cancer Institute at the NIH developed the technology for the HPV vaccine and licensed it to Merck, which formulated its Gardasil vaccine and ran the clinical trials. The FDA granted Fast Track approval for Gardasil after only a six-month review process and it was licensed to Merck in 2006.

From 2007 through 2019, the HPV vaccine was among the NIH’s top four most commercially successful inventions, an assessment based on the royalties a product produces for the NIH.

The National Cancer Institute, which is housed in the HHS, receives the royalties from the Gardasil vaccine and is the agency funding the UNC study.

The inventors, who work for the NIH, also individually receive up to $150,000 per year for their patentable inventions, depending on how much the NIH receives in royalties.

It is unclear how much NIH receives from the HPV vaccine. A 2020 Government Accountability Office report found that the NIH had generated $2 billion in profits from 34 licensed drugs — with three drugs generating more than $100 million —  it created since 1991 and recommended that NIH ought to increase transparency around this process.

HPV vaccination, which requires multiple doses, was first recommended by the CDC for girls in 2006 and for boys in 2011. The CDC routinely recommends vaccination at ages 11-12 and says it can be started at age 9.

HPV infections may lead to the development of cervical cancer. However, most infections are benign and resolve on their own.

The UNC grant description states the HPV vaccine could prevent 32,100 cancers per year if it were administered at the target rate of 80% of the population.

But the efficacy of the vaccine is disputed.

Studying HPV vaccine efficacy for eliminating cervical cancer is challenging due to the long amount of time between infection and the development of cancer (mean time 23.5 years), lack of adequate informed consent, complexity between HPV infection and cervical cancer and the negative impact of girls’ sexual behavior, which may worsen the risks of cervical cancer.

In 2020, the CDC reported that about 75% of U.S. teens had gotten at least one dose in the two or three-dose HPV series, and about 59% had gotten the whole series — a rate that falls short of its goal of 80% coverage. That number dropped nearly 5% during the pandemic.

It also reported that uptake of the HPV vaccine is lower than that of other routinely recommended vaccines. A new study published May 23 in Pediatrics investigated why parents decide against the HPV vaccine for their children.

The study found that although uptake increased overall between 2010 and 2020, during that time, the number of parents citing “safety or side effects” as a reason for vaccine hesitancy increased by nearly 16% annually.

Since the Gardasil vaccine was introduced in 2006, numerous studies have linked it to debilitating autoimmune disorders, neurological side effects and other complications, prompting many families of injured children to file lawsuits alleging the company knew the vaccine could cause serious side effects, The Defender reported.

Until the COVID-19 vaccine became available, the FDA had received more adverse reaction reports related to Gardasil than any other vaccine in history.

The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program has paid out over $70 million to people making claims regarding Gardasil. Merck now faces more than 80 complaints in federal court alleging that the HPV vaccine caused debilitating autoimmune complications. A judge consolidated 31 of these cases into a single bellwether pool, against Merck’s protest.

But Merck continues to work with national agencies to increase gardasil uptake. Merck’s researchers in March published a study in Pediatrics suggesting evidence shows that moving routine HPV vaccination to ages 9 to 10 may improve vaccination coverage rates.

Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

June 2, 2023 Posted by | Deception | | Leave a comment

YouTube reverses ban on questioning 2020 US election

RT | June 2, 2023

Video platform YouTube has reversed its controversial ban on questioning the validity of the 2020 and other US election results, acknowledging in a Friday blog post that the policy could silence legitimate political speech.

Effective immediately, the platform said, “content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches occurred in the 2020 and other past US presidential elections” will no longer be removed.

Citing “today’s changed landscape,” the Alphabet subsidiary explained that “in the current environment, we find that while removing this content does curb some misinformation, it could also have the unintended effect curtailing political speech without meaningfully reducing the risk of violence or other real-world harm.”

YouTube explained its policies were aimed at two goals – “protecting our community, and providing a home for open discussion and debate” – and that those goals were not always aligned, admitting open debate was “core to a functioning democratic society.”

While the scrapped policy supposedly covered all past US elections, YouTube had appeared to focus its censorship on content questioning the 2020 results, ignoring or even promoting content that suggested the 2016 outcome was the result of Russian interference, especially if it came from establishment media outlets.

The platform acknowledged removing “tens of thousands” of videos due to the now-repealed ban on electoral fraud discussion. However, the blog post did not indicate if any of those videos would be restored or re-evaluated. While YouTube offers users whose content has been removed a chance to appeal the decision, critics claim the process is only for show and rarely if ever results in content being reinstated.

The platform also reminded users that the rest of its “election misinformation” policies still applied, meaning users could not post content designed to mislead voters about when, where, or how to vote or anything that might either discourage someone from voting or encourage someone to interfere with elections.

Freedom of speech has become a critical issue in the 2024 elections, with both Republican frontrunner Donald Trump and leading Republican challenger Ron DeSantis, as well as Democratic contender Robert F. Kennedy Jr., promising to take on Big Tech’s far-reaching censorship powers.

June 2, 2023 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite | | Leave a comment

Enthusiasm for the vaxx falls ever lower & millions of unwanted doses expire

The German press discover that maybe big pharma & their political enablers are not our friends after all

eugyppius: a plague chronicle | June 2, 2023

I know it’s not the repudiation we hoped for, but the widening displeasure over the deeply idiotic and imprudent contracts that the European Union negotiated with Pfizer and BioNTech for Covid-19 vaccine doses says a lot about where the vaccinators find themselves, politically and socially, at this late hour.

That erstwhile pillar of the vaccinator-industrial complex, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, has revealed a markedly reduced enthusiasm for the vaccines and their procurement in the past months. After attacking the lack of transparency surrounding the contract negotiations, they’ve found the energy to deplore all the worthless vaccine that our health ministers have purchased:

In Germany, by the end of March 2023, around 83 million Covid-19 vaccine doses expired and were thrown away by with the federal government alone. Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (SPD) has informed a private session of Bundestag budget committee of these developments …

These figures raise many questions. Did Germany, especially under Lauterbach’s predecessor Jens Spahn (CDU), but also during Lauterbach’s tenure during the fight against the pandemic, order too much vaccine? Could they have avoided these costs, which reach into the billions? Or did the state have no choice, because it was not foreseeable how many people would get vaccinated, and how many injections would be needed for effective protection in the longer run?

What devastating answers all of these questions have.

In any case, the EU and the Federal Republic of Germany have purchased far more vaccine than is needed now. As the Ministry of Health informed the Bundestag, Germany has donated 120 million vaccine doses to other countries. Even after these donated doses left the central warehouse, further doses nevertheless expired …

The Ministry explains that additional doses have expired ““at the various stages” of the supply chain. This refers to doses shipped to wholesalers, pharmacies and doctors’ offices. These parties are in turn responsible for “proper disposal,” the ministry explains. They did not provide figures on how many doses had expired and been destroyed by these wholesalers, pharmacies and medical practices. It is possible that these numbers have not been collected.

In other words: The 83 million figure represents a floor; nobody actually knows or is all that eager to tabulate how many doses have been thrown away.

When asked by the SZ, the Ministry of Health did not say how much the expired and destroyed doses at the federal level cost. Publicly available data nevertheless supports the assumption that the costs to the taxpayer … are in the billions.

And that may not be all.

Through the start of 2023, the federal government had ordered a total of 672 million doses for 13.1 billion Euros, generally via the EU. Each jab therefore costs just on average just under 20 Euros … According to the Ministry of Health, by the start of May, around 192 million doses had been injected in Germany, and some of the deliveries are still outstanding.

More than a year ago, the Berlin-based newspaper Tagesspiegel asked whether Lauterbach was threatened with “billions in damages”. At that time, it was already becoming apparent that vaccine could remain unused. In mid-2022, 3.9 million vaccine doses had expired. By the beginning of 2023, there were already 36.6 million vaccine doses. And now, only five months later, it is already 83 million. By the end of last year, approximately 54 million doses had expired and in the first quarter of 2023, approximately 29 million doses had been destroyed, the ministry informed the Bundestag.

Possibly even more vaccine will have to be destroyed. As of the beginning of May, the federal government still has stores amounting to around 120 million doses. Their future is “fraught with uncertainty” and depends, among other things, on the future course of the pandemic, the Ministry of Health informed the Bundestag. The Federal Government still intends to give “unneeded vaccine” to other countries.

Not a single country anywhere on earth can be found to take this stuff.

To avoid having to destroy more vaccine, the EU has now negotiated a partial cancellation of supply contracts with the pharmaceutical companies BioNTech and Pfizer. A “cancellation fee” is due for this, Lauterbach informed the Bundestag. According to reports, Lauterbach did not give a figure. The cancellation fees for unwanted vaccine is likely to reach costs in Germany alone of hundreds of millions of Euros.

While the details of the deal are officially secret, an outraged Polish health minister revealed several weeks that Pfizer and BioNTech have demanded that EU countries pay 50% of the cost for every previously ordered yet unneeded vaccine dose.

At the end of the article there lurks this foul paragraph:

With early access to safe and effective vaccines, many lives have been saved and millions of people have been protected from serious illness. The economic costs of the pandemic have also been reduced and the “impact on social life has been noticeably mitigated.” The vaccine surplus is a consequence of this strategy. This is how the Ministry of Health justified the bulk purchases in the Bundestag.

We’ve been over this many times at the plague chronicle, but as long as politicians and the press continue to indulge in these hollow excuses, I’ll keep repeating myself: It’s strange indeed that enthusiasm for these SaFE aNd EfFeCtIvE vaccines should have plummeted in precise inverse correlation to public experience with them. You’d almost think that the more the vaccinators were allowed to vaccinate, the more everybody decided the vaccines weren’t for them after all. This is hardly the response you’d expect to such miraculous, life-saving side effect-free products.

A great many journalists, bureaucrats, politicians and ordinary people were complicit in the excesses of the past several years, and as the policies of the pandemic continue to sour, they’ll do anything but talk about it. This more than anything is the reason for the deafening silence surrounding all of these matters. What critique there is will increasingly attach itself to isolated matters, such as school closures, and to specific initiatives in which few participated directly, such as the buying of vaccines. They’ll do everything they can to assign blame in those few areas, where they can’t be blamed themselves.

June 2, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | | 1 Comment

World-Renowned Physician Receives Public Acknowledgement from Accuser Admitting Allegations of Academic Fraud Were Incorrect

FLCCC | May 25, 2023

Washington, D.C. – The source of the false complaint that triggered the nearly year-long investigation into research supporting the use of intravenous Vitamin C to treat medical sepsis has publicly acknowledged his error and expressed regret for questioning the integrity of the study’s lead author, Paul E. Marik, M.D., FCCM, FCCP, founding member of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) and former Chief, Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at Eastern Virginia Medical School.

In March of 2022, Kyle Sheldrick, a physician and Ph.D. candidate in Australia, made a series of unsubstantiated allegations of fraud on social media and to the CHEST Journal, claiming that he was able to determine that study data had been fabricated by applying baseless statistical methods to the 2017 peer-reviewed study led by Dr. Marik titled “Hydrocortisone, Vitamin C, and Thiamine for the Treatment of Severe Sepsis and Septic Shock: A Retrospective Before-After Study.” After receiving the complaint, the CHEST Journal launched a thorough review of the study that lasted almost a year. In April of this year, Dr. Marik received a letter from the journal stating that the investigation found no methodological errors as cited by the allegations.

Today Dr. Sheldrick issued the following statement acknowledging his mistake and accepting the outcome of the investigation:

“On 22 March 2022, I posted a blog post called ‘This scattrd corn.’ This post was a copy of a complaint I filed with the journal CHEST identifying features of a study led by Paul Marik titled ‘Hydrocortisone, Vitamin C, and Thiamine for the Treatment of Severe Sepsis and Septic Shock’ published on 3 February 2017 in CHEST, identifying that I believed them to be signs of fraud, and linked to this on twitter.

Those complaints have since been formally rejected by the journal CHEST, which I consider to be the definitive conclusion to the matter. I realise that this letter was used to imply that Dr. Marik personally acted deceptively, and falsely reported study data, which was not my intention, and this caused him significant hurt and distress. I regret this hurt to Dr Marik. I will inform those who have reported on this complaint that it has been rejected by the journal.

Dr Marik has also indicated to me that some subsequent controlled studies have found some positive outcomes for vitamin C in Sepsis, and I accept this.

This statement is not an endorsement of the use of Vitamin C in sepsis.”

“It was highly unprofessional that Kyle went to such lengths to accuse my colleagues and me publicly of academic fraud,” said Paul E. Marik, M.D., FCCM, FCCP, founding member of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) and former Chief, Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at Eastern Virginia Medical School. “I hope that as he gains more experience as a researcher, he will understand that there are protocols in place for questioning the results of research that prevent harming reputations by making baseless accusations in public.”

The journal’s response to Dr. Marik did cite two minor revisions that do not change the final outcome of the original published study, but simply make it clear that some of the patients selected for the control group were “nonconsecutive” given the nature of hospital logistics and that the 1.5 g every 6 h for 4 days was a “target” dose that might not have been reached in all patients due to clinical considerations.

In a previous statement, Dr. Marik said the following about the revisions from CHEST : “I welcome the two words changed by the journal as they make the description of our methodology clearer and have no impact on the research results. However, this whole process was unnecessary as it raised unneeded concern about a life-saving treatment that we know is effective and used worldwide. I hope patients were not deprived of this vital treatment because of these false allegations.”

The World Health Organization estimates that in 2017 there were 11 million sepsis deaths worldwide, half of these deaths occurred among children.

A link to Dr. Sheldrick’s statement can be found here: https://kylesheldrick.blogspot.com/2023/05/update.html

A copy of the CHEST Journal’s findings can be found here: https://covid19criticalcare.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Marik-Vitamin-C_Editors-Note-and-Ltr-to-Marik-2023-04-03.pdf

The published study can be found here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27940189/

About the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance

The FLCCC Alliance was organized in March 2020 by a group of highly published, world renowned critical care physicians and scholars with the academic support of allied physicians from around the world. FLCCC’s goal is to research and develop lifesaving protocols for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19 in all stages of illness including the I-RECOVER protocols for “Long COVID” and Post Vaccine Syndrome. For more information: www.FLCCC.net

Click here to download this statement.

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June 2, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

WHO Initiative Would ‘Promote Desired Behaviors’ by Surveilling Social Media

By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | May 30, 2023

The World Health Organization (WHO) is proposing a set of recommendations for “social listening surveillance systems” designed to address what it describes as a “health threat” posed by online “misinformation.”

The WHO’s Preparedness and Resilience for Emerging Threats (PRET) initiative claims “misinformation” has resulted in an “infodemic” that poses a threat — even in instances where the information is “accurate.”

PRET has raised eyebrows, at a time when the WHO’s member states are engaged in negotiations on two controversial instruments: the “pandemic treaty” and amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR).

The latest draft of the pandemic treaty contains language on how WHO member states would commit to “social listening.” Under article 18(b), WHO member states would commit to:

“Conduct regular community outreach, social listening, and periodic analysis and consultations with civil society organization and media outlets to identify the prevalence and profiles of misinformation, which contribute to design communications and messaging strategies for the public to counteract misinformation, disinformation and false news, thereby strengthening public trust and promoting adherence to public health and social measures.”

Remarking on PRET’s “social listening” proposals, Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D., author of “Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom” and a former New York University liberal studies professor, told The Defender :

“The WHO’s PRET initiative is part of the UN’s attempt to institute global ‘medical’ tyranny using surveillance, ‘social listening’ and censorship. PRET is the technocratic arm of the WHO’s proposed pandemic treaty, which, if accepted by nation-states, would amount to the surrendering of national and individual sovereignty to this ‘global governance’ body.

“What better way to establish a one-world government than by using so-called global crises that must be addressed by nothing short of ‘global governance’? I remind readers that you cannot comply your way out of tyranny.”

WHO could use artificial intelligence to monitor social media conversations

A WHO document outlining the PRET initiative — “Module 1: Planning for respiratory pathogen pandemics, Version 1.0” — contains a definition of infodemic:

“Infodemic is the overabundance of information — accurate or not — which makes it difficult for individuals to adopt behaviors that will protect their health and the health of their families and communities.

“The infodemic can directly impact health, hamper the implementation of public health countermeasures and undermine trust and social cohesiveness.”

The document recommends that in response to the “infodemic,” countries should “incorporate the latest tools and approaches for shared learning and collective action established during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

According to the WHO document, this can be done if governments “establish and invest in resources for social listening surveillance systems and capacities to identify concerns as well as rumors and misinformation.”

Such resources include “new tools and approaches for social listening … using new technologies such as artificial intelligence to listen to population concerns on social media.”

According to the document:

“To build trust, it’s important to be responsive to needs and concerns, to relay timely information, and to train leaders and HCWs [healthcare workers] in risk communications principles and encourage their application.”

Risk communications “should be tailored to the community of interest, focusing on and prioritizing vulnerable groups,” the WHO said.

“Tailored” communication was a hallmark of public health efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic.

For instance, in November 2021, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Science Foundation and the Social Science Research Council launched the Mercury Project, which aimed “to increase uptake of COVID-19 vaccines and other recommended public health measures by countering mis- and disinformation” — in part by studying “differential impacts across socio-demographic groups.”

Similarly, PRET states that it will “incorporate the latest tools and approaches for shared learning and collective action established during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

These “tools and approaches” could be deployed during “acute respiratory events,” according to the document, which recommends that governments:

“Develop and implement communication and behavior change strategies based on infodemic insights, and test them during acute respiratory events including seasonal influenza.

“This includes implementing infodemic management across sectors, and having a coordinated approach with other actors, including academia, civil society, and international agencies.”

This is not the first time the WHO has addressed the so-called “infodemic.”

A WHO review published Sept. 1, 2022, titled “Infodemics and health misinformation: a systematic review of reviews,” found that “infodemics and misinformation … often negatively impact people’s mental health and increase vaccine hesitancy, and can delay the provision of health care.”

In the review, the WHO concluded that “infodemics” can be addressed by “developing legal policies, creating and promoting awareness campaigns, improving health-related content in mass media and increasing people’s digital and health literacy.”

And a separate, undated WHO document advises the public on how we can “flatten the infodemic curve.”

WHO, Google announce collaboration targeting ‘medical misinformation’

The WHO’s PRET proposals coincided with a new multi-year collaboration agreement with Google for the provision of “credible health-related information to help billions of people around the world respond to emerging and future public health issues.”

The agreement was announced on May 23 by Dr. Karen DeSalvo, Google’s chief health officer, on the company’s blog. She wrote:

“Information is a critical determinant of health. Getting the right information, at the right time can lead to better health outcomes for all. We saw this firsthand with the COVID-19 pandemic when it was difficult for people worldwide to find useful information online.

“We worked with the World Health Organization (WHO) on a range of efforts to help people make informed decisions about their health — from an SOS alert to surfacing locally relevant content about COVID-19 to YouTube policies on medical misinformation.”

One way Google will collaborate with the WHO is through the creation of more “knowledge panels” that will prominently appear in search results for health-related questions on the platform.

“Each day people come to Google Search looking for trustworthy information on various health conditions and symptoms,” DeSalvo wrote. “To help them access trustworthy information our Knowledge Panels cite content from reliable sources covering hundreds of conditions from the common cold to anxiety.”

“Working closely with WHO, we’ll soon expand to cover more conditions such as COPD [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease], hypertension, type 2 diabetes, Mpox, Ebola, depressive disorder, malaria and more,” she added.

Google will make these Knowledge Panels available in several languages, including English, Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish.

DeSalvo’s May 23 post also addressed an ongoing collaboration between Google and the WHO, Open Health Stack (OHS), which “help[s] accelerate the digital transformation of health systems around the world” and “lower[s] the barrier to equitable healthcare.”

Google also awarded the WHO with more than $320 million “in donated Google Search advertising via ad grants” allowing the agency “to publish health topics beyond COVID-19, such as Mpox, mental health, flu, Ebola, and natural disasters.”

Google is slated to provide an additional $50 million in ad grants to the WHO this year.

According to Google, the ad grants to the WHO represent the company’s largest such donation to a single organization.

Separately, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) tweeted on May 22 about the agency’s own efforts at combating purported “misinformation” and “disinformation.”

The tweet contains a 35-second video, which claims “misinformation” travels “six times faster than the facts,” while promoting the FDA’s “Rumor Control” initiative.

A top priority of FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf, “Rumor Control” was launched in August 2022 and joins other agency initiatives to fight “misinformation” and “disinformation.”

“The growing spread of rumors, misinformation and disinformation about science, medicine, and the FDA, is putting patients and consumers at risk,” according to the FDA’s Rumor Control webpage. “We’re here to provide the facts.”

The initiative asks the public to do “three easy things” to “stop rumors from spreading”: “don’t believe the rumors,” “don’t pass them along” and “get health information from trusted sources like the FDA and our government partners.”

“Rumor Control” appears to have been inspired by an initiative developed by the Virality Project, “a coalition of research entities” from six institutions “focused on supporting real-time information exchange between the research community, public health officials, government agencies, civil society organizations, and social media platforms.”

Documents released as part of the “Twitter files” in March revealed that the Virality Project, based out of the Stanford Internet Observatory, also called for the creation of a disinformation board just one day before Biden announced plans to launch his government-run Disinformation Governance Board.

Similar to PRET’s recommendations to target “accurate” information that nevertheless contradicts establishment public health narratives, the Virality Project worked with Twitter and other social media platforms, recommending they “take action even against ‘stories of true vaccine side effects’ and ‘true posts which could fuel hesitancy.’”

These censorship efforts included at least one tweet by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., chairman on leave of Children’s Health Defense.

Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

June 2, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , | Leave a comment

The Ursula von der Leyen Affair

Free West Media | June 2, 2023

After a criminal complaint in Belgium against the President of the European Commission, the so-called SMS-case, now takes a new turn. The judge responsible for the investigation will likely gain access to the secret messages exchanged between Ursula von der Leyen and Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer, at least if they haven’t been deleted.

The agreements on vaccines negotiated via SMS between EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and pharmaceutical giant Pfizer’s CEO Albert Bourla have caused much ink to flow, not least because many legally knowledgeable claim that the EU Commission, which is not elected, does not have the mandate to negotiate in these matters.

Due to this suspicion of negotiations “outside the framework” of the mega-contract for vaccine procurement signed, it would constitute a crime not to present these SMS messages, which are legally considered administrative documents and thus should be recorded. If they have been deleted, President Ursula von der Leyen, as the responsible head of a public authority, must answer in court. The case could reveal the existence of “a corruption pact,” according to French lawyer Diane Protat, but has received very little attention in mainstream media.

Several alternative media have written about the administrative contortions in the case when EU parliament members twice unsuccessfully invited Pfizer’s CEO to come and explain himself before the European Parliament. He accepted the first invitation, but canceled at the last minute and sent a subordinate, Janine Small, instead. When asked directly, she admitted that they had not tested whether the vaccine was effective against transmission but stubbornly refused to disclose any financial terms in the agreement.

Conflicts of interest? Corruption?

Since October 2022, an investigation has been ongoing within the European authorities. Then in December, the BonSens association initiated a procedure at the New York State Court to have the infamous text messages handed over, as they have serious suspicions against the President of the European Commission regarding conflicts of interest or even corruption.

The fact is that no official document precisely describes the official terms from the negotiations of the gigantic third contract for the purchase of Pfizer vaccines, covering 1.8 billion doses, for an amount of more than 70 billion euros.

Something else not reported to any significant extent by mainstream media is that the New York Times sued the European Commission, on the same grounds, to gain access to the text messages on January 25, 2023.

On April 5, 2023, lobbyist Frédéric Baldan filed a new complaint, this time as a criminal case in Belgium, to investigating judge Frenay in Liège. His complaint directly refers to the issue of the third contract for vaccine procurement and the fact that the negotiations were apparently conducted outside the usual framework to negotiate this type of contract, bypassing the steering committee responsible for evaluating the bids. Ursula von der Leyen, however, has no mandate giving her the right to intervene in this type of contract negotiation.

Belgian law has a peculiarity. A public authority operator who arbitrarily violates a constitutional law risks imprisonment (article 151 of the penal code). In this case, it is about the right to allow every citizen access to administrative documents, according to the principle of publicity.

The complaint is thus from a private individual and concerns civil liability for improper exercise of authority, exceeding powers, destruction of public records, illegal bias, and corruption. The complaint, therefore, aims to cover all eventualities.

This case is a real earthquake on the European political scene, which has already been hit by suspicions of corruption against the EU’s Health Commissioner Stella Kyriakidou and the QatarGate scandal.

Chaos

Even though the EU Commission did not want to let citizens, or even EU parliamentarians, shed light on the (expensive) economic conditions for the purchases of vaccines, a legal solution could be found at the state level and its jurisdiction, in this case, Belgium.

Moreover, a dozen European states, including Poland and Bulgaria, are now questioning the purchase price of vaccine doses and are concerned about the obligation to recommend products that, besides widespread doubt about their real effectiveness, are no longer useful since the Covid-19 epidemic phenomenon is over.

In France, 46 million doses remain in the health administration’s warehouse and will go to waste. There are more than 30 million doses in Italy and more than 10 million in Belgium. A real waste. How to support – or how it was possible to support – the idea that even more doses need to be purchased under threat of being sued for non-compliance with a commercial contract … that nobody gets to see?

This situation has handed all the cards to the pharmaceutical industry, primarily to Pfizer, which has grabbed more than three-quarters of the sales contracts. This prompts European Parliament Member Michèle Rivasi, from Europe Ecology-The Greens (EELV), to say:

“It seems as if it is the pharmaceutical companies that have been holding the pen at the EU Commission.”

She has discussed the case in several French media, such as the left-wing newspaper l’Humanité, which has presented the subject on its YouTube channel. The newspaper Valeurs Actuelles brought up the subject in a column by Patricia de Sagazan. The EU news website EURACTIV covered the subject. Sud-Radio also addressed this news thanks to André Bercoff, who left the word to Diane Protat and Frédéric Baldan.

A Catastrophic Silence for Democracy

The subject could quickly go from soap opera to a major legal and political scandal. The President of the EU Commission, who already has a turbulent past with the German justice system from when she was the country’s defense minister, has shown many signs of close friendship with Albert Bourla, not least through her husband, who works in the pharmaceutical field.

The exchanged text messages must be shown to the public to not further discredit the EU institutions, short-circuited by von der Leyen’s wish to handle this matter herself. EU institutions suffer from an apparent worrying structural weakness, namely, being overly exposed to the power behind industrial and financial lobbying groups.

Since the beginning of the “health crisis” in 2020, mainstream media has shown a clear inactivity on these issues. The ethical rules for journalists established in the Munich Declaration of 1971 aim to guarantee citizens objective and factual information about the dangers threatening public affairs and the common interest. Today’s corps of journalists often seems to have forgotten these rules.

This silence is serious for democracy and stability in the political sphere in Europe. While citizens’ mistrust of the media continues to grow in Europe, this situation also damages the image of the EU, and its member states that do not react to the deficiencies in the supranational institutions that now largely govern the countries.

June 2, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | 2 Comments

CIA Vets: FBI Withholds Damning Evidence on Bidens Prior to Presidential Election, Again

By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 01.06.2023

House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer moved to hold FBI Director Christopher Wray in criminal contempt of Congress on Tuesday after the agency refused to provide a subpoenaed document potentially implicating US President Joe Biden.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has refused to provide a form that “describes an alleged criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Biden and a foreign national relating to the exchange of money for policy decisions,” as per James Comer, R-Ky.

According to Larry Johnson, a veteran of the CIA and the State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism, the information in the FD-1023 form would require criminal charges to be filed against the incumbent president.

“It’s just that simple,” Johnson told Sputnik. “I think the evidence is conclusive that [Joe Biden and his son Hunter – Sputnik ] have been involved with bribery and with activities that are taking advantage of Biden’s position in government. It is corruption on a scale that is frankly astonishing. (…) [The FBI is] doing everything they can to try to cover for the president.”

What’s a FD-1023 Form?

Comer and his fellow lawmakers subpoenaed the FBI for the document in question last month. However, the bureau refused to provide it, claiming that a specific Justice Department policy “strictly limits when and how confidential human source information can be provided outside of the FBI.”

On May 30, acting assistant director of the FBI, Christopher Dunham, sent a letter to Comer, downplaying the significance of the document: “Investigative reports, such as an FD-1023, include leads and suspicions, not the conclusions of investigators based on fuller context, including information that may not be available to the confidential source.”

“That document is the record of somebody who is – of a source of an informant,” said Johnson. “That’s all it is, it’s a written account of someone’s testimony. So it is one piece of that. But apparently, it provides very specific facts about what the Bidens did. Joe Biden has become rich while being president. And I find it fascinating that the United States will always want to criticize or make claims about corruption in Russia, for example, when they’re guilty – the people of the United States – the Bidens are guilty of the very thing they accuse the others of.”

The very next day, on May 31, Wray held a phone conversation with Comer and Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and confirmed the existence of the aforementioned FD-1023 form. He further offered to provide the congressmen “an opportunity to review information responsive to the subpoena in a secure manner to accommodate the committee, while protecting the confidentiality and safety of sources,” as per the bureau’s statement.

“While Director Wray — after a month of refusing to even acknowledge that the form existed — has offered to allow us to see the documents in person at FBI headquarters, we have been clear that anything short of producing these documents to the House Oversight Committee is not in compliance with the subpoena,” Comer stated, adding that the Committee is ready to begin contempt of Congress proceedings.

Is the FBI Deliberately Delaying the Process?

Just hours after holding talks with Comer and Grassley, Wray “hopped” on the bureau’s jet and headed to the FBI’s Las Vegas field office to hold a meeting and attend a counterterrorism conference there, according to Just the News, an independent US media outlet founded by American investigative journalist John Solomon. The media outlet remarked that the trip allowed the FBI chief to escape “an increasingly hostile atmosphere” for himself in DC.

The FBI is interested in further delaying the congressional probe prior to the 2024 elections, believes former CIA station chief Philip Giraldi.

“The FBI works for Attorney General Merrick Garland who works for the president,” Giraldi told Sputnik. “The president will be badly damaged politically if the investigation is carried out diligently so it is on a slow schedule with no results out before next year’s election in all probability. Denying material to the House panel means that there will be procedural delays which will slow up the process even more.”

FBI and DoJ Have Record of Shielding Bidens

Sputnik’s interlocutors noted that the unfolding spat between GOP lawmakers and the FBI should be seen in a larger context of the Justice Department and bureau operatives hindering attempts to turn the spotlight on the Bidens’ potential wrongdoing.

“There is hard evidence of income from foreign sources that was not reported for tax purposes,” Giraldi said, referring to the ongoing Hunter Biden tax probe. “Also some evidence that Joe Biden took bribes from foreign governments and/or intelligence agencies to influence certain policies favorable to those governments. Whistleblowers inside the IRS have indicated that the FBI and attorney general have both been deliberately slowing down the investigative process, presumably to protect the president.”

In April, an IRS whistleblower came forward informing the US Congress about apparent violations during the Hunter Biden tax crimes investigation by the DOJ, citing “preferential treatment” and attempts to shield the first son.

He also alleged misleading statements to Congress by Attorney General Merrick Garland related to the probe. After that, the whistleblower’s team was abruptly suspended from the Hunter Biden investigation at the DoJ’s orders, as per IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel. According to the whistleblower, who turned out to be Gary Shapley, a 14-year IRS veteran, the expulsion could be nothing short of “retaliation.”

FBI agents facilitated the suppression of the New York Post’s Hunter “laptop from hell” story in October 2020 as his father, Joe Biden, ran for the presidency, according to Elon Musk’s Twitter Files expose.

In addition, 51 ex-top intelligence officials branded Hunter’s laptop from hell as “Russian disinformation” at the time. As it turned out in April, it was done at the request of then-Biden campaign top operative Antony Blinken, now serving as a secretary of state.

How Could FBI’s Doc Affect Biden’s 2024 Bid?

The unfolding row over the FD-1023 form replicates the circumstances of 2020, when Joe was amidst his presidential campaign.

“If the story will ever develop fully and appear in the mainstream media, which is unlikely, it could easily change the outcome of the 2024 election if Biden runs,” Giraldi suggested.

“I suspect the story will be played down by the media, however, and I would imagine Biden would not run again if he decides that he has been badly damaged.”

For his part, Johnson does not believe that Biden will be able to run.

“I think he will either decide not to run or may be removed from office before his term is out. So, I think there will be evidence coming out of the nature of this corruption that will be impossible to deny,” the former CIA analyst said.

Team Biden and their allies in the FBI and DoJ appear to have been doing “everything they can to try to obstruct justice,” Johnson noted. “That would be another charge that should be filed against them, they’re making sure that they’re not held accountable.”

June 2, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , , | Leave a comment

CIA hacked iPhones of diplomats in Russia – FSB

RT | June 1, 2023

The CIA installed malware on thousands of Apple phones used by Russian citizens and foreign diplomats working in the country, Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) has claimed.

The FSB said on Thursday that a joint operation with the Federal Guard Service (FSO) had “uncover[ed] a surveillance operation by American intelligence agencies, carried out with the use of Apple’s mobile devices.”

An assessment of Russia’s telecom infrastructure revealed “anomalies” in the operations of some iPhones, caused by “a previously unknown malicious program that uses software vulnerabilities provided by the manufacturer,” a statement by the agency read.

Several thousand phones made by Apple were infected with the malware, according to the FSB.

Not only Russian citizens were targeted, but also “foreign phone numbers and subscribers that use SIM cards registered with diplomatic missions and embassies inside Russia, including countries from the NATO bloc and the post-Soviet space, as well Israel, Syria and China,” the agency said.

The discovery is more proof of the close cooperation between Apple and the US intelligence community, the FSB claimed, adding that “the declared policy of ensuring the privacy of personal data of Apple users has nothing to do with reality.”

The FSB also accused Apple of “providing the American intelligence services with a wide range of opportunities to survey any persons of interest to the White House, including their partners in anti-Russian activities, as well as their own citizens.”

In March, the Kommersant newspaper reported that members of the Russian presidential administration had been told to discard their iPhones. According to the paper, the step was taken due to concerns that advanced cyberwarfare tools, such as the Israeli Pegasus software, could allow Apple gadgets to be breached, despite the producer’s claims of their enhanced security features.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to comment on the report, but noted that Russian officials were in any case barred from using smartphones “for work purposes” due to the potential vulnerability of devices.

June 2, 2023 Posted by | Deception | , , | Leave a comment

US Advocacy Group Releases Emails Challenging Biden’s Statements on Son’s Connections

Sputnik – 01.06.2023

US advocacy group America First Legal (AFL) has released a new package of emails that challenge US President Joe Biden’s prior statements that he knew nothing about his son Hunter’s ties with foreign business people.

The emails are dated from December 2009 to June 2010, the group said, adding that they had been provided by the National Archives at its request. They include emails sent by Hunter’s ex-business partner Eric Schwerin to top assistants of Joe Biden, then vice president in Barack Obama’s administration.

“Hunter’s business partner, Eric Schwerin, emailed the Office of the Vice President about a ‘China Lunch’ a couple of months before [former Chinese President Hu Jintao’s] official visit to the United States. Despite Joe Biden’s denial that he was aware of Hunter’s business dealings with China, the National Archives redacted this email because its ‘Release would disclose confidential advice between the President and his advisors, or between such advisors,'” AFL said.

Schwerin purportedly intended to secure an invitation for his colleague to a 2010 State Department dinner with high-ranking Chinese Communist Party officials.

Joe Biden has adamantly denied any knowledge of or involvement in any of his son’s business dealings as the Republicans in Congress are probing him over possible abuse of power.

Other emails indicate that Hunter Biden received confidential information from the vice-president’s office about a state visit to Africa in 2010.

“These records – which are only a small portion of the actual records that the National Archives possess – demonstrate for the American people, yet again, continued evidence of influence peddling and personal enrichment by the Biden family. The full extent has yet to be seen, but with each release, we are painting a fuller picture for the American people of the extent to which the Biden family business was intertwined with the official business of the United States,” America First Legal Vice President and General Counsel Gene Hamilton said.

In September 2020, a report by two US Republican senators revealed Hunter Biden and his associates were involved with foreign individuals in millions of dollars worth of questionable financial transactions. The transactions involved individuals with ties to the Chinese Communist Party and the wife of the former mayor of Moscow.

June 2, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , | Leave a comment

State Department Defends “Disinformation” Grant That Funded Online Blacklists

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | June 1, 2023

The State Department justified its funding of the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), an organization that provides blacklists of certain outlets for the purpose of demonetizing them.

In a letter sent in March, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) criticized the State Department for funding the GDI, and called for an investigation into the $100,000 grant the department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) awarded GDI in 2021. In a response sent last week, the department said it did not regret funding the GDI.

The letter to Rep. Issa, authored by the assistant secretary of the bureau of legislative affairs Naz Durakoglu, stated that reports that the “State Department funding may have been used to fund GDI’s work in the United States” are inaccurate.

The letter continued to state that Issa’s letter “raises several important points concerning free speech and the principles of democracy, both of which are fundamental to the Department’s representation of U.S. foreign policy and promotion of American ideals abroad,” Washington Examiner reported.

Durakoglu argued that the grant “focused on countering foreign disinformation overseas and, consistent with the GEC’s mission, no domestic-focused activities were included in the scope of work.”

“Funding under the award could not be used for any other purpose,” the letter added.

“America’s foreign adversaries and competitors have wielded information manipulation as a tool of statecraft for decades,” Durakoglu wrote. “The comparatively recent proliferation of global information and communications technology accentuates a contemporary national security risk. The Department stands by the work of the GEC and the crucial role it plays in helping to ensure that foreign disinformation operations do not undermine the policies, security, or stability of the United States, its allies, and partners.”

Speaking to the Washington Examiner, Rep. Issa said: “It is disappointing but not surprising that the Biden State Department hasn’t come close to offering a suitable explanation or corrective action for its role in the censorship of individual Americans and established conservative media. Make no mistake: Congress isn’t done holding State accountable.”

The GEC missed a deadline to hand over documents related to the GDI and other groups to the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Congress is also considering whether or not to reauthorize the GEC in 2024. Last September, the State Department’s inspector general said that the GEC had failed to thwart foreign threats and failed to determine how foreign groups spent money provided by the US government.

June 2, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | | Leave a comment

BBC Verify?

By Iain Davis | OffGuardian | May 31, 2023

With great fanfare, the BBC has launched BBC Verify. The state broadcaster’s very own, specialist “disinformation and social media correspondent,” Marianna Spring, announced its arrival live on UK TV.

She explained that the BBC would verify video, fact check and “counter disinformation.” So rest assured, no one needs to think about anything. The BBC will “fact check” everything for us and tell us what “the truth” is.

Apparently, it “really matters” that the BBC acts as the UK government’s official arbiter of truth because, according to Spring, “mistruths” can “cause really serious harm to society.” Marianna has yet to define “harm,” but that doesn’t really matter. The government hasn’t either, despite the fact that it has placed its vague concept of “harm” at the centre of its equally ambiguous Online Safety Bill. Which is proposed state censorship legislation that Marianna is very keen to promote.

Marianna said that we can familiarise ourselves with BBC truth if we are shown the BBC news team’s “workings.” A strange choice of words.

While “workings” means “the way an organisation operates” it also means “a system of holes.” It isn’t clear which definition Marianna was using, although both seem appropriate in reference to BBC news coverage.

Marianna proudly announced that the BBC were “able to look at maps.” This presumably unique BBC capability supposedly enables their intrepid reporters to analyse “war zones.” And find them too, which is handy.

Spring is very concerned about, what she calls, social media “disaster trolls.” She is seemingly referring to people who understand that the UK government is among those that often rely upon false flag terrorist attacks when they want to pass oppressive surveillance legislation or justify their next war.

“Disaster trolls,” she alleges, “cause real world harm” by questioning the often implausible and contradictory accounts of people who claim to have been injured in, what evidently appear to be, false flag terrorist attacks. Marianna hasn’t clarified whether “disaster trolls” are the people who ask questions or the idiots who abuse others online. Te be fair, that distinction is probably moot because Marianna, the BBC and the government clearly want to silence everyone who disagrees with them.

Marianna told the nation that she’s a social media troll. She described the “undercover” accounts that she has “set up” to deceive people on social media. She claimed that these help the BBC news team understand “polarisation online.” Although, the BBC are seemingly causing a fair bit of “polarisation” themselves with their fake troll accounts and endless accusation levelled against anyone who questions the state.

Trolling, Marianna maintains, helps the BBC nail down “just how social media works.” It is a shame they felt the need to create a network of fake accounts to figure this out. They could have just asked my 80-year-old mum. She understands how it works.

Marianna’s said that her online trolling activities are helping her to investigate the “UK’s conspiracy theory movement.” I wish her well, but I fear this is going to be a monumentally difficult task because there is no such thing as the UK’s conspiracy theory movement.

“Conspiracy theory” is just a term the CIA weaponised for their propagandists to help them shut down any debate—about who shot JFK—by sticking the dismissive “conspiracy theorist” label on anyone who dared to question the US government’s official account. It really doesn’t mean anything more than that. Alleged “conspiracy theorists” are just people who question government narratives.

This may go some way to explaining why attempts by the Establishment to lucidly define “conspiracy theories” are frequently absurd. For example, according to the UN, a conspiracy theory is “a belief that events are secretly manipulated behind the scene by powerful forces with negative intent.”

Of course, no one can ever know what a secret is because it’s a “secret.” Typically, the people who get labelled “conspiracy theorists” point toward real evidence that possibly indicates real conspiracies. They only remain “secrets” if you refuse to look at the evidence.

If there are people who believe events can be explained by highlighting things that can’t be known, and there is no evidence that such a “movement” exists in the UK or anywhere else, that would indeed be rather silly.

The UN then adds to its own confusion by stating that a “conspiracy theory” can be identified, in part, because there is evidence that “seems to support the conspiracy theory.” Quite how you find evidence that “seems” to support something that is incomprehensible is mystifying.

However, we do get some contradictory clarification from the academics the UN selected to back up its bizarre contention. In the Conspiracy Theory Handbook , cited by the UN as “evidence,” Professor Stephen Lewandowsky and John Cook PhD, from George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication, stated:

Real conspiracies do exist. [. . .] The U.S. National Security Agency secretly spied on civilian internet users. [. . . ] We know about these conspiracies through internal industry documents, government investigations, or whistleblowers.

So conspiracies do exist! What are the UN rambling on about then? Are they secret or not? We get further clues from the UN’s eminent experts:

Real conspiracies get discovered through conventional thinking—healthy skepticism of official accounts while carefully considering available evidence and being committed to internal consistency.

Begging the question, what is the difference between the evidence that “seems to support the conspiracy theory” and the evidence that “seems” to expose a “real conspiracy”? The answer is, at least, forthcoming:

Conspiracy theories, by contrast, tend to persist for a long time even when there is no decisive evidence for them. [. . .] Typically, conspiracy theories are not supported by evidence that withstands scrutiny.

Ah, I see!

The real conspiracies are exposed by a novel type of evidence called “decisive evidence.” This is different from the evidence that “seems to support the conspiracy theory,” because only it can withstand scrutiny. Although, neither the UN nor its employed academics specify who should scrutinise it.

Perhaps we can now try to construct some sort of sense from, what otherwise appears to be, the UN’s garbled drivel.

The UN and its experts appear to suggest that “real conspiracies,” such as the US government spying on US citizens, are only revealed when “decisive evidence” is uncovered by, for example, US “government investigations.” Unless the evidence is officially acknowledged, or approved by the appointed experts, it is not evidence that stands up to scrutiny.

Right! Got it!

Presumably, we can therefore expect Marianna and the BBC Verify team to scrutinise the evidence offered by those she labels “conspiracy theorists” in order to “debunk” it. This will certainly represent a sea change for the BBC because, to date, they haven’t even reported any of the evidence offered by so-called conspiracy theorists, let alone scrutinised it.

Marianna promises to expose the nonexistent “UK conspiracy theory movement” with her new investigation, “Marianna in Conspiracy Land.” This, she claims, will enable the BBC audience to see how Marianna and her colleagues “piece together the truth.”

I suspect, BBC Verify will prove to be quite illuminating. But not for the reason’s that Marianna and the BBC hope.

June 2, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

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