There is a drought in Germany, and naturally the media has gone into hyperdrive to link it to global warming:
Drought hits Germany’s Rhine River: ‘We have 30cm of water left’
This report is all over the media, and all with virtually the same wording, suggesting a carefully coordinated, manufactured story, almost certainly from one of the well funded, climate misinformation organisations.
The BBC headline is grossly misleading, as the 30cm is the water under the boat; As Captain Kempl comments, the river depth is actually 1.5m.
The river gauge measurement of 42cm at Kaub is also widely reported, but is equally misleading, as this measurement is taken near the river bank, rather than at the deepest part of the stream.
In none of the dozens of reports I have read is there any actual historical data to compare against this event, whether rainfall or water level data. We are told this is the lowest water level since 2018, as if this means anything at all. There is no evidence presented to show that this drought is in any way unprecedented, or that droughts are becoming more extreme; merely this claim that appears in most of the articles:
“HGK and other shipping companies are preparing for a “new normal” in which low water levels become more common as global warming makes droughts more severe, sapping water along the length of the Rhine from the Swiss Alps to the North Sea.
“There’s no denying climate change and the industry is adjusting to it,”
However, annual rainfall trends at Mainz, which is just upstream of Kalb, show that while recent years have been drier than the 1980s and 90s, they are no drier than the 1950s. We also see exactly the same trends with April to September rainfall:
And finally, WUWT offers an insight to some of the megadroughts in Germany in the past, notably in 1540.
There is therefore nothing to suggest that this is not just another weather event.
August 14, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | BBC |
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Safety lessons from smallpox vaccination
In 2015 a team of researchers employed by the medical services of the US military published a peer-reviewed paper on the incidence of myocarditis and pericarditis after smallpox vaccination (SPX) and vaccination with an inactivated trivalent influenza vaccine (TIV).
Despite being published 7 years ago before anyone had heard of “covid”, the findings in this study could have very significant implications for the Covid-19 mRNA injections.
In this study, the researchers found that:
- When active surveillance systems are used, significantly more myocarditis cases were identified than in earlier studies which had relied on more passive reporting.
- The incidence of cases of possible myocarditis without symptoms – detected by testing all subjects vaccinated regardless of symptoms – was far higher than the cases in which subjects developed symptoms such that they would seek medical help.
Given these observations, it seems highly likely that the incidence rates of myocarditis following Covid vaccination have to date been severely underestimated.
The background to the study was that the US military rolled out a limited program of SPX following a perceived threat that smallpox might be used as a weapon in a bioterrorism incident. By the time of the paper’s publication, >2m doses had been administered, but the US had 290m doses in reserve to use for the general population if required. Concerns had been raised about a possible risk of myocarditis after this vaccination. This study sought to quantify these risks.
Key aspects of the study design:
- Subjects were selected from previously healthy military personnel presenting for either SPX (1081 subjects) or TIV (189 subjects). A battery of baseline tests were performed and these were repeated either once or twice 5-8 days after vaccination and / or 9-28 after vaccination.
- The notable difference between this and other studies assessing myocarditis and pericarditis rates was that the assessments were performed on all subjects and they included measurements of cardiac troponin levels (a protein which is released by damaged heart muscle cells) and ECG, in an attempt to detect possible “subclinical” cases of myocarditis – ie those which did not result in symptoms and so ordinarily would not gain the attention of healthcare systems.
- Clinical myocarditis and pericarditis were determined according to published epidemiological case definitions that require the development of new onset cardiac symptoms soon after vaccine exposure, and each case was confirmed by an independent adjudicator.
- Possible subclinical myocarditis and pericarditis were diagnosed whenever troponin levels rose by or to a certain level[1], or by ECG changes respectively, in the absence of symptoms.
- Incidence rates were compared to background incidence rates calculated from a 2002 study among 1,390,352 service members (no exposure to any vaccines).
Key results:
- Subjects receiving SPX were predominantly young (mean 23 years) and male (88%), those in the TIV cohort were more evenly balanced (54% male) and older (mean 36 years)
- 8.8% of the SPX recipients reported severe cardiac symptoms (defined as >3 out of 10 on a visual scale for at least 2 days).The most frequently reported cardiac symptoms were chest pain and dyspnea on exertion.
- Despite no significant differences in pre-vaccine health self-assessment between the cohorts and fewer reported physical limitations in the SPX cohort, there was a significantly higher incidence of new onset cardiac symptom(s) post-SPX (10.6%) compared to the older post-TIV cohort (2.6%), p<0.001. These differences remained 4-5 fold higher in the SPX cohort after adjusting for group differences in age, sex, weight, race, smoking, and physical limitations, and also when symptoms were limited to consideration of those above 3 out of 10 on the visual scale.
- The incidence rate of clinical myocarditis / pericarditis after SPX was 5 cases out of 1081 (4 were myocarditis and one pericarditis), equating to 463 per 100,000, which was >200 x background expected rates.
- The incidence of possible subclinical myocarditis / pericarditis after SPX was 2868 per 100,000, or nearly 3%, which was 6 x the rate of clinical myocarditis.[2] This could not be compared to an expected background rate as this had never been measured before in this way.
- No cases of either clinical or subclinical myocarditis were detected after TIV.
Implications.
Before going on to discuss the implications of this study for the Covid-era, it must be emphasised that “full recovery” from myocarditis is a misleading term: whilst the patients may initially become symptom-free, all should ideally receive regular cardiological follow-up to detect cardiomyopathy and / or arrhythmias later in life, and there is a significantly raised risk of cardiac morbidity and mortality.
Moreover, in several case series, for example this one published in JAMA, “Late Gadolinium Enhancement” on cardiac MRI[3] indicative of long term heart damage was found in the majority of clinical myocarditis cases which underwent detailed investigation. This finding is not consistent with mRNA-induced myocarditis having a more benign course than other forms, as was originally hoped.
For the above reasons, it is important to try to accurately capture all possible cases of myocarditis, both for the individuals concerned (so they can receive proper follow-up) and for calculating the extent of any added risks from vaccination.
In respect of the accurate detection of myocarditis cases, this study raises several important concerns relevant to the Covid injections:
Passive surveillance misses many cases.
Before this study, the rate of clinically diagnosed myocarditis / pericarditis had been previously estimated to be 16.1 cases per 100,000 in a cohort of US service members receiving smallpox vaccination, nearly 7.5-fold higher than the expected background rate of 2.16 per 100,000 observed among comparable unvaccinated service members.
The rate of clinical myocarditis observed in this SPX study was approximately 28 times higher than the previous estimate, at 463 per 100,000 – several hundred times the expected background rate. The higher incidence rate detected is almost certainly due to the active surveillance systems in place, where cases were pro-actively sought out and participants and their physicians made aware of their possibility.
As the authors state:
Prior to the present study, the incidence of myocarditis / pericarditis following smallpox vaccination was estimated from passive surveillance registries and population databases, with an inherent bias towards underestimation of disease incidence.
Myocarditis cases may be easily dismissed as musculoskeletal in origin.
Myocarditis is usually self-limiting in its acute phase, improving with self-treatment by a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug such as ibuprofen. It could quite easily be confused with “expected” aches and pains following injection, or with musculoskeletal injury, and this would be more frequent in the young, especially if active in sport.
The authors make the point that:
“3 of the 5 clinical cases would not have sought medical care without study interventions including enhanced education and surveillance.”
With the Covid mRNA injections, not only have we experienced a lack of active surveillance and a reliance on passive adverse event reporting, but there has been an atmosphere of discouragement of reporting. Many physicians have reported censure by hospitals or other health authorities for even discussing a possible vaccine origin for adverse events, and even subjects themselves have received opprobrium online after questioning the origin of their symptoms.
Hence, whatever factors the authors noted in 2015 in relation to underreporting of myocarditis following SPX are likely to be even more in evidence now for the Covid vaccines.
Because of this, there must be a very significant possibility that the actual numbers of clinical myocarditis cases caused by the mRNA injections have to date been very significantly underestimated.
The frequency of subclinical cases may dwarf the clinical cases.
This was actually the first study to attempt to detect possible subclinical cases of myocarditis (ie those without discernible symptoms) following vaccination. It is highly likely that, just as there is a spectrum of outcomes with symptomatic cases, such that a proportion have zero long-term problems, so with the subclinical cases an unknown proportion may well go on to have cardiac problems. Given that heart cells are irreplaceable and that scar tissue in the heart can disrupt electrical conduction the degree of concern about heart damage must be much more than with, say, damage to the skin, which can self-repair and still perform its primary function.
The actual proportion of subclinical cases which go on to manifest in cardiac disease later in life is unknown, however the authors selected a threshold for the measured troponin levels by which to define a subclinical case which is known to be associated with an increased risk of adverse outcomes. In the paper cited by the authors in support of their chosen troponin criterion it had been concluded that:
“In the general population, cTnT [troponin – protein released from heart damage] elevation is rare in subjects without CHF, LVH, CKD, or DM, [Congestive Heart Failure, Left Ventricular Hypertrophy, Chronic Kidney Disease or Diabetes Mellitus] suggesting that the upper limit of normal for the immunoassay should be <0.01 μg/L. Even minimally increased cTnT may represent subclinical cardiac injury and have important clinical implications, a hypothesis that should be tested in longitudinal outcome studies.”
*Definitions in [ ] with bold added by this author
The rate of possible subclinical myocarditis detected after SPX (3% of subjects) was 6 x the rate of symptomatic myocarditis. That these findings are or might be significant rather than chance fluctuations is supported by the fact that zero such cases were detected in the TIV cohort.
Moreover, the authors point out that even this may be an underestimate (bold added):
“While assumptions about benign troponin release from the myocardium have been made, there is a growing body of literature suggesting that even in generally healthy populations with no known cardiac disease risk, small elevations in troponin (stratified below the levels measured by the assay in this study) are associated with increased risk of all cause and cardiovascular mortality. Therefore, the rate of reported elevations in this study may actually be an underestimate of the true incidence of vaccine related subclinical myocarditis.“
There seem no reasons to suggest that possible subclinical myocarditis might not also be occurring after Covid injections, and also at higher rates than clinical cases. In fact, given the use of active surveillance for clinical cases employed in the SPX study, it is likely that the ratio between possible subclinical and reported clinical myocarditis cases for the Covid vaccines may in fact be higher than the 6-fold seen after SPX, because of the significant underreporting of clinical cases after Covid vaccines for the reasons mentioned above.
It should be stressed that little is known about the long-term prognosis of myocarditis / pericarditis, whether infective in origin or otherwise. No follow-up to the Engler et al paper (now 7 years old) measuring cardiac status in either the clinical or possible subclinical cases has been published to date.
A 2005 paper reported a well-conducted follow-up study of 67 cases detected following smallpox vaccination of 540k military personnel and found normalisation of echocardiography, ECG, and functional status (measured by ECG exercise-testing) in all subjects including those who initially had depressed cardiac function. This is encouraging, although the median follow-up period was just a few months and none were followed for more than one year after the myocarditis; hence concerns must remain regarding cardiac function in later life, especially in those in whom cardiac reserve falls secondary to other cardiac pathology such as coronary artery disease.
Concluding remarks
The authors conclude their paper with this warning:
Our study identified a rate of myocarditis/pericarditis following SPX immunization that is significantly higher than previously described, and highlights the challenges of post-licensure vaccine safety surveillance to identify adverse events that are not well understood or previously unrecognized.
Applying the incidence described in this study to a SPX immunization program that has delivered over 2 million doses, largely to young, healthy primary vaccinees, there are potentially thousands of vaccine associated cases, many undiagnosed because of self-medication or lack of provider awareness].
In our study, 3 of the 5 clinical cases would not have sought medical care without study interventions including enhanced education and surveillance. The recognition of potential adverse events following immunization requires accurate diagnosis of new onset clinical symptoms.
Our study reinforces the need, as part of all post-vaccine (and potentially new drug related) adverse events surveillance, to include specific standardized inquiry about new onset cardiac symptoms and to highlight the value of dynamic pre to post immunization cardiac troponin increases as a potential biomarker of risk in future safety surveillance studies.
Two million doses of SPX sounds a large number, but it is sobering to consider where we are today in respect of our understanding of the association of the Covid vaccines to myocarditis, having rolled out several billion doses, a program which is now continuing with 3rd or even 4th doses (whereas the incidence studies published to date have been based on 2 doses only).
It is accepted now that there is a definite association between mRNA vaccination and myocarditis, yet the precise rates of increased risks reported vary hugely between different studies, which probably reflect vastly different methodologies between investigators and countries according to prevailing local reporting standards and customs.
Moreover, initial claims that myocarditis risk might be higher after Covid infection compared to vaccination have not held up to scrutiny. The latest study – based on a large (~200k) cohort of adults in Israel – found no increase in the incidence of pericarditis or myocarditis in adult patients recovering from COVID-19.
In addition to the high, yet underreported, rates of clinical myocarditis, there remains a distinct possibility that there may have been very large numbers of subclinical myocarditis cases caused by Covid vaccines, the long-term outcomes for which are uncertain.
Approximately 3% of those receiving a single SPX vaccination met the criteria for having developed possible subclinical myocarditis, and given that billions have now received Covid mRNA products (many multiple times), if the frequency is similar to SPX the number of such cases following mRNA injections could well be in the millions.
Despite these worrying data, we have inexplicably witnessed the rollout of multiple booster doses, including in many countries to young adults and even children, despite there having been:
- No active surveillance for myocarditis, only passive reporting
- No prospective studies of troponin levels (which would be relatively simple to perform).
- No standardised inquiries about new onset cardiac symptoms
One could be forgiven for thinking that the reason for this is that those who have relentlessly pushed this program into younger and younger people at little to no risk from Covid, simply do not want to know, and prefer to maintain a degree of “plausible deniability”.
Footnotes:
- For subclinical myocarditis, the criteria for diagnosis were: the development of any one of the following: a) elevated post-vaccine levels of cTnT ≥ 0.02 ng/ml with pre-vaccine cTnT levels <0.01 ng/ml; or b) a post-vaccine cTnT level of 0.02 ng/ml greater than the pre-vaccine level based on the imprecision profiles of the assay.
- The absolute subclinical cTnT elevations post SPX vaccine ranged from 0.02 to 0.24 ng/ml with the majority (n = 28, 90.3%) ranging from 0.02 to 0.07 ng/ml
- This is a radiological feature seen on cardiac imaging which is indicative of myocardial damage consistent with a high risk of poor long-term prognosis.
August 14, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | COVID-19 Vaccine, United States |
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Great news! New York City is closing “Infant COVID Vaccination Sites”, citing lack of demand, next week!
In effect, New York is really forced to do the same thing as DeSantis did in Florida — it is closing vaccination clinics for infants, which DeSantis never even opened. While in Florida it was done thanks to the Governor, in New York it happened because parents refused to give their children the Covid vaccine.
The ridiculous explanation NYC gave, is that they are “pivoting to monkeypox”.
This is a huge win for New Yorkers and for people everywhere.
This also means that our anti-Covid-vax activity, broadly speaking, is NOT a waste of time. Mind you, the media keeps lying, as usual. The New York Times, the most important newspaper in New York, is mum about this closure. Google does not show any articles about it except the one I quoted, either.
But people noticed and the public opinion has turned from most people wanting COVID vaccines a year ago to 90% not wanting any extra doses. It did not just happen by itself. We made it happen.
I want to thank my readers who shared my anti-Covid-vaccine-for-babies articles like crazy. That helped, perhaps to a very tiny extent, to warn parents of the danger of giving their kids Covid vaccines.
If people like us did not spread it, nobody would know the truth!
August 13, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Aletho News | COVID-19 Vaccine, New York Times, United States |
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In 2020, government orders to stay home — along with lockdown-produced job losses, public fear of COVID-19 and other factors — led to dramatic declines in in-person utilization of healthcare services among adults and children, both in the United States and globally.
“Well-baby” and “well-child” visits were some of the noteworthy casualties.
In the U.S., children’s and teen’s vaccination rates plummeted dramatically, falling that year by as much as 91% depending on the age group, including a noticeably lower uptake of diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis vaccines (DTaP or DTP), meningitis shots and human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines.
Public health officials expected this “pandemic hangover” to dissipate by 2021, but instead, the change in parents’ vaccine-seeking behavior for their kids persisted.
Internationally, 6 million fewer children worldwide got at least one dose of DTP vaccine in 2021 versus 2019, causing the head of UNICEF to lament “the largest sustained drop in childhood immunization in a generation.”
And in the Philippines — where the president threatened to jail COVID-19 vaccine refusers — 2021’s percentage of children receiving a first DTP dose was just 57% versus 92% a decade previously.
Stateside, Washington State reported flu shot uptake in children under age 5 was down by around 25% in November 2021, compared to the two previous flu seasons. And Michigan’s state registry for March 2022 showed that 24% fewer toddlers “were considered vaccinated” compared to March 2020.
When Michigan compared its 2020 vaccination data against the 2016-2019 period, it found vaccination coverage had declined in “all milestone age cohorts, except for birth-dose hepatitis B coverage.”
At this juncture, state officials are openly speculating that COVID-19 shots — thus far rejected by the parents of 97% of under-5-year-olds — are the reason parents are increasingly ambivalent about childhood vaccination more generally.
Referring to this “spillover doubt,” a Michigander public health spokesperson said parents who once accepted childhood vaccination without question are now saying, “Wait a minute. Do I really need these vaccines?” and asking, “How are these vaccines made?”
According to another Michigan official, “vaccination” — the “V-word” — has become a “trigger word” for irate parents who believe government not only overstepped its authority during COVID-19 but is fraudulently pushing unsafe vaccines on their little ones.
Fewer babies dying is no ‘disaster’
In October 2020, three scientists from the U.S. and U.K. authored the Great Barrington Declaration and condemned — quite gloomily — the steep decline in childhood vaccination resulting from COVID-19 lockdowns.
As long-time proponents of vaccination — professionally involved in vaccine development, promotion of the dangerous HPV vaccine and accepting of COVID-19 vaccines as a solution to lockdowns — the three declaration authors positioned the decline in childhood vaccination rates at the head of their list of “disastrous” lockdown consequences.
Far from witnessing a disaster, however, observers by June 2020 had begun noticing a wonderful silver lining — a “surprising” pandemic effect on the death rate among infants, in particular, with 200-plus fewer infants dying per week, amounting to a 30% reduction in expected child deaths within a few months.
To explain the “something mysterious” saving the lives of infants, these analysts, along with Children’s Health Defense (CHD) Chief Scientific Officer Brian Hooker, pointed out how the missed infant vaccines coincided with a “precipitous drop” in reports of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
SIDS deaths — which by definition affect children who are normal and healthy — and sudden unexplained deaths in children over age 1 typically occur in close temporal proximity to vaccination, with nine out of 10 SIDS deaths following two- and four-month “well-baby” visits.
An analysis of three decades of VAERS data found 75% of reported post-vaccination SIDS cases occurred within seven days of childhood shots.
Japanese pathologists who identified SIDS cases taking place within a week of vaccination agree that “suspicious cases do exist,” leading them to encourage forensic pathologists to “devote more attention to vaccination” in SIDS events.
Naturally, “fact-checkers” dispute the hypothesized association between 2020’s lower vaccination rates and the decreased deaths in young children.
Additional clues
CHD has reviewed dozens of studies showing dramatically better health in unvaccinated children while finding “no studies that show superior health outcomes in vaccinated children.”
However, because the effects of vaccination are complex, cumulative and synergistic with other toxic exposures — and because most chronic disease data sets have not yet caught up to the pandemic — it is not so easy to tease out other upsides resulting from 2020’s lower childhood vaccination rates.
There are a few clues, however.
Consider the decline in emergency department (ED) visits and the fact that the largest declines were in persons under age 15.
Ordinarily, an estimated one in seven children experiences an ED visit every year.
An analysis comparing 2020’s pediatric ED visits to ED encounters over the previous decade found “substantial” decreases for certain diagnoses — notably abdominal pain, ear infections, asthma, pneumonia, upper respiratory and urinary tract infections and trauma — while visits for diagnoses such as seizures and complications of diabetes held steadier.
Although there is no surefire way to know why ED visits declined for those specific conditions, all of the diagnoses in question show up in vaccine package inserts as post-vaccination occurrences — along with nearly 400 other acute and chronic symptoms and conditions.
Abdominal pain may not sound serious, but it can be a sign of acute pancreatitis (sudden-onset inflammation of the pancreas), so much so that clinicians advise “always” considering acute pancreatitis “in the differential diagnosis of abdominal pain in children.
Acute pancreatitis has followed receipt of hepatitis A and B, HPV, influenza and measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccines, among others, in toddlers, adolescents and adults.
And case reports are now flooding in (for example, from the U.S., Japan, Poland and New Zealand) describing severe pancreatitis in the aftermath of COVID-19 vaccination.
Moreover, acute and chronic pancreatitis began mysteriously surging in children following the childhood vaccine schedule’s expansion in the 1990s and 2000s, and juvenile diabetes and pancreatic cancers in young adults — two conditions associated with pancreatitis — began escalating soon thereafter.
COVID vaccines — a line in the sand?
Most observers attributed the sudden drop-off in routine childhood vaccination in 2020 purely to circumstance-imposed foregone care (“the gap between perceived need and actual utilization of healthcare services”).
Now, however, it is COVID-19 vaccines — and particularly the unscientific authorization of the jabs for teens and young children — that appear to be the principal reason many parents no longer “perceive a need” to rush back into the vaccine fold.
Even the propagandistic New York Times admitted to a hardy new contingent of vaccine “skeptics” whose questioning was forged in the crucible of COVID-19 restrictions, COVID-19 vaccine mandates and, tragically for some, a child’s adverse reaction to the COVID-19 shots.
As a physician tweeted from the “frontlines of medicine” in early August, “Parents are DONE with giving their kids any and all [syringe emoji]. Not only that but they’re disgusted with what they had already allowed to be injected into their kids. They wish they could turn back.”
Public health’s tired old strategy for recapturing these wayward parents appears to be (surprise, surprise) badgering parents to “catch up as many vaccines as possible in a single visit” — bolstered by the false claim that it is to a child’s advantage to get a bunch of shots at once — while also stoking worries about a resurgence of so-called “vaccine-preventable” illnesses.
Thus, following a single case of paralysis ascribed to “polio,” New York State is busily trying to conjure up a polio outbreak, never mentioning the decades of manipulation of the “polio” diagnosis intended to mask nonviral causes of paralysis that include vaccination and poisoning.
Florida, meanwhile, is urging college students and other groups to get meningococcal vaccines following the deaths of seven gay and bisexual men, allegedly from meningococcal disease.
Why did the deceased men develop meningitis to begin with? No one has shared information about their COVID-19 vaccination status, but researchers around the world are reporting meningitis as a post-COVID-vaccination adverse event in adolescents and adults — for example, in Japan, Singapore, Korea, Iraq, Belgium and Germany.
Meningitis also is a listed adverse event for DTaP, hepatitis A and B, influenza and MMR vaccines, and vaccines containing Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) and polio components.
And a 28-year-old physician who volunteered in Brazil’s clinical trials for AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine died after receiving the meningitis vaccine given to the “control group.”
What kids really need
Sadly, whatever temporary or longer-lasting silver lining may have emerged from the COVID-19-induced lull in childhood vaccination, children and their parents still face many challenges.
According to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study, the weight status of children and adolescents who were already overweight or obese worsened significantly during 2020, and children’s food insecurity is rising both domestically and internationally.
In addition, the massive social and behavioral changes commanded through government restrictions have prompted dire headlines about young people’s mental health — although experts caution these could counterproductively lead to overdiagnosis and overmedication with black-box-warning drugs known to cause violence and suicide.
Rather than more vaccines or drugs that have never delivered on their hype or promises, what children and youth need to thrive are the slower-but-surer public health fundamentals — such as solid nutrition, safe housing and economic security — and the loving attention of their parents.
August 13, 2022
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Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | COVID-19 Vaccine |
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Samizdat – August 13, 2022
Ukrainian soldiers that were captured as prisoners of war by Russia have decided to remain in the territory controlled by Moscow and allied forces, expressing reluctance to continue fighting, Russia’s Ministry of Defense claimed on Saturday.
“Ukrainian prisoners of war belonging to the units of the Naval infantry, National Guard, air assault and ground forces chose to stay in the territory controlled by Russia because of their reluctance to fight and fear of being sent to the frontlines again,” the ministry wrote on its Telegram channel.
The Defense Ministry said the Ukrainian POWs do not want to be used as “cannon fodder” and die on the battlefield while “carrying out criminal orders” issued by Kiev.
The Russian military also posted a video of what appears to be an interview with a Ukrainian POW who said he laid down his arms voluntarily and turned himself in to the allied forces.
According to the prisoner, he has been treated well and does not want to return to Ukraine as part of any future swaps.
Few soldiers manage to surrender voluntarily due to a crackdown by Ukraine’s nationalist battalions, the ministry claimed, noting that the nationalists threaten to shoot any soldiers that seek to abandon their combat positions.
According to the ministry, the POWs have told of rampant corruption among the Ukrainian ranks, the use of intimidation tactics by Kiev, and “barbaric treatment of civilians who are used by [the] nationalists as human shields on a regular basis.”
Earlier this month, Moscow claimed that it scrupulously observes the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war, while Kiev’s forces have tortured, starved, and deprived of medical care Russian POWs. At the time, Russian Deputy Defense Minister Aleksandr Fomin also condemned the West’s unwillingness to hold Kiev accountable for these violations and crimes.
In July, Moscow blamed Kiev, and Ukranian President Vladimir Zelensky personally, for the fatal shelling of a detention facility in the Donetsk People’s Republic. According to the Russian Defense Ministry, a missile strike using the US-made HIMARS multiple rocket launcher killed 50 Ukrainian POWs, injuring another 73.
August 13, 2022
Posted by aletho |
War Crimes | Russia, Ukraine |
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Europe’s biggest nuclear power plant is under repeated missile attacks by the NATO-backed Kiev regime. Let that appalling fact sink in for a moment. Can anything more criminal and reckless at this time be imagined?
Bear in mind that the very governments (regimes really) responsible for this abysmal situation are the same ones who proclaim “rules-based order” and “liberal democracy”. Evidently, their rhetoric is just a sick facade for totalitarianism and lawlessness.
What is going on is nuclear terrorism by the Nazi-infested Kiev regime and its Western sponsors. The missiles hitting the Zaporozhye nuclear plant (ZNPP) are supplied by the United States and its NATO allies. The power station has been under sustained artillery or drone attack since last week. A fire at the installation has already been reported although the Russian military and the Ukrainian civilian operators at the Zaporozhye plant managed to put the blaze out. The ZNPP is reckoned to contain hundreds of tonnes of enriched uranium and other spent nuclear fuel. Situated on the mighty Dnieper River in southeast Ukraine that flows into the Black Sea, if the ZNPP is fatally hit the damage would be catastrophic for Europe and the rest of the world. The resulting radioactive contamination would far exceed that of Chernobyl or the Fukushima disaster. The world is on the brink of a deliberately orchestrated cataclysm.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and the UN international nuclear supervising agency, the IAEA, have both condemned the attacks on Zaporozhye as “suicidal”. They have appealed for demilitarization of the area. The UN is being cowardly in its restraint by not specifically condemning the NATO-weaponized Kiev regime. The UN is hiding behind cynical claims that there are “conflicting reports” of who is to blame for the shelling of the nuclear plant.
The United States and its Kiev proxy are blaming Russia for the military strikes. Displaying twisted logic, they say Russia is carrying out the attacks in order to smear the Ukrainian regime. They also claim that Russia is using the plant as a cover for its military forces.
Russian forces commandeered the Zaporozhye NPP in early March, days after they invaded Ukraine on February 24. Russia’s military operation was compelled by the relentless build-up of NATO’s offensive threat in neighboring Ukraine since the CIA coup d’état in 2014. Securing the ZNPP was a top priority given the criminal recklessness of the NATO-backed Kiev regime. Now the United States and its Kiev catspaw are absurdly making out that Russia is hitting its own forces and territory under its control, including the vitally important ZNPP.
The trajectory of missiles fired on the ZNPP clearly shows that the attacks are coming from the territory under the control of the Ukrainian forces and its NATO accomplices. The rational suspicion is that the long-range multiple-launch rocket systems supplied and overseen by the U.S., Britain and Germany are involved.
Washington and its NATO allies are calling on Russia to relinquish control of the nuclear plant and give it back to the Kiev regime.
That preposterous demand exposes who the nuclear terrorists are. The United States and its NATO axis are responsible for holding Europe and the world hostage with the threat of nuclear catastrophe.
We should note that anything claimed by the Kiev regime and its Western handlers, including the entire news media acting as propaganda outlets, cannot be taken remotely seriously. This week, the Kiev puppet president Vladimir Zelensky admitted through his aide Mikhail Podolyak that all public statements are “information warfare” designed to deceive Russia. The alleged Russian massacres at Bucha and Mariupol, allegations of mass rapes by Russian soldiers, and allegations of bombing civilians all fit into this admission of lies.
The furor over a report by Amnesty International last week blaming the Kiev regime for using civilian centers such as hospitals, schools and homes as military shields is just the tip of a very dirty iceberg. But it illustrates the depravity and corruption of the NATO-backed Kiev regime.
The risible accusations that Russia is shelling the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant as some kind of propaganda stunt betray the guilt of projecting onto others what the accusers themselves are capable of doing.
Russian forces have secured Europe’s largest nuclear power station and up to now have averted disaster by protecting it. It is Russia that summoned the UN Security Council to convene this week in an emergency session to highlight the extreme danger. Moscow is calling for demilitarization and for IAEA inspectors to be allowed access to the ZNPP in order to report the circumstances. It is the Kiev regime and its Western sponsors who are preventing those calls. The United States and its NATO axis are supplying more and more long-range missiles to Ukraine and slandering Russia with claims of “nuclear terrorism”. The U.S. axis is in effect giving a green light to the Kiev regime to continue its criminal offensive.
This week saw the 77th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That horror was carried out as a criminal act of state terrorism. American justifications for the crimes on August 6 and 9, 1945, have always been known – albeit not widely known due to Western media lies – to be baseless propaganda. The intended effect of the U.S. imperial regime then was to terrorize the rest of the world into submitting to its presumed global dominance.
The same abominable, lawless logic is on show again with the situation in Ukraine over the Zaporozhye nuclear plant. The United States is using its Kiev proxy to hold the world hostage to its imperial objectives.
The psychopathic gambling by the U.S. regime is heinous. Russia has warned that if its territory comes under threat it will use nuclear forces to defend itself. Nuclear war is an increasing risk. If the U.S.-sponsored Kiev regime makes a fatal blow on Zaporozhye causing untold radioactive contamination of Europe, Russia and the rest of the world, what do the Americans expect Moscow to do? Yet this madness by Washington is being pursued.
A diplomatic end to the crisis over Zaporozhye as with the general war in Ukraine is being thwarted by NATO’s militarism. The world’s foremost nuclear terrorist regime – in Washington – is playing with fire and acting as the perverse God of Death again, holding the whole world to ransom for its pernicious ends.
A simple, urgent test beckons: stop the military attacks on Zaporozhye. Now, who is objecting?
August 13, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Nuclear Power, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | NATO, Ukraine, United States |
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By Aleksandar Pavic | Samizdat | August 13, 2022
In crisis after crisis, Western narrative control kicks into overdrive to shift blame, whitewash culprits, or make sure inconvenient lines of questioning are never pursued
Soon after US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s recent descent on Taiwan, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, called out Nicholas Burns, America’s ambassador to China, for “keeping an embarrassed silence” regarding the “insolent stunt.”
The silence was quite a change from how vocal Burns had been a mere month prior at the World Peace Forum in Beijing, where he demanded that China stop relaying “Russian propaganda” by “accusing NATO of starting” the conflict in Ukraine. He used the opportunity to accuse the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s spokesperson of “telling lies about American bioweapons labs, which do not exist in Ukraine.”
But that was then and this is now in the West’s ‘rules-based order’, where each occasion requires a new set of rules. Thus, it goes without saying that, for the time being, Burns will also keep an ‘embarrassed silence’ about another potentially tectonic event – the latest, even more damning statement regarding alleged US-run biolabs in Ukraine made by the Russian Defense Ministry on August 4. Lieutenant-General Igor Kirillov, the head of the Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Protection Troops of the Russian Armed Forces, said Moscow was assessing the possibility of US involvement in the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as investigating US-funded research of various other pathogens.
The reason for Burns’ silence is not difficult to guess – the serious allegations made in Kirillov’s presentation, if properly investigated and proven true, could serve as an indictment of what could be America’s use of Ukraine as a vast pathogen testing ground. And since the Western media mostly chose to ignore it, the ambassador was certainly not going to make a statement they would have to quote, drawing attention to the issue. And now that Twitter has suspended the Russian Foreign Ministry’s account for daring to quote key parts of Kirillov’s media presentation about the possible origins of Covid-19, Burns and company don’t have to say anything at all. If it’s memory-holed by the social media, then it’s as if it never happened.
That’s the modus operandi of the Western elites – it’s not the truth that matters, but successfully managing the narrative so that it doesn’t leave room for doubt in people’s minds. In other words, they think they can do whatever they want.
Perhaps we should remind ourselves of the post-Cold War Western formula announced during the heady days of the early 2000s, an era marked by another famous American political quote, Karl Rove’s “we’re an empire now and, when we act, we create our own reality.” As Tony Blair’s policy adviser, Robert Cooper, nonchalantly put it on the pages of The Guardian in April 2002: “The challenge to the postmodern world is to get used to the idea of double standards. Among ourselves, we operate on the basis of laws and open cooperative security. But when dealing with more old-fashioned kinds of states outside the postmodern continent of Europe, we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era – force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary to deal with those who still live in the 19th century world of every state for itself. Among ourselves, we keep the law but when we are operating in the jungle, we must also use the laws of the jungle.”
Two decades later, despite the rise of both China and Russia and the world’s inexorable evolution to multipolarity, imperial habits die hard – usually until they hit a wall of reality, as is currently happening in Ukraine and is bound to happen in Taiwan. But back to Burns for a moment. He’s far from new in enforcing double standards in the ‘jungle’. Before his present work on poking the Dragon regarding Taiwan, and the Bear regarding just about everything, he distinguished himself as a partisan and apologist of NATO’s illegal aggression against Serbia back in the 1990s, which resulted in Kosovo’s unilateral secession.
Meanwhile, in 2009, when he was the US under-secretary of state for political affairs, Burns explained to the media that the recognition of Pristina’s independence was in fact an expression of the US’ “interest in good relations with Serbia.” Will he, in due time, express himself similarly vis-à-vis China and Taiwan? Outside the West, it’s all still a jungle to Burns and his ilk, and the ‘natives’ are to be dealt with accordingly. So, in Burns-talk, Pelosi’s Taiwan sojourn and pledge of continuing US support for the island is actually a sign of America’s interest in good relations with China.
Another notable Anglo-American figure visible across the Kosovo-China-Ukraine crisis landscape is the Englishman Geoffrey Nice, who gained international notoriety as a prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), whose sole purpose was to shift the blame for the Western-inspired bloody breakup of that multinational country solely onto the Serbs. In addition to his selective prosecution of former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic for ‘crimes against humanity’, Nice’s ICTY legacy also includes accusations of destroying evidence related to human organ trafficking in Kosovo.
Nice subsequently offered his legal services to former Kosovo President Hashim Thaci, one of the main figures in not just the trafficking but the alleged “forcible extraction” of human organs of still-living, mostly Serb prisoners, as outlined in a stunning Council of Europe 2011 report, ‘Inhuman treatment of people and illicit trafficking in human organs in Kosovo’. The report also cites anti-drug agencies of “at least five countries” as saying Thaci “exerted violent control over the trade in heroin and other narcotics.” Nice’s subsequent attempt to discredit the report was, however, brilliantly dissected and exposed by American journalist Diana Johnstone as the latest attempt by a representative of “self-righteous Western democracies” to reserve the privileges of a “culture of impunity” exclusively for themselves and their clients. Of course, the clients in the ‘jungle’ still have to pay for the imperial ‘double standards’ umbrella, so in the end, Nice reportedly accused Thaci of owing him “almost a half a million euros” for his work for the Kosovo government.
Zakharova just recently more fully described the house of horrors over which Thaci allegedly presided: “Kosovo is the territory of ‘black’ transplantation. People were dissected alive, taking out internal organs for sale to those people in the West… In the West they stood in line for organ transplant operations. And they began to receive these organs when Kosovo turned into a terrible black hole in which people disappeared, who were not just killed, but killed to sell their internal organs.”
To paraphrase Franklin D. Roosevelt’s immortal words justifying US support for Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, they may be sons of b****es, but they’re the West’s sons of b****es.
August 13, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Russia, Ukraine, United States |
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In 2013, the CNN presenter Deborah Feyerick asked if asteroids falling to earth were caused by climate change. Earlier this year, CBS anchor Nate Burleson commented on the Tonga earthquake by saying: “We talk about climate change… these stories are a harsh reality of what we are going through. We have to do our part because these are more frequent.” Last week, the academic networking blog The Conversation discussed the Fagradalsfjall volcano eruption in Iceland and asked: “Is climate change causing more eruptions?”, adding that it had the potential to increase volcanic eruptions and affect their size.
Dear God – they’ll be telling us that climate change causes lightning next. Wait, hang on – “Washington DC lightning strike that killed two serves as climate warning” – Reuters, August 5th.
In the climate change show, jumping the shark is now a daily occurrence, particularly in the mainstream media. Gaslighting on a global scale is evident as the media push the command-and-control Net Zero agenda. Bad weather incidents and natural disasters are catastrophised to promote this increasingly hard-left political agenda. But the distinguished atmospheric scientist Emeritus Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT recently voiced the views of an increasing number of people when he said the current climate narrative was “absurd”. Yet he acknowledged that it had universal acceptance, despite the fact that in a normal world the counter-arguments would be compelling. “Perhaps it is the trillions of dollars being diverted into every green project under the sun, and the relentless propaganda from grant-dependent academics and agenda-driven journalists, along with the political control offered to elite groups in society by Net Zero, that currently says it is not absurd,” he speculated.
The Daily Sceptic has written numerous articles presenting evidence that global warming started to run out of steam over 20 years ago, despite the frequent, back-dated and upward temperature adjustments made by state-funded weather services. No science paper exists that proves conclusively that humans cause noticeable changes in the climate by burning fossil fuel. Despite years of research, scientists are no nearer knowing how much temperatures will rise if carbon dioxide doubles in the atmosphere. No link has been shown directly connecting temperatures and CO2 rises (and falls) over the entire paleoclimatic record. Countless natural processes play a part in determining climate conditions. And attempts to link individual weather events to long-term changes in the climate are produced by climate modellers and green activists giving vent to wishful thinking.
In the absence of credible science, there has been a resort to the name-calling, shaming and appeals to authority, common in previous ages. The recent news that the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) had returned to blooming health, and was showing record growth, was a disaster for most mainstream media outlets. All parts had reported for years that the coral was on its last legs due to human-induced climate change. During this time, the GBR observer Professor Peter Ridd was vilified for stating that the reef was a vibrant and healthy ecosystem. He was fired from his post at James Cook University for pointing out the deficiencies in the output of reef science institutions.
In August 2019, the Guardian reported that the former Australian chief scientist Ian Chubb had accused Ridd of “misrepresenting robust science” about the plight of the GBR. Shamefully, it repeated without comment Chubb’s slur that Ridd was relying on the “strategy used by the tobacco industry to raise doubts about the impact of smoking”.
Professor Ridd emerges from the whole sorry affair with his reputation restored and an acknowledgement that true scientists report their findings without fear of the mob, or seeking the favour of the Establishment.
Just days before the news was confirmed that the GBR was continuing to grow back in record amounts, the Guardian ran a long article saying that scientists had demonstrated “beyond any doubt” that humanity is forcing the climate to disastrous new extremes, They hadn’t, of course, and “beyond any doubt” is a phrase borrowed from the criminal law, not science. Professor Terry Hughes from the National Coral Bleaching Taskforce estimated that close to 50% of the GBR coral is already dead. Attribution science is said to show that the hot March weather in 2016 that caused a “catastrophic die-off” in 2016 was made “at least 175 times more likely” by the human influence on the climate. A more realistic explanation, invariably ignored in mainstream media, is that the powerful El Nino experienced in that year warmed sea waters temporarily, and led to a natural burst of bleaching. Full reef health was quickly restored when the effect of the natural oscillation was removed.
The global media gaslighting over political climate change is easier to understand if you follow the money. Earlier this year, the Daily Sceptic reported that the Associated Press was adding two dozen journalists to cover “climate issues”. Five billionaire foundations, including the left-wing Rockefeller operation, supplied $8 million. AP now says over 50 jobs are funded from these sources. The BBC and the Guardian regularly receive multi-million dollar contributions from the trusts of wealthy donors. It is estimated that Bill Gates has given more than $300 million over the past decade to a wide variety of media outlets. Democrat power couple James and Kathryn Murdoch also help pay the staff’s wages at AP. On their Foundation web site, it is noted that there is an investment in Climate Central, where meteorologists are used as “trusted messengers” of the links between extreme weather and climate change.
Meanwhile, the foundation of the green technology-funding Spanish bank BBVA hands out annual €100,000 payments. Last year the cash went to Marlow Hood of Agence France-Presse, who describes himself as the “Herald of the Anthropocene”, the latter being a political renaming of the current Holocene era. In 2019 Matt McGrath of the BBC took home the annual prize, while in 2020 it ended up in the coffers of the Guardian.
The White Queen tried to believe in six impossible things before breakfast. It’s a shame climate change wasn’t around in Alice’s day.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor
August 13, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | CBS, CNN, James Cook University, The Guardian |
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EXCESS all-cause mortality in New Zealand is running at record levels. About 100 people are dying each day in a country with a population of five million. A few times during the last couple of months, we have asked a key question: What are people dying of?
Ministry of Health data records that about seven people are dying each day with Covid, but only about a maximum of three of these because of Covid. That is just three per cent of deaths. Occupancy of intensive care beds with Covid hovers around three to five per cent Therefore it is not Covid that is overwhelming our hospitals, so what is?
The Ministry of Health and mainstream media have been talking vaguely about a bad flu season, but a quick check of the FluTracking website reveals that the 2022 flu season is not even as bad as 2019.
My plumber was doing a job for me last week and complained about staff falling ill continuously. Sick leave among teachers in New Zealand is up by 80 per cent. The newspapers are reporting businesses are closing because of staff shortages exacerbated by ‘winter illness’, but as the incidence of flu is not that high, what could be going on?
An article on the Stuff news website contains an important hint: Te Whatu Ora Taranaki hospital emergency department clinical nurse manager Therese Manning said while there had not been much change in the number of presentations to department in the last five years, the patients tend to be more unwell and therefore likely to stay in hospital longer.’
Acute presentations at emergency departments are increasing, but what are the patients ill with? We aren’t being told and may never be, if our health czars are allowed to continue to deny access to information.
This week it has been reported (correctly) that six Canadian doctors died suddenly (at least three of them immediately after receiving their mandatory fourth Covid shot), but hospitals refused to release the cause of death or vaccination status, citing privacy concerns. The authorities have vehemently denied that the deaths could be related to mRNA vaccination. See this article for a summary.
I don’t know if you have noticed, but stories about sudden death incidents seem to have dropped off the mainstream media radar. Three years ago a sudden unexplained death might have made the headlines, but today if they are reported at all, they only remain on the visible online page for a very short time. You might have missed this one.
Yet, as the Taranaki Hospital emergency department data and the all-cause mortality data reveal, acute illness and sudden death are at an all-time high. Life insurance data from the US paints a similar picture.
So have our newspapers ceased to care, or are they, like the hospitals and emergency services, too inundated to cope? Having heavily promoted mRNA vaccination for 18 months, are they too embarrassed to ask questions?
Not everyone is keeping silent. Professor Shmuel C Shapira, longtime head of the Israeli Institute of Biological Research, has been speaking out about the failure of the Israeli mRNA Pfizer vaccination programme, describing it as a house of cards about to come tumbling down.
He tweeted: ‘I am not against vaccines, I am against stupidity, false science and management that is not professional and ignores matters of fact.’
Dr Clare Craig, a former NHS diagnostic pathologist, is also raising her voice. On GB News, she analysed official German government data. This shows that one in every 5,000 doses causes a serious reaction to Covid vaccines. But it doesn’t stop there. The German government conducted a survey of more than half a million vaccine recipients. It found that one in 500 reported a serious adverse reaction after an mRNA dose (more than ten times the underreported official count).
If you are worried that lightly-affected Germans are inflating the figures, don’t be. The definition of a serious adverse reaction requires that a person be hospitalised or suffer a permanently life-changing event.
Dr Craig invited us to step back from the modelling and government guidance about efficacy and safety, and consider that Covid data from around the world does not show that mRNA vaccination leads to any reduction in deaths. Most illustrative are comparisons between comparable countries with high and low vaccination rates.
For example, compare Israel, with close to 100 per cent vaccinated (and most boosted with four doses), with Palestine, with just 40 per cent double-vaccinated.
Israel has 1,204 Covid-related deaths per million population and Palestine 1,182 deaths per million – roughly the same. It thus becomes apparent that mRNA vaccination does not reduce the Covid death rate.
Look at the Covid data from Africa and the picture becomes more concerning. Africa has a vaccination rate of 15 per cent, a population three times larger than Europe, and nine million confirmed Covid cases. Whereas Europe has 240million cases, and a Covid vaccination rate around 90 per cent.
Just remember that analysis of Covid death data does not include rising all-cause deaths unrelated to Covid infection. The evidence points to reduced immunity as a result of mRNA vaccination.
Dr Craig reported that the UK public are voting with their feet and failing to come in for boosters (and they are stopping bringing in their children for this dangerous jab). Aren’t we all in sympathy? We are waiting for our doctors to speak up and our courts to do the math.
The writer is in New Zealand.
August 12, 2022
Posted by aletho |
War Crimes | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, New Zealand |
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The CDC has dropped special quarantine recommendations for unvaccinated persons, finally admitting that natural immunity should be considered and that vaccines don’t stop infection.
“CDC’s COVID-19 prevention recommendations no longer differentiate based on a person’s vaccination status because breakthrough infections occur, though they are generally mild, and persons who have had COVID-19 but are not vaccinated have some degree of protection against severe illness from their previous infection,” their update reads.
The CDC removed the recommendation that unvaccinated persons quarantine after they’re exposed to the virus. They now recommend that individuals wear a mask for ten days post-exposure and get tested after five days.
The CDC further acknowledged that the Omicron variant of COVID poses a smaller risk of hospitalization and death than previous variants.
This announcement will likely pressure Canada’s health authorities (and Trudeau) to follow suit. Although numerous countries dropped their medical segregation policies long ago, Canada remains one of the last to do so.
Moreover, each consecutive variant appears to be weakening, with immunity (including natural immunity) being widespread. Although Canada has an abnormally high amount of mask and vaccine fanatics, the remaining medical segregation could soon be a thing of the past.
With that said, Canada’s health authorities have done nothing but warn of a return to restrictions and upcoming waves of COVID, telling Canadians that the pandemic is not over.
Additionally, the University of Toronto recently mandated that young health students living on residence get a 3rd vaccine.
August 12, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | Canada, CDC, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States |
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Facebook has hidden posts with the “#diedsuddenly” hashtag because it claims that some of these posts violate its far-reaching community standards. When users search for this hashtag, no results are displayed and Facebook shows a message stating that the results are hidden.
While Facebook doesn’t specify which rules these posts allegedly violated, Twitter users have been using the hashtag to share news stories about people who died suddenly. Most of these Twitter posts note that those who died were fully vaccinated for COVID-19 and allude to there being a connection between the vaccines and their deaths.
If Facebook users are posting similar content under this hashtag, the posts are likely to violate the tech giant’s ban on a wide range of COVID-19 vaccine claims. Facebook prohibits claims that “vaccines are toxic, dangerous, or cause autism” and reduces the distribution of “shocking stories” about the vaccines. One of Facebook’s examples of a shocking story is “Uncovered: See the 632 reports made of people who died within a week of having the new COVID-19 vaccine.”
The blocking of this hashtag is the latest of many examples of Facebook censoring content that is critical of or raises questions about the COVID-19 vaccines. Throughout the pandemic, Facebook has also mass censored anti-mask content, anti-lockdown content, and content that said the coronavirus came from a lab (a censorship policy that was suddenly reversed after the Biden admin announced that it would be investigating the origins of COVID).
Not only does Facebook mass censor content that goes against or questions government guidance and the legacy media narrative on COVID but it also partnered with the Pfizer-backed CDC Foundation to increase “vaccine uptake” and maintained a close relationship with US federal agencies on COVID messaging.
The tech giant has previously used hashtag blocking to censor many other topics including “#buchamassacre” (a block that it later said was a mistake), “#Revolution” (which was blocked on a July 4th weekend), and “#SaveTheChildren.”
August 12, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | COVID-19 Vaccine, Facebook |
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Newly released internal messages between Twitter staff show them discussing an April 2021 meeting with the White House where the Biden administration reportedly pushed for journalist and author Alex Berenson to be booted from the platform before Twitter banned him.
Berenson was banned from Twitter for violating its “COVID-19 misinformation” rules four months later in August 2021. Berenson responded by suing Twitter in December 2021, with the lawsuit accusing the tech giant of acting “on behalf of the federal government in censoring and barring him from access to its platform.” Berenson’s account was subsequently reinstated in July 2022 after both parties settled the censorship lawsuit.
These internal messages were published by Berenson and show April 22, 2021 discussions between Twitter employees on the business messaging app Slack. Berenson said he obtained the messages as part of his lawsuit against Twitter.
In one of the Slack messages, a Twitter employee says their meeting with the “WH [White House]” was “pretty good” but “they had one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn’t been kicked off from the platform.”
In another Slack message, a Twitter employee says that the White House “really wanted to know about Alex Berenson” and that Andy Slavitt, a Senior Advisor to President Biden’s COVID-19 Response Coordinator, “suggested they had seen data viz that had showed he was the epicenter of disinfo that radiated outwards to the persuadable public.”
Berenson said that in another Slack message, a Twitter employee said: “I’ve taken a pretty close look at his account and I don’t think any of it’s violative.”
Berenson noted that the message about White House officials questioning why he hadn’t been banned from the platform “make clear that top federal officials targeted me specifically, potentially violating my basic First Amendment right to free speech.”
He added: “If the companies are acting on behalf of the federal government they can become ‘state actors’ that must allow free speech and debate, just as the government does.”
Berenson also noted that previous censorship lawsuits accusing the government and social media companies of colluding to ban users have failed because the courts have “universally held that people who have been banned have not shown the specific demands from government officials that are necessary to support state action claims.”
However, in this case, Berenson argues that “federal officials appear to have gone far beyond generically encouraging Twitter to support Covid vaccines or discourage ‘misinformation’ (i.e. information that the government does not like). Instead, top officials targeted me personally.”
Berenson said he intends to sue the Biden administration for violating his First Amendment rights by pressing Twitter to ban him and that there will be “more to come soon.”
Jenin Younes, an attorney for the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), who has worked on two lawsuits that accuse the Biden administration of violating Americans’ First Amendment rights by coercing tech companies to censor “misinformation,” said that the revelations in the Slack messages released by Berenson are “a virtual smoking gun, and along with myriad circumstantial evidence proves our contention beyond any doubt.” Younes added that despite initial setbacks, she is confident that the NCLA’s lawsuits will be successful.
August 12, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Covid-19, Twitter, United States |
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Part One, The Record, treats the history of garlic as evidence. From the clay garlic bulb placed in an Egyptian grave nearly six thousand years ago, through the Ebers Papyrus, through Hippocrates, Dioscorides, Pliny and Galen, the Arab physicians under Avicenna, the medieval herbals, Culpeper, and the plague years, to the last era in which Western physicians prescribed garlic as a matter of course, which ran from 1850 to 1945. It closes with the living traditions that never stopped using it, and with the folklore of charms, vampires and the evil eye.
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