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Clinical Trial Documents Suggest Moderna Skimped on Autopsies, Discounted Serious Injuries — Did FDA Know?

By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 20, 2023

A 13,685-page tranche of documents related to Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials released Tuesday contain details about the deaths of 16 trial participants, the prevalence of severe adverse events (SAEs) and other abnormalities.

The documents, previously submitted by Moderna to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as part of the licensing process for Moderna’s Spikevax COVID-19 vaccine, also exposed an “utter lack of thoroughness” in how the trials were conducted, according to Defending the Republic (DTR), a Dallas-based nonprofit that obtained the documents via a a still-pending Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against Moderna.

The documents, shared with The Defender in advance of their public release, are the first set of “Moderna documents” to be released as part of the lawsuit — with approximately 8,000 more pages expected to follow later this year.

Travis Miller, a Fort Worth-based attorney representing DTR, told The Defender, “These documents include over 13,500 pages relating to serious adverse event listings that  document injuries — such as shingles and Bell’s palsy and other more serious conditions — which we believe may be related to the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine.”

DTR also received documents describing  experiments involving mRNA injections on rats in 2017-2018, prior to the onset of COVID-19. Miller told The Defender these studies revealed fetal abnormalities in pregnant rats.

Dr. Meryl Nass, an internist, biological warfare epidemiologist and member of the Children’s Health Defense scientific advisory committee, said the Moderna clinical trial data bear similarities to the outcomes seen in the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine trials, and raise several questions about safety and liability.

Nass told The Defender :

“Both the preclinical (animal) studies of Moderna and of Pfizer revealed skeletal abnormalities in the offspring of vaccinated mice and rats at higher-than-normal rates and revealed vaccine components travelled throughout the body into all organs.

“Both the Pfizer and Moderna trial data in humans reveal concerning deaths and side effects that were attributed to other causes, but likely were vaccine side effects.”

Nass said “it appears” the FDA did not perform due diligence regarding the clinical trials for each vaccine.

“Did the FDA perform its required regulatory function to oversee the conduct of the trials?” Nass asked. “Or did Operation Warp Speed wave the vaccines through without a proper FDA review of the data?”

Nass asked “who is responsible” if the FDA failed to “perform its regulatory tasks?”

She said the clinical trial data also lead to questions about the liability shield enjoyed by vaccine manufacturers:

“If Moderna (and Pfizer) knew of more problems with the vaccines than they acknowledged, will they have liability under the PREP Act?

“Finally, pilot lots of vaccine (used for the clinical trials of the Pfizer vaccine, and likely the Moderna vaccine) were considerably different than lots made later, using different methods. This was noted by the European Medicines Agency.

“Therefore, do the clinical trial findings even apply to everyone else who received the vaccine later?”

Serious adverse events routinely classified as ‘unrelated’ to vaccine

Four of the six files contained in the documents released Tuesday contained data from the human clinical trials for the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. The documents date from between November 2020 and June 2021.

Miller criticized Moderna’s lack of scientific rigor in determining the causes of the deaths and adverse events, saying that, in several cases, “Individuals who died after receiving the Moderna vaccine were not given an autopsy.”

According to DTR, “The study’s authors indicated that of those 16 deaths, only two autopsies were performed, five of the dead were not autopsied, and the autopsy status of nine of the dead was ‘unknown.’”

In one instance, a 56-year-old woman experienced “sudden death” 182 days after receiving her second dose of the Moderna vaccine. The cause of death was listed as “unknown” and no autopsy was performed.

“It seems they purposely decided not to investigate suspicious deaths in case the Moderna vaccine might be the cause,” DTR stated in its summary.

Yet the deaths “did not stop those running these ‘studies’ from concluding, despite the absence of evidence, that the Moderna vaccine was not related to these deaths,” DTR added.

Several trial participants also developed neurological disorders, DTR said. “One 44-year-old female had ‘left side facial paralysis’ just eight days after the second dose” and “Numerous vaccinated participants saw the onset of shingles less than 10 days after vaccination.”

This was not the full extent of SAEs sustained by trial participants. According to DTR:

“A number of participants experienced: myocardial infarction (heart attack); pulmonary embolism; spontaneous abortion/miscarriage; transient ischemic attack (TIA); and lymphoma.

“Subsequent analyses of reports from the FDA VAERS [Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System] database, the Department of Defense’s DMED [Defense Medical Epidemiological Database], and European regulators showed heightened rates of these illnesses following administration of the Moderna vaccine.”

VAERS has historically been shown to report only 1% of actual vaccine adverse events.

Similar to the Pfizer documents released last year, the Moderna documents indicate SAEs were routinely classified as being “unrelated” to the vaccine. According to DTR:

“… similar to their treatment of deaths post-vaccination, the studies seemed predestined to conclude that these serious adverse events — many of them life-threatening — were not related to the Moderna vaccine. It didn’t matter whether the adverse event occurred within days of vaccination.

“All this creates serious doubt about the safety of the Moderna vaccine and the standards by which it was approved by the FDA,” Miller said.

According to DTR, the documents also contained “troubling” evidence from animal studies.

Referring to the results of one study, DTR stated, “The findings of this study are troubling: the mRNA vaccine altered the skeletal variations of the rat fetuses and the ‘female pregnancy index’ of the vaccinated rats was significantly lower than the control group.”

Other abnormalities noted in this study included an above-average rate of “common skeletal variations consisting of wavy ribs and increase[d] nodules,” a “statistically significant higher” mean number of reproductive cycle lengths and a lower incidence of mating and pregnancy in the mRNA-1273 group rats compared to the control group.

Moderna included an older study, conducted in 2017 and 2018, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, in its application for FDA approval. The study showed similar results, with mRNA found in several organs.

According to DTR, “Testing revealed that ‘mRNA-1647 was detected in all of the analyzed tissues except for kidney[s],’ with elevated levels of mRNA-1647 found in the spleen and eye. Notably, mRNA-1647 was detected in the brain and heart.”

FDA twice denied FOIA requests for release of the Moderna documents

Miller told The Defender that DTR sued Moderna after the FDA “wrongly denied our request for the expedited production of the records submitted by Moderna in support of its Biologics License Application (BLA) for its COVID-19 vaccine ‘Spikevax.’”

The lawsuit was filed June 7, 2022 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas – Dallas Division — the same federal court that previously ordered the release of the FDA documents pertaining to the approval of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. The court rejected the FDA’s proposed release schedule to make those documents public over a period of 75 years.

DTR said it reached an agreement earlier this year with the FDA for the production of approximately 24,000 pages of some of the most important records submitted by Moderna in support of its Biologics License Application.

The agreement, announced March 31, required the FDA to release the first 13,685-page set of documents by July 17, and the remainder by the end of 2023.

The FDA granted full approval of Moderna’s Spikevax on Jan. 31, 2022. On Feb. 3, 2022, DTR filed a FOIA  request with the FDA, “seeking the expedited production of records relating to the FDA’s approval of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine.”

However, the FDA twice rejected DTR’s request — first on Feb. 9, 2022 and again on June 6, 2022 — claiming DTR had not shown “a compelling need for expedited processing” of the documents. DTR sued the FDA the following day.

While the lawsuit is still ongoing, Miller told The Defender it will be “dismissed per agreement by the parties” once the FDA provides the remaining documents.

According to Miller, these documents include:

  • Moderna’s May 28, 2021 original application.
  • Postmarketing reports of herpes zoster.
  • Data related to unsolicited adverse events.
  • Data relating to analysis and efficacy against severe COVID.
  • Information on antibody quantification.
  • Information on postmarketing vaccine effectiveness.

The documents are expected to be released by the end of the year.

Miller told The Defender he hopes the findings in the Moderna documents will “at a minimum, lead to further Congressional oversight of the FDA’s approval process and for accountability within that agency.”

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.

July 21, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

The Free Speech Scare

By Jeffrey A. Tucker | Brownstone Institute | July 21, 2023

It was a strange experience watching the House hearing in which Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was testifying. The topic was censorship and how and to what extent federal government agencies under two administrations muscled social media companies to take down posts, ban users, and throttle content. The majority made its case.

What was strange was the minority reaction throughout. They tried to shut down RFK. They moved to go to executive session so that the public could not hear the proceedings. The effort failed. Then they shouted over his words when they were questioning him. They wildly smeared him and defamed him. They even began with an attempt to block him from speaking at all, and 8 Democrats voted to support that.

This was a hearing on censorship and they were trying to censor him. It only made the point.

It became so awful that RFK was compelled to give a short tutorial on the importance of free speech as an essential right, without which all other rights and freedoms are in jeopardy. Even those words he could barely speak given the rancor in the room. It’s fair to say that free speech, even as a core principle, is in grave trouble. We cannot even get a consensus on the basics.

It seemed to viewers that RFK was the adult in the room. Put other ways, he was the preacher of fidelity in the brothel, the keeper of memory in a room full of amnesiacs, the practitioner of sanity in the sanatorium, or, as Mencken might say, the hurler of a dead cat into the temple.

It was oddly strange to hear the voice of wise statesmen in that hothouse culture of infantile corruption: it reminded the public just how far things have fallen. Notably, it was he and not the people who wanted him gagged who was citing scientific papers.

The protests against his statements were shrill and shocking. They moved quickly from “Censorship didn’t happen” to “It was necessary and wonderful” to “We need more of it.” Reporting on the spectacle, the New York Times said these are “thorny questions”: “Is misinformation protected by the First Amendment? When is it appropriate for the federal government to seek to tamp down the spread of falsehoods?”

These are not thorny questions. The real issue concerns who is to be the arbiter of truth?

Such attacks on free speech do have precedent in American history. We have already discussed the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 which led to a complete political upheaval that swept Thomas Jefferson into the White House. There were two additional bouts of censorship folly in the 20th century. Both followed great wars and an explosion in government size and reach.

The first came with the Red Scare (1917-1020) following the Great War (WWI). The Bolshevik Revolution and political instability in Europe led to a wild bout of political paranoia in the US that the communists, anarchists, and labor movement were plotting a takeover of the US government. The result was an imposition of censorship along with strict laws concerning political loyalty.

The Espionage Act of 1917 was one result. It is still in force and being deployed today, most recently against former President Trump. Many states passed censorship laws. The feds deported many people suspected of sedition and treason. Suspected communists were hauled in front of Congress and grilled.

The second bout occurred after the Second World War with the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) and the Army-McCarthy hearings that led to blacklists and media smears of every sort. The result was a chilling of free speech across American industry that hit media particularly hard. That incident later became legendary due to the exaggerations and disregard for the First Amendment.

How does the Covid-era censorship fit into this historical context? At Brownstone, we’ve compared the wild Covid response to a wartime footing that caused as much trauma on the homeland as previous world wars.

Three years of research, documents, and reporting have established that the lockdowns and all that followed were not directed by public health authorities. They were the veneer for the national security state, which took charge in the month of February 2020 and deployed the full takeover of both government and society in mid-March. This is one reason that it’s been so difficult getting information on how and why all of this happened to us: it’s been mostly classified under the guise of national security.

In other words, this was war and the nation was ruled for a time (and maybe still is) by what amounts to quasi-martial law. Indeed, it felt like that. No one knew for sure who was in charge and who was making all these wild decisions for our lives and work. It was never clear what the penalties would be for noncompliance. The rules and edicts seemed arbitrary, having no real connection to the goal; indeed no one really knew what the goal was besides more and more control. There was no real exit strategy or end game.

As with the two previous bouts of censorship in the last century, there commenced a closure of public debate. It began almost immediately as the lockdowns edict were issued. They  tightened over the months and years. Elites sought to plug every leak in the official narrative through every means possible. They invaded every space. Those they could not get to (like Parler) were simply unplugged. Amazon rejected books. YouTube deleted millions of posts. Twitter was brutal, while once-friendly Facebook became the enforcer of regime propaganda.

The hunt for dissenters took strange forms. Those who held gatherings were shamed. People who did not socially distance were called disease spreaders. Walking outside without a mask one day, a man shouted out to me in anger that “masks are socially recommended.” I kept turning that phrase around in my mind because it made no sense. The mask, no matter how obviously ineffective, was imposed as a tactic of humiliation and an exclusionary measure that targeted the incredulous. It was also a symbol: stop talking because your voice does not matter. Your speech will be muffled.

The vaccine of course came next: deployed as a tool to purge the military, public sector, academia, and the corporate world. The moment the New York Times reported that vaccine uptake was lower in states that supported Trump, the Biden administration had its talking points and agenda. The shot would be deployed to purge. Indeed, five cities briefly segregated themselves to exclude the unvaccinated from public spaces. The continued spread of the virus itself was blamed on the noncompliant.

Those who decried the trajectory could hardly find a voice much less assemble a social network. The idea was to make us all feel isolated even if we might have been the overwhelming majority. We just could not tell either way.

War and censorship go together because it is wartime that allows ruling elites to declare that ideas alone are dangerous to the goal of defeating the enemy. “Loose lips sink ships” is a clever phrase but it applies across the board in wartime. The goal is always to whip up the public in a frenzy of hate against the foreign enemy (“The Kaiser!”) and ferret out the rebels, the traitors, the subversives, and promoters of unrest. There is a reason that the protestors on January 6 were called “insurrectionists.” It is because it happened in wartime.

The war, however, was of domestic origin and targeted at Americans themselves. That’s why the precedent of 20th century censorship holds in this case. The war on Covid was in many ways an action of the national security state, something akin to a military operation prompted and administered by intelligence services in close cooperation with the administrative state. And they want to make the protocols that governed us over these years permanent. Already, European governments are issuing stay-at-home recommendations for the heat.

If you had told me that this was the essence of what was happening in 2020 or 2021, I would have rolled my eyes in disbelief. But all evidence Brownstone has gathered since then has shown exactly that. In this case, the censorship was a predictable part of the mix. The Red Scare mutated a century later to become the virus scare in which the real pathogen they tried to kill was your willingness to think for yourself.

July 21, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | 1 Comment

Deny, Deflect, Defend: The Censors’ Strategy on Display

Brownstone Institute | July 20, 2023

Despite the uproar surrounding the case, Judge Terry Doughty’s order in Missouri v. Biden was straightforward. It prohibited government actors from colluding with social media companies to censor “content containing protected free speech.”

In other words, the defendants – including the White House, the CDC, and the Department of Justice – must obey the Constitution they swore to uphold by adhering to the First Amendment. The censorship regime responded with familiar doublethink: denying the censorship exists while arguing that it must continue.

On Tuesday, the court held a hearing to consider whether Judge Doughty’s order should be reinstated. The oral arguments revealed the government’s three-part strategy: deny, deflect, and defend. Its lawyers denied the established facts, deflected from the controversy, and defended its actions through outlandish justifications.

In doing so, they demonstrated the censorship apparatus’s lack of remorse for stripping Americans of their constitutional liberties. Even worse, they insist that the totalitarian operations must continue.

  1. Deny: Blame the Facts

At the hearing, government defendants maintained that plaintiffs have manufactured the case. Like their allies in the media, they argued that allegations of censorship were nothing more than “an assortment of out-of-context quotes and select portions of documents that distort the record to build a narrative that the bare facts simply do not support.”

The censorship is nonexistent, they insist. It is a “thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory,” in the words of Larry Tribe.

Unlike issues of legal interpretation, this is a factual matter. Either government actors colluded with Big Tech to suppress Americans’ free speech rights or they did not. Discovery revealed extensive documentation proving that they did, and the defendants make no effort to explain how Judge Doughty’s 155-page order detailing dozens of violations of the First Amendment is merely “an assortment of out-of-context quotes.”

Journalists including Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and Alex Berenson have detailed the “censorship industrial complex,” the entangled web of government agencies, NGOs, and private-public partnerships that seek to control the free flow of information. But reviewing that series of connections and collusions is unnecessary – the defendants’ recorded statements contradict their denial.

“Thank you for the ongoing collaboration,” one bureaucrat wrote after a US Government “industry meeting” with Big Tech companies in October 2020.

White House Advisor Rob Flaherty took a different tack in his demands to Twitter: “Please remove this account immediately.” The company complied within an hour. “Are you guys fucking serious?” he wrote to company officials after they failed to censor critics of the Covid vaccine. “I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today.” His boss was similarly direct regarding posts from RFK, Jr. “Hey Folks-Wanted to flag the below tweet and am wondering if we can get moving on the process of having it removed ASAP.”

There is no need to recreate Judge Doughty’s 155-page opinion, but the denial of the censorship regime is facially absurd. Alex Berenson’s case, the revelations of the Twitter files, and the undisputed facts of Missouri v. Biden refute the defendant’s premise.

  1. Deflect: Blame the Russians

Rather than address the case’s inconvenient facts, government lawyers quickly pivoted to their second tactic: deflection. They avoided the case and Judge Doughty’s ruling in favor of a hypothetical narrative.

At one point, they defended government agencies’ right to issue health advisories that say “the vaccines work or smoking is dangerous.” They argued, “There’s nothing unlawful about the government’s use of the bully pulpit.” That reasoning was uncontroversial, but it was not responsive to Judge Doughty’s order.

Under Doughty’s ruling, the White House can denounce journalists, deliver press briefings, publish on social media, enjoy the bully pulpit, and take advantage of the friendly media environment; it just can’t encourage private companies to censor constitutionally protected speech.

The defense conflates free speech with control over information to deflect attention from the censorship at issue. The tactic is not limited to the government’s powers under the order.

During the hearing, the judge asked the defense attorneys whether saying “the COVID vaccine does not work” is constitutionally protected free speech. “That speech itself could be protected,” the attorney responded at one point. After repeatedly refusing to concede that the First Amendment protects political opinions that deviate from President Biden’s agenda, he resorted to Russian fear-mongering.

“Let’s say it was spoken by a covert Russian operative, that would not be protected by free speech,” he told the judge. Like the issue of the government’s “use of the bully pulpit,” restricting Russian operatives’ speech is unrelated to Judge Doughty’s order.

The attorney’s refusal to defend basic First Amendment liberties was telling. The defense instinctively changed the issue from free speech to national security, relying on an oft-used fear tactic to subvert the First Amendment.

These deflections deliberately obfuscated the purpose of the hearings. Defendants implied the plaintiffs sought to ban anti-smoking PSAs and fund Kremlin media campaigns. Like their strategy of denial, the goal was to avoid discussion of their extensive censorship operations.

  1. Defend: Blame the Virus

When the government was forced to address the case, it resorted to claiming that Covid justified the abolition of constitutional liberties. The pandemic-made-us-censor argument continued the pervasive Doublethink. Eradicating democratic norms was necessary to protect democracy, they reasoned. Previously, the Biden Administration told the court that reversing the order was necessary “to prevent grave harm to the American people and our democratic processes.”

Defendants argued that the evidence of the case vindicates the government actors. The attorneys said “It shows, in the face of urgent crises, a once-in-a-generation pandemic and bipartisan findings of foreign interference with U.S. elections, the government responsibly exercised its prerogative to speak on matters of public concern.”

They continued, “It promoted accurate information to protect the public and our democracy from these threats. And it used the bully pulpit to call on various sectors of society, including social media companies, to make efforts to reduce the spread of misinformation.”

Demonstrating no remorse, they remain proud of their efforts to usurp the First Amendment because of their self-professed noble aims. They expect this defense to evade judicial scrutiny.

When confronted with past censorship – including CISA’s “switchboarding” leading up to the 2020 election – defendants reasoned that prior conduct was not pertinent to the case because plaintiffs could not prove it will happen again.

They described the Department of Homeland Security’s unconstitutional censorship campaigns as “occurring long in the past.” They argued that health officials’ emails working to silence opponents should be disregarded because they were sent “more than two and a half years ago.”

The censorship apparatus is asking the courts to trust them to act responsibly despite repeatedly demonstrating its indifference, or perhaps disdain, toward the First Amendment.

While the government’s denials and deflections are insulting to the citizens they purport to represent, we must remain focused on their aim: they appealed Doughty’s order because they oppose constitutional restraints on their control of information.

We would hope that requiring the government to obey the Constitution would be uncontroversial; now, it may signify whether the rule of law still stands in the United States.

July 21, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

RFK Jr. Pleads with Fellow Democrats for More Civility and Less Censorship

By Dan Hart | The Washington Stand | July 20, 2023

A fiery hearing held Thursday by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the “Weaponization of the Federal Government” unexpectedly became an opportunity for Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to reflect on civility and the seminal importance of free speech in the wake of Democratic committee members accusing him of being racist and anti-Semitic.

In his opening statement, Kennedy announced that he would be setting aside his prepared remarks so that he could address the accusations of racism and anti-Semitism leveled at him by ranking member Rep. Stacey Plaskett (D-V.I.), Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schulz (D-Fla.), and others. Kennedy’s testimony ended up becoming an impassioned plea for Americans of all political persuasions to become more empathetic of each other and to have greater respect for the free speech protections enshrined in the Constitution.

“Debate — congenial, respectful debate — is the fertilizer, it’s the water, it’s the sunlight for our democracy,” he said, after noting that his speech in April announcing his Democratic 2024 presidential bid was deplatformed by YouTube. “We need to be talking to each other.”

Kennedy then referred to a letter signed by 102 of his fellow Democrats in Congress that attempted to get him barred from testifying at the hearing because of his supposed “anti-Semitism,” noting that “this itself is evidence of the problem that this hearing was convened to address. This is an attempt to censor a censorship hearing.”

“Censorship is antithetical to our [Democratic] party,” Kennedy continued. “It was appalling to my father, to my uncle [John F. Kennedy], to FDR, Harry Truman, Thomas Jefferson. … [Opposition to censorship] sets us apart from all the other forms of government. We need to be able to talk. The First Amendment was not written for easy speech. It was written for the speech that nobody likes you for.”

He went on to observe that the Biden administration invented the word “malinformation” to censor him and others. “There was no misinformation on my Instagram account. Everything I put on that account was cited and sourced by peer-reviewed publications or government databases. … I was removed for something they called ‘malinformation.’ Malinformation is information that is true but is inconvenient to the government, that they don’t want people to hear. That’s antithetical to the values of our country.”

Kennedy further explained that after he announced his candidacy for the presidency, it was harder for the administration and social media platforms to censor him. “So now I’m subject to this new form of censorship which is called ‘targeted propaganda.’ … I am being censored here … through smears, through misinterpretations of what I’ve said, through lies, through association, which is a tactic that we all thought had been discredited and dispensed with after the Army-McCarthy hearings in the 1950s. But those same weapons are now being deployed against me to silence me.”

Kennedy then launched into a fervent appeal for the Democratic Party to turn away from polarization, censorship, and demonization.

“This toxic polarization is destroying our country today. How do we deal with that? This kind of division is more dangerous for our country than any time since the American Civil War. … Every Democrat on this committee believes we need to end that polarization. Do you think you can do that by censoring people? I’m telling you: you cannot. That only aggravates and amplifies the problem. We need to start being kind to each other. We need to start being respectful to each other. We need to start restoring the comity to this chamber and to the rest of America. It has to start here.”

After noting that his uncle, former Senator Ted Kennedy, was able to pass a record amount of legislation by reaching across the aisle, Kennedy discussed the cordial relationship between Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and former Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich.

“There are no two people in the country who feel more differently about American politics than these two people, and yet they are friends,” he observed. “Dennis attended his children’s basketball games, attended his daughter’s wedding. This is how we need to start treating each other in this country. We have to stop trying to destroy each other, to marginalize, to vilify, to gaslight each other. We have to find that place inside of ourselves of light, of empathy, of compassion. And above all, we need to elevate the Constitution of the United States which was written for hard times. That has to be the premier compass for all of our activities.”

Immediately after Kennedy finished his statement, Wasserman Schultz moved to halt the hearing, claiming that his past statements on race violated the committee rules. Her motion was voted down. Later in the hearing, Wasserman Schultz refused to allow Kennedy to fully respond to her direct questioning of him regarding his reference to an NIH-funded study that suggested that the coronavirus may have been engineered to target particular ethnicities. Instead of allowing Kennedy to provide context for what he said, Wasserman Schultz repeatedly interrupted his attempted response by stating “reclaiming my time” over and over again.

Later in the hearing, Kennedy issued a stern warning about where government censorship of the citizenry can lead.

“A government that can censor its critics has license for every atrocity,” he underscored. “It is the beginning of totalitarianism. There’s never been a time in history when we look back, and the guys who were censoring people were the good guys. All of us grew up reading Arthur Koestler, Robert Heinlein, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and they were all saying the same thing: once you start censoring, you’re on your way to dystopia and totalitarianism.”

July 21, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | | 1 Comment

Ireland’s public broadcaster – undeclared earnings bad, endorsing The Great Reset good?

By Gavin O’Reilly | OffGuardian | July 17, 2023

Over the past several weeks, Ireland has been rocked by a scandal related to the significant undeclared earnings of Ryan Tubridy, the most prominent presenter on the public broadcaster of the 26-County State, RTÉ, and the long-time host of its flagship talk show, The Late Late Show, until his departure earlier this year – prior to the revelations related to his salary becoming public knowledge.

In response, Director General of RTÉ Dee Forbes tendered her resignation, and both Tubridy and his agent Noel Kelly have been brought before a government tribunal to account for the undeclared earnings, something that has received significant media coverage across Ireland, including OJ Simpson-style live television coverage of the proceedings.

What has been noticeable however is how this extensive media attention lies in stark contrast to the virtually non-existent mainstream media coverage of RTÉ’s endorsement of the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset initiative over the past three years, intended to usher in a totalitarian global corporate dictatorship, where technology is used to stifle and censor debate.

From the outset of the ‘Covid Pandemic’ in March 2020, Ireland, like numerous other countries, introduced stringent lockdowns under the guise of preventing the spread of an alleged virus. In reality, the forced closure of vast swathes of society served the purpose of making it virtually impossible for smaller businesses to operate, thus creating a greater dependence on corporate outlets such as Amazon.

As a result, the global lockdowns saw the greatest upwards transfer of wealth from the working and middle-classes in history, with corporate elements receiving upwards of $1tn in profit.

With Taoiseach Leo Varadkar being a WEF ‘Young Global Leader’, RTÉ was fully complicit in endorsing the ‘Pandemic’ narrative, WEF-linked scientist Luke O’Neill being a regular guest on The Late Late Show under Ryan Tubridy in order to further its promotion.

The public broadcaster would also condemn Irish anti-lockdown protests as being ‘organised by the far-right’ in lock-step with similar mainstream media descriptions being ascribed to protests in New Zealand, France and Canada – each country also being under the respective rule of WEF ‘Young Global Leaders’, Jacinda Ardern, Emmanuel Macron and Justin Trudeau.

What would be perhaps the most sinister aspect of RTÉ’s two-year promotion of the ‘Pandemic’ narrative however, was the use of children to promote uptake of the ‘Covid’ Vaccine during the 2020 edition of The Late Late Toy Show, a seasonal edition of the programme used to showcase that Christmas’s latest toy selection, one that is traditionally very popular amongst families with young children.

Indeed, Ryan Tubridy himself would later double down on his promotion of the vaccine by infamously using his radio platform to encourage listeners to disinvite guests from weddings who had not been vaccinated, his incendiary remarks coming amidst a time when access to bars, restaurants, hairdressers and gyms in the southern Irish state, was forbidden to those who had not yet received a ‘Covid’ jab and the resulting digital QR code that would subsequently be placed on their smartphone.

This enforced segregation, in Ireland and further afield, served as a dry-run for the introduction of mandatory digital ID, a key part of the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ that the WEF envisages will come about as a result of the Great Reset, with the ultimate goal being a cashless society. One where the corporate-government alliance has full control over its citizen’s financial transactions, and can easily impose sanctions against those it deems to be dissidents.

Indeed, this very situation would play out during last year’s Freedom Convoy in Canada, when Justin Trudeau would use emergency legislation to freeze the bank accounts of Truckers protesting against his decision to mandate that truck drivers re-entering Canada from the US had to be vaccinated. A truly dystopian move, and one that could be far more easily implemented in a society with no physical cash.

RTÉ’s two-year endorsement of the introduction of such a totalitarian society has come in for little criticism since the sudden collapse of the ‘Pandemic’ narrative last January however, the undeclared earnings of its chief propagandist being a far more newsworthy item it would seem.

Gavin O’Reilly is an Irish Republican activist from Dublin, Ireland, with a strong interest in the effects of British and US Imperialism; he was a writer for the American Herald Tribune from January 2018 up until their seizure by the FBI in 2021, with his work also appearing on The Duran, Al-Masdar, MintPress News, Global Research and SouthFront. He can be reached through Twitter and Facebook and supported on Patreon.

July 21, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

Israeli squatters occupy Greek Orthodox Church in Jerusalem

MEMO | July 21, 2023

Two Israeli settlers stormed the Orthodox Church complex in the Mount Zion area of occupied Jerusalem, laid blankets on the ground and announced that they would remain there.

A video shared on TikTok yesterday morning showed the two settlers sitting on the church grounds as they spread items they brought with them.

When a church official asked them to leave the settlers started shouting insults, obscene and racist slurs towards him, telling him to “get out” of the grounds, and claiming that “Mount Zion belongs to the Jewish people”, adding that every minute the church remains standing is considered “looting”.

The Orthodox Church has been battling settler associations supported by the Israeli government which claim the land the church is situated on belongs to Jews.

Staff at the church said the settlers were armed and had frightened personnel.

After hearing about the settler invasion, locals gathered outside the church to defend it.

The Israeli authorities and settlers have, in recent years, intensified their attacks against Christian churches and property in occupied Jerusalem in an effort to displace Christians, reduce their numbers and steal their property.

July 21, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | , , | 2 Comments

Washington sanctions 14 Iraqi banks in new anti-Iran ‘crackdown’

The Cradle | July 20, 2023

The US Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York have barred 14 Iraqi banks from conducting transactions in US dollars as part of a “sweeping crackdown” to stop Iran and other sanctioned nations from acquiring the greenback, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on 19 July.

US officials say the new sanctions were issued after discovering “information” showing the banks “engaged in money laundering and fraudulent transactions, some of which may have involved sanctioned individuals and raised concerns that Iran could benefit.”

“We have strong reason to suspect that at least some of these laundered funds could end up going to benefit either designated individuals or individuals who could be designated,” a senior US official told the WSJ.

The banks targeted by the punitive measures are small institutions reportedly “heavily involved” in US dollar transactions.

According to Iraq’s Shafaq News, the targeted banks include the Islamic Advisor for Investment and Finance, the Islamic Qartas for Investment and Finance, Al Mustashar Islamic Bank, Elaf Bank, Erbil Bank, the International Islamic Bank, Trans-Iraq Bank, Mosul Bank, Al-Rajeh Bank, Sumer Commercial Bank, Trust International Islamic Bank, the World Islamic Bank, and Zain Iraq Islamic Bank.

The sanctions came only one day after the US State Department issued a new 120-day sanctions waiver to allow Baghdad to deposit payments for Iranian natural gas into non-Iraqi banks in response to criticism that the White House is responsible for recent power cuts at the height of Iraq’s blistering hot summer.

Since 2003, all Iraqi oil revenues have been paid into an account with the US Federal Reserve. Although Iraqis formed a sovereign government after the US invasion and occupation of their state, Iraq is still restricted from opening accounts for its oil earnings outside the US.

Given its dominance of the global financial system, Washington can control all funds of Iraq’s Central Bank through threats or sanctions, even though these funds are not deposited exclusively in US banks. Furthermore, Iraq’s oil funds, which in 2022 amounted to more than $90 billion, remain in one single account in New York Fed – the institution that two years ago unilaterally blocked Afghanistan from accessing its foreign reserves, plunging the nation into an unparalleled crisis.

Last November, the US Treasury cut off four Iraqi banks from access to dollars and imposed tight controls on wire transfers, sending the economy reeling.

To negate the effect of these unilateral measures, Baghdad has been looking to move trade away from the greenback and, in May, banned the use of the US dollar for both personal and business transactions.

Earlier this month, the commercial advisor to the Iranian embassy in Iraq, Abd al-Amir Rabihawi, revealed that Baghdad proposed that the two nations switch trade payments to the Iraqi dinar to combat US economic coercion.

July 21, 2023 Posted by | Economics, Wars for Israel | , , | 2 Comments

Lockheed Martin Predicts Strong Profits as Global Instability Rises

By Kyle Anzalone | The Libertarian Institute | July 20, 2023

Lockheed Martin believes global instability is driving demand and sees an increase in annual profits. Washington’s proxy war in Ukraine has caused an increase in arms spending among NATO members, boosting weapons makers’ stock prices.

On Tuesday, Lockheed raised its annual profit and sales outlook on strong demand for military equipment. After making the announcement, the company’s stock price increased by one percent. Reuters reports, “[Lockheed] expects full-year net sales to be between $66.25 billion and $66.75 billion, up from its earlier forecast of $65 billion to $66 billion.”

The billions in profit are driven by sales of big-ticket systems like the F-35. However, Lockheed has struggled to produce F-35s that can perform its promised abilities. In May, the government found the planes’ engines have a serious problem dealing with heat. “The F-35’s engine lacks the ability to properly manage the heat generated by the aircraft’s systems,” POGO reported. “That increases the engine’s wear, and auditors now estimate the extra maintenance will add $38 billion to the program’s life-cycle costs.”

The arms maker has additionally experienced a boost in demand for smaller systems, like the Javelin anti-tank missile. The White House has shipped thousands of Javelin systems to Kiev since Joe Biden took office.

As well as predicting future success, Lockheed announced it beat expectations regarding quarterly sales. According to Reuters, “Quarterly net sales rose 8.1% to $16.69 billion, beating expectations of $15.92 billion.”

Last year, Ian Bond, director of foreign policy at the Centre for European Reform, described the surge in the market for weapons as the highest since the Cold War. “This is certainly the biggest increase in defense spending in Europe since the end of the Cold War,” he said.

Prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Lockheed’s stock price traded below $340 a share, the price increased to over $450 within a few months. On Thursday, Lockheed’s stock was valued at $456 per sale.

July 21, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | | 1 Comment

Italy Ruffled By German Health Minister’s Wild Claim: “Climate Change Destroying Southern Europe”

By P Gosselin | No Tricks Zone | July 21, 2023

Germany’s radical, fear-porn health minister, Karl Lauterbach, has once again stirred controversy with another of his wild doomsday exaggerations.

Italian minister of tourism unamused

Nius.de reports how Italy is “angry with the German health minister” who has been spending his summer vacation in the Italian Tuscany. Since the end of Corona and the start of summer, Lauterbach has made extreme heat Germany’s number one health issue and has been busily hyping Europe’s regular summer heat as some sort of threat to humanity.

“No future”

On his most recent escapade, Lauterbach tweeted of the once popular summer holiday destinations of Italy: “Arrived in Bologna Italy today, now it’s off to Tuscany. The heat wave is spectacular here. If things continue like this, these holiday destinations will have no future in the long term. Climate change is destroying southern Europe. An era is coming to an end.”

Tourism Minister Daniela Santanchè took issue with Lauterbach’s outlandish tweet: “In any case, we are sure that Germans will appreciate Italian holidays more and more,” adding: “I thank the German Health Minister for choosing Italy as a destination, which has always been the preferred holiday destination of his compatriots. And of course we look forward to welcoming him again in the future.”

Lauterbach not using “objective data”

Giuseppe Ciminnisi, president of the Fiavet tourism association, accused Mr. Lauterbach of misrepresenting the weather and climate data, telling Germany’s FAZ he should analyze the issue “on the basis of objective data in order to substantiate his opinion.”

It turns out that Italian hot weather is exactly what warm weather deprived Germans are looking for. Nius.de comments:  “According to Ciminnisi, Italy is ‘overcrowded’ with tourists this year. According to forecasts by the polling company ‘Demoskopika’, 68 million tourists are expected in Italy this summer, more than 35 million of them from abroad – that would be a new record.”

Bologna summer temperature is normal

German energy expert Prof Fritz Vahrenholt reacted to Lauterbach’s claims in the German talk round panel “stimmt”: “That’s really terrible because we know that on the day he landed there, it was basically 30°C and the week that followed it didn’t get over 31°C. That, by the way, is usual in Bologna. In July in Bologna the average high temperature over the last 30 years has been 32°C. That means instead he could have said that we are seeing pleasant temperatures, not quite as hot as usual. But, he has to spread fear among the people.”

The heat crisis seems to be solely in Karl Lauterbach’s mind. Vahrenholt added that currently 15 million Germans are now headed to southern Europe for their summer holidays this year.

Lauterbach is among them. Can 15 million Germans be wrong about that?

July 21, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

UK intelligence ‘freelancers’ helped Ukraine target Crimean Bridge

RT | July 21, 2023

Ukraine’s drone attack on the Kerch Bridge was most likely planned by former British military intelligence agents who signed a contract with Kiev in 2022, the independent outlet Grayzone has reported citing leaked documents.

A “cabal of British military-intelligence freelancers” led by Chris Donnelly has worked with the Odessa office of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) since April last year, Grayzone said in a report published Wednesday evening. The outlet had published leaked documents proving their partnership in October 2022, after the first attack on the Crimean Bridge.

“A review of leaked files previously revealed by The Grayzone provides a solid basis for again blaming Donnelly’s cabal,” the outlet noted in reference to Monday’s drone attack that killed two civilians and orphaned a 14-year-old girl.

Donnelly is described as “a senior intelligence operative and former high ranking NATO advisor.” He is allegedly using a “transnational nexus” involving companies such as Prevail Partners and Thomas in Winslow, to manage “London’s contribution to the proxy war at arm’s length.”

The two companies signed a “technical support” agreement with the Odessa branch of the SBU in April 2022, according to Grayzone, which included the use of surveillance drones to “monitor coastline and Russian movement” and access to satellite imagery to assist military and black operations.

A “geospatial intelligence” specialist at Prevail provided the SBU with a presentation titled “Kerch Bridge info pack,” which laid out various plans to blow up the bridge built in 2018 to connect Crimea to the Krasnodar Region on the Russian mainland.

“One speculative plot involved detonating a vessel containing ammonia nitrate directly under the bridge,” according to Grayzone. The proposal “approvingly cited as an example to emulate” the August 2020 explosion in Beirut, which killed at least 214 people and devastated the Lebanese capital.

According to Grayzone, the British advisers have also provided Kiev with assistance in targeting alleged “Russian collaborators” in territories under Ukraine’s control. Anton Gerashchenko, an advisor to the Ukrainian Interior Ministry, boasted to Western media in October 2022 that intelligence services were “shooting them like pigs.”

July 21, 2023 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

In the abyss of the vaccine-injured, there’s no one to catch you

By Anonymous | TCW Defending Freedom | January 20, 2023

Prior to my vaccine injury I’d had short-lived dalliances with The Fear. For instance when I found a lump in my breast I called my GP surgery and they arranged a same-day appointment. The GP I saw was very kind. He confirmed that I did indeed have a lump, that he would refer me for an urgent appointment, and that I would be seen very quickly, so to try not to worry. He took it very seriously and I felt safe that the NHS would do whatever was needed to help me.

After a few nerve-racking days of waiting, my referral came through for the same week and I had a scan, and was told during my appointment that the lump was a cyst. Phew!

In the weird twilight zone between finding the lump and being told it was benign, the fear of dying reared its ugly head, but it was only for a short window, so I managed to keep it at bay by focusing on the next step in the reassuringly proactive clinical pathway.

Since my vaccine injury, fear of dying has become a more regular feature of my life. It’s always waiting in the wings, ready to pounce when I go downhill, or new research shows more information about the havoc that the spike protein can wreak, or I have terrifying symptoms (the heart symptoms are particularly frightening and I have thought I was a goner more than once).

I can’t hold the fear at bay for a short time until I get test results, like when I found the lump, because there are no tests to alleviate my fears. There is no ‘two-week wait’; in fact there is no clinical pathway for vaccine injury. There are no specialists keen to support me to get to the bottom of my complex multi-system issues (more than 50 symptoms) and find a way to cure me; there is no one and nothing to reassure me that it will be ok.

The medical safety net of our health service that has caught me so many times throughout my life is not in place now that I am vaccine-injured.

My experience has been the opposite of feeling safe. I have been gaslit, lied to, shouted at abusively. Some people don’t believe/acknowledge that vaccine injury is a phenomenon. And the caring specialists are limited in how much they can help because it’s novel: the research and equipment are not in place yet for them to test, diagnose and treat me. I’ve lost trust in medication, after all Big Pharma is the reason I got injured, and their unwillingness to acknowledge vaccine injury is the reason we’ve suffered so much abuse and continue to struggle to get help. There is no one, and nothing, in place to catch me when I fall.

So in this abyss that is being vaccine-injured, I’ve learned to co-exist with the fear. Instead of keeping it at bay, whenever I am strong enough, I face up to it. I have written letters to my husband and son, updated my will, and told my closest friends that I love them. I joined a wonderful group of other vaccine-injured, and I research ways to help myself. I acknowledge that we all die some time, and I allow myself to be scared. I’ve learned that I’m not scared for me, even though I love my life, especially the people; I am scared for my son who needs his mum.

I also feel angry. For the way we have been knowingly abandoned to fend for ourselves, and for the abuse we receive from both the pro- and anti-vaxxers (we don’t please either camp! Anti think we’re covidiots and pro think we’re liars, and both can be quick to tell us!)

But also, when I’m not too foggy, I try to take more notice, to feel more, to cherish and be grateful more, to be kinder, to appreciate the few wonderful specialists who care to do what little they can to understand our issues more, to empathise with other injured, to recognise the kind souls who empathise with us, and I now see the world in colours and detail that I never saw before. It has also helped me to realise what really matters to me; put things in perspective. On the better days, I can see these things as a gift; at these times the fear doesn’t have control of me.

My son recently told me he’s scared I’m going to die from my injury – he asked me outright. I was honest as always. I said ‘Everyone dies at some point; some know for a long time that they’re ill, and some die suddenly. I don’t know when that time will be for me, but I can promise you that I am doing absolutely everything I can to get better, and I always will, so I can be with you as long as possible (he’s young enough to still want to be with his mum lol). And while we are together let’s always try to make the best of it, have the most fun we can!’

Take that, The Fear.

For anyone similarly affected, the support group UK CV Family https://www.ukcvfamily.org/about works hard to help and be a voice for the Covid Vaccine injured

July 21, 2023 Posted by | Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

CDC ISSUES NEW “CHESTFEEDING” GUIDANCE

The Highwire with Del Bigtree | July 13, 2023

As new CDC director Dr. Mandy Cohen takes the helm of the agency, the topic of ‘chestfeeding’ has hit the media as guidelines from the CDC now recommend off-label use of drugs to enable men to breastfeed.

July 21, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | | 1 Comment