Al-Qassam Brigades announced that the occupation’s claims that the bodies of Israeli captives were found in hospitals in the Gaza Strip were false and that they were undergoing treatment there.
The brigades conveyed in an official statement on its Telegram channel: “We transferred a number of prisoners to care centres to receive treatment due to the seriousness of their health condition and to preserve their lives. This happened recently with the detainee, Aryeh Zalman Zdmanovich, card number 0010185791, who received intensive care.”
Al-Qassam Brigades explained: “After he recovered, he was returned to his place of detention. He died due to panic attacks as a result of the repeated bombing around his place of detention, and we will publish material documenting this.”
The occupation forces on Thursday announced the discovery of two bodies: a female Israeli soldier, who Al-Qassam confirmed was killed as a result of the occupation bombing her detention site, in addition to another female detainee, whose body they claimed was found in a building next to Al-Shifa Hospital.
Al-Qassam Brigades stated that the occupation forces have so far caused the deaths of more than 60 of its captives in the Gaza Strip due to the continuous brutal bombing of all parts of the strip, especially Palestinian homes.
Israeli forces ordered doctors, patients and displaced people at Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital to evacuate the medical compound, giving them an hour to do so and forcing some to leave by gunpoint, Al-Jazeerareported on 18 November.
Israeli forces issued the demand to evacuate in “one hour” at around 9 am local time, but it was “impossible” to evacuate everyone, a doctor in Al-Shifa told Al-Jazeera.
Medical sources inside the facility said there are more than 7,000 people sheltering from Israeli bombing in the Al-Shifa complex, including 300 patients in critical condition.
It also includes “at least 35 premature babies who already for eight days now have been out of their incubators because of the lack of oxygen and the lack of electricity,” Al-Jazeera’s correspondent in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, said. Four babies died late on Friday and five are severely ill now, the correspondent added.
“There is no transportation means in Gaza City and the northern parts because of a lack of fuel. So people are expected to evacuate on foot. And doctors are telling us it’s impossible to evacuate with this many people on foot.” She added that doctors also did not want to abandon their patients.
“We were told to leave through al-Wehda road. Dozens of dead bodies are scattered on the road,” Omar Zaqout, the hospital’s supervisor, said. “Many homeless people who cannot walk are left out in the open.”
“Many of the patients were put on wheelchairs or rolling beds. Family members were forced to carry their wounded children or parents themselves … These are horrible, unprecedented scenes,” explained Munir al-Barsh, a doctor at the hospital.
The hospital has also been without food, water, electricity and oxygen for at least a week, while Israeli troops and tanks raided the facility over the last couple of days. Some 37 patients have died as the hospital’s ability to operate has collapsed.
Israel claimed Hamas has a command center underneath the hospital and released video footage claiming to show weapons its troops found in various rooms. It also released footage claiming to show its troops unloading boxes full of medical supplies.
However, a BBC analysis of the footage clearly showed Israeli forces themselves brought the weapons into the hospital in the boxes of medical supplies in an effort to fabricate claims that Hamas was active there.
Before raiding the hospital, Israel also claimed that captives taken by Hamas on 7 October were being held there, and that a major Hamas “command center” was present below the hospital. But Israel could provide no evidence for either claim after taking control of the hospital.
The Palestinian Authority, released a statement in response to the evacuations saying, “The evacuation of al-Shifa deepens the humanitarian and environmental catastrophe Gaza faces.” Israel’s actions represent “another hideous facet of the crimes of ethnic cleansing and genocide committed by the occupation forces against Palestinians,” the statement said.
United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur Pedro Arrojo-Agudo on Friday called on the occupying state to stop using water as a weapon of war against the Palestinians and called on it to provide clean water and fuel to the besieged Gaza Strip.
The UN special rapporteur on the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation issued a statement in the context of the water crisis in the Gaza Strip due to the strip being subjected to an Israeli siege and intense attacks.
“Israel must stop using water as a weapon of war and allow clean water and fuel into Gaza to activate the water supply network before it is too late,” Arrojo-Agudo urged.
Arrojo-Agudo pointed out: “Every hour that passes with Israel preventing the provision of safe drinking water in the Gaza strip, in brazen breach of international law, puts Gazans at risk of dying of thirst and diseases related to the lack of safe drinking water.”
He stressed: “I want to remind Israel that consciously preventing supplies needed for safe water from entering the Gaza Strip violates both international humanitarian and human rights law,” adding that the impact on public health and hygiene will be “unimaginable.”
The UN rapporteur pointed out that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) had previously announced that 70 per cent of Gaza’s population drinks salty and dirty water.
For the 42nd consecutive day, the Israeli occupation army continues to launch devastating attacks on Gaza. Its planes target buildings and residential homes, destroying them above the heads of their residents and depriving the Gaza Strip of water, food and fuel. This has led to the deaths of more than 11,630 Palestinians, including 4,710 children and 3,165 women, as well as more than 31,800 wounded people, 70 per cent of whom are children and women, according to official Palestinian sources.
GAZA – The International Criminal Court (ICC) announced that it received referrals from five states seeking an investigation into Israeli war crimes in Gaza.
ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan disclosed that South Africa, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Comoros, and Djibouti submitted the referrals.
Khan confirmed in a statement that the ICC is already investigating the situation in Gaza.
“In accordance with the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, a State Party may refer to the Prosecutor a situation in which one or more crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court appear to have been committed requesting the Prosecutor to investigate the situation for the purpose of determining whether one or more specific persons should be charged with the commission of such crimes,” he said.
Khan mentioned the establishment of a specialized team upon assuming his term in June 2021, aimed at advancing the investigation in Palestine.
The prosecutor emphasized that the team will probe crimes suspected to be committed during the Israeli aggression on Gaza.
South Africa declared that it had submitted the referral request with “other countries that share the same concerns”, demanding that the International Criminal Court would urgently pay “attention to the seriousness of the current situation.”
The South African Ministry of Foreign Affairs stressed in a statement that Pretoria “urges other signatory states to the Rome Statute to join this referral request, or to submit their referral requests independently.”
The ICC opened an investigation in 2021 into war crimes suspected to be committed by the Israeli occupation forces in Palestine.
Since October 7, Israel has been waging a bloody aggression on the Gaza Strip, resulting in the martyrdom of more than 12,000 Palestinian civilians, most of whom are children and women.
There are 149 states party to the Genocide Convention. Every one of them has the right to call out the genocide in progress in Gaza and report it to the United Nations. In the event that another state party disputes the claim of genocide – and Israel, the United States and the United Kingdom are all states party – then the International Court of Justice is required to adjudicate on “the responsibility of a State for genocide”.
These are the relevant articles of the genocide convention:
Article VIII
Any Contracting Party may call upon the competent organs of the United Nations to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III.
Article IX
Disputes between the Contracting Parties relating to the interpretation, application or fulfilment of the present Convention, including those relating to the responsibility of a State for genocide or for any of the other acts enumerated in article III, shall be submitted to the International Court of Justice at the request of any of the parties to the dispute.
Note that here “parties to the dispute” means the states disputing the facts of genocide, not the parties to the genocide/conflict. Any single state party is able to invoke the Convention.
There is no doubt that Israel’s actions amount to genocide. Numerous international law experts have said so and genocidal intent has been directly expressed by numerous Israeli ministers, generals and public officials.
This is the definition of genocide in international law, from the Genocide Convention:
Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
I can see no room to doubt whatsoever that Israel’s current campaign of bombing of civilians and of the deprivation of food, water and other necessities of life to Palestinians amounts to genocide under articles II a), b) and c).
It is also worth considering Articles III and IV:
Article III
The following acts shall be punishable:
(a) Genocide;
(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;
(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
(d) Attempt to commit genocide;
(e) Complicity in genocide.
Article IV
Persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.
There is, at the very least, a strong prima facie case that the actions of the United States and United Kingdom and others, in openly providing direct military support to be used in genocide, are complicity in genocide. The point of Article IV is that individuals are responsible, not just states. So Netanyahu, Biden and Sunak bear individual responsibility. So, indeed, do all those who have been calling for the destruction of the Palestinians.
It is very definitely worth activating the Genocide Convention. A judgement of the International Court of Justice that Israel is guilty of genocide would have an extraordinary diplomatic effect and would cause domestic difficulties in the UK and even in the US in continuing to subsidise and arm Israel. The International Court of Justice is the most respected of international institutions; while the United States has repudiated its compulsory jurisdiction, the United Kingdom has not and the EU positively accepts it.
If the International Court of Justice makes a determination of genocide, then the International Criminal Court does not have to determine that genocide has happened. This is important because unlike the august and independent ICJ, the ICC is very much a western government puppet institution which will wiggle out of action if it can. But a determination of the ICJ of genocide and of complicity in genocide would reduce the ICC’s task to determining which individuals bear the responsibility. That is a prospect which can indeed alter the calculations of politicians.
It is also the fact that a reference for genocide would force the western media to address the issue and use the term, rather than just pump out propaganda about Hamas fighting bases in hospitals. Furthermore a judgement from the ICJ would automatically trigger a reference to the United Nations General Assembly – crucially not to the western-vetoed Security Council.
All this begs the question of why no state has yet invoked the Genocide Convention. This is especially remarkable as Palestine is one of the 149 states party to the Genocide Convention, and for this purpose would have standing before both the UN and the ICJ.
I am afraid the question of why Palestine has not invoked the Genocide Convention takes us somewhere very dark. Anyone who, like George Galloway and myself, cut their political teeth in left-wing politics of Dundee of the 1970s has (long story) their experience and contacts with Fatah, and my sympathies have always very much lain with Fatah rather than Hamas. They still do, with the aspiration for a democratic, secular Palestine. It is Fatah who occupy the Palestinian seat at the United Nations, and the decision for Palestine to call into play the Genocide Convention lies with Mahmoud Abbas.
It is more and more difficult daily to support Abbas. He seems extraordinarily passive, and the suspicion that he is more concerned with refighting the Palestinian civil war than with resisting the genocide is impossible to shake. By invoking the Genocide Convention he could put himself and Fatah back at the centre of the narrative. But he does nothing. I do not want to believe that corruption and a Blinken promise of inheriting Gaza are Mahmoud’s motivators. But at the moment, I cannot grab on to any other explanation to believe in.
Any one of the 139 states party could invoke the Genocide Convention against Israel and its co-conspirators. Those states include Iran, Russia, Libya, Malaysia, Bolivia, Venezuela, Brazil, Afghanistan, Cuba, Ireland, Iceland, Jordan, South Africa, Turkey and Qatar. But not one of these states has called out the genocide. Why?
It is not because the Genocide Convention is a dead letter. It is not. It was invoked against Serbia by Bosnia and Herzegovina and the ICJ ruled against Serbia with regard to the massacre at Srebrenica. This fed directly through to ICC prosecutions.
Some states may simply not have thought of it. For Arab states in particular, the fact that Palestine itself has not invoked the Genocide Convention may provide an excuse. EU states can hide behind bloc unanimity.
But I am afraid that the truth is that no state cares sufficiently about the thousands of Palestinian children already killed and thousands more who will shortly be killed, to introduce another factor of hostility in their relationship with the United States. Just as at this weekend’s summit in Saudi Arabia, where Islamic countries could not agree an oil and gas boycott of Israel, the truth is that those in power really do not care about a genocide in Gaza. They care about their own interests.
It just needs one state to invoke the Genocide Convention and change the narrative and the international dynamic. That will only happen through the power of the people in pressing the idea on their governments. This is where everybody can do a little something to add to the pressure. Please do what you can.
Hat tip to the indefatigable Sam Husseini who has been pressing the Genocide Convention on the White House.
Despite the hype in the U.S. media about their much-anticipated summit in California this week marking a putative return to normal bilateral relations, the Biden administration continues pushing unprecedented aggression towards China.
Just like San Francisco’s notorious Third World-like homelessness and squalor being hurriedly cleaned up (swept under the rug, more like it) for the media spectacle, all the signs point to no return to decent U.S.-China relations in the longer term. It’s all a duplicitous facade for a passing moment on a path of enmity.
Biden held a four-hour summit with Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping on Wednesday in San Francisco ahead of the annual conference for the 21-nation Association of Pacific and Economic Cooperation (APEC).
It was highly notable that Biden and Xi did not hold a joint press conference following their lengthy discussions. Nor did the two leaders issue a joint statement. So much for a new beginning!
Almost comically, the supposed positive meeting was later thrown into disarray when Biden at the end of his solo press conference made a hallmark embarrassing gaffe by repeating an earlier epithet for Xi. Asked by a reporter if he still considered the Chinese president “a dictator”, Biden responded, “Yes”.
Antony Blinken, the U.S. Secretary of State, was visibly perplexed by his tone-deaf boss’s remarks, sensing that all the effort to create an apparent amiable reset in relations was in danger of collapsing in farce.
Chinese media tended to overlook Biden’s undiplomatic gaucheness. Surprisingly, China’s foreign ministry and media appeared to talk up the presidential summit as bearing prospects of more friendly bilateral relations. Global Times reported in an upbeat mood on a “strategic summit” for “greater stability in the world”.
The American and Chinese media spinning or wishful thinking about a seeming turnaround in positive relations is misplaced.
As Biden’s foolish and gratuitous remark about Xi being a “dictator” shows, the U.S. rulers have nothing but contempt for China. Biden may have held out a friendly hand to Xi, but the American president and the U.S. establishment are harbouring endemic and growing hostility towards Beijing.
The two presidents last met a year ago during the G20 gathering in Bali, Indonesia. Since that encounter there has been a worrying downturn in U.S.-China relations with many commentators in the U.S. and China, as well as around the world, fearing a possible outbreak of war between the two global nuclear powers.
Frankly, the belligerence stems from one side: the United States. It’s not just the administration of President Joe Biden that espouses aggression by deploying contrived economic sanctions against China. There is a preponderance of irrational hostility in Congress towards Beijing as well as among the U.S. military. Only a month ago, the Pentagon once again labelled China as a growing military threat to American global interests. The alleged threats that Washington traduces are baseless or, ironically, a projection of its own intimidatory actions, such as sending countless naval and aviation patrols near China’s borders on the cynical pretext of “freedom of navigation”.
The Biden White House has continually provoked China with false claims of Chinese expansionism in the Asia-Pacific while the U.S. relentlessly builds up its own military power in the region. Washington is also assiduously recruiting regional allies to gang up on China in the event of war. The AUKUS coalition with Australia and Britain armed with nuclear submarines is a particularly tendentious development. So too is the Quad group involving the U.S., Japan, South Korea and India which arrogantly denigrates China as a hemispheric threat, thereby turning reality completely on its head.
Biden is merely continuing an escalation in hostility that began ramping up under the Obama administration (2008-16) more than a decade ago. Trump maintained the belligerence during his four years (2016-20), which Biden has redoubled. The latter was vice president when Obama launched the so-called Pivot to Asia in 2011.
The trajectory unmistakably shows a systematic policy of U.S. power to confront China, and that policy prevails regardless of who sits in the White House, and no matter whether the president is a Democrat or Republican. So much for democratic choice!
As American hegemonic dominance goes into rapid decline owing to inherent economic and societal failure under sclerotic late U.S. capitalism, it has become all the more imperative for Washington to try to scale up military aggression towards perceived geopolitical rivals. It’s a desperate gambit to offset an historic decline.
China, being the world’s ascendant second largest economy after the U.S., is logically seen as the Number One threat. So too are Russia and other nations that advocate a multipolar world order free from arbitrary U.S. and Western privileges. This is the geopolitical context for why the NATO axis is waging a proxy war in Ukraine against Russia, and why the United States seems hellbent on fomenting chaos and conflict in the Middle East. The would-be hegemon needs violence, chaos and tension like a drug addict craving a narcotic fix.
The deterioration in U.S.-China relations has caused many observers to be apprehensive of a looming war. Pentagon commanders remark openly about an anticipated armed conflict breaking out between the two nuclear powers, especially in relation to tensions over Taiwan.
One reason why Biden seems to be seeking a belated easing of tensions with China is precisely because Washington has stoked the war tendency too much and therefore needs to dampen it, albeit for short-term practical reasons.
Another reason for seemingly engaging with President Xi this week is Biden’s electioneering. He faces a tight presidential race next year and no doubt is looking for something positive to show American voters. Significantly, Biden chose to prioritize his top achievement from discussions with Xi as “counter-narcotics policy”. Over 70,000 Americans die every year from opioid overdosing, more than from gun violence or road accidents. It is a major national scandal in the U.S. China is blamed as a source of fentanyl precursor chemicals. Biden boasted this week that the U.S. and China would cooperate more on controlling illicit drug trade. It seems that Biden was looking more at scoring favour with the U.S. electorate than to genuinely restoring normal bilateral relations with China based on principles of ensuring global peace.
Under Biden, the U.S. has recklessly intensified military and political interference in Taiwan, an island province of China. The Biden administration has proliferated weapons sales to Taiwan in flagrant defiance of China’s warnings to desist.
High-level political delegations from the U.S. to Taiwan have gone hand-in-hand with the increasing American militarization of the island, which is only some 130 kilometres from China’s southeast mainland. The provocation is similar to how the U.S. and NATO weaponized Ukraine to antagonize Russia.
The breakdown in military communications between the U.S. and China was instigated by the visit to Taiwan in August 2022 by Nancy Pelosi, the then Speaker of the House of Representatives, which is the third most senior political office in the U.S. after the president.
This week’s summit between Biden and Xi declared a resumption in military communications between the U.S. and China.
We’ll see how long the supposed detente lasts. Not for long, one suspects going by past form.
After Biden met with Xi in Bali at the end of last year, there were similar professions from the U.S. side of tamping down tensions and resuming normalcy. A couple of months after that supposed “reset”, the Biden administration sparked a crisis when it shot down a Chinese weather balloon that had been blown off course.
The notion that the U.S. can easily repair relations with China is naive. All the signals indicate that Washington is on a collision course with China. Provocative name-calling of China as a threat, the relentless arming of Taiwan and the pursuit of aggressive trade war policies all spell out confrontation.
That dire direction is, unfortunately, unavoidable because the U.S. sees itself as the indispensable sole superpower that will not tolerate any global arrangement other than its hegemonic dominance. That zero-sum mindset of the United States is intrinsic to its imperialist power. That is why the U.S. as it is currently formulated as a state is destined to be a warmonger. World peace is anathema to U.S. imperial power.
China, Russia and other nations aiming for a new multipolar world must be cognizant of that nefarious reality. Aspiring to have normal relations with the U.S. as a global hegemonic power is like trying to have normal relations with a psychotic predator.
President Teddy Roosevelt (1900-10) once jocularly described the practice of U.S. foreign policy as speaking softly while carrying a big club. That’s the essence of a global bully. U.S. power always relies on wielding a military club. The only difference now under Biden is that instead of speaking softly, the U.S. stutters over its lies and deceptions.
WASHINGTON – Cordial talks between US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping were immediately undermined by the rhetoric of the American leader himself and US hubristic policies and sermonizing, experts told Sputnik.
The two men held their talks on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in San Francisco on Wednesday. Biden said important progress was made during his talks with Xi as both sides agreed to open direct military-to-military communications and begin to cooperate on AI.
However, within a few hours, Biden outraged the Chinese by describing Xi in public as a “dictator.” His comments drew an immediate furious response from Beijing. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning responded by calling Biden’s comment “wrong and irresponsible.”
“Our policies and rhetoric continue to increase tension versus easing tension,” retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel Earl Rasmussen, political commentator and former vice president of the Eurasia Foundation told Sputnik.
“Until we come out of our cave and realize that the world is changing and take on a cooperative view… not much will improve in relations and the world will move past the United States and their close allies.”
“Based on the US readout, we continue to continual virtue signaling and that we are the all-powerful. Hitting all the buzz areas: Free and open Indo-Pacific; defense of Indo-Pacific allies; Freedom of navigation; Adherence to international law; maintaining peace and stability and not to forget support for Ukraine and Israel,” Rasmussen said.
Former CIA analyst and station chief Philip Giraldi said Biden’s decision to call Xi a dictator explains why the United States is in decline. Moreover, he added, there is nobody in Washington sensible enough to reverse the trajectory.
‘Outdated’ World Order
Canadian historian, political commentator and Canadian Patriotic Review editor Matthew Ehret agreed that Biden’s comments were the expression of a collapsing US political society in the American capital.
“The Xi-Biden meeting involved a glimpse into a senile and outdated primitive world order melting down under its own self-contradictions and trying desperately to stay relevant when placed into close proximity with a sane 21st century paradigm,” he said.
Biden’s political naivete and incompetence in his extreme old age went unchallenged because almost everyone else in the US political and media establishment thought and felt exactly the same way, Ehret explained.
“Biden represents the perfect embodiment of corruption, self-deceit and self-centeredness characteristic of the liberal intelligentsia of baby-boomers that have taken control of western policy making for the past 60 years while offering nothing approximating authenticity to the rest of the world,” he said.
Xi, on the other hand, expressed the confidence and philosophical as well as political strength of China as she emerged on the world scene, Ehret pointed out.
The Chinese leader “is coming from a place of well-reasoned confidence and strength in embodying the ancient traditions of Chinese civilization, Confucian values and the largest rate of industrial and scientific progress in the world, which he knows presents the greatest salvation not only for the Chinese people, but the world at large,” he said.
The United States needed to work constructively in cooperation with China to build a genuine new world order favorable to all, Ehret advised.
“If the United States itself is to survive the storms of war and economic collapse which it has largely brought on to itself, then it will be largely because of the creative efforts made by China to build a new system premised around cooperation, industrial growth and peace,” Ehret said.
The CDC has recently announced that exemptions to vaccinations have hit record highs in the United States. We take a look at the reasons why parents are choosing to forgo vaccinations for their young children.
Founder and Executive Director OF Texans for Medical Freedom, Jackie Shlegel, joins Del to share the monumental legal win this week in Texas and how she played an integral part in helping get SB7 passed, which protects private employees from being mandated to get the COVID-19 vaccine. Jackie details how she worked closely with Texas Governor Greg Abbott to pass this historic legislation.
The human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine may increase the prevalence and distribution of some HPV virus strains not targeted by the vaccine — including some strains that are linked to cancer — resulting in unknown and potentially concerning consequences, according to a study published last week in Cell Host & Microbe.
The study was not designed to show that the HPV vaccine prevents cancer or that HPV or cervical cancer screenings need to change, though the authors did include a brief, speculative mention of the potential implications of their findings for future screening.
Yet STATNews, reporting on the study, said the findings showed that the HPV vaccine is so effective at preventing cancers — particularly when both boys and girls are vaccinated — that cancer-screening protocols may need to change.
“The STATNews headline — misguidedly suggesting even less frequent screening — is deeply troubling. Statistics in the U.S. and elsewhere suggest that cervical cancer is on the rise in younger age cohorts where we least expect to see cervical cancer, while continuing to decline in the older populations where cervical cancer historically is diagnosed.
“We know from prior studies that the HPV vaccines already have led to decreased cervical intraepithelial neoplasia/cervical cancer screening at appropriate intervals for young women around the world.
‘Imminent risk of viral evolutionary responses’ may ‘introduce problems’
The study included approximately 11,000 — not 60,000 as STAT reported — young women born in 1992, 1993 and 1994 from 33 Finnish communities. The researchers divided them into three groups based on their community’s vaccination strategy: gender-neutral HPV vaccination, girls-only vaccination and no vaccination.
Four years after the groups were first offered vaccination (and eight years after for a smaller subset of around 3,600 subjects), the researchers tested for 16 types of genital HPV viruses considered oncogenic (linked to tumor formation) because they are associated with cervical or other cancers. The presence of oncogenic HPV is not the only risk factor for cervical cancer.
There are over 200 strains of the HPV virus, a subset of which are deemed high-risk. Depending on the vaccine, HPV vaccines target only two (Cervavix targets strains 16 and 18), four (Gardasil 4 targets strains 6, 11, 16 and 18) or nine (Gardasil 9, which adds strains 31, 33, 45, 52, 58) of those high-risk strains.
The researchers investigated how different community-level HPV vaccination strategies might change the prevalence of different HPV strains.
They found that in both vaccination groups, four and eight years following vaccination, there was a significant depletion of the high-risk HPV types targeted by the vaccine relative to the non-vaccinated group. The depletion was stronger in the gender-neutral group — when boys had also been vaccinated.
But they also found a higher prevalence of other, lower-risk oncogenic HPV strains than previously existed, particularly in the gender-neutral group. As the vaccine suppressed the targeted strains, the authors explained, other strains moved into the “niche” they formerly occupied.
That means that rather than reducing the incidence of the HPV virus altogether, vaccination changed the distribution of HPV strains, they wrote. Those oncogenic strains not targeted by the vaccine that grew in prevalence are also linked to cancer but at lower rates.
The authors noted that “the imminent risk of viral evolutionary responses” would diminish the impact of HPV vaccination.
“It is tempting to suggest that an increase of [other oncogenic strains] or the like with increased virulence might cause a risk of HPV-related cancers in the future,” they said.
In other words, new strains that occupy the niche vacated by the vaccine-targeted strains could become more virulent and potentially cancer-causing.
The authors concluded that to control oncogenic HPVs and related cancers, more research on how long-term vaccine use could change the disease evolution is imperative. They said this may have implications for future screening protocols, but did not elaborate.
Rosenberg said the implications are that more rigorous screening protocols may be necessary. She said:
“In ‘HPV Vaccine on Trial,’ my co-authors and I discussed type replacement, a phenomenon found with HPV vaccines and other vaccines.
“The study discussed in the STATNews article actually raises again the specter of type replacement — which should support more rigorous screening protocols, not a lackadaisical, unsupported reduction in screening placing the health of untold numbers of young women at risk.”
Why would ‘type replacement’ matter?
The study authors hypothesized that this strain-type replacement occurs because vaccine-induced immunity reduces the number of people susceptible to the targeted strains and leads to a biased immune response favoring infection by other strains.
Type replacement could also lead to the selection for immune escape variants — new variants that result from the selective pressure on the virus from imperfect vaccination.
Vaccine-favored variants have developed after vaccination for a number of diseases, including hepatitis B, pertussis, Streptococcus pneumoniae, Marek’s disease, malaria and diphtheria.
In some cases, like Marek’s disease and malaria, research shows vaccination led to an increased prevalence of variants with increased virulence. In others, like pertussis, this evolution was linked to the paradoxical reemergence of the disease in highly vaccinated populations.
In other cases, such as Haemophilus influenzae type b, evidence suggested that vaccination caused a milder strain to become more virulent.
One possible biological explanation in these cases could be original antigenic sin, a phenomenon wherein the molecular immune memory to a previous antigen hampers the ability of the immune system to properly recognize a structurally similar target, J. Jay Couey, CHD staff scientist, told The Defender.
Another related but separate mechanism — antibody-dependent enhancement — occurs when antibodies aimed at previous antigens (from infection or vaccination) have the paradoxical effect of increasing the severity of disease in subsequent infections, Couey said.
“Neither of these biological possibilities are discussed in either the STAT or Cell Microbe articles in general or in relation to the questions regarding the ‘ecology’ of HPV,” Couey added.
In the study, the authors emphasized that particularly among the gender-neutral vaccine groups, the targeted strains were suppressed. However, between four and eight years post-vaccination, the levels of HPV diversity were similar to those of the non-vaccinated control group.
The researchers found that after vaccination, non-targeted cancer-linked HPV types increased in prevalence and diversity. This suggests that even with vaccination, different cancer-linked HPV types are still evolving in complex ways.
This raises questions about the long-term effects of the HPV vaccination on the antigenic variation and possible virulence shifts of the remaining oncogenic HPVs, the authors noted.
Cervical cancer ‘eradication’ by vaccinating boys?
In the authors’ press release on the study — also reported in Medical Xpress — they claimed definitively, “The most effective way to prevent cervical cancer is to give HPV vaccines to both boys and girls.”
This claim was based on their finding that in the communities where boys and girls were vaccinated, they saw a decline in four types of oncogenic HPV (16, 18, 31 and 45) and in the communities where only girls were vaccinated, they saw a decline in only three types of oncogenic HPV (16, 18 and 31).
“This shows that you get stronger herd immunity if you vaccinate both boys and girls,” said lead author Ville N. Pimenoff, Ph.D. “According to our calculations, it would take 20 years of vaccinating girls to achieve the same effect that can be achieved in eight years with a relatively moderate vaccination coverage rate of gender-neutral vaccination.”
However, they concede this herd immunity would not eliminate the risk of HPV-linked cancer, given the type replacement they identified.
Couey said these claims about the efficacy of gender-neutral vaccination are based on a questionable methodology, using a “dubiously blurred” combination of data sets.
Couey told The Defender :
“Their ‘observations’ are made without any data from HPV prevalence in these populations before vaccination and using a general linear model, or GLM, to interpret their data set. There are no quantitative differences for the authors to draw from in their data without mathematically extending it to a synthetically generated data set using a mathematical fitting technique the authors termed a graphical independence network, or GIN, model.
“The distinction between conclusions drawn from real-world observations in experiments versus conclusions drawn from mathematical modeling inference is dubiously blurred in this article and the follow-up coverage of it.
“Their conclusions are not based on disproving a null hypothesis using an experiment. Their conclusions are at best inferences drawn from the interpretation of mathematical models applied to limited real-world data.”
This analysis builds on previous analyses of these same cohorts the authors did with colleagues from Merck, GSK and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
That research also claimed that HPV vaccination with moderate coverage “eradicates” oncogenic HPV if a gender-neutral strategy is used. It also asserted in 2018 that there was no evidence of type replacement — findings this current study upends.
Those Big Pharma corporations have been dedicated over the last several years to expanding HPV vaccination throughout the world to girls, but also more recently to boys and to young and middle-aged adults.
Various agencies of the Department of Health and Human Services have spent at least tens of millions of dollars on behavioral research to increase vaccine uptake in the U.S.
Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance —- primarily funded by the Gates Foundation —- recently announced WHO-supported plans to vaccinate 86 million girls in low- and middle-income countries against HPV by 2025 as part of the global plan to eradicate cervical cancer.
Merck’s Gardasil was first licensed in 2006 for use in girls and women ages 9-26 to prevent four high-risk strains of HPV.
The FDA in 2009 expanded the license for use in males ages 9-26 for the prevention of genital warts and in 2011, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommended it for routine use in boys.
In 2014, the FDA approved Gardasil 9, designed to protect against nine HPV strains, for use in the prevention of HPV-related cervical, vaginal and vulvar cancers in females and HPV-related anogenital lesions and anal cancers in males and females.
The FDA in 2018 also expanded the age range of potential HPV vaccines to males and females between the ages of 9 and 45.
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
IPCC models rooted in assumptions that we humans can and do control the Atlantic Ocean’s circulation with our daily-activity CO2 emissions have been wrong since the mid-1980s. Why should we still believe in them?
The latest IPCC report continues to say it is “very likely” the Atlantic Meridional Ocean Circulation (AMOC), a fundamental climate parameter, will weaken (and unleash cooling, catastrophic storms, drought, floods) in the 21st century.
But, as the authors of a new study note, since the mid-1980s the 84 (CMIP5) and 56 (CMIP6) AMOC models have been contradicted by observations in both magnitude and sign. The AMOC has not been declining in response to increases in atmospheric CO2. There is even evidence of trend increases.
“[W]e find that neither the CMIP5 nor the CMIP6 ensemble mean are successful at representing the observational AMOC data. … We show that both the magnitude of the trend in the AMOC over different time periods and often even the sign of the trend differs between observations and climate model ensemble mean, with the magnitude of the trend difference becoming even greater when looking at the CMIP6 ensemble compared to CMIP5.”
So, as the scientists ask, why should we trust future modeled predictions?
“[I]f these models cannot reproduce past variations, why should we be so confident about their ability to predict the future?”
ROME – The Italian parliament on Thursday passed a law prohibiting production and sale of synthetic food and feed, making Italy the first EU country to introduce such a ban.
The law was supported by 159 members of the Italian lower house, while 53 voted against the measure and 34 abstained. The upper house of the parliament approved the law, which was developed at the initiative of the Italian Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Forestry and the Ministry of Health, back in June.
The new regulation prohibits the use in production, sale, import, export manufacturing and distribution of “food or feed consisting of, separated out or produced from cell cultures or tissues derived from vertebrate animals.” Violators face a fine ranging from 10,000 euros ($10,858) to 60,000 euros. However, if the law is violated by a large-scale enterprise, the fine may be increased to up to 10% of the company’s annual turnover and confiscation of the produced goods.
A recent Washington Post (The Post) story, “Where Malaria is Spreading,” claims that climate change could put over 5 billion people at risk of malaria by 2040, primarily due to expanding seasons where mosquitoes can spread the disease, migrating mosquitoes, and increased populations and stagnant water caused by unusual flooding. This is false. Malaria already has a wide distribution, with many areas only avoiding it being endemic due to past suppression efforts. Population growth in areas where the disease remains common may lead to more instances of the disease unless available preventative and prophylactic measures are taken. However, there is no evidence malaria will spread geographically, due to either modestly rising temperatures or increased moisture.
The Post’s article, written by authors Rachel Chason, Kevin Crowe, John Muyskens, and Jahi Chikwendiu, mainly focuses on malaria’s increase in Mozambique. It has seen a 10 percent increase in malaria cases over the past six years. The Post than ties Mozambique’s malaria increase to claims made in a Lancet study, “Projecting the risk of mosquito-borne diseases in a warmer and more populated world: a multi-model, multi-scenario intercomparison modelling study,” which used climate and mosquito-borne disease models to estimate how the transmission seasons and population densities might change with global warming.
The study’s authors say their modelling shows malaria suitability may increase by 1-6 months in tropical highlands in Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Americas. Dengue sees similar results, with suitability increasing in lowlands in the Western Pacific and the Eastern Mediterranean by 4 months.
Shamefully, like many studies making misleading and alarming claims attributed to climate change, the Lancet study uses the climate modelling scenario RCP8.5 (RCP meaning representative concentration pathway), which climate scientists admit runs way too hot. Any research that built upon that scenario is going to produce extremely skewed results, because RCP8.5 involves an amount of released carbon dioxide that is actually impossible, even if all the fossil fuels on the planet were burned.
While the Lancet study is suspect, it may still seem logical to assume that the modest warming of the past hundred or so years has and will continue to expand the range of mosquitoes, as well as the number of days during the year in which they are active and biting. However, a large body of research refutes this assumption.
A chapter in Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels, discusses the results of more than a dozen peer-reviewed studies which demonstrate that temperature alone is not enough to guarantee migration or longer survival of mosquitoes or mosquito-borne illnesses like malaria. There are far more factors that come into play, including human interventions, that outweigh temperature alone.
The report explains:
Gething et al. (2010), writing specifically about malaria, may have put it best when they said there has been “a decoupling of the geographical climate malaria relationship over the twentieth century, indicating that non-climatic factors have profoundly confounded this relationship over time.
More examples from Climate Change Reconsidered are discussed in a Climate Realism post, “Environment Journal Wrong About Climate Change Increasing Malaria,” including papers by a vector-borne disease expert, Paul Reiter, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) which explain that while reemergence of malaria and similar diseases in some regions is concerning, “it is facile to attribute this resurgence to climate change.”
ThePost admits that endemic malaria “was eliminated in North America and Europe in the mid-1900s, with a better understanding of how to control it.” This is true, and what’s more, a 2010 Nature study (Gething et al.) found that malaria was probably endemic on 58 percent of the world’s surface in 1900, before the period of modern warming, and only 30 percent by 2007, after decades of modest warming.
Almost every credible study, not based on biased computer models, rejects the myopic causal view of the relationship between climate and malaria.
Extreme weather, ThePost claims, like flooding are causing cases to rise in places like Mozambique, with “experts” telling them that the frightening trend is likely to continue. While The Post suggests the trends are mostly due to climate change, they also admit that other factors like “increased resistance of mosquitoes to insecticides and of the parasite to drugs” and improved disease reporting and tracking have played a role in the reported increase.
Flooding is unlikely to cause an increase in mosquito-borne illness, because even the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports only low confidence that there is even any sign climate change has impacted flooding. Mozambique, a South-East African nation, has suffered some flooding in recent years, but as discussed in Climate Realism, here, any link to long-term climate change lacks evidence. Flooding is a regular occurrence in many parts of southern Africa, and population increases means that during the rainy season more people are living near mosquito-friendly standing water.
Before running this alarming story, The Washington Post should have examined the wider body of research available concerning mosquito-borne illnesses. There is no evidence that warming is currently causing, or will lead to, an increase in malaria cases or deaths. Facts, not fearmongering, should guide The Post’s and other legitimate news outlets’ coverage of climate and disease issues.
A detailed report published by the Guardian newspaper has shown how Britain is massively contributing to Saudi Arabia’s devastating war on Yemen as it suggests that London is not only supplying the bombs that fall on Yemenis, but it provides the personnel and expertise that keep the war going.
The comprehensive report by Arron Merat published on Tuesday showed that Britain was doing much of the killing in Yemen as the country continues to provide Saudi Arabia with everything it needs to turn its southern impoverished neighbor into a graveyard.
“Every day Yemen is hit by British bombs – dropped by British planes that are flown by British-trained pilots and maintained and prepared inside Saudi Arabia by thousands of British contractors,” said Merat in the report. … continue
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