The Guardian has been running a series to mark the second anniversary of the first U.K. lockdown called “Rewriting COVID-19”, billed as examining the “narratives and received wisdom of the first two years of the pandemic”. It aims to ask “experts what we’ve got wrong and how to move forward”.
“Rewriting COVID-19” seems an apt title, with one contribution, from anthropologist Devi Sridhar, criticised for literally rewriting the history of the pandemic by claiming she only advocated Zero Covid before the vaccines arrived, when she is on record promoting it subsequently.
Despite the Guardian saying the series is about asking “experts”, it begins with a scurrilous piece by science journalist Debora MacKenzie, proclaiming, “False narratives about Covid left us with millions of deaths.” Criticising lockdown scepticism as “libertarian” (boo, hiss!), MacKenzie argues: “Infectious disease is always profoundly collective, whether or not leaders find that ideologically congenial… The many people whose age or medical condition makes them more likely to die if [infected], or who have suppressed immunity – perhaps only because they need an arthritis drug – cannot take ‘personal responsibility’ for avoiding Covid if they must return to the office, surrounded by maskless people exercising their ‘individual freedom’ to exhale asymptomatic Omicron.” According to Ms. MacKenzie, then, we must all change the way we live forever in case we inadvertently infect others with our asymptomatic bugs. But don’t worry, if we all wear masks then no one will get infected!
One expert who has contributed is Dr. William Hanage, Professor of the Evolution and Epidemiology of Infectious Disease at Harvard University. It’s not a great start, however, when he cites a figure of 160,000 U.K. pandemic deaths, even though the number of excess deaths during the pandemic is more like 133,000 (a figure which includes collateral deaths). He also claims herd immunity has “stubbornly failed to arrive and expel the virus from the population”, despite that being, as he should know, a caricature of what scientists say about herd immunity.
It’s what he says next, however, that puts his dogmatism really on show.
It should be astonishing given these facts, but some stubborn voices have continued to argue that in the autumn of 2020 we should have rushed to remove restrictions on all except those most at risk – who would be somehow saved by untested, implausible means gathered together under the heading of ‘targeted protection’. At that point no vaccines were widely available, and the effective therapies we now have against Covid were pie in the sky. Shockingly, there are now attempts to rehabilitate these ideas in parts of the media. Reaching back to relitigate such already-discredited approaches is nonsense. And worse, it makes reasonable discussions about pandemic management that much harder. Distraction has always been the goal of such revisionism.
It’s a bit rich to criticise focused protection as untested and implausible when the lockdown measures he is promoting are themselves untested – and now that they have been implemented have shown no overall benefit or effectiveness.
Although he implies he wants “reasonable discussions about pandemic management”, he shows no sign himself of pursuing that, as he writes off any scepticism of Covid restrictions as beyond reasonable debate. He implies that relaxing restrictions before vaccines were available was not a “reasonable” position to take as it was “guaranteed to lead to more preventable transmission, more serious illness, more hospitalisations and more deaths”. This is despite it being shown repeatedly that Covid waves rise and fall whether or not restrictions are in place, with Sweden demonstrating this in spring 2020 and Florida – which from autumn 2020 adopted the focused protection approach Professor Hanage rails against – having no worse a winter than those places which locked down hard. Why is a Harvard professor of epidemiology dismissing out of hand the ‘reasonableness’ of the evidence from Florida in the winter of 2020-21?
Professor Hanage states that Omicron BA.2 is mild enough to be “readily handled by the great majority of vaccinated folks” – implying it isn’t readily handled by the great majority of unvaccinated people, which is clearly misleading.
Having found a scientist willing to write meanly and intemperately about those who disagree with him, the series falls back on its science journalists. (To be fair, it also includes a contribution from Professor Danny Altmann of Imperial College London, saying the vaccines are not much cop and seem to cause original antigenic sin – which is surprisingly off-narrative.)
Science journalist Laura Spinney attempts a heroic defence of Zero Covid – though seems to undermine her own argument by conceding that you “need a plan B in case the context changes”. This might seem fatal for the argument, as of course the context always changes (you can’t live in a hermit kingdom forever), but Spinney instead blames the ultimate failure of Zero Covid on “other countries” which “let the virus rip”. If only everyone had done Zero Covid, it would have just gone away.
Reciting the Zero Covid article of faith, “The virus deprives us of liberty; the efforts preserve it,” she insists these “efforts” don’t necessarily mean lockdown, but merely “mass testing plus isolation of the infected, ventilation, masking, distancing” – failing to recognise that such measures, even without stay-at-home orders and business closures, are economically and socially crippling, rendering normal life and many activities unviable or prohibitively unpleasant.
It’s no surprise to find Spinney is no fan of cost-benefit analyses when it comes to pandemics, claiming it is “pointless… to cost elimination, or any other containment strategy”. “How do you measure what it has saved you,” she asks, in a misplaced rhetorical question. “In speculative fiction terms, what’s the counterfactual?” I’d suggest, countries which didn’t do these things, and earlier pandemics where we didn’t panic and overreact, which show clear benefits to keeping calm and carrying on.
At one point she claims that “non-pharmaceutical interventions” “stop transmission completely” – has she been following any of the data or studies these past two years? – and lines up countries which are “abandoning” such restrictions as responsible for the rise of hypothetical “more severe” new variants. Whatever the problem, it’s always the fault of the countries which didn’t impose more severe Zero Covid measures.
Not so much rewriting Covid, then, as rewriting the facts. So much for them being sacred.
Yesterday morning, celebrity doctor Sara Kayat appeared on GB News to defend the UK government’s decision to “offer” coronavirus vaccinations to children between the ages of 5 and 11.
It’s important we remind parents that the [Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization] have looked into all of the data, they’ve told us the benefits far outweigh the risks. The risks are extremely low, and the risks of Covid much higher.”
Is this true?
Let’s take the statements in reverse order.
Are the “risks of Covid much higher than the risks of the vaccine?”
They have literally no way of knowing.
But since Covid’s survival rate for children is something like 99.9998%, does it even really matter?
Do the benefits of the vaccine “far outweigh its risks”?
have demanded legal immunity to protect themselves from being sued should their vaccine cause harm,
and released a document listing 9 pages of over 1200 “adverse events of special interest”, which they defend by saying there “may not be a causal relationship”
… they are at least aware that there might be some risks.
And finally, have the JCVI really looked into “all the data”?
Absolutely not, because they don’t have all of the data.
None of the covid vaccines were subject to usual tests due to the covid “emergency”, the few studies that were done were highly flawed, and since the vaccines have only existed for about 18 months there has been literally no time to do any kind of research on the possible long term side effects of the vaccine.
In short, they don’t have “all the data”. They don’t have most of the data. They have almost no data, except that your child has 499,999 out of 500,000 chance of surviving “Covid”.
Do you want to risk giving your child an untested vaccine to mitigate a one in five-hundred-thousand chance?
New revelations surfaced this month around the suppression of ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19.
The Frontline Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) Community on March 8 laudedPhil Harper, a documentary director and producer, for his efforts to identify the unnamed individual responsible for influencing leading expert opinion on the safety and efficacy of ivermectin in treating COVID early in 2021.
The actions of this hidden hand resulted in the systematic and tragic dismissal of a powerful remedy that could have saved millions of lives across the world.
Before we dig deeper into Harper’s discovery, let’s look at the latest attempt by a mainstream media outlet to discredit ivermectin’s utility in treating COVID.
The Wall Street Journal misleads the public
The Wall Street Journal on March 18 published an article with this headline: “Ivermectin Didn’t Reduce Covid-19 Hospitalizations in Largest Trial to Date.”
Headline readers will easily reach the seemingly obvious conclusion: Drs. Anthony Fauci and Rochelle Walensky, along with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, were right all along.
However, for those who read beyond the headline and first few paragraphs, the story begins to morph.
The headline clearly states the trial in question was the largest to date. However, this is not the case — as the article’s author, Sarah Toy, explains early in the piece:
“The latest trial, of nearly 1,400 Covid-19 patients at risk of severe disease, is the largest to show that those who received ivermectin as a treatment didn’t fare better than those who received a placebo.”
This wasn’t the largest trial to date — it was only the largest trial to date among the subset of trials that have shown no benefit of ivermectin.
Was this an oversight? Or was it a deliberate attempt to confuse the 42 million readers of The Wall Street Journal’s digital content?
Putting aside the possible intention to mislead, it is impossible for a study to definitively prove that no effect exists. This is what is referred to in science as the null hypothesis, meaning an intervention has no effect.
It is entirely possible that a study may demonstrate no measurable effect. It is quite a different thing to prove that that same intervention will not have an effect under any circumstances.
To put it flatly, one cannot prove that something doesn’t exist.
Toy chose not to mention the 81 separate studies — involving a combined 128,000 participants — that demonstrated an average efficacy of 65% for several different outcomes.
She also did not mention the 22 studies — involving nearly 40,000 people — around the outcome in question, hospitalization. Those studies showed an average efficacy of 39%.
The Wall Street Journal did not cite the study that was the focus of its article, because the study hasn’t yet been published. Yet Toy assured readers the study has been “accepted for publication in a major peer-reviewed medical journal.”
With no paper to cite, the journal instead quoted Edward Mills, one of the study’s lead researchers and a professor of health sciences at Canada’s McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario:
“There was no indication that ivermectin is clinically useful.”
Of note, all participants in this prospective study were drawn from one of 12 clinics in the Minas Gerais region of Brazil. All were at risk for severe disease due to underlying comorbidities.
The dosing regimen was unspecified and COVID diagnosis was made through rapid testing only.
The real story behind ivermectin and COVID-19
The Wall Street Journal article is yet another widely read piece that cherry-picks studies that purportedly show no benefit while categorically ignoring the mounting evidence to the contrary.
The systematic suppression of ivermectin’s efficacy against COVID has been well documented by The Defenderhere, and in Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s New York Times bestselling book, “The Real Anthony Fauci.”
However, as mentioned at the outset of this article, FLCCC this month shed more light on the mystery behind Dr. Andrew Hill’s stunning decision early in 2021 to recommend that more research would be required to support the use of ivermectin to treat COVID patients — despite the enormous amount of data suggesting otherwise.
It was Hill’s so-called systematic review that effectively scuttled the World Health Organization’s (WHO) acceptance of ivermectin as a potent COVID remedy.
Other governing medical bodies, including the NIH, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency immediately fell in line behind the WHO’s stance.
Hill had been a strong advocate for ivermectin in the closing months of 2020. In October 2020, he was tasked by the WHO to present the findings on ivermectin.
Hill, Dr. Tess Lawrie, director of The Evidence-Based Medicine Consultancy, Ltd. and other researchers were collaborating to publish their findings in early 2021. Those findings would definitively conclude that ivermectin could and should be used to treat COVID at all stages of the disease.
On Jan. 18, 2021, days before the planned publication of this joint effort, Hill chose to independently release his findings on preprint servers. He concluded the opposite of what he and others had found through their research:
“Ivermectin should be validated in larger appropriately controlled randomized trials before the results are sufficient for review by regulatory authorities.”
His shocking reversal of opinion drew immediate consternation from members of FLCCC and Lawrie. Soon after Hill released his paper, he spoke with Lawrie in a recorded zoom meeting that raised more questions.
Oracle Films released an informative and succinct video that contextualizes the pivotal conversation between Hill and Lawrie.
When Lawrie confronted a squirming Hill, Hill eventually admitted the conclusions in his analysis had been influenced by Unitaid, a quasi-governmental advocacy organization funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and several countries — France, the UK, Norway, Brazil, Spain, the Republic of Korea and Chile — to lobby governments to finance the purchase of medicines from pharmaceutical multinationals for distribution to the African poor.
“Unitaid gave $40 million to Andrew Hill’s employer, the University of Liverpool, four days before the publication of Hill’s study. Hill, a Ph.D., confessed that the sponsors were pressuring him to influence his conclusion.
“When Dr. Lawrie asked who was trying to influence him, Hill said, ‘I mean, I, I think I’m in a very sensitive position here …’”
Who was the Unitaid member who impelled Hill to change his tune?
Thanks to the sleuthing by Phil Harper, producer, director and author of a Substack newsletter under the moniker “The Digger,” we may have an answer.
The hidden hand that muzzled ivermectin
Harper explained his remarkable discovery, writing:
“Sometimes information can be sitting right underneath your nose. Many suspected that ‘persons unknown’ had altered the paper, but we didn’t know who. Who are these people who nudge science into profitable shapes?!”
In another Substack article, Harper explained how he was able to identify crucial changes made in the days prior to the study’s distribution by comparing it to a previous version that was emailed to Lawrie. This original version was not made public.
The changes were subtle but clearly designed to weaken the conclusions of the analysis. Even more suspicious was the deletion of Unitaid’s financial contribution in the form of an “unrestricted research grant” from the funding declaration portion of the paper.
By examining the metadata attached to the PDF document Hill submitted to several preprint servers, Harper discovered that the author (as indicated in the metadata) of the paper was Andrew Owen, a professor of pharmacology & therapeutics and co-director of the Centre of Excellence in Long-acting Therapeutics (CELT) at the University of Liverpool.
Harper continues:
“His authorship is tied programmatically to the document, meaning a device or software programme registered to the name Andrew Owen saved off the document as a PDF. When exporting a PDF, Microsoft Word automatically adds title and author information.
“Unless someone used his computer, Andrew Owen has his digital fingerprint on the Andrew Hill paper. A paper we have very strong reason to believe was altered by ‘people’ at Unitaid.”
Owen is also a scientific advisor to the WHO’s COVID-19 Guideline Development Group. Just days before Hill’s original paper was to be published, a $40 million grant from Unitaid, the paper’s sponsor, was given to CELT. Owen is the project lead for that grant.
According to Harper:
“The $40 million contract was actually a commercial agreement between Unitaid, the University of Liverpool and Tandem Nano Ltd (a start-up company that commercializes ‘Solid Lipid Nanoparticle’ delivery mechanisms) — for which Andrew Owen is a top shareholder.”
Owen is not listed as an author of the analysis, yet his digital fingerprint is on its last-minute revisions.
Instead, Hill listed all the authors of the studies that his systematic review was critiquing as co-authors of the review itself. This is a striking departure from standards of a systematic review, as it undermines the purpose and objectivity of such an analysis.
Conclusion
It is difficult to summarize this situation without diluting the impact of what has been presented here.
Mainstream media sources such as The Wall Street Journal continue to publish unbalanced and poorly researched articles while enormous stories are unfolding behind the wall of corporate-funded propaganda.
Hill’s own opinion, when untrammeled by hidden influence, suggested 75% of COVID deaths could have been prevented by using ivermectin as treatment.
The “hidden hands” of profit-driven operatives are taking an enormous toll on humanity through their manipulation of public and scientific opinion.
In the end, the public must decide when enough is finally enough.
British sanctions on Russian media, including RT, interfere with the right of journalists to work where they please, Stephane Dujarric, the spokesman for UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, told journalists on Thursday.
“As a matter of principle, we very much do believe in the right of journalists to do their work everywhere,” Dujarric told reporters.
Hours earlier, UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss announced a new tranche of sanctions targeting state-sponsored ANO TV-Novosti, which runs RT, and Rossiya Segodnya, which operates Sputnik News.
London described the two outlets as “Russian propagandists and state media who spread lies and deceit about Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine,” although no examples of falsehoods or deceitful statements from RT or Sputnik were given. Instead, the British government claimed that RT has “propagated pro-Kremlin narratives around the invasion of Ukraine, including that neo-Nazis are present in the country and that Ukrainian soldiers have committed war crimes.”
The presence of neo-Nazis in Ukraine has been reported by both RT and the Western media, members of the Ukrainian military have openlystated that they intend to commit war crimes, and footage allegedly detailing such crimes is currently being investigated.
General Mikhail Mizintsev, a senior Russian military planner, and Sergey Brilev, a Russian TV anchor, were also among the 14 names and entities sanctioned on Thursday.
Truss’ latest sanctions came several weeks after British media regulator Ofcom revoked the broadcasting licenses of Russian media outlets, claiming they weren’t in a position to cover the Ukraine crisis. Meanwhile, London’s own state-controlled BBC has covered all conflicts involving the UK in living memory, including the “weapons of mass destruction” pretense for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which turned out to be false.
While UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has condemned Russia’s military offensive against Ukraine, his office has not supported all of the west’s retaliatory measures. In a briefing on Tuesday, Dujarric said that Guterres does not support proposals by US lawmakers to exclude Russia from the UN Human Rights Council, and that such a move would set “a dangerous precedent.”
The Russian military has presented documents showing Ukraine’s interest in using drones to deliver weaponized pathogens developed in US-funded biolabs. Names of US officials involved in the biolabs projects, and the role the current US president’s son played in the program, were also made public during the special briefing on Thursday.
One of the key pieces of evidence was a letter from the Ukrainian company Motor Sich to the Turkish drone manufacturer Baykar Makina – makers of the Bayraktar TB2 and Akinci UAVs – dated December 15, 2021. The Ukrainians specifically asked if the drones could carry 20 liters of aerosolized payload to a range of 300 kilometers – putting them in range of a dozen major Russian cities and almost all of Belarus.
“We are talking about the development by the Kiev regime of technical means of delivery and use of biological weapons with the possibility of their use against the Russian Federation,” said Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, commander of the Russian Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Protection Forces.
Kirillov also referenced a US patent (No. 8,967,029) for a mechanism to deploy aerosolized pathogens from a drone. The US response to a 2018 Russian inquiry about this patent did not deny its existence, but claimed that it technically did not violate Washington’s obligations under the treaties banning chemical and biological weapons, he pointed out.
Kirillov showed signed contracts between US government agencies – Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), the Pentagon, the Department of State – and the Ukrainian Ministry of Health, as well as the specific facilities inside Ukraine. The Pentagon spent more than $30 million for biological research at just one Ukrainian facility, the Public Health Center of the Ministry of Health, according to the Russian military.
DTRA official Robert Pope was “one of the key figures” in the program, and “the author of the idea of creating a central depository of especially dangerous microorganisms in Kiev,” Kirillov said. The Pentagon’s biological projects in Ukraine were coordinated by Joanna Wintrol, head of the DTRA office in Kiev, until she left in August 2020. She directly supervised projects UP-4, UP-6, and UP-8 to study deadly pathogens, including anthrax, the Congo-Crimean fever, and leptospirosis, according to Kirillov.
The US agency’s point of contact was Ukraine’s Health Minister (2016-2019) Ulyana Suprun, herself a US citizen, Kirillov noted, while a major go-between was the private contractor Black and Veatch, whose Kiev office was headed by Lance Lippencott. Another Pentagon contractor, Metabiota, also had a role in the project.
Kirillov said that Hunter Biden – son of the current US President Joe Biden – played “an important role in creating a financial opportunity to work with pathogens on the territory of Ukraine,” pointing to several emails between him and executives of Metabiota and Black and Veatch. In particular, he described the Metabiota VP as “a confidant of Hunter Biden,” based on their correspondence. According to the general, the “Western media” has confirmed the authenticity of these emails – presumably a reference to materials published last week by the British newspaper the Daily Mail.
Even Kiev was concerned about the biolabs, according to a memo Kirillov showed. A 2017 letter from the Kherson department of the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) said that DTRA and Black and Veach intend to “establish control over the functioning of microbiological laboratories in Ukraine conducting research on pathogens of particularly dangerous infections that can be used to create or modernize new types of biological weapons.”
Pointing to a June 2019 document from the Public Health Center of the Ministry of Health of Ukraine, Kirillov wondered why it insisted on secrecy and required that “serious” incidents “including the death of the subjects” had to be reported to the US bioethics authorities within 24 hours – when other documents about that specific program only reference standard blood sampling work.
“We do not exclude that the official research program is only the ‘visible part of the iceberg’, while in practice, volunteers were infected with the Congo–Crimean fever virus, hantaviruses and the causative agent of leptospirosis,” the general said, accusing the US of “a dismissive attitude towards the citizens of Ukraine,” and treating them as guinea pigs for biological and medical experimentation.
The US has long claimed that allegations about Pentagon-funded biolaboratories in Ukraine were “Russian disinformation.” Earlier this month, however, US diplomat Victoria Nuland testified before the Senate that “biological research laboratories in Ukraine” did exist, and that Washington was working with Kiev “to ensure that the materials of biological research do not fall into the hands of Russian forces.”
According to Kirillov, all pathogenic biomaterials stored in Ukraine were “transported by military transport aircraft to the United States via Odessa,” in early February 2022. On February 24, as Russian troops entered Ukraine, the ministry of health in Kiev ordered the remaining strains to be destroyed, the general said.
Kirillov said that the Russian intervention halted activities at five Ukrainian biolabs that had been working with anthrax, tularemia, brucellosis, cholera, leptospirosis, and African swine fever.
The push to get Canada’s controversial Bill C-11 – otherwise known as “Internet Censorship Bill” – is entering its final stages, as MPs in the country’s parliament will now debate it.
Those opposed to the bill are calling on Canadians to contact their MPs and ask them to vote against this legislation, which, if passed, is likely to make radical changes to the way Canadians are allowed to express themselves online, and what content they will be permitted to access.
Like any other declaratively liberal democracy that finds itself dangerously close to undermining the very foundations of its own system, Canada’s government is assuring citizens that their freedoms will not be curtailed in any way.
However, while the politicians’ lips say one thing, the draft law itself and its wording speak another story, critics are warning. The bill wants to force social and other online platforms to artificially prioritize certain categories of content, such as those promoting diverse ethno-cultural backgrounds, socio-economic statuses, abilities and disabilities, sexual orientations, gender identities, etc.
The bill is the “brainchild” of Canada’s Minister of Environment and Climate Change Steven Guilbeault, who back in 2020 served as Minister of Canadian Heritage, when he said that once the bill becomes law, a new regulator will be appointed to make sure it is implemented, and “hate speech monitored.”
The main criticism the bill has faced from a flurry of free speech advocates of various ideological and political persuasions is that the Canadian Radio Television and Telecommunications (CRCT), a broadcasting and telecommunications regulatory agency, will now serve as a government tool to “regulate” the internet as well, and fairly explicitly, ending the era of the open internet in Canada (although that crucial quality has been steadily eroding across the globe for years.)
On March 30 of last year, The New York Timespublished an article that was treated as a bombshell by the political class. Citing exclusively anonymous sources — “three people briefed on the matter” — the Paper of Record announced that Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) “is being investigated by the Justice Department over whether he had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old and paid for her to travel with him.”
The headline chosen by Times editors was as inflammatory and provocative as possible: “Matt Gaetz Is Said to Face Justice Dept. Inquiry Over Sex With an Underage Girl.” The paper, high up in the article, emphasized what grave crimes these were: “The Justice Department regularly prosecutes such cases, and offenders often receive severe sentences.” The article was extremely light on any actual evidence regarding Gaetz, instead devoting paragraph after paragraph to guilt-by-association tactics regarding “a political ally of his, a local official in Florida named Joel Greenberg, who was indicted last summer on an array of charges, including sex trafficking of a child and financially supporting people in exchange for sex, at least one of whom was an underage girl.”
Only in the seventh paragraph — well below the headline casting him as a pedophile and sex trafficker — did the Times bother to note: “No charges have been brought against Mr. Gaetz, and the extent of his criminal exposure is unclear.” Exactly one year after publication of that reputation-destroying article, this remains true: while the DOJ may one day formally accuse him, Gaetz has not been charged with, let alone convicted of, a single crime which The New York Times stapled onto his forehead.
From the start, the GOP Congressman vehemently denied these accusations. And he went further than mere denials: he claimed that these allegations arose as part of a blackmail and extortion scheme to extract $25 million from his family in exchange for not publicizing these accusations, which his father promptly reported to the FBI. While many scoffed at Gaetz’s story as fantastical and bizarre, that part of his story was vindicated last August when a Florida developer and convicted felon “was arrested on a charge that he tried to extort $25 million from the father of Rep. Matt Gaetz in exchange for a presidential pardon that would shut down a high-profile, criminal sex-trafficking investigation into the Republican congressman.” In November, that developer, Stephen Alford, pled guilty to trying to extort $25 million from Rep. Gaetz and his family.
In other words, the only component of this story that has thus far been confirmed — a full year after the NYT first trumpeted it — is the part of Gaetz’s denial where he insisted that all this arose from an extortion attempt. Yet none of that mattered, and it still does not matter. As I wrote in the aftermath of the Times story, designed to warn of the perils of assuming someone’s guilt without any due process: “That Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL)is a pedophile, a sex trafficker, and an abuser of women who forces them to prostitute themselves and use drugs with him is a widespread assumption in many media and political circles.” CNN celebrated the fact that one of Gaetz’s arch political enemies — the liberal icon Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) — said that “as the mother of daughters, the charges certainly are sickening.”
In sum, Matt Gaetz has now spent a full year with millions of people believing he is guilty of pedophilia and sex trafficking even though he has never had the opportunity to confront witnesses, evaluate evidence or contest his guilt in a court of law because he has never been charged. Instead, he has been found guilty by media-led mob justice, all from unethical and possibly illegal leaks by “people briefed on the matter.” As a result, not only did Gaetz become radioactive due to crimes that have never been proven, but so too did anyone who argued that he is entitled to due process before being assumed guilty. For writing that April article and producing an accompanying video advocating the need for due process before assuming someone’s guilt, I spent two days trending on Twitter due to widespread accusations that, like Gaetz, I too must be a pedophile who was only defending him because I am guilty of the same crimes. That is the core evil of mob justice: it triggers the worst instincts in mob participants, who become drunk with righteous rage and bereft of reason.
In a separate article and video report in December of last year, I outlined the reasons prosecutors are ethically and often legally barred from leaking the pendency of criminal investigations as appears to have been done to Gaetz. It is precisely because it is common that a person who is the subject of a criminal investigation never ends up being charged with, let alone convicted of, any crimes due to a lack of evidence to support an indictment or guilty verdict. Leaks thus have the effect, and often the intent, of destroying someone’s reputation, convicting them of repellent crimes in the court of public opinion that will never be brought in a court of law, thus relieving the state of the requirement to prove the crime and depriving the accused the opportunity to exonerate themselves.
These vital journalistic and ethical principles clearly apply to Gaetz but not only to him. In 2019 and 2020 in Brazil, I worked with colleagues for eighteen months on a multi-article exposé which revealed widespread corruption and wrongdoing on the part of the most powerful Brazilian prosecutors and judges. The misconduct was varied and severe, but one of the key unethical tactics they used was strategic and selective leaks about investigations against their adversaries. They would frequently use friendly media outlets to plant stories that a particular politician, activist or business person who opposed them was being “investigated” for some grave crime involving bribes or money laundering.
As these dirty prosecutors and judges in Brazil intended, these leaks would destroy the reputation of their targets overnight. Their allied media outlets would trumpet these accusations as if they were proven fact. The public assumed that their targets were guilty. Many lost their jobs, while others had their political careers ended. Yet so often, no charges were ever brought based on these leaks. That is because there was little to no evidence that the targets of these leaks had actually committed any crimes. As we revealed in August, 2019 as part of that investigative series:
Brazil’s Chief prosecutor overseeing its sweeping anti-corruption probe, Deltan Dallagnol, lied to the public when he vehemently denied in a 2017 interview with BBC Brasil that his prosecutorial task force leaked secret information about investigations to achieve its ends.
In fact, in the months preceding his false claim, Dallagnol was a participant in secret chats exclusively obtained by The Intercept, in which prosecutors plotted to leak information to the media with the goal of manipulating suspects by making them believe that their indictment was imminent even when it was not, in order to intimidate them into signing confessions that implicated other targets of the investigation.
The abuse inherent in such leaks is self-evident. When large corporate media outlets publish or broadcast innuendo from prosecutors by framing it as “X is being investigated for Grave Crimes Y and Z,” the public naturally believes that where there is smoke, there must be fire. In the midst of our exposés, Sérgio Dávila, the editor-in-chief of Brazil’s largest newspaper, Folha of São Paulo, apologized for this practice in an article by its ombudsman:
In the evaluation of the [editor], the space given by the newspaper to the allegations leaked by the prosecutor is deserving of criticism. “If I had to revisit the case and do the coverage again, I know that’s not possible, maybe I’d rethink the space we’ve given, headlines after headlines… So, yes, I do that self-criticism.”
Dávila spoke … about a common procedure not only in Folha, but in all major newspapers: the headlines produced from [accusations made during investigations] along the lines of “so and so” said that [a politician] “did such a thing, according to an investigation by Operation Car Wash”.
Much of this content, however, ended up being reviewed or invalidated by the courts, without a new headline to make amends.
In other words, media outlets frequently blared in headlines any accusatory leaks made by prosecutors and investigators, ruining the reputations of countless people. But when no charges were brought, or courts dismissed the accusations for lack of evidence, the paper or news broadcast rarely returned to tell their readers and viewers that the accusation had not been proven. Therein lies the grave danger, the clear injustice, of accusing people of crimes through media leaks and forcing them to live with a cloud over their head with no fair process to defend themselves.
One could make a similar argument about the ongoing FBI criminal probe into Hunter Biden’s international business and tax activities. On Monday, we produced a new video report on what is clearly one of the most egregious disinformation campaigns in modern American political history: the union of the CIA, corporate media and Big Tech to spread the outright lie in the weeks before the election that the incriminating materials from the Hunter Biden archive were not real but instead were “Russian disinformation” — meaning fake documents forged by the Kremlin.
As we have repeatedly reported, the evidence that this was a lie, and that the archive was real, was overwhelming from the start. But six months ago, a reporter from Politico, Ben Schreckinger, published a book, “The Bidens,” that contained ample proof that the key materials on the laptop were authentic. The media outlets that spread that lie in the weeks before the election simply ignored that book.
Two weeks ago, the outlet they unironically regard as the Paper of Record — The New York Times — published an article on the FBI probe into Hunter Biden which, in their words, relied on emails “obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop. The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.” On Monday, The Washington Postpublished a lengthy article on the Bidens’ potentially corrupt business activities in China that also relied on materials from the laptop, which that paper also said it confirmed.
Yet not a single media outlet that spread the pre-election “Russian disinformation” lie has acknowledged any of this, let alone retracted their pre-election lies. That is because, as we document in our new video report, these outlets no longer see their function as journalistic but instead as partisan and propagandistic: they are absolutely willing and even eager to lie if it helps the Democratic Party stay in power. They know that their almost exclusively liberal readers and viewers want them to lie to help Democrats, and so they feel no compunction about lying and no need to acknowledge it when they get caught red-handed doing so. Our new video report can be viewed on our Rumble page, or on the video player at the end of this article.
But note what our numerous reports on the Hunter Biden matter do not allege or imply. We do not state or suggest that he is, in fact, guilty of the crimes for which he is being investigated, precisely because he has not yet been charged with those crimes, which means that the government has not yet been forced to show its evidence of guilt and Hunter Biden has not yet had the opportunity to defend himself in a fair process. One can suspect his guilt based on the disclosed evidence, but to assume he is guilty prior to charges being filed and a trial being held would be just as wrong as assuming that about Matt Gaetz. The corporate media, vehemently defending Hunter Biden, has no problem recognizing this core principle when it comes to the president’s son, yet refuses to recognize its validity at all when it comes to Congressman Gaetz — whom they have all but branded a pedophile and sex trafficker of children — and other enemies of American liberalism.
There are multiple forms of corruption and wrongdoing in the world of politics and journalism. Obviously, if Gaetz in fact had sex with a 17-year-old girl, that would be a crime in some states. If he paid her to travel across state lines to do so, that would be a crime under federal law.
But thus far, he has not been charged with any such crimes. Maybe one day he will be. But as a result of these unethical leaks and the treatment of them by The New York Times, he has lived for a full year with millions of people believing that he committed a serious crime with which he has never been charged. Even if the day comes when he finally is charged and convicted, this will still be a form of grave corruption and profound injustice, one committed by the sinister leakers and the journalists who deliberately turned him into a pedophile and sex trafficker for ideological reasons, even knowing that the state has not yet concluded that it has sufficient evidence to prosecute him for it.
Stephen Dinan of the Washington Times reported on a new peer-reviewed paper that analyzes the results of the 2020 election and found Biden received 255,000 excess votes. It has been accepted for publication by the journal Public Choice and was written by Dr. John R. Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center. The linked pdf may not match the final printed version of the paper that will appear in the journal, but it is the copy that was peer-reviewed.
Both Dinan’s article and the paper are worth reading. Unfortunately, statistical analysis doesn’t prove anything, but I found Lott’s analysis impeccable and compelling. His discussion of the problems in several states with mail-in and absentee ballots is interesting and informative. He makes the following points very clearly.
Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin did not match signatures on the outer mail-in envelopes to the official registration records. Some states, like Pennsylvania accepted ballots that were not enclosed in outer envelopes. These acts are in violations of the laws in many states and make it impossible to verify a vote’s legitimacy.
Lott compares votes in adjacent voting precincts, where one of the precincts is accused of voter fraud, as with Georgia’s Fulton County, and finds statistically significant evidence of abnormal mail-in and absentee ballot results. In short, Trump’s absentee ballot share in the Fulton County precincts was depressed, compared to adjoining precincts. The largest estimate of depressed Trump votes was more than Biden’s margin in Georgia.
In Pennsylvania and other states, numerous voters trying to vote in person were told they had already voted absentee, suggesting that someone else had voted using their name. The differences found to be statistically significant in Georgia were not significant in Pennsylvania, but Pennsylvania was missing some essential data for the study, which was a problem.
In Nevada, 42,000 people voted more than once, 1,500 dead people voted, and 19,000 did not have a Nevada residence.
In Wisconsin 28,395 people voted without identification.
In Georgia, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, the rejection of improper absentee ballots in 2020 were a fraction of those rejected in 2016.
The most serious problems in the 2020 election were the procedural changes made, generally illegally, in absentee and mail-in voting. This type of voting is discouraged by the Jimmy Carter and James Baker, 2005 voting commission (Carter & Baker, 2005, pp. 46-47). The past problems with absentee voting in Europe have been much worse than in the U.S., at least prior to 2020, and as a result the practice is banned in 35 of 47 countries in Europe. In ten of the countries that allow it, the voter must show up in person and present a photo id, to pick up their absentee ballot. The remaining countries temporarily allowed voting in limited cases. Europe learned the hard way what happens when mail-in ballots are not secured, just as we did.
Lott concludes that his study underestimates the extent of voter fraud because it assumes that no voter fraud occurred with in-person voting. He also concludes that there were 142,000 to 368,000 total excess Biden votes, enough to swing the election. The statistical methods used for the study look valid to me, but as noted above, statistics are not proof. They do suggest that the election should be investigated, and the study shows that the permissive, and mostly illegal, absentee, and mail-in ballot procedures used in 2020 should never be repeated. I recommend everyone read Dinan’s article and the paper.
The Federal Election Commission, tasked with maintaining the integrity of US campaign finance rules, fined former Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee for violations related to election expenditures concerning the Trump-Russia collusion hoax.
On Tuesday, the FEC declared Clinton and the DNC “violated strict rules on describing expenditures of payments funneled to the opposition research firm Fusion GPS through their law firm,” according to a memo obtained by the Washington Examiner’sPaul Bedard.
“A combined $1,024,407.97 was paid by the treasurers of the DNC and Clinton campaign to law firm Perkins Coie for Fusion GPS’s information, and the party and campaign hid the reason, claiming it was for legal services, not opposition research.
“Instead, the DNC’s $849,407.97 and the Clinton campaign’s $175,000 covered Fusion GPS’s opposition research on the dossier, a basis for the so-called ‘Russia hoax’ that dogged Trump’s first term.
“The memo said that the Clinton campaign and DNC argued that they were correct in describing their payment as for ‘legal advice and services’ because it was Perkins Coie that hired Fusion GPS. But the agency said the law is clear and was violated.”
The fine revolves around a complaint filed by the Coolidge Reagan Foundation back in Sept. 2018.
The memo says (pg. 9) that Clinton and the DNC have agreed to pay the fine: “Solely for the purpose of settling this matter expeditiously and to avoid further legal costs, Respondent does not concede, but will not further contest the Commission’s finding of probable cause to believe.”
As a result, the Hillary for America campaign will pay a fine of $8,000, while the DNC is fined a civil penalty of $105,000.
Dan Backer, a representative for the Coolidge Reagan Foundation, told Bedard the settlement represents a monumental instance of accountability rarely seen these days.
“This may well be the first time that Hillary Clinton — one of the most evidently corrupt politicians in American history — has actually been held legally accountable, and I’m proud to have forced the FEC to do their job for once. The Coolidge Reagan Foundation proved that with pluck and grit, Americans who stand with integrity can stand up to the Clinton machine and other corrupt political elites,” Backer said.
The fines come as President Donald Trump last week sued Clinton, several staffers and various members of the DNC and fake news media for causing him and the American people grievous harm by perpetuating false claims of Russia collusion during the 2016 presidential election.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky lied to Norwegian lawmakers when he accused Moscow of deploying mines in the Black Sea to block foreign civilian ships from leaving Ukrainian ports, the Russian defense ministry said on Thursday, accusing Ukraine of being the culprit.
The rebuke came in response to Zelensky’s Wednesday address to the Norwegian parliament, during which the Ukrainian leader accused the Russian military of “creating the worst threat to international security since World War II” through its “insidious” operations in the Black Sea.
“About a hundred ships cannot leave to the Mediterranean. Some ships have been simply seized in acts of piracy aimed at stealing the cargo. Some ships were attacked,” Zelensky said.
“But the blockade of the ports was done by Russia not only through use of naval forces. They have deployed mines in the sea. And now the mines set up by the Russian forces are drifting in the sea. They pose a threat to anyone, to ships and ports of every nation in the Black Sea region.”
Mining its shores and territorial waters has long been part of Ukraine’s strategy of defending against a Russian attack from the Black Sea, which it started implementing after the hostilities broke out. On March 5, its armed forces warned residents of the Odessa region to stay away from the sea because of the mines being deployed by the military.
“We call on fishermen and owners of boats not to move near the shore of the Odessa region to avoid the risk of being fired upon or contacting mine barriers,” the message said.
According to the Russian defense ministry, Ukraine deployed some 420 old YaM-1 moored naval mines along its shores, including 370 in the Black Sea. About ten of them went adrift after their cables snapped during a storm earlier this month, the Russian military believes.
At least two apparent mines were reported found and have since been destroyed: one by the Turkish military and one in Romanian territorial waters. “Nobody knows where the rest of them are drifting,” the Thursday statement said, adding that Kiev’s mining operations created a major threat to shipping in the Black Sea.
The Russian ministry said that the second charge voiced by Zelensky during his video address was likewise “a lie”. The reality is that Ukraine is preventing 68 foreign ships from sailing from its ports of Chernomorsk, Odessa, Nikolaev and Yuzhny, while the Russian Navy is offering daily opportunities of safe passage to them.
“Crews of the ships radioed us and said any attempt by a foreign vessel to depart the Ukrainian ports is banned by the authorities under a threat of immediate sinking,” General Igor Konashenkov, the spokesman for the defense ministry, said.
Zelensky is currently on a virtual tour to whip up support for his nation, with addresses made to various Western nations each day. On Tuesday, he told the Danish parliament that transition to renewable energy is a moral imperative for the EU, because otherwise it would not be able to punish Russia by stopping buying its energy.
A study1 published March 24, 2022, supports past research that shows artificial sweeteners can increase your risk of cancer. Many people make the mistake of believing that since artificially sweetened products have fewer calories and no sugar, they therefore must be healthier. Yet, there is mounting evidence that the rising rates of obesity and cardiovascular disease are linked to consuming food products with artificial sweetener.
Artificial sweeteners became more popular after thousands of studies over many decades showed that sugar damages your health. As the sugar industry has successfully manipulated the evidence and misdirected the public, they also created a demand for artificial sweeteners with zero calories.
Sugar-sweetened beverages are the leading source of added sugar in the U.S., estimated to account for 341.1 calories from drinks in an adult’s diet and 312.6 calories in a child’s diet every single day.2 Despite this damaging evidence, sales have continued to rise, from $314.4 million in 2013 to $414.8 million in 2021.
This offers further evidence of both the addictive quality of sugar and artificially sweetened food and drink and the effectiveness of the sugar industry’s ability to hide the evidence.
Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention3 stops short of advising Americans to ditch sugar-sweetened beverages to avoid chronic disease. This isn’t entirely surprising, considering former CDC director Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald received $1 million in funding from Coca-Cola4 to purportedly combat childhood obesity during her six-year stint as commissioner of Georgia’s public health department. She also has a history of promoting the soda industry’s “alternative facts.”
One of those alternative facts is that soda and junk food are not responsible for obesity.5 According to statistics from 2016,6 39.6% of American adults were obese, not just overweight. By 2021,7 that number had reached 42% of adults who were obese and 35% who were overweight.
The American Obesity Association8 expects this trend to continue and predicts 50% of people will be obese by 2025 and 60% by 2030. Beverage makers advertise their artificially sweetened products as a healthier alternative to sugar, which makes it confusing, since when it comes to health, artificial sweeteners cause just as many health problems as sugar.
Even worse, most people don’t seem to catch on that artificial sweeteners likely have the opposite effect of what they’re trying to achieve with weight loss. In addition to promoting obesity, artificial sweeteners are not safe alternatives and are linked to multiple different health effects, including cancer.
Study Concludes Artificial Sweeteners Increase Cancer Risk
A team of scientists from the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research and Sorbonne Paris Nord University in France9 sought to look at the safety of artificial sweeteners — a topic that has been the subject of debate since they were released, despite multiple studies demonstrating adverse health effects.
This team looked at data from 102,865 adults enrolled in the ongoing NutriNet-Santé study against risk of cancer. Enrollment was voluntary, during which participants self-reported their diet, lifestyle, health data, medical history and socio-demographic information.10
Past studies had resulted in conflicting findings. This team was interested in the carcinogenicity of specific artificial sweeteners, including sucralose, aspartame and acesulfame-K, also known as Ace-K and marketed as Sunnet and Sweet One.11
The researchers looked at overall cancer risk and cancer by original site of tumor growth.12 The population-based cohort included information from 2009 to 2021 with a median follow-up time of 7.8 years. The researchers gathered data through a 24-hour dietary record and looked for associations between artificial sweeteners and cancer incidence.
The data were adjusted for multiple factors known to affect cancer diagnosis, including age, weight gain, physical exercise and family history of cancer. The results showed that individuals who consumed the highest level of artificial sweeteners had a higher overall risk of cancer, with the highest risks observed for breast cancer and obesity-related cancers. The researchers found associations between aspartame and Ace-K, writing:13
“Our findings do not support the use of artificial sweeteners as safe alternatives for sugar in foods or beverages and provide important and novel information to address the controversies about their potential adverse health effects.
While these results need to be replicated in other large-scale cohorts and underlying mechanisms clarified by experimental studies, they provide important and novel insights for the ongoing re-evaluation of food additive sweeteners by the EFSA [European Food Safety Authority] and other health agencies globally.”
Artificial Sweeteners Found in Many Processed Foods
Artificial sweeteners are found in many of the processed foods sold in the grocery store. As the sugar industry pivots to create foodstuffs for people eating low-carb meals without sacrificing taste, they add artificial sweeteners. Business Insider14 looked at 24 processed foods you commonly find in the store that have artificial sweeteners.
Many of these you likely would have guessed had either added sugar, high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) or artificial sweeteners, for example, Diet Snapple, Nestle mini marshmallows and Breyers Carb Smart Ice Cream. After all, if sugar is a carbohydrate, how else can you make low-carb ice cream taste good without sugar?
But other staples you may have thought were sweetened with sugar, also have artificial sweeteners, such as ketchup and Thomas’ Whole Grain English Muffins. Nearly every food product labeled “light,” “lite” or “low-calorie” also comes with a side order of artificial sweetener. But did you know that Pedialyte — a commonly used rehydration fluid in children with vomiting and diarrhea — also contains sucralose and Ace-K?
Greek yogurt, bottled salad dressing, and granola cereals may have natural sugars, but near the bottom of the ingredient list you’ll also likely find artificial sweeteners.15 If you’re steering away from “diet” foods, you’ll also find sugar substitutes in microwave kettle popcorn, non-diet ginger ale, chewing gum and toasted coconut almonds.16 In fact, unless you’re carefully reading the labels on any processed food you purchase, including bread, you’re likely getting artificial sweetener.
Increased Risk of Gut Bacterial Biofilms
Let’s start in the first place where artificial sweeteners can impact your health — in your gut. Much of the past research demonstrating a change in gut bacteria had used sucralose. One study17 found that sucralose lowered gut bacteria in an animal model by at least 47.4% and increased the pH of the intestines. Another study18 showed sucralose had a metabolic effect on bacteria and could inhibit the growth of certain species.
Researchers from Angelia Ruskin University tested the most popular sweeteners used in foods and hot beverages, including sucralose (Splenda), aspartame (NutraSweet, Equal and Sugar Twin) and saccharin (Sweet and Low, Necta Sweet and Sweet Twin).19 The data revealed that the products have a pathogenic effect on two types of gut bacteria.
Using lab data, the researchers showed that sugar substitutes triggered beneficial bacteria to become pathogenic. This could potentially increase your risk of serious health conditions and was the first study to demonstrate how two types of beneficial bacteria could become diseased and invade the gut wall.20
In this case, researchers studied Escherichia coli (E. coli) and Enterococcus faecalis (E. faecalis) and found they killed Caco-2 cells that line the wall of the intestines. The concentration of artificial sweeteners commonly found in two cans of diet soft drinks increase the ability of the bacteria to adhere to the Caco-2 cells and increased the development of bacterial biofilms.
Biofilms promote the invasion of intestinal cell walls and make the bacteria less sensitive to treatment and more likely to express variance that causes disease. Havovi Chichger, Ph.D., lead author, spoke about the results of the study in a press release:21
“Our study is the first to show that some of the sweeteners most commonly found in food and drink — saccharin, sucralose and aspartame — can make normal and ‘healthy’ gut bacteria become pathogenic. These pathogenic changes include greater formation of biofilms and increased adhesion and invasion of bacteria into human gut cells.
These changes could lead to our own gut bacteria invading and causing damage to our intestine, which can be linked to infection, sepsis and multiple-organ failure.”
Sweeteners Linked to Obesity and Type 2 Diabetes
Changes to the gut microbiome are some of the underlying factors that lead to other health conditions associated with sugar substitutes. Past studies have demonstrated that artificial sweeteners raise your risk of obesity and Type 2 diabetes, perhaps to an even greater degree than sugar. In 2018,22,23 animal research presented at the annual Experimental Biology conference in San Diego confirmed this.
The study explored how different sweeteners affect the ways food is used and stored in the body and how they affect vascular functioning. The researchers found that sugar and artificial sweeteners lead to impairment in both criteria, albeit through different pathways. Animals were fed diets high in artificial sweeteners or sugars (white or high fructose corn syrup) for three weeks and all demonstrated increased blood lipids.
However, artificial sweeteners accumulated in the blood, harming the vessel lining to a greater degree. Of the two artificial sweeteners tested, aspartame or Ace K, Ace K appeared to be worse. Lead author Brian Hoffmann, Ph.D., said,24 “In moderation, your body has the machinery to handle sugar; it is when the system is overloaded over a long period of time that this machinery breaks down.”
Artificial sweeteners, on the other hand, wear the machinery down. “Sweeteners kind of trick the body. And then when your body’s not getting the energy it needs — because it does need some sugar to function properly — it potentially finds that source elsewhere,” he says.25
Artificial sweeteners can worsen your insulin sensitivity and promote weight gain. Excessive consumption has been associated with cardiovascular disease and stroke.26 One popular artificial sweetener, aspartame, continues to be used despite increasing evidence it has negative health effects.
In one study,27 healthy adults were asked to consume a high aspartame diet for eight days followed by a low aspartame diet for eight days, with a two-week washout between. During the high aspartame period, individuals suffered depression, poor mood and headaches. They performed worse on spatial orientation tests, which indicates aspartame has a significant effect on neural behavioral health.28
The high aspartame diet was well below the maximum acceptable daily intake, causing the researchers to warn, “careful consideration is warranted when consuming food products that may affect neurobehavioral health.”29 Researchers have suggested aspartame may trigger insomnia, headache and seizures related to changes in concentrations of catecholamine in the brain.30
One study31 evaluated whether people with mood disorders are more vulnerable to the effects of aspartame. The study was halted by the Institutional Review Board after 13 had completed the study, but experienced severe reactions.
Zero Calorie Doesn’t Mean Zero Impact on Your Health
Manufacturers bait consumers with the lure that artificial sweeteners have reduced calories and may help with weight loss efforts. Yet, years of exposure have demonstrated that it has not made a positive impact on the obesity epidemic. In fact, since the 1980s, the prevalence of obesity has continued to rise in adults.32
In an effort to lower the number of both sugar- and artificially-sweetened beverages sold in Philadelphia, the city levied a beverage excise tax.33 One study34 compared the change in prices and sales after the tax was levied in Baltimore, which served as a control city without tax. They found the tax was associated with a substantial decline in the number of beverages sold.
However, the volume was partially offset by rising sales in neighboring areas. Another study looked at the impact employers could have by banning sales of sugar-sweetened beverages in the workplace. They found a reduction in waist circumference without a change in body mass or insulin sensitivity.
It’s important to note the ban existed only during work hours and employees were free to drink as they wished outside of work. In other words, the researchers found a reduction in waist circumference in employees when their sugar-sweetened beverages were limited only during work hours.
One of the most straightforward steps you can take to improve your health is to give up all forms of soda, both those sweetened with sugar and those with artificial sweeteners, but the American Beverage Association and the sugar industry are not interested in your health. Instead, they are interested in protecting profits.
Consider drinking clean, pure water instead of sugar-sweetened beverages and choosing organically grown produce and regeneratively raised, pastured meats to protect your health and your future.
The globalist cabal wants to monopolize health systems worldwide, and a stealth attack is already underway in the form of an international pandemic treaty.1 The negotiations for this treaty began March 3, 2022.2 As reported by The Pulse (video above):
“Coming off the back of the COVID-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization is proposing a new pandemic treaty they’re hoping will be accepted by enough member countries to become a reality by 2024.”
According to Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, “me-first” approaches “stymie the global solidarity needed” to address global threats. His solution? Give the WHO all the power.
Over the past two years, in the name of keeping everyone “safe” from infection, the globalists have justified unprecedented attacks on democracy, civil liberties and personal freedoms, including the right to choose your own medical treatment. Now, the WHO wants to make its pandemic leadership permanent, and to extend it into the health care systems of every nation.
Treaty Threatens National Sovereignty
As noted by The Pulse, “there are a number of things in the treaty that the people of the world need to consider before going down this path.” In the featured video, The Pulse’s Joe Martino interviews Shabnam Palesa Mohamed, a member of the steering committee of the World Council for Health, who points out that the treaty gives the WHO:
“… an inordinate amount of power to make decisions in sovereign countries as to how people live and how they deal with pandemics, from lockdowns to mandates over treatment.”
In short, it would create a one-size-fits-all approach to disease, without regard for all the varying situations found in individual countries, and this is something we already know doesn’t work. The treaty is a direct threat to a nation’s sovereignty to make decisions for itself and its citizens, and would erode democracy everywhere.
At the same time, it would cost each member country millions of dollars to participate in this process. As explained by Mohamed, the treaty will need to go through a voting process at the World Health Assembly in 2023. They need a majority for it to pass and, if passed, all member countries will be bound by it.
The Treaty Is ‘Invalid and Unlawful’
Another concern raised by Mohamed is that many countries don’t even know about this treaty as of yet, and it’s possible that the WHO might try to push for earlier implementation than 2024 — all without public participation or input. “It is undemocratic, it is unconstitutional and therefore it makes the treaty invalid and unlawful,” she says.
She also highlights the WHO’s history of corruption and many health policy failures, which are “intrinsically linked to conflicts of interest.” In an open letter on the WHO’s pandemic treaty, the World Council for Health writes, in part:3
“The proposed WHO agreement is unnecessary, and is a threat to sovereignty and inalienable rights. It increases the WHO’s suffocating power to declare unjustified pandemics, impose dehumanizing lockdowns, and enforce expensive, unsafe, and ineffective treatments against the will of the people.
The WCH [World Council for Health] believes that the people have a right to participate in any agreement that affects their lives, livelihoods, and well-being.
However, the WHO has not engaged in a process of public participation, which is evidence that its priority is capturing more power for itself and its corporate accomplices, than serving the interests of the people. Without an unbiased democratic process, any agreement by the WHO, acting via the United Nations, will be unlawful, illegitimate, and invalid.
Historically, the WHO leadership has failed the people. Among many examples, it approved the injurious H1N1 (swine flu) vaccine for a controversially declared pandemic.
Equally, the WHO failed during the COVID-19 chapter as it encouraged lockdowns, suppressed early preventive treatments, and recommended product interventions that have proven to be neither safe nor effective.
The WHO cannot be allowed to control the world’s health agenda, nor enforce biosurveillance. While it receives funding from public sources belonging to the people, it is caught in a perpetual conflict of interest because it also receives substantial funding from private interests that use their contributions to influence and profit from WHO decisions and mandates.
For example, the Gates Foundation and the Gates-funded GAVI vaccine promotion alliance, contribute over $1 billion a year.”
Another concern is the fact that when people are harmed by the WHO’s health policies, there’s no accountability because the WHO has diplomatic immunity. According to Mohamed, “the WHO should not be making ANY decisions about world health in the future.”
The Ultimate Power Grab
As noted by Martino, while the treaty claims to be focused on pandemic planning and responses, there’s serious concern that it could be expanded to cover other areas of health as well. Mohamed agrees, saying that it could potentially be expanded, using the WHO’s constitution as the basis for that expansion. Article 2 of the WHO’s constitution states:
“In order to achieve its objective, the functions of the Organization shall be: a) to act as the directing and coordinating authority on international health work … k) to propose conventions, agreements and regulations, and make recommendations with respect to international health matters …
s) to establish and revise as necessary international nomenclatures of diseases, of causes of death and of public health practices … v) generally to take all necessary action to attain the objective of the Organization.”
Its power is already very significant, and the goal to turn the WHO into a global health dictatorship is virtually written into its constitution. Also, remember that the WHO removed the specificity of mass casualties from the definition of a pandemic, so now a pandemic can be just about any disease that occurs in multiple countries. Even obesity could theoretically qualify. So, the WHO could claim power over health care systems in any number of ways, given the chance.
Treaty Would Grant WHO Power to Mandate Vaccine Passports
While most of the world is more than ready to move on, the WHO seems unwilling to let go. A WHO official recently told the Ottawa Citizen that the COVID pandemic is still “far from over.”4
The reason for this reluctance to declare the pandemic over is likely because the WHO hopes to gain the power to mandate vaccine passports and COVID jabs worldwide. It’s already working on the creation of a global vaccine passport/digital identity program. As reported by WEBLYF:5
“Under the guise of a ‘trust network,’ another initiative called Vaccination Credential Initiative (VCI) is also gaining momentum.
Partnering with big tech companies, big corporations, and big universities, VCI describes itself as ‘a voluntary coalition of public and private organizations committed to empowering individuals with access to verifiable clinical information including a trustworthy and verifiable copy of their vaccination records in digital or paper form using open, interoperable standards.’
VCI’s SMART Health Cards, as reported by Off-Guardian, are already implemented by ‘25 states in America, plus Puerto Rico and DC, and have become the US’s de-facto national passport.’ As explained in the article:
‘The US government, unlike many European countries, has not issued their own official vaccine passport, knowing such a move would rankle with the more Libertarian-leaning US public, not to mention get tangled in the question of state vs federal law.
The SMART cards allow them to sidestep this issue. They are technically only implemented by each state individually via agreements with VCI, which is technically a private entity. However, since the SMART cards are indirectly funded by the US government, their implementation across every state makes them a national standard in all but name.’”
United Tribes of New Zealand Denounce the WHO Treaty
As noted by NZDSOS,6 “Is this the way we want to live our lives? Constantly at the behest of shadowy individuals and corporations who monitor our every move and determine what we can and can’t do, down to buying food?”
In a formal letter of notification to the WHO and the Executive Board of the World Health Assembly, the government of Aotearoa Nu Tireni in New Zealand strongly denounced this and any other treaty that challenges national sovereignty:7
“… you are thereby formally notified that the Wakaminenga Māorigovernment of Aotearoa Nu Tireni/New Zealand does not consent in any shape of form to any type of international pandemic treaty under the WHO or its assembly. Any such construct shall be void ab initio.
We, as United Tribes and Hereditary Chiefs, represent the only current legitimate government in New Zealand. The current NZ government represented by Jacinda Ardern is an illegitimate government because it is a corporation (SEC CIK #0000216105) listed on the US Security & Exchange Commission as Her Majesty the Queen in Right of New Zealand.8,9
In accordance with the Clearfield Trust Doctrine, a corporation does not have any implied right to govern a sovereign people. We hereby register our vote of no confidence in the actions or authority of the corporation unlawfully posing as a government in our territory.
This unlawful Ardern government and its ministers stand charged by the Nga Tikanga Māori Law Society and the Wakaminenga Maori Government of Nu Tireni with genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity related to their wilful disregard for the suffering and loss of life resulting from their unlawful response to the engineered bioweapon known as COVID-19 and the unlawful forced administration of a poison to our people and forced medical experimentation.
Also charged with serious crimes related to a pandemic response, the WHO and Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus have no standing or authority to form any binding agreement related to a pandemic response, in any jurisdiction and we command that these attempts shall cease and desist immediately pending the outcome of these charges under Rome statutes 6, 7 and 8, filed in the international Criminal Court 6 December 2021 …
You are hereby directed to cease and desist discussions or negotiations with the unlawful Arden Government, a NZ Corporation, known as Her Majesty Queen in Right of New Zealand. The Wakaminenga Maori Government of Aotearoa Nu Tireni reserves the right to discuss/negotiate with any international partner(s) of its choice, including the World Council for Health (WCH).”
Treaty Would Create Global Censorship of Health Information
The treaty would also give the WHO the power to censor health information worldwide. On the European Council’s web page discussing the pandemic treaty, under the headline “Restoring Trust in the International Health System,” it states:10
“The agreement … will set the foundation for better communication and information to citizens. Misinformation threatens public trust and risks undermining public health responses. To redeem citizen trust, concrete measures should be foreseen to improve the flow of reliable and accurate information as well as to tackle misinformation globally.”
In other words, under this treaty, we can expect even greater censorship than what we’ve experienced so far. Tech companies have already proven where their allegiance lies, and it’s not with the public.
Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others have deplatformed just about everyone who posts health information that runs counter to what the WHO is saying, real-world data and verifiable facts be damned. Financial platforms have also banned people for the same reason. Now imagine there being a binding international law that makes all that censorship mandatory.
Their Playbook Was Revealed in 2019
Officially, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the second largest funder of the WHO, second only to the U.S. government,11 but the combined contributions from the Gates Foundation and GAVI made Gates the unofficial top sponsor of the WHO as of 2018.12
Gates has also been funding pandemic exercises, including Event 201,13 held October 18, 2019, which gained notoriety for its extraordinary accurate “predictions” of the COVID pandemic mere months before it was declared. Other co-sponsors included the World Economic Forum and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
However, earlier that year, February 14, 2019, Gates also funded the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s (NTI) pandemic exercise for senior global leaders on international response to deliberate biological events, which took place in Munich, Germany.14,15
NTI was founded to assess and reduce threats associated with the proliferation of nuclear weapons,16 but they’ve since expanded to include biological threats.17 Gates has also given grants to the NTI for vaccine development in relation to biological threats.18
While Event 201 featured a fictional coronavirus outbreak, the NTI exercise involved response to “deliberate, high consequence biological events.” In other words, a deliberate release of a genetically engineered bioweapon — in this case a pneumonic plague — for which there is no available treatment. This exercise scenario was the first of its kind. The video above features a summary of the four-phase exercise.
Curiously, in mid-November 2019, The Guardian, The New York Times,19The Washington Post20 and others reported that two people in China had in fact been diagnosed with pneumonic plague.21
In addition to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the NTI event was sponsored by the Wellcome Trust, the “philanthropic arm” of GlaxoSmithKline and an investor in Vaccitech, which owns the patents to AstraZeneca’s COVID jab.22 Both Gates and Wellcome are part of the technocratic globalist network that is pushing The Great Reset forward.
Another sponsor was Georgetown University,23 which also curated the World Economic Forum’s library of COVID-19 treatments (primarily focused on antivirals and COVID gene transfer injections).24
Curation was done by three Georgetown University professors and Rebecca Katz, director of the Georgetown Center for Global Health Science and Security.25 Katz is also listed as an author on the NTI paper,26 “A Spreading Plague: Lessons and Recommendations for Responding to a Deliberate Biological Event,” published June 2019, in which they review the conclusions reached from that February 2019 exercise.
‘A Spreading Plague’
Together, these two pandemic exercises — both of which were sponsored by Gates — form a playbook for how to set up a biological attack and then hide the truth from the world so that you can not only profit from it in the short term but also centralize power, permanently transfer wealth and change the social and financial order to your own liking in the process.
Not surprisingly, a number of Event 201 participants also partook in the NTI’s exercise,27 and hold positions within technocratic institutions like Wellcome, the WHO and the World Economic Forum.
Event 201, in particular, focused not on finding remedies and saving lives, but how to control “misinformation.” A vast majority of that exercise centered around the creation of effective propaganda and censorship. Similarly, “A Spreading Plague” also includes the recommendation to enlist private companies as “assets” to carry out the globalists bidding:28
“In 2019 and 2020, international organizations, including the WHO, UNODA [United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs], and the World Economic Forum, should convene private sector companies to identify gaps and concrete next steps to strengthen the capability of companies to provide assets to assist with international response for deliberate biological attacks and other high-consequence biological events.”
In the NTI scenario — in which a fictional country called Carta is found to have engineered and released a biological weapon into the neighboring country of Vestia — we also see curious parallels to current-day accusations by Russia, which claims biological weapons research was being conducted in the Ukraine, necessitating defensive action.
All in all, the NTI tabletop exercise only adds to the evidence pile that suggests the COVID pandemic was premeditated and preplanned for financial and geopolitical purposes. It was a power grab.
The pandemic treaty with the WHO is precisely what the World Economic Forum and its allies now need, as it will put the technocratic cabal firmly in charge of the biosecurity of the whole world, and empower them to implement the rest of The Great Reset agenda.
You can learn more about The Great Reset on the World Economic Forum’s website29,30 and in Klaus Schwab’s book, “COVID-19: The Great Reset”31 (but you might want to review the overwhelmingly negative comments on Amazon first).
As noted in a July 21, 2020, World Economic Forum article,32 the economic devastation caused by COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns “has the potential to hobble global prosperity for generations to come.” The answer, according to the World Economic Forum, is for countries to make sure the economic system is “built back better.”
Make no mistake, this catchy slogan is part and parcel of the Great Reset plan and cannot be separated from it, no matter how altruistic it may sound. Part of the “building back better” is to shift the financial system over to an all-digital centrally controlled currency system that is tied to a vaccine passport and/or digital identity system.
Together, they will form a pervasive system of social control, as desired behaviors can be incentivized and undesired ones discouraged through loss of various “privileges,” including access to your own finances. Digital currency can even be programmed by the issuer so that it can only be used for certain types of purchases or expenses.
While it’s going to be very difficult to stop this runaway train that is The Great Reset, part of our defense is to oppose and prevent the WHO’s pandemic treaty from becoming reality, as we’ll lose our national sovereignty if it does.
Recent disclosures by the Zionist regime show that some 2,069 British nationals were serving in the IDF as of March 2025, according to Freedom of Information (FoI) requests submitted to the occupation forces (1,686 dual British-Israeli, plus 383 multinational). We cannot tell from the figures how many of these were already settler colonists and intend to stay in the colony, and how many will return or have returned to the UK. Presumably, those returning to the UK will number far fewer than 2,000, since many are known to have become permanently residents of the colony.
Additionally, the IDF figures only provide a snapshot, and do not tell us how many have served in the Jewish supremacist military either before or after March 2025. One way into the question of how many genocidaires are living in Britain is to ask how many current British residents were born in the Zionist colony. There is data on that, as we shall see. … continue
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