US High-Altitude Balloons Repeatedly Flew Over China, Chinese Foreign Ministry Says
Sputnik – 15.02.2023
BEIJING – The United States must stop misleading the international community and accept the fact that US high-altitude balloons have violated China’s airspace on multiple occasions since last year, including over Xinjiang and Tibet, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday.
Last week, the US military shot down four unidentified aircraft in its airspace, including what it claimed to be a Chinese surveillance balloon, despite Beijing’s insistence that it was a civilian aircraft carrying out science research. On Tuesday, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said US high-altitude balloons had violated Chinese airspace at least 10 times since last year, a statement US National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson rejected as false.
“We have already pointed out that since last year, more specifically since last May, the US has released multiple high-altitude balloons from its territory, which continue to circle the globe. They have made at least 10 unauthorized entries into Chinese airspace, including above Xinjiang and Tibet,” Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin told a briefing.
Wang said China repeatedly provided the US with explanations as to why its balloon mistakenly went off course due to a contingency, whereas the US never provided explanations on its own balloons’ illegal entry into Chinese airspace.
“The US must provide explanations to China and the international community, profoundly rethink its actions, and stop libeling and attacking China, as well as stop misleading the American people and the international community. China reserves the right to a further adequate response,” the spokesman said.
The spokesman contrasted China’s “calm and professional” reaction to breaches of its airspace by US balloons with that of the US military, which he considers excessive.
Western countries urge citizens to leave Russia and Belarus
By Lucas Leiroz | February 15, 2023
Recently, the US Embassy in Moscow urged Russia-based Americans to leave the country as soon as possible. In the same vein, US residents outside of Russia were discouraged from traveling to the country. Washington’s close allies, such as Canada and France, also joined the measure and issued notes recommending that their citizens leave Russia and Belarus.
The US diplomatic delegation in Moscow published a document on Feb. 12 advising Americans to leave Russia or avoid arriving there. According to diplomats, it is possible that Americans will suffer some kind of hostility in Russian territory due to the escalation of the conflict in Ukraine – and Washington’s support for Kiev’s side. The Embassy stated that the ability of the American government to help citizens in Russian territory is extremely limited, which is why their stay in the Eurasian country would not be safe.
“Do not travel to Russia due to… the potential for harassment and the singling out of US citizens for detention by Russian government security officials, the arbitrary enforcement of local law, limited flights into and out of Russia, the embassy’s limited ability to assist US citizens in Russia, and the possibility of terrorism”, the Embassy’s document says, adding that “The US government’s ability to provide routine or emergency services to US citizens in Russia is severely limited, particularly in areas far from the US Embassy in Moscow, due to Russian government limitations on travel for embassy personnel and staffing, and the ongoing suspension of operations, including consular services, at US consulates”.
Following the decision of American diplomats, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Canada also joined the provocation. In a declaration, the country’s authorities said that Canadians should leave Russia while commercial flights are “still available”, suggesting that transport blockade measures will begin to be implemented soon. In the same sense, referring to Canadians unable to leave Russia, it was advised that they maintain a “low profile”, avoiding exposure.
“If you are in Russia, you should leave while commercial means are still available (…) [But] If you remain in Russia, maintain a low profile”, the statement says.
On the 13th, France also adopted similar guidelines, emphasizing, however, the need for its natives to leave Belarus. According to the French authorities, the geographical proximity of Belarus to the conflict zone and the close political partnership between Minsk and Moscow pose dangers to the stay of French people in the country. Therefore, they are encouraged to leave as quickly as possible, preferably via the routes of Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland – which are considered “safe” territories due to their ties to NATO.
“Amid the Russian army offensive in Ukraine and the closure of Belarus’ airspace, we strongly advise you to refrain from visiting Belarus (…) [If you are in Belarus now, we advise you] to leave the country immediately by motor transport across the borders with Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland”, the statement says.
In fact, this is not the first time this has happened. Western countries have repeatedly encouraged their natives to leave Russia and Belarus since the beginning of the special military operation. The last occasion on which the American Embassy in Moscow issued this type of alert was on September 28, 2022. As far as Belarus is concerned, on October 4, Washington’s State Department published an alert for Americans to leave the country. In practice, advising nationals of western states to leave Russia and Belarus has become commonplace.
The main arguments for these guidelines have been the alleged “dangers” of harassment, arbitrary detention, terrorism and other types of violence by Russians and Belarusians against foreigners, but there have also been rumors of forced mobilization of non-Russians with permanent residence in the country. Both arguments are absolutely unsubstantiated, considering that there is no report of violence against foreigners in Russia or Belarus, and that troops’ mobilization is obviously restricted to Russian nationals – in addition to taking place voluntarily, not by force.
However, it should be noted that this type of measure also sounds like a threat and blackmail for the residents of the countries in which the alerts are being issued. By discovering that foreigners are being evacuated, some Russians, Belarussians may believe that their country is really threatened, about to be bombed, which tends to generate collective panic.
In this sense, there seems to be a psychological operation that works in two directions: 1- against Western citizens, who begin to believe that they are actually threatened by Russia and Belarus and start to support NATO’s actions; 2- against Russians and Belarusians themselves, who see this type of action as a suggestion that an open war can start at any moment, with the enemy side trying to save their nationals from possible attacks.
The evident reality, however, contradicts any provocative narrative from the West. There is no danger for western people in Russia or Belarus. And the risks of escalation to an open conflict, although they exist, are not so high, depending exclusively on Western goodwill for them to cease to exist, considering that NATO is the provoking side. The best thing for the West to do is stop trying to generate collective panic among ordinary people and engage in effective proposals to reach a peaceful resolution to the conflict.
Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.
WHO Abandons Covid Origins Investigation, Saying China Isn’t Cooperating. But What About America?
BY WILL JONES | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | FEBRUARY 14, 2023
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has quietly abandoned its investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, citing ongoing challenges over attempts to conduct crucial studies in China. Nature has the story.
Researchers say they are disappointed that the investigation isn’t going ahead, because understanding how the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 first infected people is important for preventing future outbreaks. But without access to China, there is little that the WHO can do to advance the studies, says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada. “Their hands are really tied.”
In January 2021, an international team of experts convened by the WHO travelled to Wuhan, China, where the virus that causes COVID-19 was first detected. Together with Chinese researchers, the team reviewed evidence on when and how the virus might have emerged, as part of phase one. The team released a report in March that year outlining four possible scenarios, the most likely being that SARS-CoV-2 spread from bats to people, possibly through an intermediate species. Phase one was designed to lay the groundwork for a second phase of in-depth studies to pin down exactly what happened in China and elsewhere.
But two years since that high-profile trip, the WHO has abandoned its phase-two plans. “There is no phase two,” Maria Van Kerkhove, an epidemiologist at the WHO in Geneva, Switzerland, told Nature. The WHO planned for work to be done in phases, she said, but “that plan has changed”. “The politics across the world of this really hampered progress on understanding the origins,” she said.
Researchers are undertaking some work to pin down a timeline of the virus’s initial spread. This includes efforts to trap bats in regions bordering China in search of viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2; experimental studies to help narrow down which animals are susceptible to the virus and could be hosts; and testing of archived wastewater and blood samples collected around the world in late 2019 and early 2020. But researchers say that too much time has passed to gather some of the data needed to pinpoint where the virus originated.
Many researchers aren’t surprised the WHO’s plans have been thwarted. In early 2020, members of then US president Donald Trump’s administration made unsubstantiated claims that the virus had originated in a Chinese laboratory, and US intelligence officials later said they had begun investigations. The city of Wuhan is home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a high-security lab that works on coronaviruses. Chinese officials questioned whether the virus originated inside the country’s borders.
In the midst of simmering hostility between the two superpowers, WHO member states requested in May 2020 that the agency put together a science-led effort to identify how the pandemic started. Although China agreed to the mission, tensions were high by the time the WHO group left for Wuhan, and engagement with China quickly unravelled after the group returned.
In its March 2021 report, the team concluded that it was “extremely unlikely” that the virus accidentally escaped from a laboratory. But the inclusion of the lab-incident scenario in the final report was a key point of contention for Chinese researchers and officials, says Dominic Dwyer, a virologist at New South Wales Health Pathology in Sydney, who was a member of the WHO team.
That July, the WHO sent a circular to member states outlining how it planned to advance origins studies. Proposed steps included assessing wild-animal markets in and around Wuhan and the farms that supplied those markets, as well as audits of labs in the area where the first cases were identified.
But Chinese officials rejected the WHO’s plans, taking particular issue with the proposal to investigate lab breaches. Zhao Lijian, the spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry, said the WHO proposal was not agreed by all member states, and that the second phase should not focus on pathways the mission report had already deemed extremely unlikely.
The Nature report adds that outside the formal WHO process some studies have gone ahead. In May 2022, researchers in China published the results of an analysis of donor blood supplied to the Wuhan Blood Centre before December 2019. After screening more than 88,000 samples collected between September 1st and December 31st 2019, they did not find any SARS-CoV-2-blocking antibodies in the samples (though did find some non-neutralising antibodies, which they imply are false positives due to cross-reaction or other issues). A second study, by the Chinese CDC in February 2022, looked at samples collected at the Huanan wet market in January and February 2020 and found evidence of the virus among humans but not among animals, confirming the early outbreak but casting doubt on the idea of a zoonotic spillover event at the market.
We may not be inclined to believe these Chinese findings. But we should note that they are more than the U.S. has managed to put out in the same period. The U.S. published one study of archived Red Cross blood in November 2020, which found 39 antibody-positive serum samples (2%) collected December 13th-16th 2019 in California, Washington and Oregon. No further studies of early spread in America have appeared. On this evidence, of course, the virus is more likely to have been circulating in the U.S. than Wuhan during autumn 2019. Certainly, the Wuhan data may not be trustworthy, or the U.S. data may be mistaken. But clearly there is good reason to look into what was going on in America as well as China. Note that we still don’t have a single wastewater study from the U.S. to give an indication of when in 2019 the virus may have begun circulating in different parts of the country (to be fair, we also don’t have any wastewater studies from China). A wastewater study from Brazil turned positive as of November 27th 2019, suggesting extensive community spread in the Americas during that month.
We also still have no idea what U.S. scientists were working on in relation to SARS-like viruses at the onset of the pandemic. Yet we know that in collaborative coronavirus projects with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the genetic engineering of the virus was typically stated to be done in the U.S., not China. We also know that Jeffrey Sachs disbanded the Covid origins taskforce which formed part of the Lancet Covid commission he was chairing because he perceived severe conflicts of interest and a basic lack of cooperation from U.S. scientists.
Concerns about a U.S. cover-up are growing. The latest senior figure to call for an investigation into the role of the U.S. in the origin of the virus is Matt Pottinger, the Deputy National Security Adviser at the start of the pandemic, who recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “China hasn’t been the only problem”.
In the early days of the pandemic, a small group of Western virologists came together to consider the pandemic’s origin. Emails that eventually came to light revealed their plan to push the public conversation away from the lab-accident hypothesis and toward the natural-origins explanation. In a now infamous February 2020 letter in the Lancet, and in an equally problematic letter in Nature Medicine the next month, some of these scientists labelled any questions about a possible lab origin as “conspiracy theories”, even though they lacked evidence to dismiss the lab-leak hypothesis.
But in September 2021, a leaked Defense Department document revealed that some of the same scientists had worked together, along with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, on a 2018 proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Their project? Genetically engineering rare gain-of-function features, called furin cleavage sites, into SARS-like viruses in their possession.
To its credit, DARPA didn’t fund that research, but it was highly significant — or spectacularly coincidental — that the SARS-CoV-2 virus, containing this precise feature never-before-seen in any SARS-like virus, began infecting people in Wuhan the next year. Scientists who had called the lab-leak hypothesis a conspiracy had failed to disclose that the lethal virus sweeping the world was eerily similar to the one they had wanted to create.
China’s systematic efforts to block meaningful investigation doesn’t mean that the U.S. should throw up its arms. In fact, both the Trump and Biden administrations have taken action to dig further. The Trump administration began asking questions internally. Early in his tenure, President Biden also authorised a limited, 90-day review of this issue by America’s intelligence agencies. It’s fair to say that both administrations did something and that neither has done enough.
Earlier this year, an international group of scientists and former national security officials — including us — signed an open letter detailing some of the failures of scientific journals and news organisations and calling for greater accountability. What we now need are bipartisan, evidence-based hearings asking the toughest questions about the pandemic’s origins. Congress must carefully look at China’s transgressions as well as our own shortcomings.
The obfuscation by the Chinese is obviously very poor form and only increases suspicions they are hiding something. However, what the Nature report – and the WHO, based on that report – fail to acknowledge is that we don’t need Chinese cooperation to investigate what U.S. scientists and officials can tell us about the origin of the virus and early spread in America. Investigating this properly should have begun long ago, and even now it is not too late. The politicians need to compel the scientists and officials to reveal what they know.
From the Peak of Fitness to Wanting to Die — How the COVID Vaccine Ruined One Man’s Life
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | February 14, 2023
Adam Rowland had a promising career, working with professional athletes on the PGA Tour and Premiership Rugby, splitting his time between the U.S. and the U.K.
He also was the fittest he’d ever been, Rowland told The Defender — until early 2021, when he received the two-dose primary series of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine.
Today, Rowland, 48, cannot work, cannot lie down, and experiences several conditions affecting everything from his heart health to his vision, including pericarditis, pulmonary embolisms, severe thrombotic vasculitis and vascular neuropathy.
He is now separated from his wife, misses most family events and was repeatedly told by doctors that his severe injuries were “all in his head” — bringing him to the brink of suicide.
He said his discovery of online support groups for the vaccine-injured afforded him a new lease on life.
Rowland, who provided extensive documentation supporting his claims, shared his story with The Defender in an exclusive interview.
‘I was the fittest I’d ever been in my life’
Rowland had worked as a medical sports physiotherapist and stroke consultant for professional golfers for the previous 16-17 years.
“I was absolutely at the top of my career in professional sport,” he said, having worked on the PGA Tour with Jason Day and other high-profile golfers.
“I was working in America when COVID kicked off,” said Rowland, “and living quite a luxury lifestyle. And then, I decided to come back to the U.K. because obviously, I didn’t know when I’d be able to get back to the U.K. if I didn’t go then.”
The U.S. government gave Rowland special permission to return to the country and resume his employment. However, “Once the vaccination program kicked in, you had to be double vaccinated.”
It was during this time — before he got the vaccine — that Rowland said he was “even fitter than when I was 18,” because “any workout program I gave an athlete, I would try it myself” to determine firsthand how physically strenuous it was.
He said:
“So, because of that, I exercised six or seven days a week … I was just so fit, I could row on the rowing machine 18 minutes, something around five kilometers. I could ride a bike 20K in under 30 minutes. At one stage I was running 5K in 21 minutes.”
Multiple injuries and conditions brushed off as ‘anxiety’
Rowland received two doses of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine in February and May 2021. That’s when everything changed.
“Very quickly after being vaccinated, I started to get quite ill,” said Rowland. “I never got back to the U.S.” He continued working for six months after his first dose, but had to take a lot of time off from work because he was in the hospital.
“I’ve never worked since,” he said. “I’ve lost my job and I’m disabled as we speak.”
Rowland’s symptoms began with a “fever like I’d never had before in my life,” he said. “I was in bed for four days.” The fever eventually subsided, he said, “but I felt very virally ill for a number of weeks. I started to notice horrendous pains down my left arm and my left leg. And my wife noticed I started to have fits in bed … they were basically non-epileptic fits.”
The symptoms appeared within a week of his first dose.
Rowland couldn’t get a face-to-face appointment with his doctor because of the pandemic, so he had to settle for a phone appointment. The doctor diagnosed him with “anxiety” and “said it was a panic attack” — not unlike what happened to other vaccine-injury victims, whose conditions also were chalked up to “anxiety.”
Rowland’s condition continued to worsen. “I couldn’t sleep for five days because [the fits] were happening 15 or 20 times a night,” he said. “It got horrendous. I just couldn’t lie down.”
Rowland took six weeks off from work. However, when he spoke to his doctor again, “He said it’s anxiety and depression and put me on antidepressant medication. So, I tried this medication, and it made me even worse.”
Rowland’s doctor then prescribed “three or four” additional antidepressants, but none of them helped. Ultimately, his doctor said, “I don’t know what to do for you, I’m going to send you to a psychiatrist because I believe this is like a mental health [issue].”
“He didn’t think it was anything physical,” said Rowland, “and neither of us … I didn’t think it was a vaccine, because I had vaccines all my life. I didn’t figure it was the vaccine … no one put it down to the vaccine.”
Rowland eventually returned to work.
‘I just got sicker and sicker’
Whatever sense of normalcy Rowland reattained was short-lived. After receiving the second dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine, “That’s when all hell broke loose in my life.”
Rowland told The Defender :
“Immediately after having the second vaccine … I passed out once at work. I passed out at home … I developed chest pain immediately after the vaccine. I developed such chest pain and dizziness, and I was sweating. The pain was horrendous. I couldn’t breathe. I thought I was having a heart attack.”
Rowland was taken to the hospital, where he was told, “We can’t find anything wrong with you. We think it’s just a panic attack,” and he was sent home.
Not satisfied with the diagnosis, Rowland spoke to a cardiologist at his workplace and asked for an electrocardiogram (EKG or ECG). “So, he did a 24-hour ECG … and it basically showed my heart was going into ventricular tachycardia (VT), when I was getting all dizzy. It’s very dangerous and could cause sudden death.”
The cardiologist instructed Rowland to show the results of this exam to the hospital in the event he was to go back.
“Another week went by,” said Rowland, “I was getting tremendous pain and dizziness and I had another episode where I nearly collapsed again.” He showed paramedics the results of his ECG and was taken to the hospital.
But Rowland’s difficulties with doctors didn’t end there.
“I had a high D-dimer, so they started to look for blood clots on my lungs and kept me in hospital, wouldn’t let me move out of the bed.”
He added:
“They still didn’t think it was the vaccine when they couldn’t find blood clots … they sent my ECG to a specialist heart hospital … and got them to look at the ECG. Nobody thought it was the vaccine.”
As a result, Rowland was discharged and told he would be administered an MRI “in a couple of weeks,” with the expectation of finding cardiomyopathy. But the MRI didn’t find anything.
“Doctors were very, very confused about what was causing this VT,” he said. “They thought it was an adrenal problem and then referred me to an endocrinologist, and that’s when my horrible gaslighting and traumatic story really started. Because, again, they couldn’t find the cause of it, so they kept blaming things on anxiety.”
Rowland described what happened next:
“And then … I just got sicker and sicker. I developed blurred vision, face rashes, jaundice and tinnitus in my head. I started to develop neuropathy in my hands … some of my fingers don’t straighten anymore.
“I developed horrendous pain below both my knees … I can’t feel temperature in my lower legs. My toenails have died … I have no pulse in my feet.”
He was discharged from the hospital but returned monthly. Each time, doctors told him, “We can’t find what’s wrong with you.”
In June 2022, Rowland “collapsed with three pulmonary embolisms” in his lungs — but when he went to the hospital, they again told him it was just anxiety.
“So I said, ‘look at my eyes. I’ve lost two stone [one stone = 6.35 kilograms] in weight … I’m not leaving this hospital until you do some more scans and tests. This is definitely not anxiety.’”
So they scanned his lungs, and that’s when they found the three pulmonary embolisms and “a hundred tiny embolisms on my lungs.”
Rowland ended up in the hospital for a month, where he was diagnosed with pericarditis and told he would have died if they hadn’t found the embolisms.
Since then, Rowland said, “I’ve spent four more months in hospital on separate occasions. And I’ve been diagnosed now with severe thrombolytic vasculitis of my blood vessels.”
But that’s not all that’s wrong with his health. Rowland told The Defender :
“My diaphragm doesn’t work properly. Some of my eye muscles and my facial muscles aren’t working properly, and my leg muscles aren’t working properly … They did something called a CPET [cardiopulmonary exercise] test and … found that my cells in my muscles aren’t getting enough oxygen and nutrients.
“I’m waiting to see a vascular surgeon for the blood — it’s not getting to my legs and my muscles. I’m also waiting to see an immunologist and another hematologist because I’m on three blood-thinning medications and they don’t think it’s stopping my blood clotting properly.
“They think my blood is still clotting. They want me to have a special test where they take my blood out, spin it and take the platelets out and then look how my blood is responding to the three blood thinners I’m on, because for some reason it’s not doing its job.”
Rowland hasn’t been able to get that test because under the U.K. healthcare system, “the government won’t pay for it.”
He’s been trying to get the test through private healthcare. Meanwhile, his doctors tell him they can see that he’s really ill, “but we don’t know how to make it better” because they don’t know what’s in the vaccines. They suggested he travel to Germany to receive specialist treatment.
‘You’re the 239th person we have seen with similar symptoms from the vaccines’
Rowland described how he finally got a diagnosis that definitively linked the vaccine to his injuries:
“After I collapsed with the blood clots and they tried to send me home and I said ‘no, I’m not going anywhere, you scammed me, there’s something wrong,’ they finally admitted it was probably the vaccine.
“I was needing a wheelchair and they just discharged me and said, ‘Take this morphine, we’ll see you in four or five months’ time.’ And I was like, ‘I can’t even walk, you know?’ And they were like, ‘well, we can’t help you.’”
Rowland did his own research, locating a specialist hospital and private lung consultant, whom he visited in London, bringing with him the scans from the exams administered at his local hospital.
He said:
“I just said to him, ‘I feel like I’m dying, can you look at my scans and tell me, am I going to die, you know, imminently? I want you to be honest with me so I can tell my children.’ He looked at my scans and he said, ‘I don’t think you’re going to die imminently from your lungs’ … but he said to me, ‘it is 100% vaccine injury.’
“He said ‘you’re the 239th person we have seen with similar symptoms from the vaccines.’ And that was at one hospital in London … He said, ‘I’m more worried that you’re going to die with your heart and I need you to see one of my colleagues urgently.”
So Rowland saw a cardiologist who told him, it’s “completely vaccine injury. You don’t get VT like you developed for no reason. It’s definitely the vaccine with everything that’s happened to you since.’”
The doctor urged him to go to London immediately for treatment. “So they took me down to London for a month and then they diagnosed me … they realized it was in all my organs. So it’s in my heart, my lungs … so they diagnosed me with multisystem inflammatory syndrome.”
“So, at this moment in time, I’m on steroids for the pericarditis in my heart,” he said. “I’m on two different heart medications, another one for pericarditis [and] one for microvascular angina … and I’m on three blood thinners from my clotting, and various painkillers and things like that.”
‘It’s like living in hell’
As for what his life is like today, Rowland said:
“I don’t say these words slightly, but it’s like living in hell. It’s like torture, and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.”
He said he’s pretty much housebound and struggles to walk because of his breathing issues and chest pain.
Rowland added:
“Because I have fits trying to lie down, I can’t sleep in a regular bed … my bed’s adapted, so it’s at 45 degrees, so it’s like sitting up in a chair because the fits get triggered when I lie down.
“I don’t sleep. I just get these fits. So, every single day, I dread going to bed because the fits are so scary. And my heart sometimes misses a few beats and stops for a split second. And when I get that, it feels like I’m going to die.”
Rowland’s waking hours are not much better. He told The Defender :
“Because of my pain and my vulnerability, I can’t stand up for very long on some days. I struggle to make food. I can make breakfast and maybe lunch if I’m lucky, but I can’t cook myself an evening meal. When I go to the hospital, I never know whether I’m going to be able to walk from the car park to the hospital …
“Some days I can walk very short distances, 50 meters, maybe 100 meters. I’m really, really breathless … the chest pain is so bad that I can’t walk any further. And it does crazy things in my heart, it gives me the heart arrhythmia.”
Rowland also experiences blurred vision and struggles to type and write because of the neuropathy in his hands and because he can’t straighten some of his fingers.
Most days, he has to “live within the four walls of the house,” he said. “And then occasionally, when I’m on a good day, a friend might come and pick me up and take me for a drive to a nearby coffee shop and have a coffee. That’s about the most pleasure I’m getting in my life. I can’t walk my dog anymore. I can’t take my grandson to the park to push him on the swing.”
Rowland said he lost his wife and family because of the strain. “They couldn’t look after me,” he said. “I’ve not had a Christmas dinner with the family in two years because I’ve been too ill.”
As for his prognosis, Rowland said his doctors “don’t know how much I’ll heal or whether I’m just going to slowly die, because since I got injured, I’ve just gotten worse gradually on a linear projection.”
“I haven’t gotten any better,” he said, “so we don’t know what the future’s going to hold.”
‘I got to a point where I was suicidal’
The gaslighting Rowland experienced from multiple doctors, the lack of definitive answers, and the questioning of his mental health, drove him to the brink of suicide.
“Because they didn’t believe me … I felt like I was going crazy,” he said. “And I got to a point where I was suicidal.”
Rowland said many of the doctors he saw wanted him to be “on lots of pain medications: morphine, oxycontin, pregabalin.” He said his local hospital is “quite happy to give me morphine and all these other medications and leave me like that for the rest of my life.”
He doesn’t want to go back to taking lots of medications, he said, noting that morphine “doesn’t work … it takes a bit of the edge off the pain, but it doesn’t get rid of it.”
Rowland told The Defender he “wasn’t someone who watched TV or used social media.” But taking to social media ultimately helped provide Rowland with a new lease on life.
He said:
“I went on Twitter one evening. I don’t know what drew me to do that. This was when I was suicidal. I found a guy called Alex Mitchell in the U.K. who lost a leg [due to vaccine injury]. I started chatting to him and he was like, ‘it sounds like you might have a vaccine injury.’
“He pointed me to a support group, UK COVID Vaccine Family. I couldn’t believe it, that there was — I think at the time in the U.K. there were 600-odd people in this group — and I was like, ‘there’s all these people [with] all the same symptoms as me’ … It just completely opened my eyes.”
“From that moment,” said Rowland, while “it was nice to get the support, I still realized that the doctors didn’t have a clue what they were doing. I think what it did was, it took me from a place of being suicidal [to] where I wanted to fight for my life now.”
Rowland said he started to seek out specialists who were seeing patients with vaccine injuries and “knew it wasn’t all in their heads and knew what sort of tests to do.”
He also “went on Twitter and decided that I needed to speak out, because I thought, ‘well, if I’m going to die’ — and I didn’t realize how bad my story was — I thought, ‘well, I didn’t want anyone else to go through what I’m going through.’”
“I just wanted to warn people that if they do inject you and it goes wrong,” he said, “they tell you it’s safe and effective but there’s nobody there for you to help you.”
He said he’s met some wonderful people “who’ve reached out to me and offered me support.”
“I just take pleasure from speaking to those people and the people who are trying to help me,” said Rowland.
At the same time, Rowland told The Defender he is also “going down a legal route.”
“I want to know … what’s keeping my blood clotting and giving me vasculitis. [Doctors] don’t seem prepared to do that. So that’s the battle I’m on … I want to prove it’s negligence because then the [U.K.] government will have to pay for private treatment for me, even if it’s abroad. So, it’s about keeping me alive,” he said.
He had some words of advice for other vaccine-injured individuals:
“I think the first thing they need to do is, don’t suffer in silence alone … trust your own body and your intuition. So, if people are saying that to you, don’t just accept that if your intuition says otherwise.
“Try a two-pronged approach. Find a support group and question people in that support group. Even reach out and contact me online. That’s what I’m there for. And then also, if your doctor is gaslighting you … print off a lot of evidence. If your doctor is not helping you, you need to find another doctor, which I know is not as easy as that, but do not accept a doctor that’s telling you it’s in your head.”
Rowland encouraged vaccine injury victims to “come out publicly if you’ve got the strength to do that because there’s hundreds of thousands and probably millions of us around the world.”
“We were part of the worst experiment that I believe has probably ever taken place,” said Rowland. “And I think it’s going to be like a dam that’s going to burst by the back end of 2023 … I don’t think they can keep it covered up much longer.”
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.
Canada’s conservative leader Pierre Poilievre says no to digital ID
By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | February 13, 2023
The leader of the Canadian Conservative Party, Pierre Poilievre, said that if he were to be elected Prime Minister, he would not impose digital IDs. He made the comment on a campaign trail in Windsor, Ontario.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government announced its federal Digital Identity Program last August.
“And to answer your question, I will never allow the government to impose a digital ID,” Poilievre said.
Poilievre’s comment came a few days after Alberta and Saskatchewan’s premiers said that they were not interested in a federal digital ID.
“The government of Saskatchewan is not creating a Digital ID nor will we accept any requirements for the creation of a digital ID tied to healthcare funding,” said Saskatchewan’s Premier Scott Moe.
Alberta’s Premier Danielle Smith said that she fully supported what Moe said.
Transport Canada has recently announced that the Known Traveller Digital Identity (KTDI) project is ongoing, contrary to earlier reports suggesting that the project has been discontinued.
The KTDI is a collaborative effort between the World Economic Forum (WEF), Accenture, INTERPOL, various government entities, and the governments of the Netherlands and Canada. The project was initiated in 2018 to create a secure and decentralized digital identity system for travelers between the Netherlands and Canada. The system utilizes cryptographic encryption and distributed ledger technology to ensure the protection of travelers’ personal information.
DeSantis Announces Legislation To Ban Social Credit Scores, ‘Woke ESG Financial Scam’
By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | February 13, 2023
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) on Monday announced a proposal to eliminate ESG banking and prohibit the financial sector from implementing social credit scores that would otherwise prevent Floridians from obtaining loans, lines of credit and opening bank accounts.
“Today’s announcement builds on my commitment to protect consumers’ investments and their ability to access financial services in the Free State of Florida,” said DeSantis in a statement. “By applying arbitrary ESG financial metrics that serve no one except the companies that created them, elites are circumventing the ballot box to implement a radical ideological agenda. Through this legislation, we will protect the investments of Floridians and the ability of Floridians to participate in the economy.”
The proposal “seeks to protect Floridians from the woke ESG financial scam” by:
- Prohibiting big banks, trusts, and other financial institutions from discriminating against customers for their religious, political, or social beliefs — including their support for securing the border, owning a firearm, and increasing our energy independence.
- Prohibiting the financial sector from considering so called “Social Credit Scores” in banking and lending practices that aim to prevent Floridians from obtaining loans, lines of credit, and bank accounts.
- Prohibiting banks that engage in corporate activism from holding government funds as a Qualified Public Depository (QPD).
- Prohibiting the use of ESG in all investment decisions at the state and local level, ensuring that fund managers only consider financial factors that maximize the highest rate of return.
- Prohibiting all state and local entities, including direct support organizations, from considering, giving preference to, or requesting information about ESG as part of the procurement and contracting process.
- Prohibiting the use of ESG factors by state and local governments when issuing bonds, including a contract prohibition on rating agencies whose ESG ratings negatively impact the issuer’s bond ratings.
- Directing the Attorney General and Commissioner of Financial Regulation to enforce these provisions to the fullest extent of the law.
“That is a way to try to change people’s behavior. It’s a way to try to impose politics on what should just be economic decisions,” said DeSantis, of ESG. “We are also not going to house in either the state or local government level deposits. And we have a lot of deposit, we got a massive budget surplus in Florida, you have deposits all over the place that go in where state and local government use financial institutions, none of those deposits will be permitted to be done in institutions that are pursuing this woke ESG agenda.”
As Florida’s Voice notes,
The proposal would also aim to make sure ESG will not “infect decisions” at both the state and local governments, such as investment decisions, procurement and contracting, or bonds.
House Speaker Paul Renner said Bob Rommel, R-Naples, will introduce the bill in the House.
“The biggest thing that I think ESG represents is a total hijacking of democracy,” said Renner.
“We’re lucky here in the state of Florida, that we’ve got a governor who will stand up to things like ESG, when others will not.”
Israeli soldier filmed assaulting Palestinian activist in occupied West Bank
This screengrab shows an Israeli soldier assaulting Palestinian activist Issa Amro on February 13, 2023.
Press TV – February 14, 2023
An Israeli soldier has been filmed assaulting a prominent Palestinian human rights activist in front of a famous American journalist in the occupied West Bank city of al-Khalil.
In a video posted on Twitter by Lawrence Wright of the New Yorker on Monday, the Israeli soldier is seen grabbing Issa Amro by his jacket and neck and throwing him to the ground. He then kicks Amro before being pulled away by another soldier.
“I never had a source assaulted in front of me until today when an Israeli soldier who stopped my interview did this … I can’t stop thinking how dehumanizing the occupation is on the young soldiers charged with enforcing it,” Wright, the author of The Looming Tower, wrote in a post on his Twitter account.
The Israeli military claimed in a statement that the incident occurred after the soldier, who was guarding a military post, asked the Palestinian activist who approached the post, to step away.
It further claimed that in response, the Palestinian began recording and cursing at the soldier, and that a verbal confrontation followed, which soon became a physical confrontation, during which the soldier hit the Palestinian.
However, Wright tweeted that Amro had done nothing to justify the “violent assault,” adding that the Israeli military is “misrepresenting” the build-up to the assault on the Palestinian peace activist.
“The soldier initiated the encounter, Amro did not curse him, [he] only asked to call his commander. Nothing to justify the violent assault that followed,” he said.
“Before the assault the other soldiers were afraid to intervene although I warned them it was getting out of hand,” he added.
Amro also posted several videos of the run-up to the incident on Twitter, saying the Israeli military has lied about what happened.
“I was detained outside the military post, I started shouting to bring the commander out, the soldiers refused to tell him, it was a trap for me by them. The commander came out only after I was beaten and grabbed by the throat and kicked and pushed on the ground,” he wrote n another post.
He said that the video is not just about the activist as it tells the story of every Palestinian in Palestine.
“It is not about Issa Amro, it is about the Palestinian women and children who are attacked frequently by Israeli soldiers and settlers. All Palestinians are living under Israeli occupation and apartheid. The video of the attack tells the story of each Palestinian in Palestine,” he added.
The Israeli military said the soldier was jailed for 10 days in a military prison following the incident.
Far-right Israeli minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has defended the soldier’s actions, describing the decision to put him in a military prison as a “disgrace.”
Amro, an engineer by profession, is a well-known human rights defender in his hometown of al-Khalil. He is the founder of Youth Against Settlements (YAS), which aims to empower the Palestinian community in the face of Israeli settlers in the Old City of al-Khalil.
He was detained in November days after filming a soldier assaulting an Israeli activist during a visit by Israeli anti-occupation activists to meet Palestinian residents near the Old City of al-Khalil.
Israeli occupation soldiers and Israeli settlers have noticeably been escalating their attacks against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank and other areas, in an attempt to forcibly expel Palestinians from their lands and make way for expanding illegal Jewish-only settlements.
More than 600,000 Israelis live in over 230 settlements built since the 1967 Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories of the West Bank and East al-Quds.
All the settlements are illegal under international law. The UN Security Council has condemned Israel’s settlement activities in the occupied territories in several resolutions. – View videos
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Book Review
The Zeolite Book — First Edition, 2026, Paperback
The volcanic mineral medicine will not patent — for the toxic burden medicine will not name
Lies are Unbekoming – October 30, 2026
Zeolite is old. It is in Roman concrete that has held for two thousand years. It’s in the water filters of ancient cisterns. It’s in the stomachs of Pacific livestock whose keepers knew, somehow, that this grey crumbling rock made the animals healthier. It’s in Soviet clinical protocols from the 1960s. It’s in the standard emergency response to the Chernobyl explosion.
In 1986, after the Chernobyl reactor failure, the Soviet Union manufactured and distributed natural zeolite at industrial scale — for soil remediation, for livestock feed, for human consumption, for the cleanup itself. Karl Hecht, who had been director of the Institute for Experimental and Clinical Pathophysiology at the Charité of Humboldt University Berlin, spent the six decades after that building the clinical research base — on silicon’s role in human health, on zeolite’s clinical safety, on its applications in ageing. In 2018, Pavelić and colleagues published a comprehensive clinical safety review of natural clinoptilolite in Frontiers in Pharmacology. In 2019, Mastinu analysed its binding affinities. In the Western medical literature, these works sit largely uncited.
What has not been treated at book length, until now, is how a volcanic mineral with six decades of Soviet clinical work behind it, two major peer-reviewed Western reviews, and ongoing clinical use across the former Eastern Bloc, remains almost entirely absent from Western medical practice — and what the toxic burden it’s meant to address actually is.
The Zeolite Book gathers the Soviet clinical record, the Western peer-reviewed studies, three contemporary practitioner voices, and three serious counterviews into one honest treatment. That’s why the book runs to seven appendices. 288 pages, four parts, three practitioner voices, three counterviews, seven appendices. The honest treatment is the argument.
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