Illegal settlers may drag Israel into a war it cannot handle
By Robert Inlakesh | RT | June 28, 2021
Israel’s illegal settler population is driving the country’s government towards miscalculated violence, putting the entire state at risk, and last month’s 11-day conflict with Gaza may just be the beginning.
Currently, roughly 700,000 illegal Israeli settlers live in the occupied Palestinian West Bank and East Jerusalem. Although Israel’s ever-growing settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories (OPT) are in violation of international humanitarian law, causing great strife in the United Nations, the state continues to support expansion activities in the OPT.
The UN is not, however, the only place where Israel is suffering due to its unhinging support for its illegal settlers, many of whom carry hardline religious fundamentalist beliefs and are also leading Israel into violent confrontations it does not know how to deal with.
Last month, the then Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, launched an 11-day military operation entitled ‘Guardian of the Walls’ against the illegally blockaded Gaza Strip. The military operation was largely viewed as an astounding failure, even acknowledged as such by the Israeli media, whilst Palestinians celebrated the triumph of their armed groups upon the announcement that the ceasefire had been held.
The difference this time, when it came to Israel’s announced war on Gaza, was that it had been fought on the terms of the Palestinian armed factions. Hamas, unlike in previous wars back in 2008-09, 2012 and 2014, fired first and dictated the course of the battle, even commanding the respect of Palestinian citizens of Israel, as well as Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem who revolted in sync with the rocket fire of Palestinian armed groups in Gaza.
The reason Israel was dragged into this conflict was in large part the fault of Israeli settler extremists who had provoked an uprising throughout historic Palestine. The initial rocket fire from Gaza was triggered by a planned Israeli settler march which had been aimed at storming Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in the old city of Jerusalem.
Weeks of settler provocations, including the infamous “death to Arabs” marches during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, helped to stoke tensions. Netanyahu, in a bid to keep on side his hardline, settler-supporting allies in the Religious Zionism Party, refused to take de-escalatory measures in order to deter the likes of Hamas from responding to the violence in Jerusalem.
At the time, the leader of the Religious Zionism Party, Bezalel Smotrich, along with far-right Otzma Yehudit front man Itamar Ben Gvir, had both appeared in Jerusalem with religious extremist settlers. Otzma Yehudit, or the Jewish Power Party, is closely connected with extremist settler organisations, such as Lehava. Lehava’s current leader, Bentzi Gopstein, even tried to run for election to the Israeli Knesset as part of Otzma Yehudit, but was banned due to racist comments he had made. Just days ago, some of the same members of Knesset who previously appeared provocatively in Jerusalem, did so again in a delegation supporting illegal settlers.
Despite there having been a change in the government, with the far-right Yamina Party leader, Naftali Bennett, now taking over as prime minister, very little seems to have changed on the ground. One of the biggest provocations in the build-up to last month’s 11-day war was the court effort of an Israeli settler organisation to seize the homes of Palestinians, in order to uproot them and replace them with Jewish settlers in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah.
“By continuing to pursue this court case – after the outcry over the planned forced evictions in Sheikh Jarrah in occupied East Jerusalem – Israel is fanning the flames of the latest upsurge in violence and perpetuating the same systematic human rights violations against Palestinians that are at the root of the latest violence,” Amnesty International’s Deputy Director for the Middle East and North Africa Saleh Higazi said.
The settler violence, also dealt out by Israel’s occupation forces, against Palestinian demonstrators in Sheikh Jarrah has only intensified since the formation of Israel’s new coalition government. In addition to this, settlement activity in the Silwan neighbourhood in East Jerusalem has erupted into a second flashpoint for similar violent crackdowns against peacefully demonstrating Palestinians who face expulsion from their homes.
Israel’s political scene is now almost entirely right-wing, with only a handful of parties claiming the title of left-wing or centre-left. And this is not working well for Israel’s image on the international scene. For instance, the current Israeli ambassador to the United Kingdom, Tzipi Hotovely, believes – like PM Naftali Bennett – that the bible gives Israel the right to take over the West Bank. She said before that her “dream is to see the Israeli flag flying over the Temple Mount [Al-Aqsa Mosque compound].” During her tenure at the Committee on the State of Women and Gender Equality in 2011, Hotovely affiliated with the racist Lehava group, inviting them to a Knesset discussion on activities to prevent romantic relationships between Arabs and Jews.
Such political figures as Tzipi Hotovely, who openly espouse their racist and pro-settler views to a Western audience are an additional problem for Israel as it begins to lose legitimacy in the eyes of the global public.
Israeli settler violence is increasing in the West Bank and the government has just approved further settlement expansion. Recent threats of settlement expansion in the village of Beita (south of Nablus), sparked violence and calls for up to 100,000 Palestinians to join in the protests. The illegal settler outpost Evyatar is considered illegal even by Israeli law, yet despite this, Bennett is so far refusing to dismantle the settlement and defuse rising tensions which have led to the killing of seven Palestinians.
Last Tuesday, the Israeli government also allowed for a right-wing settler protest group to march into a Palestinian-majority area in Jerusalem again. Illegal settlers chanted “Death to Arabs” and made several other racist remarks. The settlers came close to provoking another large-scale Palestinian response, which the Israeli government demonstrated it would rather confront than upset their settlers.
The Israeli government’s support for settlement expansion may have seemed like a good idea as a strategy that could work to usurp Palestinian land. However, the problem that is now arising seems to be that Israel is becoming overrun by the settlers and being forced into irrational and dangerous moves as a result. The leader of Lebanese Hezbollah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, has pledged that attacks on Al-Aqsa should lead to a regional war against Israel – not a threat to be taken lightly. Yet, Israelli settler groups continue to come dangerously close to replicating last month’s events.
Settlers used to be under the complete control of the government, but if Israel does not check itself, soon those settlers – many of whom carry extremist views – may end up seizing more control over them and forcing Israel into a war that it cannot handle.
Robert Inlakesh is a political analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker currently based in London, UK. He has reported from and lived in the occupied Palestinian territories and currently works with Quds News and Press TV.
Scientific American magazine removes article detailing Israeli crimes against Palestinians
Press TV – June 28, 2021
A US publication has removed an op-ed detailing Israeli crimes against the people of Palestine and calling for solidarity with them.
Scientific American, a popular science magazine in the US, reportedly has done this act under pressure from the Zionist lobby, which is the pro-Israel lobby in the United States.
The magazine published an article earlier this month written by a group of physicians and medical students reporting details of the recent Israeli aggression against the people of Gaza and promising support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, also called the BDS movement which says Israeli and multinational firms complicit in the regime’s crimes must be boycotted.
The BDS movement seeks to raise global awareness about the Tel Aviv regime’s racist policies against Palestinians.
“Those of us who work in health care understand well that health care does not exist in a vacuum,” the physicians and students wrote.
“We increasingly understand how structural forces, systematized and institutionalized oppression, racism, violence, disinvestment, and displacement, as well as policies meant to deny people their basic human rights, lead to adverse health outcomes and mortality,” they added.
“We cannot continue to sit idly by and witness the violent erasure of an entire people by what is, as documented by international human rights organizations, an apartheid state, exacting untold physical and psychological damage to the Palestinian people,” they continued.
The BDS movement was initiated in 2005 by over 170 Palestinian organizations that were pushing for “various forms of boycott against Israel until it meets its obligations under international law.”
Thousands of volunteers worldwide have since then joined the BDS movement, which calls for people and groups across the world to cut economic, cultural and academic ties to Tel Aviv, to help promote the Palestinian cause.
Following the publication of the article, pro-Israel groups wrote letters to the magazine, accusing the magazine of “one-sided political propaganda.”
The publication was forced to remove the article and said that it was revising its internal review process to prevent “a repetition of this error by the magazine.”
Pro-Israeli groups in the United States have been aggressively targeting the people and publications who have exposed Israeli crimes in the wake of the recent Israeli aggression in Gaza.
Last week, under pressure from such groups, a US hospital fired a doctor following a Facebook post in which she condemned Israel’s crimes, and said that Zionists have a “thirst to kill our Palestinian children.”
She posted on Facebook on 21 June where she said Palestinians would “expose the #massacre and #genocide you #zionists are proud of.”
“A state based on atrocity, inhumanity, racism and cannibalism never lasts long,” Wishah continued. “Hey #israel … your end is coming sooner than you think.”
The Tel Aviv regime launched the aggression against the besieged Gaza Strip on May 10, following Palestinian retaliation against violent raids on worshipers at al-Aqsa Mosque and the regime’s plans to force a number of Palestinian families out of their homes at the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem al-Quds.
Apparently caught off guard by the unprecedented barrage of rockets from Gaza, Israel announced a unilateral ceasefire on May 21, which Palestinian resistance movements accepted with Egyptian mediation.
According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, nearly 260 Palestinians were killed in the Israeli offensive, including 66 children, while some 2,000 others were wounded.
Iraq PM strongly condemns US raids on PMU forces as ‘flagrant violation’ of country’s sovereignty
Press TV – June 28, 2021
Iraq’s Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhemi has strongly condemned as a “flagrant violation” of the Iraqi sovereignty an overnight airstrike by US warplanes against the positions of the anti-terror Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), also known as Hashd al-Sha’abi, in which several resistance fighters were killed.
“We condemn the US air attack that targeted a site last night on the Iraqi-Syrian border, which represents a blatant and unacceptable violation of Iraqi sovereignty and Iraqi national security,” said a statement from Kadhemi’s office on Monday.
The statement added that the government will “study all legal options” to prevent such action being repeated.
The statement came after the Iraqi cabinet, headed by al-Kadhemi, held an emergency security meeting following the U.S. airstrikes.
In the early hours of the day, US warplanes attacked three positions purportedly belonging to the PMU along the border.
Later, the 14th Brigade of the PMU announced that four of its fighters had been killed when the warplanes hit its headquarters. The brigade is made up of the Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada anti-terror resistance group.
The PMU in general is an Iraqi government-sponsored umbrella organization composed of about 40 factions of volunteer counter-terrorism forces, including mostly Shia Muslims besides Sunni Muslims, Christians, and Kurds. The organization had a significant role in defeating the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group in Iraq.
Iraqi military condemns U.S. airstrikes on PMU’s positions
Separately, Iraq’s military spokesman Yehya Rasool denounced the US airstrike and said it was a “breach of sovereignty.”
“We condemn the US air attack that targeted a site on the Iraqi-Syrian border last night, which represents a blatant and unacceptable violation of Iraqi sovereignty and national security in accordance with all international conventions.”
Rasool further called on all involved parties to exercise restraint and avoid any escalation of tensions.
He said Baghdad would work thoroughly to prevent the recurrence of such incidents.
Foreign Ministry: US attack on PMU violation of Iraq’s sovereignty
Additionally on Monday, Iraq’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement, condemning the deadly strike. It was an “assault and a violation of national sovereignty and a clear departure from international norms and conventions,” the statement read.
“We affirm our adherence to Iraq’s sovereignty and unity and to rely on everything that would enhance that, through sustained coordination and communication with various parties and through diplomatic initiatives and endeavors that ensure the non-repetition of such rejected and condemned hostilities.”
Syria: US attacks prove its presence meant to serve Israel’s goals
Syria, for its part, also condemned in strongest terms the US flagrant aggression in the Syrian-Iraqi border region, describing it as a blatant violation of the sanctity of the Syrian and Iraqi territories.
An official source at Foreign and Expatriates Ministry told SANA that the US aggression, which was ordered by the highest ranks in the US leadership, proves once again “the recklessness of US policies and the need for Washington to withdraw its aggressor forces” from the region.
The Syrian foreign ministry source added that such acts of aggression only escalate the tense situation in the region and prove “what we have repeatedly said in Syria that the US military presence in our region is basically meant to serve the Israeli goals and the separatist forces contrary to the interests of its own people.”
The Syrian source concluded by saying that Damascus, once again, demands the US administration respect the territorial integrity of Syria and Iraq and to immediately stop those attacks on the independence of the two countries.
Al-Nujaba Movement: US will pay for its folly
In a relevant development on Monday, a senior member of Iraq’s al-Nujaba Movement, which is part of the PMU, said in a Twitter post that Washington would pay for its folly in attacking Iraq’s popular forces.
Ali al-Asadi said the Monday US airstrike was a desperate reaction to the latest manifestation of power by the PMU through a huge military parade, which was held to mark the anniversary of the PMU’s formation.
“This [attack] is another reason, which proves that the occupier does not care about stability of this country…. We tell the occupier: you will pay for your despicable measure and will suffer the consequences of your folly,” Asadi said.
Hezbollah: US airstrikes on PMU aimed to weaken anti-terror fight
Lebanon’s Hezbollah resistance movement also reacted to the latest airstrikes by the occupying American forces on the PMU positions in western Iraq and Syria, strongly condemning the US act of aggression.
In a statement on Monday, Hezbollah said the air raid by American warplanes was blatant violation of sovereignty of both Iraq and Syria, which is aimed at weakening these countries’ power to fight terrorism on their soils.
Hezbollah then expressed support for the official condemnation of the US airstrike by Iraqi government and armed forces as well as various popular groups.
Yemen’s Ansarullah: US strikes aimed at supporting Daesh, al-Qaeda
In another development on Monday, the political office of Yemen’s Ansarullah movement issued a statement on the latest US airstrikes on Iraq’s PMU, expressing the movements condolences for the families of the PMU fighters killed in the US strikes.
“The US aggression is in line with its policy to provide aerial support for its criminal proxies, that is, the Daesh [Takfiri terrorist group] and al-Qaeda” in Syria and Iraq.
The Yemeni movement added that it strongly supported the powerful positions taken by Iraq’s officials and popular forces in opposition to the projects planned and carried out by the Great Satan, the United States, and Israel.
Yemen’s Ansarullah movement noted that the US act of aggression will only strengthen the determination of the Iraqi people and proves that the path chosen by the Iraqi nation is correct and should continue until complete expulsion of all occupying forces from the country.
US congresswoman: This failed policy will not make us any safer
Meanwhile, Ilhan Omar, a US congresswoman who represents Minnesota’s 5th congressional district, took to Twitter on Monday, condemning US act of aggression against Iraqi popular forces.
“This constant cycle of violence and retribution is a failed policy and will not make any of us safer,” she said.
Omar added that the US government cannot take any hostile action in other countries without the Congress’ approval, saying, “Congress has authority over War Powers and should be consulted before any escalation.”
Anti-American sentiments have been running high in Iraq since the US assassinated Iran’s anti-terror commander Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani, and the deputy head of Iraq’s PMU, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, in Baghdad on January 3, 2020.
Just two days later, Iraqi lawmakers unanimously passed a bill mandating the withdrawal of all foreign troops from Iraq.
Iraqi resistance groups have pledged to take up arms against US forces if Washington fails to comply with the parliamentary order.
Britain wants to turn Ukraine into its stronghold but now realizes its limitations in the Black Sea
By Paul Antonopoulos, | June 28, 2021
Kiev and London have signed a Memorandum of Intent in the field of military shipbuilding. The partnership envisions joint design, as well as the construction of ships and naval bases in Ukraine. If the plan comes to fruition, this could maybe pose as a security risk for Russia in the Black Sea as NATO countries will have access to newly constructed naval bases, but after last week’s incident, London has likely come to the realization that its power is limited.
The memorandum was signed on the British Royal Navy HMS Defender frigate in the Ukrainian city of Odessa, just two days before the UK provoked a near-crisis by violating Russian territorial waters. The “Defender” intentionally violated Russian borders, resulting in the Russian military firing warning shots and forcing the British warship to change its course. The incident was such an embarrassment for the British that they are still denying Russia’s strong reaction.
If new naval bases are built in Ukraine, it would be to serve the ships of non-Black Sea NATO countries, such as the U.S. and the UK. It must be stressed though that for now this is a memorandum, which is not binding, and thus it calls into question its implementation.
Signing the memorandum on behalf of the UK, Minister for Defence Procurement Jeremy Quin said: “The UK and Ukraine have a close defence relationship, and we continue to strengthen this partnership to help deter shared threats” and “I am delighted that British and Ukrainian industry will work together on these projects, which will provide world-leading capabilities and provide opportunities for both our nations to boost our shipbuilding enterprises.”
London has long been strengthening cooperation with Kiev in the defense sector in its attempt to create a stronghold for itself in the region – this is to spread its influence and spy on Russia. With UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson attempting to build a “Global Britain”, creating a stronghold in Ukraine is part of its long-term strategy given London’s belief that it is a powerbroker all across Europe. London sees the post-Soviet space as one of the regions where British influence should expand. However, as last week’s incident between the Russian and British Navies demonstrated, the UK is not even remotely close to achieving a “Global Britain.”
The main message of the memorandum is to demonstrate Britain’s power. However, Russia, as another global player, is perceived as a direct competitor and this is why British authorities are attempting to weaken it. Ukraine is a suitable stronghold for British ambitions against Russia given the pervasive and obsessive Russophobic ideology that permeates Kiev. Therefore, London is just merely using Kiev for its own interests.
The British provocation in Russian territorial waters last week was an attempt to portray the British Navy as a global power in the 21st century. However, even U.S. President Joe Biden was not impressed with London’s action, but none-the-less, was still accused of emboldening Russia. Sources told The Telegraph that the U.S. decided against sailing close to Crimea alongside the British.
According to media reports, London and Kiev plan to build eight missile boats. In addition, the Ukrainian Navy could get two modern British minesweepers in a joint project with Ukrainian companies. It was announced that the work will be financed by Britain, and Kiev hopes that British experts will complete the “Vladimir the Great” corvette. The parties expect to confirm the agreements in August.
When it comes to bases, it is assumed that one could be built on the Sea of Azov, and the other on the Black Sea. Keeping in mind the condition of the Ukrainian fleet, experts estimate that Ukraine does not need two new military bases, especially since serious military shipbuilding has not existed in the country since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Ukrainian fleet is nearly obsolete, with most vessels stemming back to the Soviet era, along with only a few gunboats from the U.S.
The signing of the memorandum was done in order to strengthen the general impression that Britain is not only an independent player, but also an important ally of Ukraine. However, London would be seriously considering their capabilities in the Black Sea, especially since the signing of the memorandum was done before their provocations against Russia spectacularly failed and embarrassed the country to the extent that they had to deny that such an event occurred.
Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.
HMS Defender Versus The Russian Military: The Danger of Believing Your Own Propaganda
By Ron Paul | June 28, 2021
Less than two weeks after NATO members reaffirmed allegiance to Article 5 – that an attack on one member was an attack on all members – the UK nearly put that pledge to the test. In a shockingly provocative move, the UK’s HMS Defender purposely sailed into Crimean territorial waters on its way to Georgia.
Press reports suggest that there was a dispute between the UK defense and foreign ministries over whether to violate Russia’s claimed territorial waters with a heavily armed warship. According to reports, Prime Minister Boris Johnson himself jumped in to over-rule the more cautious Foreign Office in favor of confrontation.
As Johnson later claimed, because the UK (and the US) does not recognize Russian sovereignty over Crimea, the UK was actually sailing through Ukrainian waters. It was an in-your-face move toward Russia just weeks after the US and NATO were forced to back down from a major clash with Russia in eastern Ukraine
This time, as was the case in eastern Ukraine, the Russians took a different view of the situation. Russian coast guard vessels ordered the HMS Defender to exit Russian territorial waters – an order they punctuated with rare live fire of cannon and dropping of bombs.
Having had their bluff called, the UK government did what all governments do best: it lied. The Russians did not shoot at a UK warship, they claimed. It was a previously-scheduled Russian military exercise in the area.
Unfortunately for the UK government, in its haste to create good propaganda about standing up to Russia, they had a BBC reporter on-board the Defender who spilled the beans: Yes, the Russian military did issue several warnings, yes it did buzz the HMS Defender multiple times, and yes there were shots fired in the Defender’s direction.
Similarly, in the spring, Russia rapidly deployed 75,000 troops on the border with Ukraine in response to a US-backed Ukrainian military build-up. The message was clear: Russia would no longer sit by as the US government and its allies intervened next door.
Russia now has demonstrated that it will protect Crimea, which voted in a 2014 referendum to re-join Russia. The Crimean vote was triggered by the US-backed coup in Ukraine. That is called “unintended consequences” of foreign interventionism.
The problem with the UK, the US, and their NATO allies is that they believe their own propaganda and they act accordingly. A famous 2004 quote attributed to George W. Bush advisor Karl Rove, clearly spelled out this line of thinking. Said Rove, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”
These two recent near-clashes with Russia demonstrate that the “reality” created by an almost religious belief in American or NATO exceptionalism can often crash hard against the reality of 75,000 troops or the Black Sea Fleet
The anti-Russia propaganda endlessly repeated by both political parties in Washington and amplified by the anti-Trump media for more than four years has completely saturated the Beltway and beyond. Even as the Russiagate conspiracy was proven to be a lie, the propaganda it spawned lives on.
Blustering Boris Johnson almost provoked a major war over an infantile desire to continue poking and prodding Russia in its own backyard. This time the war was averted, but what about next time? Will the adults ever be in charge?
Copyright © 2021 by RonPaul Institute.
American Medicine, American Malfeasance
By Dr. Gary Null and Richard Gale | Global Research | June 26, 2021
An issue that is rarely discussed or given serious attention is the over-specialization in healthcare. Modern medicine’s approach to identify and treat illnesses and tackle the reduction of infections has in many instances ceased to be multidisciplinary. Medicine has also become increasingly compartmentalized and confined to a rigid materialistic belief system that has now established its own set of standards, criteria and values that are often contrary to gold-standard scientific protocols. The consequence is that its narrow single-mindedness has insulated modern medicine from objective criticism and preserved its internal flaws, errors and fabrications, which have contributed to the unnecessary injury and death of countless patients.
US healthcare spending reached $3.8 trillion in 2019. Due to the Covid pandemic, expenditures for 2020 will be astronomically higher. One might expect that with the world’s most expensive healthcare system, the US would equally have the best evidence-based practices to keep its citizens healthy. By now we should be proficiently expert at preventing and reversing disease, while making minimal errors resulting in injury or death. However, the exact opposite is the case. Instead of minimizing disease-causing factors, American medicine causes more illness through misguided diagnostic testing, overuse of medical and surgical procedures, and over prescribing pharmaceutical drugs. The fundamental reason for this catastrophe is that today’s healthcare establishment, and corporate science in general, over relies on profit-generating motives.
Dr. Peter Gotzsche is arguably recognized as one of the world’s foremost experts in evaluating evidence-based medicine (EBM). As the co-founder of EBM’s preeminent flagship organization – the Cochrane Collaboration — to review and analyze peer-reviewed clinical research, he is intimately knowledgeable about the widespread corruption permeating the pharmaceutical industry and medical journals. In his book Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime, he writes,
“The reason why we take so many drugs is that drug companies do not sell drugs. They sell lies about drugs… The patients do not realize that although their doctors know a lot about diseases, human physiology and psychology, they know very little about the drugs that have been concocted and dressed up by the drug industry.”
After we take a fair and objective look at American medicine during the past five decades, especially at the statistics of iatrogenic fatalities, or deaths caused by prescribed medications and medical error, our healthcare establishment is found to be anything but benign. Despite its many noteworthy discoveries and merits, a substantial amount of recommended medical practice has failed patients. “If the medical system were a bank,” writes Dr. Stephen Persell at Northwestern University’s School of Medicine, “you wouldn’t deposit your money here, because there would be an error every one-in-two to one-in-three times you made a transaction.” Dr. Persell is referring to the rates of preventable medical errors causing patients serious injury and now the third leading cause of death.
There is excellent evidence to support the argument that iatrogenic deaths have passed cancer fatalities and are now challenging heart disease for the number one spot. A 2008 study found as many as half of adverse events reported by patients were not recorded in their hospital charts. As of 2017, investigations continue to find that less than 10% of medical errors are reported. Reported adverse effects vary depending on the specialty and frequently go unnoticed or are improperly evaluated. An additional study found that almost two thirds of cardiologists had refused to report a serious error they had direct personal knowledge of to an authority.
As one example, heart disease is America’s leading cause of fatality, accounting for 665,000 deaths annually. The CDC, which consistently undermines health threats if it means positioning itself in opposition to private commercial interests, estimates that 34 percent of cardiovascular fatalities are premature and preventable. In contrast, the American Heart Association claims 80 percent are preventable. What are the heads of our federal health agencies doing to advocate on the side of prevention? Little to nothing.
There is no realistic and science-based national policy in place to lessen cardiovascular, cancer and diabetic death rates. Since the most viable and effective means to prevent these diseases are natural and within every person’s means, it is not financially lucrative to divert federal funding away from pharmaceutical treatments and surgical procedures. The CDC and FDA are largely dependent upon monetary income received from the drug and medical device industries.
Earlier we reported about the systemic corruption and fraud that has plagued the CDC and FDA for decades. It would be far cheaper to completely empty, dismantle, fumigate and rebuild the agencies anew rather than continue exerting pressure for reforms, which have only perpetuated a killing spree by protecting life-threatening drugs, vaccines and unnecessary medical procedures. Dr. Gotzsche notes, the same is true for private drug companies. Despite the numerous lawsuits drug companies have lost in federal courts, nothing has fundamentally changed in order to deter them from illegal activities to increase profits. In fact, the cost of paying out settlements and settling lawsuits is factored into the expense of doing business.
A decade ago, we teamed up with three board-certified physicians to undertake the task to review the peer-reviewed literature in order to recalculate the statistics from many branches of medicine in order to arrive at a more realistic casualty rate due to medical error. We began with a basic question. Do the current standards of American medical practice and its supporting science prove that the recommended therapies and healthcare protocols – whether drugs, surgery, diagnostic methods, medical devices, etc – are actually effective? And if so, at what cost to the patients’ health and well-being?
Our results and final conclusions were startling and culminated in the release of a widely read and referenced book, Death by Medicine. We made every effort to avoid editorial commentary to our findings. We decided to only report the statistics and facts with our calculations. The fact that our data placed iatrogenic error as the number one cause of death in America was alone sufficient. What was novel in our analysis was that we included preventable deaths, such as certain infections and severe nutrient deficiency, which could have been easily corrected by clinicians and medical personnel if viable prevention programs had been part of our healthcare system. After publication the book was sent to hundreds of journalists, federal officials and non-profit medical organizations. It was completely ignored by the orthodoxy; however, it became increasingly popular among alternative and complementary medical physicians who were already fully aware of the structural dangers to public health within conventional medical care.
Revisiting American medicine’s legacy of iatrogenic deaths is now more crucial than ever because the same behaviors that have contributed to the nation’s leading cause of death are being repeated during the Covid-19 pandemic. The government and federal health officials are in reprehensible denial of inexpensive and highly effective drugs, such as Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, to treat early and middle stage SARS-2 infections. Cases of Covid infections and deaths have been grossly exaggerated. And now we are realizing that the efficacy and safety profiles of the vaccines are orchestrated scams. As a result, the entire institutional edifice to vaccinate the global population is destined to become the greatest scandal of the 21st century.
Unfortunately, nobody can acquire accurate statistics for Covid-19 vaccine associated injuries and deaths from the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS). Careful weekly monitoring of VAERS’ adverse event updates convince us that the entire system is criminally rigged. CDC officials overseeing the database are undoubtedly fudging numbers after ratio of adverse events, including deaths, per number of doses administered are compared to the more robust and accurate EudraVigilance database in the European Union and the less reliable Yellow Card System in the UK.
As of June 17, VAERS was reporting 329,021 injuries and 5,888 deaths due to the Covid vaccines. The database’s most recent update is reporting an additional 26,541 injuries but 1,972 less deaths. How can this sudden disappearance of almost 2,000 deaths be accounted for? The mysterious loss of fatality entries occurred during the same week as a CDC working group of outside medical professionals was reviewing an association between the mRNA vaccines and the rising number of reported cases of cardiac inflammation or myocarditis. The group concluded that there is indeed “a likely association.” The occasion of deleted deaths in VAERS is also on the heels of the Israeli Shamir Medical Center report that Pfizer’s vaccine is linked with occurrences of thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura, an autoimmune disorder associated with a rare form of blood clotting. However, despite weekly local news stories around the nation about youth as young as 19 years of age dying of vaccine complications shortly after receipt of an mRNA vaccine, the CDC is claiming that all 1,200 persons, between 16-24 years of age, recovered and no deaths were reported. Does this account for the likely scrubbing of entries in VAERS?
But it is much worse. We only need to look at the European Union’s statistics for adverse Covid-19 vaccine events and compare that with VAERS and the CDC’s recent conclusion to realize there is a massive cover-up in our government’s efforts to sanitize the safety record of Covid vaccines. As of this week the EudraVigilance system is reporting over 1.5 million injuries and 15,472 deaths. Within those figures, 28,583 injuries and 1,862 deaths are from cardiac complications such as myocarditis.
Second, the EU and US have administered approximately the same number of Covid vaccine doses, roughly 409 million and 379 million respectively. Therefore we should expect to find a similar dose-to-injury ratio. Again we discover the CDC gaming the nation’s reporting system to lessen the perception of lethal risks. Based upon the EU ratio we can conservatively estimate that a minimum of 14,300 Americans have been killed by the vaccines so far. If we go back a week before the CDC scrubbed entries in VAERS, it would be over 17,000 Covid vaccine deaths. The actual number of Americans suffering adverse reactions would be 1.4 million.
In other words the EU is reporting 4 times more vaccine injuries and deaths than American health officials. In both the US and EU, Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine accounts for the majority of these casualties. Unless the Covid-19 vaccines engineer a personal vendetta against people holding EU passports, these numbers don’t add up.
Before the arrival of the Covid vaccines, Merck’s anti-inflammatory drug Vioxx was widely regarded as the single largest pharmaceutical catastrophe in American medical history. The drug should never have been approved and licensed in the first place; and, Merck knew beforehand that the drug would be lethal and concealed that documentation from FDA regulators. Vioxx was on the market for five years before being withdrawn. At the time of the federal class action lawsuit against Merck, FDA epidemiologist Dr. David Graham estimated the drug had killed 60,000 patients due to heart attacks and strokes. Since the majority of deaths were among elderly patients, a later report by the American Conservative predicted that upwards to half a million patients may have died from the drug over the course of a longer period. Yet during those years Merck was cashing in $2 billion annually from Vioxx sales, earning over double its eventual $4.8 billion fine after being found guilty.
To put this into a broader perspective, the Covid vaccines have only been distributed for six months and have now contributed to a realistic 17,000 deaths or upwards towards 30,000 this year alone. Since the vaccines’ immunity quickly wanes and it seems certain they provide little protection against new SARS-2 strains, health officials are already recommending regular booster shots. Similar to a prescription medication, those who buy into the vaccine propaganda hype are in principle relying upon these vaccines for life or until such time the virus resides into just a seasonal nuisance. Consequently iatrogenic vaccine injuries and deaths may likely continue at current rates during forthcoming years. The Covid-19 vaccines are on track to outpace the conservative number of Vioxx deaths over three-fold and even modern medicine’s most deadly drugCerivastatin, manufactured by Bayer in the late 1990s and responsible for over 100,000 deaths during the four-year period it was on the market. In short time, Covid vaccines will be the deadliest drug to have emerged from Big Pharma.
A study published in the Journal of Patient Safety estimated that 400,000 unnecessary and preventable deaths occur annually in American hospitals alone. At that rate, it is not surprising that the large majority of deaths ruled as SARS-2 infections happened in hospitals. If our federal health officials had been competent, and less compromised by the demands and influence of drug makers, most of these fatalities likely would never have occurred.
It has been estimated that US taxpayers have paid out $39 billion for Covid-19 vaccine development, funding and towards nationalized response measures. Most of this has been horribly wasted after we consider other options on hand to curb the pandemic but were categorically ignored. “In the case of vaccines in general,” the journal Health Affairs observed,
“the government often plays an outsized role, but in the era of Covid-19 the government’s role was even more central than usual. The government essentially removed the bulk of traditional industry risks related to vaccine development: a) scientific failures, b) failures to demonstrate safety and efficacy, c) manufacturing risks, and d) market risks related to low demand.”
While this may shock and disturb a rational person, Health Affairs – a thoroughly orthodox medical publication – applauds the government’s negligent measures as “money well spent.”
For this reason it is crucial to understand the terrible decisions made during the Covid pandemic in the context of modern medicine’s past crimes and preventable failures. In the coming months Anthony Fauci’s reputation will become further tainted. We might predict he will resign as more evidence of incompetence emerges, and, in our opinion, perhaps criminal negligence in his handling of the pandemic and efforts to whitewash the US’s role in supporting gain of function research leading to the genetic engineering of the SARS-2 virus. Fortunately, unlike past scandals when misguided medical decisions were responsible for thousands of unnecessary disabilities and deaths, numerous doctors and scientists worldwide are raising their voices to condemn the lethal policies of the CDC, NIAID, British Health Ministry and the World Health Organization.
So what can we reasonably surmise at this point? At one time most Americans trusted science, medicine and our healthcare system without question or criticism. However, today we observe systemic corruption and gross conflicts of interest across the same federal health agencies that have also contributed to untold medical errors and deaths prior to SARS-2 arrival. They have weaponized pharmaceutical science and a supplicant braying media supports this perversion of medical facts. Now the drug-happy media is attacking the truth-tellers, the physicians, professors and accomplished journalists who are risking their careers and reputations to bring forth the fallacies in the pandemic narrative. This is one battle that the silent majority can find its voice and courage to step forth and support.
Richard Gale and Gary Null PhD direct Progressive Radio Network.
Hypocritical Gospel according to the Covidians
By Elephant City | The Conservative Woman | June 28, 2021
THE recent spectacle of the G7 leaders in Cornwall posing for photos in masks and then ripping them off to party down with no social distancing is only the latest and most blatant example of double standards from the Covidians. For anyone paying attention, they have been giving us a daily masterclass in advanced hypocrisy.
The Covidian faith is strongest among Left-leaning elite managerial types. Safetyism is a huge part of their religion. These are people who slather sunblock on their kids before they step out the door and monitor them with tracking apps on their phones. And then they allow their kids to be shot up with an experimental ‘vaccine’ (gene therapy) that was tested on only 1,131 children who were followed up for less than six months.
The Covidians tremble in their homes like gutless cowards because of a disease that has an average survival rate of at 99.8 per cent for the general population and nearly 100 per cent for the healthy population. And then they allow themselves to be injected with an experimental gene therapy with less than a year of safety data, authorised by regulatory agencies fully corrupted by Big Pharma money. So much for ‘stay safe’!
Covidianism is a branch of wokism. The woke take every opportunity to manufacture status by loudly proclaiming their concern for ‘social justice’. They seized on the pandemic as a chance to flaunt their shining virtue to the world by hanging out of windows and lustily banging pots and clapping. They conveniently ignored the fact that the lockdown policies they so eagerly supported crushed the working class. They considered it completely natural that a class of workers should have to deliver their food, work in the grocery stores, take their garbage and clean their streets, while they hid behind their computer screens and called for ever harsher lockdowns. Their idea of social justice consists of forcing others to face the risks of Covid while they attend Zoom meetings in their sweatpants.
As card-carrying members of the woke, the Covidians surely spent the last four or five years eagerly mouthing the central tenet of the faith: that the ‘patriarchy’ is the root of all evil; that a gang of Western white men has spent the last few centuries brutally oppressing everyone else in the world. And then, without any irony, they slavishly follow every command of Western white men such as Boris Johnson, Chris Whitty, Matt Hancock, Anthony Fauci and Joe Biden.
Likewise, as good wokesters, they no doubt eagerly signed up to the campaign to ‘defund STEM’ (because science itself is a tool of the dreaded patriarchy). Now, without the slightest tinge of shame, they angrily insist that we must ‘follow The Science.’ Of course, what they mean by ‘The Science’ is the institutional narrative favourable to Big Pharma.
The Covidians profess tremendous faith in the vaccine. Yet they find it almost impossible to let go of their precious masks, their flag of tribal identity. Likewise, despite their faith in the vaccine, the Covidian faithful insist that everyone else on earth be forced to take the vaccine (though presumably, if the vaccine works, they are protected so it doesn’t matter whether others take it).
As members of the elite managerial class, they obsess about the quality of their food, scrutinising food labels to be sure that anything they put into their bodies is organic, artisanal and free from chemicals. And then they queue to have a syringe full of unknown, barely tested, industrial genetic products shot directly into their bloodstream.
No doubt most Covidian women are strident feminists who mouth the slogan ‘my body, my choice’. Yet they eagerly support a national campaign of coerced ‘consent’ wherein the state forces the people to accept injection of unknown and potentially dangerous genetic material into their bodies. They are supporting the penetration of the state into their physical beings – mechanical rape on an industrial scale.
Likewise, these feminists have no doubt spent the last few decades working their way into every boardroom, professorship and political office. Now they vocally support being locked in their homes by the state. They gladly accept limits on their freedom that would make Saudi Arabian women look like liberated hippie chicks.
The Covidians claim that black lives matter, and yet they support policies that damage the working class, in which people of colour are disproportionately represented. Likewise, they support the regime that actively suppresses knowledge and use of ivermectin, a drug that would eliminate Covid. Thus they perpetuate a pandemic that disproportionately affects people of colour.
If you look closely at the words and actions of the Covidians, you will see nothing but contradiction and hypocrisy. This indicates an appalling lack of principles, because principles would demand some consistency across words and actions. Rather, for the Covidians, it’s all about obedience to the diktats of the mainstream media and government agencies. These people are reeds bending in the wind, incapable of thinking for themselves and only concerned with appearing virtuous. They have stood for nothing and fallen for everything.
These are just a few examples: please add more in the comments section. We have a duty to history to document the full depths of the mind-boggling hypocrisy of the Covidians.
Re-Evaluating Mask Mandates Part II: Exposing the “Assumption-Led Claim”
By Masha Krylova | C2C Journal | June 25, 2021
This two-part review is not meant to cast doubt on the seriousness of the SARS-CoV-2 infection, but to hold up to scientific and logical scrutiny the dominant narrative that has frantically promoted mandatory face coverings for the general public as an effective means of protection against the viral spread. Open-minded inquiry quickly uncovered evidence that this narrative is not only skewed, but unscientific, as we will see in even greater clarity. One of its noticeable features has been to denounce anyone who questions the dominant view as ignorant, deluded, a conspiracy theorist or a deliberate purveyor of misinformation. This is deeply disturbing in a free and democratic society. It also raises the question, if the pro-mask forces are unwilling to debate the issue on substance, just how strong their case really is. If they are truly “following the science,” why won’t they discuss the issue on exactly those terms?
In Part I, Science Gives Way to the Talisman, we noted the previous longstanding scientific and public health consensus against ubiquitous masking as an infection-control method, a view that was initially maintained by public health leaders when Covid-19 hit – but then abandoned. Following this came a blizzard of several hundred studies that appeared to prove the efficacy and benefits of wearing masks in reducing viral transmission (but with no mention of any potential harms). These studies seemed to “seal the deal” regarding masking, ending any need for further discussion.
Strangely, however, none of these studies were randomized controlled trials (RCT), the gold-standard of reliability in scientific testing and the only research method that can establish causal relationships between a selected behaviour or intervention and an outcome. The pro-mask studies were of an observational type and could demonstrate at best only a temporal association (i.e., correlation) between mask-wearing and infection rates – but were nonetheless hailed as definitive. Yet there was still room for doubt, because large-scale RCTs had been performed examining mask-wearing in relation to influenza viruses. And the bulk of these high-quality studies in the pre-Covid era failed to support the efficacy of mask-wearing to stop the spread of viral infection.
Why does this matter today? Because even as countries around the world reopen, the conflict over mask-wearing appears fated to continue. Even though mask mandates are being discarded or even outlawed in many U.S. states, and are soon to be dropped in Alberta, there is widespread resistance to allowing people once again to show their faces wherever they go and whatever they do.
Other Canadian provinces, left-leaning big-city mayors and various groups of medical experts are all demanding that mask mandates remain in place until some utopian goal is reached – such as zero recorded Covid-19 cases (as unrealistic an idea as, say, fully eradicating influenza). If we are to be subjected to prolonged political conflict over mask-wearing – and if many of us continue to feel a lingering urge to mask up just in case – then surely it is worth understanding whether masks even work, or whether wearing them might present health risks of their own, unrelated to Covid-19.
Randomized Controlled Trials (RCT) of Masking During Covid-19
A search by C2C Journal of the scientific literature since early 2020 has found two RCTs specific to mask wearing during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The first was a large Danish study, approved by an ethics committee and published in March 2021 in Annals of Internal Medicine. It tracked over 6,000 participants across the country, divided roughly equally between people who wore surgical masks and those who did not, from April to June 2020. Universal mask wearing was not yet recommended by the Danish authorities and mask use remained generally uncommon, thereby avoiding ethical concerns that otherwise might have been raised by the need to persuade a control group not to wear masks, and freeing the study results from the impact of governmental regulation.
Another strength is that this study used not only the results of the common PCR test as its primary outcome to measure infection results, but also the participant’s antibody count, an arguably more reliable measure than nasal swab sampling. Importantly, all participants spent at least three hours per day outside their homes, i.e., were not isolated from social interaction with potentially infected individuals.
As with previous RCTs testing the efficacy of facemasks against influenza virus (discussed in Part I), the Danish scientific team found no statistically significant difference in the spread of SARS-CoV-2 between the experimental and control groups. Specifically, the researchers reported: “SARS-CoV-2 infection occurred in 40 participants (1.8%) in the mask group and 53 (2.1%) in the control group.” These results, it stated, were “compatible with a possible 46% reduction to 23% increase in infection among mask wearers,” which, as the researchers concluded, makes their findings practically inconclusive. Such low precision of the detected impact of mask wearing, varying from being beneficial against the infection to making it worse, impedes drawing a more definite conclusion. Among the study’s limitations was the reliance on self-reported data, but that seems inevitable in population-based studies.
The other RCT is a micro study performed in a laboratory setting. It used four participants whose saliva, captured on a petri dish, was analyzed following exposure to the virus. It found no difference in the median viral emission between the mask-free individuals and the mask wearers. That study, however, was ultimately retracted after the researchers admitted they had misinterpreted part of their findings but were, rather strangely, denied the customary opportunity to correct and update their paper.
Clearly then, despite claims that RCTs are inappropriate for studying mask effectiveness against Covid-19, it is both possible and would be of incalculable benefit to the public and policy-makers to perform just such studies – as was done with influenza. And the fact that the two conducted RCTs, one in a community setting and the other in a laboratory setting, were found inconclusive should only elevate the urgency of running additional and even better RCTs. Instead, and very strangely again, RCTs seem to be under a general halt in the scientific community.
The final point on the epidemiological evidence is the odd juxtaposition between the fact that most RCTs do not find facemasks to be beneficial against other respiratory illnesses while nearly all observational studies concerning Covid-19 do. That is why in reviews such as this, where accumulative data from both RCTs and observational studies are analyzed, the evidence for mask effectiveness is generally said to be “inconclusive.”
Despite claims that randomized controlled trials are inappropriate for studying mask effectiveness against Covid-19, such studies have been done with influenza.
To rationalize this observation, some have suggested that experimental epidemiological studies might underestimate the benefits of mask-wearing whereas observational studies overestimate them. If that is the case, then because the pre-Covid-19-era RCTs have been roundly ignored and virtually no Covid-era RCTs were conducted at all, the world has been subjected to a seriously skewed view of what masks can accomplish against this viral pandemic.
Looking broadly, the Covid-19 crisis has generated literally tens of thousands of scientific papers on nearly all aspects of the disease in question. This should certainly appear to justify more than two RCTs evaluating the efficacy of one of the most heavily relied-upon, onerous and contentious public health measures. The fact that this has not been done is a matter of considerable curiosity, to say the least.
The Microscopic Mechanics of Masks
There is, further, a common pro-mask argument based on “mechanistic” evidence of masks’ protective properties (see again this review). Covid-19 is said to propagate both through small respiratory aerosols, with a diameter of less than 5 micrometers (μm, one-millionth of a metre) and larger droplets, 5-10 μm in size. Technically, any kind of mask can impede the spread of aerosols and droplets, with various masks providing different degrees of protection. Although leakage is possible due to poor fit of certain mask types (reducing protective capacity by up to 30 percent), it is generally established that masks provide a physical barrier against splashes and sprays of fluids.
Masks do not, however, function as a “strainer” but rather as a filter, meaning there is far more to a mask than its pore size. Various mask fibres perform different types of filtration (such as gravitational sedimentation, inertial impaction or interception) and these processes play a role in catching airborne particles. The review cited above notes that N95 masks have the best so-called particle filtration efficiency, with surgical masks having a lower degree of such efficiency. Cloth facemasks, which are not regulated, are “expected” to be even less efficient. That was why the CDC recommended using masks with two or more layers to limit the spread of Covid-19.
This, too, seems like strong, if not decisive, evidence in favour of facemasks. And yet the conclusions provided by mechanical studies have not been supported by RCTs. On the contrary, several RCTs have shown no advantage of wearing N95 versus surgical masks in protecting individuals against clinical respiratory illness, including coronaviruses (see this systematic review of RCTs). This seemingly makes no sense given the assertions of the N95 type’s filtration advantage over surgical masks – unless of course the mechanistic studies were focused on the wrong variable, i.e., filtration efficiency is not determinative, or masks in general are not especially useful.
Moreover, recall that the studies discussed above merely state that cloth masks are “expected” to have less particle filtration efficiency. But just how much less is unknown, because to date there has been no known scientific study describing and evaluating the mechanical properties and effectiveness of cloth masks or facial coverings in reducing the transmission of droplets and aerosols containing Covid-19.
This in itself is remarkable if not shocking, since hundreds of millions of people worldwide – possibly billions – habitually wear those cloth coverings and expect them to be life-protecting. So it is fair to say that the body of mechanics-focused research that is meant to provide further evidence in favour of masking does little but cast even greater doubt on the rationale for universal public masking.
The Serious Adverse Effects of Mask Wearing
Public health decisions are not intended to be based solely on scientific evidence. Science aims to observe, explain and predict as many natural phenomena as possible, yet it is not absolute and its models frequently fail to be verified. Hence, in the realm of policy making, especially regarding public health-related issues, it is commonly understood that any proposed medical intervention should undergo thorough cost-benefit analysis prior to implementation.
Enforcement of masks on the general public should not have been an exception. Yet – again astoundingly – no known cost-benefit analysis has ever been done on the issue anywhere worldwide. Nor, until two months ago, was a comprehensive investigation conducted to evaluate the adverse effects of mask wearing in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. This should be considered a stunning omission since, in the pre-Covid-19 era, convincing evidence had been accumulated that the wearing of masks carries risks and can be harmful (see, for example, this and this study). And recall the WHO’s earlier warning about self-contamination (discussed in Part I).
The new literature review of April 2021 is devastating to the common view of masking as all-benefit, no-risk. Prepared by eight German scientists, it includes 31 RCTs and 13 observational studies, was published by the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health and is entitled Is a Mask That Covers the Mouth and Nose Free from Undesirable Side Effects in Everyday Use and Free of Potential Hazards? Notably, the review provided quantitative evaluation of all types of masks including unregulated cloth masks. It reports undesired side effects across no fewer than 14 medical disciplines, including neurology, psychology, sports medicine, pediatrics and microbiology.
The review leaves very little room for doubt that prolonged mask wearing by the general public can be unsafe. In fact, it is claimed to lead to “psychological and physical deterioration” with a “negative effect on the basis of all aerobic life, external and internal respiration, with an influence on a wide variety of organ systems and metabolic processes with physical, psychological and social consequences for the individual human being.”
The overarching negative consequences of mask wearing include an increase in dead space volume (by 80 percent in one study), a reduction in the user’s blood oxygen levels, a 30-fold increase in carbon dioxide retention and greater average breathing resistance (by 128 percent) due to excessive moisturization of masks.
In essence, wearing a mask induces changes in the person’s physiology of breathing – one of the most basic and critical biological functions. In particular, it leads to expansion of dead space volume, which is the amount of the inhaled air that does not participate in gas exchange. It’s normal to have some 150 millilitres of dead space per inhalation (out of 500 ml that is typically inhaled and exhaled in each respiratory cycle), but an increase of 80 percent greatly diminishes the effectiveness of gas exchange in lungs.
Such breathing-related changes, in turn, lead to a host of other negative medical effects: increased heart rate, elevated blood pressure and irritation of the respiratory tract which could lead to asthmatic reactions. While these may strike many people as minor irritants to be endured during a pandemic, they are medically serious. In the long run, the effects are expected to be illness-provoking and include vascular damage, coronary heart disease (metabolic syndrome) and neurological diseases such as epileptic seizures. The review states: “Even slightly but persistently increased heart rates encourage oxidative stress with endothelial dysfunction, via increased inflammatory messengers, and finally, the stimulation of arteriosclerosis of the blood vessels has been proven.”
This summary of the previous findings is distressing enough, yet is not exhaustive. The initial physiological effects of mask wearing are also recognized to lead to non-physical consequences, including the impairment of the wearer’s brain function. The view that wearing a mask, especially for a long period of time, quite simply compromises one’s ability to think is among the review’s most firmly stated conclusions and is worth quoting at length:
“Confusion, disorientation and even drowsiness… and reduced motoric abilities… with reduced reactivity and overall impaired performance… as a result of mask use have also been documented…
The scientists explain these neurological impairments with a mask-induced latent drop in blood gas oxygen levels O2 (towards hypoxia) or a latent increase in blood gas carbon dioxide levels CO2 (towards hypercapnia). In view of the scientific data, this connection also appears to be indisputable.
In a mask experiment from 2020, significant impaired thinking (p < 0.03) and impaired concentration (p < 0.02) were found for all mask types used (fabric, surgical and N95 masks) after only 100 min of wearing the mask. The thought disorders correlated significantly with a drop in oxygen saturation (p < 0.001) during mask use.” (Emphasis added.)
In addition to covering these grave cognitive harms, the German review also discusses the psychological dimension, finding that habitual mask wearing can cause a combination of exhaustion, discomfort, anxiety, panic, anger, distraction and a feeling of imprisonment.
The idea that experiencing difficulty breathing and a needlessly elevated heart rate while inhaling one’s own C02 for hours or days on end is bad for one’s health and wellbeing seems like unassailable logic and sheer common sense. Yet it was ignored, if not actively suppressed, by the political class, public health officials, widely quoted medical professionals and the news and social media in the frenzied campaign to impose and then sustain public mask mandates. And some scientists in joining this moralistic crusade cast aside their professional impartiality, even-handedness and intellectual curiosity.
Dissenting scientific voices were silenced and even cancelled by their peers. Among those are Denis Rancourt, a former tenured Full Professor of Physics at the University of Ottawa. The prolific researcher had amassed a publication record of over 100 papers in leading peer-reviewed journals in physics, chemistry, geology, materials science, soil science and environmental science. Rancourt’s scientific “h-index” of 39 placed him just one point short of the international rating for “outstanding scientist” in the Nobel Prize category. But all of that would count for nothing once Rancourt concluded that the orthodoxy on masking was wrong.
For speaking up against the imposed pro-mask narrative, former tenured University of Ottawa Full Professor of Physics Denis Rancourt was silenced and cancelled – not by government, but by his peers.
In April 2020, Rancourt wrote Masks Don’t Work: A Review of Science Relevant to Covid-19 Social Policy. The article was published by ResearchGate, a popular networking site for academics, gathering an unprecedented 400,000 reads – but was later taken down. Since then Rancourt has written another dozen articles opposing the general narrative around the Covid-19 virus and pandemic while ResearchGate has all-but erased his existence, leaving only the remnants of his publicly presented lab on its website and moving his original profile into “archives.”
On his personal blog, Rancourt explained the censorship he suffered. The note he received from ResearchGate’s two managing directors stated that he was de-platformed because his widely read paper “goes against the public health advice and/or requirements of credible agencies and governments” which they “thought… had the potential to cause harm.” In other words, instead of free-wheeling scientific inquiry like Rancourt’s stimulating broader debate, aimed at informing and strengthening public policy, the people in charge of a major scientific website appear to believe that it is current public policy orthodoxy which must dictate the bounds of science itself. And that a nebulous and entirely unsupported (i.e., unscientific) worry about the “potential” for harm must outweigh and shut down the search for truth.
On balance, it is Rancourt who evidently has truth on his side for, as we have seen, the risks of mask-wearing are extensively documented. These harmful effects are particularly evident – bluntly starring into people’s faces – in sports. There have been several vivid recent accounts of young athletes forced to wear masks during competitions falling into distress, events that were captured on video and covered by local TV stations.
Earlier this spring, for example, a young cross-country runner collapsed at a New Mexico state championship. The teenager, who had never suffered a collapse in his five-year running experience, was taken to hospital and was reported to have excessive C02 in his lungs, a lack of oxygen, elevated liver enzymes and high red blood count. Recalling the last minute of the race, the runner said, “I realized I’m going to fall, I got super dizzy, I was losing my balance and I could feel my legs almost giving out from under me every step,” and then, “I don’t feel like I’m getting enough air under the mask.” This was not the only time when masked school-age athletes needed emergency care.
Indeed, the German review makes it very clear that mask wearing has long been recognized as a destructive practise for athletes – and as much or more so for children. Respiratory problems are especially severe in children due to the high oxygen demand associated with their early developmental stages. In one of the studies cited by the German team, masks in children were shown to trigger headaches in 50 percent of cases, difficulty concentrating in 50 percent, joylessness in 49 percent, learning difficulties in 38 percent, fatigue in 37 percent, anxiety in 25 percent and even nightmares in 25 percent.
That masks and athletics are a toxic combination was considered incontrovertible until Covid-19 came along. It has required masked athletes falling into medical distress during competitions to rediscover this obvious truth.
Finally, wearing masks may actually increase the risk of catching other diseases. The surfaces and interior fibres of warm and humid masks provide an ideal environment for the accumulation of germs. As was shown in the reviewed experimental studies, after only two hours of wearing masks the pathogen density can increase ten-fold and after six hours the following viruses can be detected: adenovirus, bocavirus, respiratory syncytial virus and influenza viruses. And these are consequences observed in medical personnel who are conscious of avoiding self-contamination. While the WHO is by now likely to be discredited in the eyes of many people, its original caution about masks is evidently well-founded.
After its exhaustive scientific enterprise, the German review team arrived, in effect, back at the beginning: reiterating the longstanding skepticism towards mass-masking that prevailed until March 2020. Opening with a pointed reminder of the World Medical Association’s 1948 Geneva Declaration (revised in 2006), the German team’s conclusion can only be read as a full-throated denunciation of the mask frenzy of the past 15 months:
“… Every doctor vows to put the health and dignity of his patient first and, even under threat, not to use his medical knowledge to violate human rights and civil liberties. Within the framework of these findings, we, therefore, propagate an explicitly medically judicious, legally compliant action in consideration of scientific factual reality against a predominantly assumption-led claim to a general effectiveness of masks, always taking into account possible unwanted individual effects for the patient and mask wearer concerned, entirely in accordance with the principles of evidence-based medicine and the ethical guidelines of a physician.” (Emphasis added.)
It is worth repeating three devastating words from the German review: “assumption-led claim.” In the researchers’ considered opinion, that is the crux of the entire campaign to subject billions of people to the burdens and harms of habitual mask-wearing.
It Is Time to Unmask
Perhaps upon finishing this read there will still be some facemask proponents who maintain that mask wearing is warranted because, even if they are not as effective as first hoped, they might still do some good – perhaps saving even one life. They can point out that in a public health crisis, with thousands dying and hundreds of thousands infected, anything even marginally beneficial, especially something inexpensive and simple to use by anyone, is surely worth doing. Objections based on human rights, freedom and individual responsibility, as often argued, can be dismissed as frivolous or irrelevant, or set aside until normality returns.
Nonetheless, as we have seen, the risks of this practice on a broad population scale are substantially greater and more palpable than their benefits, which turn out to be largely assumed and remain unsupported by gold-standard scientific evidence. And these risks are not merely transient but of potentially life-shortening or life-threatening consequence.
If the benefits themselves are exaggerated or even chimerical – if masks are more like a “talisman” (in the words of a prominent WHO physician quoted in Part I) than a plausible means to control the spread of infection – then the case for masking weakens further. Once it is clearly seen that masks are harmful – and not just in one or two ways, but in a dozen or more – then the “where’s the harm” and “even one life” arguments collapse and the failure to clearly establish the net benefits of masking becomes unconscionable. If masks are bad for you and don’t even protect you, they shouldn’t be worn. At that point, the message becomes clear: it is time to unmask.
It is time to unmask because the facemask mandate for the general public – which was always an egregious assault on civil liberties – is unsupported by either the highest-quality science or a rational evaluation of the relevant risks (not only the risk of transmitting Covid-19). It is time to unmask because masks have not been shown to be effective at preventing people from catching Covid-19. It is time to unmask because the negative health consequences of wearing masks are so detrimental that continuing to wear them (especially at a time when the risks of Covid-19 have been driven down to immaterial) is not merely irrational but borders on self-destruction.
For children in particular, mask wearing is nothing less than a grave health hazard – a conclusion that also “follows the science”. Yet the dominance of the “narrative” during Covid-19 has highlighted the vulnerability of the scientific community to concurrent political ideology and the propensity towards false prediction.
As for the scientific community’s role, the public and policy-makers should insist on having more Covid-19-related experimental studies – prominently to include RCTs – and cost-benefit analyses around the imposed public health measures. The public deserves to know in tangible terms the price attached to employing either approach. This reflects the basis of any decision-making, at both personal and societal levels.
It is obvious that scientists are faced with some serious challenges with regard to this pandemic; there’s no doubt that the infamous and ever-growing cancel culture has penetrated their métier and is actively carrying out its destructive work. Arguably science has always been vulnerable to political influence, or even manipulation by the ruling class, yet the pandemic crisis has either greatly exacerbated this trend or illuminated it more starkly – perhaps both.
Had scientists remained professionally impartial, while the political and public health establishment were actually true to their unapologetic motto to “just follow science,” it is likely that we would not have seen ubiquitous mask mandates. Or, if we had, that they would have been discarded in the face of countervailing evidence – like the studies and reviews cited above.
The failure of science and government regulators to develop any kind of standard for an effective, practical and low-cost mask type to be universally used during this pandemic further undermines the integrity of the imposed mask rules. The notion that Covid-19 transmission can be halted by – to take just one of many real-world examples – pulling a mucous-laden bandana over one’s face while standing in a ski area lift lineup seems ludicrous. Yet that practice last winter satisfied government and corporate rules in B.C., Alberta and much of the U.S.
Canada is not the only country that remains largely oblivious to the truth about masks; governments around the world are maintaining the same shroud of ignorance. Yet some countries have proved more willing than others to unmask and return to normal. The United States is the most prominent example. And while the increasing vaccination rates are frequently regarded as the main or even sole ground for relaxing or discarding mask wearing, it should not be so. Because, at bottom, masks just do not work.
Maria (Masha) V. Krylova is a Social Psychologist and writer based in Calgary, Alberta who has a particular interest in the role of psychological factors affecting the socio-political climate in Russia and Western countries.
GP with the courage to say No to vaccines
By Sally Beck | The Conservative Woman | June 28, 2021
A GP who resigned his ‘job for life’ as a partner with a Hampshire practice because of his doubts about Covid-19 vaccines has been suspended by NHS England for questioning coronavirus protocol.
Dr Sam White received a letter on Friday informing him that he was suspended with immediate effect, which stops him practising as a doctor within the NHS. On Saturday he was telephoned by a senior clinical adviser to NHS England, who condescendingly called him ‘poppet’.
In a soothing manner, she told him she was concerned for his welfare. ‘I’m worried about whether you’re well,’ she said, the undercurrent of the conversation being the suggestion that Dr White is suffering mental health issues.
In fact, Dr White has never felt saner even though he has pressed the nuclear button on his professional life. The two main reasons for detonation involved the Covid-19 vaccine roll out, an initiative that he fundamentally disagrees with because vaccines are not needed if there’s an effective treatment; and the mandatory wearing of masks, a theme introduced by psychologists not scientists, which Stanford University research shows is nothing more than theatre.
He said: ‘It’s hard to go against the grain like this, but when I found out they were going to start testing the vaccine on children, I couldn’t sleep. I knew it didn’t matter what the results of the trials were, negative or positive, they would begin injecting children regardless. A healthy child is more likely to be struck by lightning than die of Covid. They don’t need an experimental vaccine that has no proven benefit.
‘The risks from the vaccine are completely unknown because it’s barely been tested. But reactions are beginning to come to light. Adolescent boys seem to be developing myocarditis – heart inflammation – which can permanently damage the heart. The risks could be potentially devastating compared with them contracting Covid and surviving it.
‘I began waking up in a cold sweat. I was so anxious that I ended up calling in sick. That was back in March, and I never went back.’ He now fears this anxiety will be used to question his mental health.
The second dig in his ribs came when someone in the Twitter community posted in the wake of apocalyptic stories about the vaccine-injured: ‘What are all the doctors doing about this crime against humanity?’ It struck a chord, and it was then he knew he had to reveal how he’d taken a stand.
Dr White explained in a heartfelt resignation video that went viral after he posted it to Twitter on Friday June 4. ‘I had to go because of all the lies. They’re so vast it’s been impossible to stomach.
‘I became a doctor because I wanted to help people and make a difference.
‘Since the pandemic was announced, I’ve had my hands tied behind my back. There are safe treatments that I have researched and there is good science behind them, proven treatments, but we’re not allowed to use them.’
During our interview, Dr White explained that the ‘vaccine cure’ was worse than the ‘disease’. He said: ‘After the vaccine programme began, I started to see more people with vaccine damage than with Covid.
‘I effectively left my practice three months after the rollout but before I left, I saw eight vaccine injured patients, they felt feverish and short of breath post-vaccination, and one was hospitalised in his 50s. He’d had Covid-19 so he didn’t need the vaccine, but no one had checked his medical notes. When I got his discharge letter back from A&E, it just said Covid-19, not that he’d had a reaction to the injection.’
The lack of information available about the vaccine worried him, as did his contract to be complicit in potentially causing harm. He said: ‘A lot of doctors don’t know that this is not a vaccine, but genetic manipulation.
‘When you sign up to become a GP you sign a contract with the NHS who tell you what to do. Essentially you can’t refuse to do what you’re told. I was hoping in December that the General Practitioners’ Committee (GPC), our governing body, would say, “Hang on, we haven’t got enough data here, we need to hold off doing this”, but that didn’t happen.’
Now, he wonders how many of his elderly Covid patients would not have died if he’d been allowed to prescribe ivermectin, the medication recommended by Dr Tess Lawrie from British Ivermectin Recommendation Development (BIRD), a group of health researchers who say research shows it can cure and prevent Covid.
On Wednesday afternoon last week, Dr White had a call from a woman claiming to be a doctor from NHS England who expressed concerns that he’d discussed drugs such as the malaria prevention medicine hydroxychloroquine which research says could increase Covid survival rates by 200 per cent. She also did not want him to mention the steroid inhaler budesonide, talked about by a doctor in the US.
A clean getaway was too much to hope for, especially as he’d made his feelings known so publicly. Since that video flew around the world it’s had close to a million views, and Dr White has paid dearly for his outspoken departure. His bank account has been hacked and a five-figure sum removed. He has no idea if it’s connected but according to the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF) it’s a ‘thing’: thieving people’s identities and stealing their money is a tactic used to intimidate the outspoken.
It has affected his personal relationships and is a divisive subject within his family, who all have their roots in healthcare.
As painful as the response from his family has been, the outpouring of support from strangers on social media has been phenomenal. He said: ‘Before I posted the video, I had 100 followers on Instagram which increased to 37.5k after my video. I had 11 followers on Twitter and now I have over 8k, but Instagram are taking down my posts. I put up a list of vitamins I take for boosting immunity. I didn’t even mention Covid, and they labelled it: “Covid-19 misinformation. False treatments. WARNING”.’
Dr White, 41, is not a naïve rookie. He qualified in 2004, worked as a GP for 11 years and was invited to become a partner in the Hampshire practice where he’d worked as a popular locum in February 2020. He’s worked in A&E, and he helped to run a palliative care unit for a while.
Initially, he turned down their offer of a partnership because he said: ‘Being a GP is a mill, you’re seeing 40 patients a day, a third of your day is spent doing paperwork, a lot of it is meaningless. It’s what we call tick-box medicine. What I felt was that I was, if I can be frank with you, a bitch for Big Pharma.
‘If you take someone coming in with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes, the agenda is to get them on a drug for the diabetes, get them on a different drug for their blood pressure, it’s not about reversing type 2 diabetes which you can do by changing their diet.’
Since he walked away from general practice, he feels lighter and is excited for the future. Dr White is now focusing on functional medicine, from which he is not suspended – a biology-based approach to healthcare that identifies and addresses the root cause of disease, for example poor diet and lifestyle.
He wants to cure people, not just control their symptoms with drugs with side effects that can potentially harm.
The vaccines, and the Armageddon he, and many other doctors and scientists, fear they could cause, are never far from his thoughts though. He has this advice for people undecided about whether to have a Covid vaccination or not: ‘Please don’t have this because you think they will let you go on holiday. Your ability to travel should not be impeded for a virus with a survival rate of 99.7 per cent. It makes no sense.’
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From the Archives
Are There 50,000 ‘Israeli-born’ Individuals Living in the UK?
By Professor David Miller | August 18, 2026
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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