The Kaiser Family Foundation is a pro-vaccine organization that has an biased polling system aimed at showing satisfaction and benefit of mass vaccination among other family issues. The May 23 through June 12, 2023 poll reveals some shocking new data. A substantial minority of Americans believe the COVID-19 vaccines have caused great harm. Here are the results.
As you can see it is roughly a third of Americans are awake and understand the COVID-19 vaccines have failed, cause great harm, and pose a giant safety risk to Americans. It is also interesting to note a quarter of respondents have been awakened to the link between childhood hyper vaccination and autism spectrum disorder. I wonder what the actual sentiment is on vaccines if Kaiser had asked the questions in a more unbiased manner and did not load up their survey with charged words such as “false” and “misinformation”.
The Journal of the American Medical Associationrecently published a review of alleged ‘misinformation’ about COVID-19 that physicians were responsible for, either on social media and in other news sources.
In the paper, the corresponding author, Dr. Sarah L. Goff, MD PhD, defined misinformation. She surveyed social media platforms and news sources for anything written by other physicians that fits her selected examples of both. She then proposes that physicians guilty of writing what she judges to be misinformation should be “regulated and disciplined”.
Dr. Goff and her co-authors define misinformation as “false, inaccurate or misleading information according to the best evidence available at the time” and disinformation as “having an intentionally malicious purpose”.
Dr. Goff states: “We conservatively classified inaccurate information as misinformation rather than disinformation because the intent of the propagator cannot be objectively assessed.”
Dr. Goff identified four major themes of alleged misinformation. These included: (1) vaccines were unsafe and/or ineffective; (2) masks and/or social distancing did not decrease risk for contracting COVID-19; (3) other medications for prevention or treatment were effective despite not having completed clinical trials or having been FDA approved, and (4) other misinformation.
Dr. Goff includes a brief discussion of vaccine safety and effectiveness and mask effectiveness, but does not attempt to undertake a full review of the published evidence in these areas. Instead, she seems to assume that her readers will agree that any suggestion that vaccines or masks were ineffective or unsafe are self-evidently false.
Dr. Goff states that the American Medical Association has called for disciplinary action for physicians propagating COVID-19 misinformation. She laments the fact that “few physicians appear to have faced disciplinary action” for alleged sins against Covid orthodoxy.
I am not an expert in analysis of published medical research. I don’t work in a School of Public Health like Dr. Goff. I have worked as a licensed physician in England for over 40 years as a family doctor and an occupational physician and I have over 40 years’ experience reading the medical peer review literature. I retired from full time medical practice in 2017. I have a reasonable understanding of English, maths, logic and critical thinking. I don’t pretend to have read all the published research on masks or vaccinations. However, I continue to read leading medical journals on a regular basis.
I understand the concept of truth and how hard it is to establish an absolute truth in science. I understand the enlightenment principles that any ideas can be discussed, that nobody has a veto on ideas and that it is important to doubt and test all of our ideas continually. There is no indication from her writing that Dr. Goff understands how important it is to doubt, question and test the effectiveness and safety of interventions such as vaccines and masks.
From my reading of the peer review literature, for illustration purposes, I identified the following four publications as examples of publications which should raise concerns and questions about COVID-19 vaccines and masks.
In February 2023 a Cochrane review into the effectiveness of masks concluded: “Compared with wearing no mask in the community studies only, wearing a mask may make little to no difference in how many people caught a flu-like illness/Covid-like illness.”
A study from the University of Queensland in September 2022 concluded: “Never in vaccine history have 57 leading scientists and policy experts released a report questioning the safety and efficacy of a vaccine. They not only questioned the safety of the current COVID-19 injections but were calling for an immediate end to all vaccination. Many doctors and scientists around the world have voiced similar misgivings and warned of consequences due to long-term side effects.”
These four publications are examples which give us a legitimate reason to question the use of masks and the Covid vaccines and to look further for evidence. Are we not allowed to raise questions about these issues without being threatened with disciplinary procedures? Not to ask any questions would be lacking in curiosity in the extreme, especially for practising physicians concerned about the safety of their patients and the integrity of their advice. These publications do not prove anything conclusively, but they should not be ignored. Expressing doubt and asking questions about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines and masks is not false, inaccurate or misleading, to use the definition adopted by Dr. Goff. If questions arise in my mind, why don’t similar questions arise in the minds of Dr. Goff and her co-authors? How did Dr. Goff reach such a degree of certainty about the effectiveness of masks and vaccines against COVID-19 that she can classify any statement to the contrary as misinformation worthy of disciplining a colleague? Why does she conclude that a colleague who disagrees with her does not have the right to be heard? Why would she seek to silence those who disagree with her?
Inaccurate information which is not deliberately intended to deceive is simply inaccurate. In science and medicine there are many inaccurate statements made in good faith by researchers who are presenting their data or their theories as accurately and honestly as possible. It is important that all theories and all research data can be published, even when the data or the theory are wrong. Disciplinary action for any statement which turns out to be inaccurate or false would surely suppress a large proportion of all scientific and medical discourse. Is this what Dr. Goff wants?
It could be argued that the examples of misinformation used by Dr. Goff are themselves misinformation. To suggest that anyone who states that the Covid vaccines were unsafe and/or ineffective is guilty of misinformation is to ignore significant evidence which raises questions about the vaccines. To suggest that anyone who states that masks did not decrease risk for contracting COVID-19 is guilty of misinformation is also to ignore evidence to support this view. It could be argued that Dr. Goff is using false, inaccurate or misleading examples of misinformation in her study in order to suppress dissenting views.
Dr. Goff appears to have very little humility. She does not appear to be in any doubt that she and her co-authors are infallible in relation to masks and vaccines. She seems to think she is the ultimate arbiter of truth, and that she is immune from being regulated or disciplined for her views in the way she promotes for others. I would not propose disciplining or applying regulatory sanctions to Dr. Goff or her colleagues if her publication includes false, inaccurate or misleading statements. Instead, I would propose respectful dialogue with her to debate her proposal, offering arguments to the contrary with a view to educating her and myself.
In England, medical doctors are obliged to respect colleagues’ skills and contributions, and to treat colleagues fairly. We must create a working environment in which it is safe to ask questions and raise concerns. I believe in these principles. Failure to adhere to these standards can lead to disciplinary action against medical doctors. I understand that similar professional obligations apply to medical doctors in the United States. Dr. Goff does not appear to respect the skills and contributions of colleagues who disagree with her. She seems to be promoting a working environment in which it is not safe for those who disagree with whatever the orthodoxy within the medical profession is at any one time to ask questions and raise concerns. Does she not realise that this may make it unsafe for her to raise concerns and ask questions in due course?
Dr. Goff acknowledges in her final sentence that “a coordinated response by federal and state governments and the profession that takes free speech carefully into account is needed”. This tiny nod towards free speech is somewhat undermined by her attempts to censor her colleagues’ right to disagree with her. Free speech is nothing if it is not accorded to those with whom we disagree.
Frederick Douglass, the American social reformer said: “To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.” If Dr. Goff persuades those in power to regulate or discipline those who disagree with her, then their right to free speech is violated and our right to hear them is violated. Does Dr. Goff not have a glimmer of doubt about her omniscience? Does she not think there is even a faint possibility that physicians who disagree with her might have something useful to say?
Why do some physicians think that the best response when another physician disagrees with them is to censor their colleague? How could any physicians achieve such unshakeable certainty in their own omniscience? When did they forget the fundamental principles of the enlightenment, that all ideas can be discussed and that nobody has a veto on any ideas? How did the principles of treating colleagues with respect and upholding the free speech of those with whom we disagree become so degraded?
Dr. Goff and her co-authors should be careful what they wish for. They seek to discipline colleagues for daring to disagree with their orthodoxy. If they succeed, the cancel police may be coming for them next.
Dr. Nigel Wilson MRCGP FFOMis a retired consultant occupational physician.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) V-safe website quietly stopped collecting adverse event reports with no reason or explanation. The V-safe website simply states: “Thank you for your participation. Data collection for COVID-19 vaccines concluded on June 30, 2023.” If you go there today, V-safe directs users to the FDA’s VAERS website for adverse event reporting, even though officials continually derided VAERS as “passive” and “unverified.”
VAERS and V-safe are mutually exclusive safety collection databases operated by the FDA and CDC, respectively. VAERS is an older way of collecting safety data where one can fill out a form online, or manually, or by calling a toll-free number, whereas V-safe is a device “app” which requires online registration. Both VAERS and V-safe collect personal information, lot numbers, dates and associated information, but V-safe was an active collection system geared towards a younger app-using demographic.
Does this mean that the CDC believes that the mRNA Covid-19 injections are so safe, there is no need to monitor adverse event reports any longer? What is the argument against continued monitoring, especially since the V-safe website was already up and paid for?
While CDC’s V-safe was stealthily and abruptly turned off, refusing to accept new safety reports, to this very day the CDC continues to urge everyone ages 6 months and older to stay up to date with COVID-19 vaccines and boosters.
As a drug safety expert, I personally can’t cite another example of any agency or manufacturer halting collection of safety data. It seems even worse because mRNA technology is relatively new with long-term manifestations unknown. On top of this, both manufacturers and the FDA refuse to sharethe list of ingredients, such as lipid nanoparticles, which could affect individuals differently and take a long time to manifest clinically.
Safety Data Collection Should Never Stop:
Now, contrast that with the fact that the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration (NHTSA) will still accept a safety report for a 30-year-old Ford Bronco II. Indeed, this is an oddly specific example, but only because I drove this exact vehicle as a family hand-me-down as a student, through my residency, fellowship, for my tenure as a Yale professor on the mean streets of New Haven and even during my years at the FDA as a medical officer /senior medical analyst.
Like mRNA shots, Bronco IIs are still available on the market and people are still using them up to this very day. My Bronco became an intermittent topic of conversation with friends and FDA colleagues. One day, I was informed by a patrolling security guard at the FDA that it was the oldest car on campus.
I didn’t know much about cars (or mRNA technology) back then, but when a fellow FDA-er informed me that my Bronco II had noteworthy safety problems and that the NHTSA still had their eye on this vehicle (rollover accidents were more common and more fatal) I addressed the problem: I got rid of the reliable relic, even though I reallyliked it. NHTSA Is still accepting safety reports three decades later.
Interestingly, the NHTSA link above on my Ford Bronco II only shows: one parts recall, one investigation and 23 complaints, and still features a button in the upper right hand corner for submitting new complaints.
Wikipedia defines an humanitarian crisis or humanitarian disaster as a: “singular event or a series of events that are threatening in terms of health, safety or well-being of a community or large group of people.” Based on VAERS and previous V-safe findings, adverse events from mRNA shots in the USA alone could be considered a humanitarian crisis.
Despite those alarming clinical findings, the CDC has concluded that collecting new safety reports is somehow no longer in the interest of America’s public health. Existing data from the V-safe site showed around 6.5 million adverse events/health impacts out of 10.1 million users, with around 2 million of those people unable to conduct normal activities of daily living or needing medical care, according to a third-party rendering of its findings. In other words, despite mRNA shots still being widely available and the CDC promoting its continued use, it’s “case closed” with regards to collecting new safety reports, under today’s federal public health administration.
Will the CDC opine on the existing data or justify its halting of collecting new safety data? To the best of my knowledge, stopping the collection of public health information doesn’t have a clinical justification or scientific precedence — especially when it comes to an actively marketed product.
In George Orwell’s 1984, characters were told by The Party to “reject the evidence of your eyes and [your] ears.” Now, the CDC isn’t even allowing that evidence to be collected for viewing (and prospective rejecting). It’s a terrible idea for any product, let alone novel mRNA technologies.
Dr. David Gortler, a 2023 Brownstone Fellow, is a pharmacologist, pharmacist, research scientist and a former member of the FDA Senior Executive Leadership Team who served as senior advisor to the FDA Commissioner on matters of: FDA regulatory affairs, drug safety and FDA science policy. He is a former Yale University and Georgetown University didactic professor of pharmacology and biotechnology, with over a decade of academic pedagogy and bench research, as part of his nearly two decades of experience in drug development. He also serves as a scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Scientists are developing a proprietary “early warning system” — powered by CRISPR gene-editing technology — to “detect and characterize deadly pathogens” in Africa “before they spread across the globe,” STAT News reported.
The surveillance system — dubbed Sentinel — was launched with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and others. It uses “participatory” digital health tools developed with funding from the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.
Sabeti is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, Harvard professor and director of the Broad Institute’s Sabeti Lab. Happi is a professor of molecular biology and genomics at Redeemer’s University in Nigeria, an adjunct professor of immunology and infectious diseases at Harvard and director of the African Centre of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases (ACEGID), a genomic research institute focused on Africa, which he co-founded with Sabeti in Nigeria.
Sentinel aims to use rapid testing at “points-of-care” — anywhere tests can be administered, including non-clinical settings — across rural Africa to identify and genetically sequence pathogens. Then researchers will use cloud-based technology to share that information across the public health information sphere.
Global public health researchers can then track and predict “threats” and use that information to rapidly develop new diagnostics and vaccines — what the researchers call a “virtuous cycle,” according to a 2021 paper published in Viruses by the developers.
The Sentinel project was officially launched in 2020 with funding from TED’s Audacious Project, backed by Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife MacKenzie Scott, Open Philanthropy, the Skoll Foundation and the Gates Foundation.
But DARPA, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Wellcome Trust and others funded the development of the CRISPR technology the project will use to detect pathogenic threats.
“They fully intend to use synthetic biology to research, develop and test biological warfare weapons. That’s DARPA’s motivation for funding this.
“It fits in with Predict and its successor, also funded by USAID [U.S. Agency for International Development], which is a front organization for the CIA, to go out into the world and find every exotic disease, fungus, toxin, virus they possibly can and bring them back here and then weaponize them in their BSL3 [biosafety level 3] and BSL4 labs.”
According to Boyle, the Broad Institute is one of the country’s leading DARPA-funded synthetic biology research centers.
Happi and Sabeti officially launched Sentinel in West Africa one month before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. By early February 2020, they were using it to deploy COVID-19 rapid testing and genomic sequencing in hospitals across Sierra Leone, Senegal and Nigeria — before anywhere in the U.S. was doing so, STAT reported.
“Experts” told STAT that Africa is a “hot spot for emerging infectious diseases” because the existing system of disease surveillance is too centralized and top-down.
Happi and Sabeti aim to change that, they said, by making disease surveillance “bottom-up” — getting “everyday Africans” and community frontline workers working as “sentinels” to surveil their friends and communities for diseases.
They said their project can change how disease surveillance works globally. “Everybody in the world should be a sentinel, a sentinel not only for his own immediate community, for his own country — but a sentinel for the globe,” said Happi.
‘Very wealthy people have figured out how they can get extremely rich from this’
The developers said the Sentinel program is needed because viruses can mutate at any time to become pandemic threats, and this system is designed to find them early.
Sabeti described the work in a video tweeted last year by Bill Gates.
Sentinel is designed to identify pathogens at the most localized level possible and then disperse diagnostic and genomic information as quickly as possible to public health officials and researchers designing treatments, vaccines and new tests.
Clinicians or others are meant to administer “point-of-care” tests that use CRISPR gene-editing technology, which turns gene editors into pathogen detectors through different techniques, some of which are still in development.
Sentinel’s first line of intervention is the SHINE (SHERLOCK and HUDSON Integration to Navigate Epidemics) diagnostic tool, easily administered at almost any location. It tests blood or urine samples and reveals the results on a piece of paper without any high-tech equipment.
Happi told STAT that administering the test is like “doing a PCR on a sheet of paper” and that it is so simple that his grandmother could do it in her village.
But SHINE — an improvement on Sabeti’s earlier Specific High-sensitivity Enzymatic Reporter UnLOCKing, or SHERLOCK test — can test for only one pathogen at a time.
If that test fails to detect anything, Sentinel researchers launch their next-level test, CARMEN (Combinatorial Arrayed Reactions for Multiplexed Evaluation of Nucleic acids), which can screen for up to 16 pathogens at a time and must be implemented at a nearby rural hospital.
Research on the CARMEN technique was funded by DARPA, NIH, and Wellcome and published in Nature in 2020.
If CARMEN fails, the sample is “escalated” to a regional genomics hub, where every virus in the sample, “known or unknown,” is sequenced.
Researchers can use those sequences to quickly make new diagnostic tests for the newly identified pathogens, STAT reported.
The data collected through Sentinel is shared across healthcare clinics and public health officials’ proprietary mobile apps and cloud-based reporting systems developed by Dimagi — a Gates Foundation-funded for-profit tech company that targets low-income communities — and Fathom — a for-profit software developer funded by Sabeti labs.
Sabeti filed patents for the technology and co-founded a biotech startup, Sherlock Biosciences, to commercialize these tests for use in the U.S.
Sherlock also has startup funding from the Gates Foundation, Open Philanthropy and a number of other biotech venture capitalist companies.
With funding from DARPA, Battelle National Biodefense Institute, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the NIH and others, the Broad Institute and Princeton University researchers also used SHINE to create a rapid test for COVID-19.
Sabeti sits on the board and serves as a shareholder of the Danaher corporation, which develops research tools determining the causes of disease and identifies new therapies and tests of drugs and vaccines.
Happi also collaborates with the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute and bioengineering firm Ginkgo Bioworks to deploy Ginko’s automation technologies to his lab to sequence genomes.
But Sabeti told STAT that providing people with access to testing is her true priority. And she is on the board of a nonprofit that will work to send the tests her new company makes to low- and middle-income countries “at cost.”
Sentinel’s real contribution, Sabeti said, is its focus on “empowerment.”
Sabeti and Happi are currently field testing SHINE and CARMEN. In the process, they are training scientists in genomic surveillance and collecting hundreds of thousands of genomes.
STAT didn’t specify whether those are virus genomes or people’s genomes, but Boyle said the testing would make it possible to also collect the genomes of African people, which he said is a form of biopiracy.
Other notable collaborators on the 2021 Viruses paper that helped publicly launch Sentinel include Scripps Research Institute virologist Kristian Andersen, Ph.D., co-author of the now infamous Nature “Proximal Origins” paper used to promote the theory that COVID-19 evolved in nature. Andersen’s private communications later revealed he suspected a segment of the SARS-CoV-2 genome may have been engineered in a lab.
Examples of conflicts of interest among the Virus paper’s co-authors also include Anthony Philippakis, M.D., Ph.D., a venture partner at Google Ventures; Jonathan Jackson, CEO of Dimagi; and Robert Garry, Ph.D., Matthew L. Boisen, Ph.D., and Luis M. Branco, Ph.D., who all work for Zalgen Labs, a “biotechnology company developing countermeasures to emerging viruses.”
Garry also co-authored the “Proximal Origins” paper.
Dr. David Bell, a public health physician and biotech consultant in global health, told The Defender the Sentinel program reflected a broader problem with global public health priorities.
“Public health has become a for-profit industry that’s very, very lucrative,” Bell said. As a result, the field no longer works to provide people with better economies, sanitation, nutrition, access to basic medicines and research on major endemic infectious diseases, such as tuberculosis and malaria.
Instead, research funding is diverted to “pandemic preparedness,” diseases that kill relatively few people.
Bell said:
“We’ve got to a point where very wealthy people have figured out how they can get extremely rich from this and they have enough money to completely control the agenda. So now they essentially control the agenda of global health.
“So you don’t hear much about sanitation and nutrition any more because that’s not where the people who are running the agenda can make their money.”
What they’re doing is not “intrinsically bad,” Bell said. “The question is whether it is proportionate to the need or is it a diversion of resources that in doing so will cause a net harm? And that’s a question that people won’t talk about.”
Sabeti, Happi and Broad Institute at forefront of viral hemorrhagic research in Africa for years
Sabeti, Happi and the Broad Institute have also been at the forefront of viral hemorrhagic fever research in Africa, including Lassa virus and Ebola.
Andersen, Garry, Sabeti and Happi all serve on the board of the Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Consortium (VHFC), founded in 2010 with funding from the NIH, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and Tulane University.
Sabeti and Happi began working together in 2008, studying the virus that causes a viral hemorrhagic fever known as Lassa fever, which infects hundreds of thousands — most of whom recover — and kills about 5,000 people globally per year, according to recent estimates. Lassa fever is considered a category A (most dangerous) bioterror threat.
The Viruses paper provides an account of Sabeti and Happi’s work on Lassa. By mapping human genomic variation in West Africa, they found the Lassa virus existed for half a millennia there, but had gone undetected because people had developed genetic resistance to it.
And many people with Lassa were being misdiagnosed because they had nonspecific symptoms.
This work led them to an epiphany moment — “the realization that in many parts of the world, we are largely blind both to the prevalence of known infectious diseases and to the appearance of new threats,” the paper said.
By developing better diagnostic tools for local healthcare workers, the paper concluded, diseases can be detected and better treatments and vaccines and then even better diagnostic tools can be created, “instead of awaiting the next outbreak.”
Lassa virus is a BSL4 pathogen, the paper notes — although in West Africa it is studied at a research facility without that safety level — and it makes a plug for BSL4 research in Africa.
“With increased globalization and an ever-expanding human population, the need for large-scale research initiatives on BSL-4 pathogens remains acute,” it says.
“Further, as only one BSL-4 lab exists in the entire region of West Africa … even today, transnational partnerships are critical to allow ongoing investigation of BSL-4 pathogen samples.”
Their work on Lassa led the researchers to begin developing a broader surveillance model and then to establish ACEGID at Redeemer University with support from Tulane, the NIH and the World Bank.
ACEGID then, according to the article, played a key role during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, which happened just as ACEGID was launched in March of that year.
Happi’s team identified the first case of Ebola in Nigeria and sequenced the genome of the Ebola virus in 2014, it said.
The mainstream press reported that the 2014 Ebola outbreak — which claimed 11,000 lives in West Africa — came from a two-year-old boy in Guinea playing in a bat-infested tree stump.
But U.S. Right to Know reported that independent evidence and phylogenetic analysis cast doubt on that narrative.
Chernoh Bah, an independent journalist and historian from Sierra Leone, reported errors in the established narrative identified through his interviews.
Research by investigative journalist Sam Husseini and virologist Jonathan Latham, Ph.D., built on Bah’s research and pointed to a leak at the U.S. government-supported research laboratory in Kenema, Sierra Leone, where the VHFC was doing research on Ebola and Lassa.
An article co-authored by VHFC’s Sabeti, Happi, Andersen and dozens of others published in Science argued that the Ebola outbreak had a zoonotic origin in Central Africa.
Happi’s lab also sequenced the Lassa virus in a 2018 outbreak.
According to an article in Nature, Happi’s sequencing also provided evidence that the Lassa outbreak had a zoonotic origin, rather than being from a mutation that made the disease more transmissible.
The Viruses paper said the success of ACEGID in addressing the Ebola crisis, along with its work on Lassa, laid the groundwork for Sentinel, launched just a few months before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Given that history, Boyle said:
“I wouldn’t trust anything Sabeti’s doing. And I’d be very skeptical of any claims that are being made [about Sentinel] given the involvement of DARPA, the involvement of Broad and Broad’s previous involvement at that Kenema lab with the outbreak of the Ebola pandemic.”
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.
The World Economic Forum has been on a tear lately! A recent article in the New York Times (paywall-free link) by a senior WEF agenda contributor, Adam Grant, a Wharton management expert and an adviser to Bill Gates, says, “Elections are Bad for Democracy.”
In the United States, any private citizen can publish any opinion on their web page or social network timeline. However, Mr. Grant is not an ordinary private person; he is a WEF contributor who participated in numerous WEF functions and authored many agenda-setting articles. He is also an adviser to Google and Bill Gates.
Far from obscure is the venue that gave him a platform to be heard: The New York Times is the foremost “newspaper of record,” which used to be the most respected publication many years ago.
Who is Adam Grant? The New York Timesforgot to mention that he is a very senior member of the WEF. Here’s his World Economic Forum page:
Adam Grant is a prolific WEF author, with posts too many to list individually.
You Are Too Dumb to Vote, Adam Grant Explains
Officials have been working hard to safeguard elections and assure citizens of their integrity. But if we want public office to have integrity, we might be better off eliminating elections altogether.
If you think that sounds anti-democratic, think again. The ancient Greeks invented democracy, and in Athens many government officials were selected through sortition — a random lottery from a pool of candidates. In the United States, we already use a version of a lottery to select jurors. What if we did the same with mayors, governors, legislators, justices and even presidents?
Mr. Grant advocates “randomly selecting” officials from a “pool of candidates.”
Who forms the pool of candidates? Who is admitted to the “pool”? Mr. Grant is vague on this question, but we can take a guess. The pool would be formed by the no-longer-elected “guardians of our democracy”; only the people acceptable to them would be allowed to be randomly selected.
Indeed, Mr Grant explains that those seeking to enter the “pool” would need to be vetted:
In America, imagine that anyone who wants to enter the pool has to pass a civics test — the same standard as immigrants applying for citizenship.
I am sure those who do not believe the WEF-promoted ideologies would be ineligible for the pool and unable to pass the civics test. We do not want doubters to undermine our democracy, after all! (Note the sarcasm)
If you, my dear reader, wonder who will ensure that “random selection” is truly random, you are not alone!
Mr. Grant is a senior adviser to the Department of Defense, Google, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. So please take him seriously, as do the organizations above who take his advice. He means it.
Just imagine the savings, Grant says:
Switching to sortition would save a lot of money too. The 2020 elections alone cost upward of $14 billion. And if there’s no campaign, there are no special interests offering to help pay for it.
Surely, we can save a lot of money if dirty peons like you and me are not allowed to vote!
The WEF is Serious About Abolishing Voting
Is the above a weird individual opinion only? Not quite!
In this video, Klaus Schwab discusses the idea of using a “prescriptive mode” to form the will of the electorate and do without elections:
The WEF views political systems with competing political parties as “toxic” and discusses “detoxifying politics,” understood as getting rid of party competition:
The “Well-being Alliance,” another organization forming the WEF’s agenda, also suggests going away from “party politics”:
I discussed the Wellbeing Alliance, its Marxian ideology, and its relationship with the WEF here.
The above well-being agenda is already being implemented in eight countries, as discussed in the article above.
These radicals envision a future “free of party politics,” with “detoxified” discourse, and with leaders selected from a pool of WEF-approved candidates. The discourse will be free of undesirable misinformation, even if the unwanted misinformation is true.
The regular peons, like you and me, do not deserve a voice because we are considered “toxic” and incompetent to select our future glorious leaders. The WEF knows better!
Chinese customs authorities announced on Thursday an immediate ban on imports of all seafood from Japan as Tokyo begins a contentious release of treated radioactive wastewater from the stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant into the ocean.
China is Japan’s biggest importer of fish, having purchased $496 million worth in 2022. It has also imported $370 million worth of crustaceans and mollusks – such as crabs and scallops – last year, data tracked by the Japanese statistics office shows.
Apart from Japan, China also purchases seafood from other countries including Ecuador, Russia, and Canada.
China had previously banned food imports from ten Japanese prefectures around the Fukushima plant, while earlier this week Hong Kong announced a ban on seafood imports from those same prefectures.
Earlier this week, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced plans to discharge around 1.3 million metric tons of treated wastewater, equivalent in volume to about 500 Olympic-size swimming pools, from Fukushima.
The Japanese authorities scheduled the discharge of the treated water into the Pacific Ocean for 1pm Tokyo time on Thursday, according to state-owned electricity firm TEPCO, adding that the weather and sea conditions were suitable.
Beijing has blasted the plan as “extremely selfish and irresponsible.” The Chinese customs agency said the suspension of imports was intended to prevent radioactive contamination risks.
The Fukushima nuclear power plant experienced a catastrophic meltdown after a 9.0-magnitude earthquake and subsequent devastating tsunami in 2011. It was the worst nuclear disaster since the 1986 Chernobyl accident.
The Kremlin reported that Ukrainian drones were downed in the Moscow region for a sixth consecutive day. Kiev has launched a series of attacks on Russia as it has failed to retake territory during its Spring counteroffensive.
The Kremlin reports that it downed three Ukrainian drones targeting Moscow on Wednesday. TASS, Russian state media, said that no one in the Moscow region was killed or injured. One building, currently being constructed, was hit by a drone after it was disabled by Russian electronic warfare systems.
“The glazing of the Neva Tower in the Moscow City district was damaged on the 11th, 12th and 13th floors on an area of about 100 square meters after the crash of the downed drone,” TASS reported.
The drones have caused Moscow to shut down traffic at its airports for short windows for three straight days.
Additionally, Ukraine attacked the Belgorod region of Russia, killing three. Belgorod’s governor said a drone was used in the attack. Several Russian civilians have been killed by Ukrainian fire in Belgorod since Kiev decided it would begin targeting Russia.
Earlier this month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced Kiev would increase strikes on Russia. “Gradually, the war is returning to the territory of Russia — to its symbolic centers and military bases,” he said. “And this is an inevitable, natural and absolutely fair process.”
In the months after Russia invaded Ukraine, the White House sought assurances from Kiev that it would not use American weapons to target Russia. However, officials in the Joe Biden administration appear to be less concerned the attacks will risk escalation with Moscow. American weapons have been documented to be used in cross-border raids conducted by Kiev-backed neo-Nazi militias.
In the past, Moscow has said that the Ukrainian attacks on Russia would not be possible without US support. “These attacks would not be possible without the help provided to the Kyiv regime by the US and its NATO allies,” the Russian foreign ministry said. The West is “training drone operators and providing the necessary intelligence to commit such crimes.”
The Kremlin has warned it will take harsh measures in response to the attacks on Moscow. “We regard what happened as yet another use of terrorist methods and intimidation of the civilian population by the military and political leadership of Ukraine,” the Foreign Ministry explained. “The Russian Federation reserves the right to take tough retaliatory measures.”
Russia’s top diplomat, Sergei Lavrov, recently said the greatest danger posed by the war in Ukraine is a direct conflict between Moscow and NATO breaking out. The Russian Foreign Minister said the war would lead to nuclear weapons being used.
The Western push to incorporate Ukraine into NATO can only lead to an escalation of the conflict with Russia, former French President Nicolas Sarkozy has said, expressing doubt that the opposing parties in the stand-off have used all the tools at their disposal to achieve peace.
Speaking to TF1 TV on Wednesday, Sarkozy stressed that he believes Ukraine must remain “neutral” and refrain from joining the EU and NATO.
“This is not the solution. The solution is to discuss, for reasonable people to sit around the table, for us to give Ukraine security guarantees and for us to engage in a discussion to see at least if we can get out of it other than by annihilating either Ukraine or Russia,” he said.
Victory in the conflict can be achieved either by destroying an enemy, or finding a compromise, according to the French president, who called on the West to “stop talking about buying planes, ammunition, tanks.” He added that the international community must “find a solution that preserves the interests of Ukraine,” noting that “Russia won’t go anywhere, with or without [Russian President Vladimir] Putin.”
“My analysis is that the world and Europe are dancing on the edge of a volcano. It can get out of hand at any moment. There have been enough deaths, and it seems to me that the path of diplomacy and discussion has not been used to the end and that it is now appropriate to use it.”
Last week, Sarkozy said that despite the current stand-off, Russia will always be Europe’s neighbor, suggesting that Ukraine “must remain” a bridge between the two.
He also stated that any compromise with Moscow would involve recognizing Crimea as part of Russia. The peninsula voted in a referendum to become part of the country in 2014 following a Western-backed coup in Kiev.
His comments, however, sparked outrage in Kiev, with Mikhail Podoliak, an aide to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, calling the proposal “criminal,” and accusing Sarkozy of complicity in organizing “genocide and war.”
Moscow has repeatedly said that it is open to talks with Kiev. Last year, however, Zelensky signed a decree banning any talks with the current Russian leadership after four former Ukrainian regions overwhelmingly voted in referendums last autumn to join Russia.
A recent journalistic report revealed that the Ukrainian president bought a luxury villa in Egypt in the region of El Gouna, also known as the “city of millionaires”. More than that, evidence indicates that Zelensky used Western money for the purchase, spending in personal luxury a significant part of the amounts he receives from NATO countries.
The data were published by Egyptian investigative journalist Mohammed-Al-Alawi. After in-depth research involving sources familiar with the topic, Mohammed discovered that the Zelensky family acquired a luxury property in Egypt valued at around five million dollars. The place is located in the coastal zone of Egypt, next to the Red Sea, an area famous for having many opulent properties. Not by chance, El Gouna is home to many millionaires interested in having a comfortable place to stay during their non-working time. For example, it is said that next to Zelensky’s villa there is an “estate that belongs to the world-famous Hollywood actress and public figure Angelina Jolie”.
The Egyptian journalist published the documents that prove the purchase of the villa, its price and the contracting parties. Zelensky bought the property through his mother-in-law, Olga Kiyashko, who signed a contract with the Egyptian sellers on May 16, 2023. Analysts who have commented on the case say that the source of the money appears to be none other than the Western financial aid packages that arrive in Kiev, considering the high price of the villa.
Egyptian political scientist Abdulrahman Alabbassy commented on the situation, saying it is “surprising” that Zelensky and his relatives spend fortunes on personal luxuries instead of using Ukraine’s riches for military and humanitarian purposes, considering the time of war. Alabbassy blames Ukrainian corruption for this kind of attitude and reminds how Kiev’s political system is controlled by egocentric officials who prioritize personal gain over care for their own people.
“I am surprised that relatives of top Ukrainian officials began to buy luxury real estate after the start of Ukraine war. I don’t remember anything like this before (…) It is surprising that Ukraine is waging a bloody war with Russia, and relatives of Ukrainian officials are buying up real estate in Egypt instead of donating their riches to the needs of the country. A suspicion is creeping in that Ukrainian bureaucrats, with the help of their relatives, are stealing financial aid to Ukraine from the West. I am quite certain that Zelenskyy’s mother-in–law’s purchase of a villa in El Gouna is the result of corruption and the theft of humanitarian aid to Ukraine. I sincerely sympathize with the Ukrainian people” he said.
In fact, this news just corroborates what has been denounced for a long time about Zelensky’s hypocrisy and his relentless pursuit of luxury and personal benefits. Previously, a case that went viral on the internet and generated popular outrage was the report that the Ukrainian politician had rented his 4 million euros luxury mansion in Italy to a couple of Russian millionaires – while publicly defending the banning of Russians from Europe because of the war. To date, the case has not been fully clarified, having media publications both confirming and denying the news. However, it does not seem to be something surprising for Zelensky, especially considering what happened recently in Egypt.
It is also necessary to remember other selfish attitudes of the Ukrainian president throughout the conflict. For example, in July last year, Zelensky and his wife Olena posed for Vogue magazine at the height of hostilities, showing absolute disrespect for Ukrainian citizens victimized by the conflict. The photos were made in staged scenarios that simulated a battlefield, in a clear attempt to “romanticize” the war to gain the attention of Western readers. At the time, there was a strong criticism and a negative impact on Zelensky’s popularity.
About corruption, it is also possible to say that these attitudes are really expected. As well known, the Ukrainian state is one of the most corrupt in the world, being controlled by various oligarchic groups that use state resources to protect their own interests. This did not change with the arrival of Western military and financial aid. When NATO’s assistance packages arrive in Kiev, they end up in the hands of corrupt politicians who use part of these funds for personal gain. The Zelensky family case is an example of this, but it is expected that many other similar situations will be revealed in the near future.
Western public opinion needs to understand that corruption in Ukraine, widely recognized by mainstream media before the special military operation, will not change just because the country is at war. Corrupts will remain corrupt, in war or peace. In this sense, the more money comes to Kiev with the excuse of “assistance”, the more Zelensky and other politicians and oligarchs will spend these resources on personal luxury.
Lucas Leiroz, journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant.
I’ve been following Jennifer Bilek’s reporting on the Transgender Agenda for the last year.
In my opinion, she is doing the best investigative journalism, in the world, on the top-down nature of this society deforming “input” and “normalization”.
What we don’t understand is the scale of money behind this push, and the individuals controlling this weaponized capital. These are questions that go to the heart of Jennifer’s work. … continue
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