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UK requests for taking extreme care of ‘Challenger 2’ tanks make them useless for Ukrainian army

By Drago Bosnic | July 8, 2023

It has been only a few weeks after the entire world saw the absolute debacle of NATO’s much-touted heavy armor. The event was accurately predicted by various independent experts and analysts mere days before the wanton counteroffensive. At that point, it became obvious that decades of close cooperation between the former Ukrainian military and NATO were effectively pointless. This also includes nearly a decade of much more intensive cooperation between the belligerent alliance and the (then newly installed) Neo-Nazi junta that focused on interoperability and the implementation of NATO standards.

However, the Kiev regime forces’ performance against even the conscripted (although battle-hardened) Donbass militias within the Russian military has not only left much to be desired, but is essentially quite poor in comparison to the massive amount of funds the Neo-Nazi junta is getting. And although the counteroffensive is still ongoing, resulting in largely insignificant gains (that are still firmly under Russian fire control), the results for heavy armor have been catastrophic, to say the least. The mainstream propaganda machine initially kept trying to conceal the horrible losses of NATO-sourced tanks and armored vehicles.

However, ample battlefield footage published by alternative platforms (particularly those on Telegram) made this an impossible task. As a result, the delivery of Western-made weapons, munitions and other equipment that was previously spearheaded by countries such as the US, UK, Poland, the Baltic states, etc. seems to be slowing down. Although London was the first to pledge heavy armor and long-range missiles, as well as banned depleted uranium munitions that can leave disastrous consequences, it is now quietly backing down from its commitments to fight Russia “to the last Ukrainian”.

Namely, the UK command is now seeking “guarantees” from the Kiev regime forces that will “ensure” no UK-supplied “Challenger 2” MBTs (main battle tanks) are destroyed or captured by the Russian military. Apart from the effectively impossible ROE (rules of engagement), London wants the Neo-Nazi junta to follow other strict requirements that also apply to their every movement even in western parts of Ukraine, which is hundreds of kilometers away from the frontline. This includes special requests for storage to prevent long-range strikes, which effectively makes the “Challenger 2” the most pampered weapon system in the conflict.

“Imagine the propaganda coup of a captured, intact Challenger 2 being paraded in Red Square in Moscow! It doesn’t bear thinking about,” British Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Crawford told the British Daily Express a few months back.

It seems the UK is now “expressing frustration” at the way its MBTs are being used, complaining that the “guarantees” given by the Kiev regime forces are “simply insufficient”. Afraid of heavy losses, as demonstrated by the disastrous performance of German MBTs, long considered the best in NATO, London is looking for ways to limit their usage by the Neo-Nazi junta forces in order to prevent a similar fate for its prized MBTs. Interestingly, Washington DC seems to be doing the exact same thing, as it has also been strangely quiet, a stark contrast to the previously boastful pledge to send its M1 “Abrams” MBTs.

Back in January, I argued that Western heavy armor, including the British “Challenger 2”, American M1 “Abrams” and German “Leopard 2” are simply not suitable for the Kiev regime, as they weren’t designed to either fight in such terrain or under such conditions (complete lack of air superiority and extremely limited or even nonexistent CAS (close air support)). The same goes for the US-made “Bradley” armored fighting vehicle (AFV) and French AMX-10 wheeled tank destroyers. Western-made tanks are infamous for their size and weight, being up to 30% bigger and heavier than their Soviet/Russian counterparts.

Weighing 75 tonnes with additional combat armor modules, “Challenger 2” is nearly twice as heavy as the Ukrainian T-64BV (38 tonnes), which is the Kiev regime’s most commonly used tank. Extensive Soviet WWII-era experience and the pedological properties of the former USSR’s western areas prompted the superpower to build lighter tanks, as heavier vehicles would nearly always get hopelessly stuck in an ocean of mud caused by the infamous rasputitsa. Video and photo evidence shows even Russian and Ukrainian tanks getting bogged down, forcing their crews to abandon the vehicles to avoid ATGMs.

And indeed, even highly mobile targets have been picked off by infantry armed with ATGMs (anti-tank guided missiles) such as the Russian 9K135 “Kornet”, making immobile heavy armor a much easier target, even for artillery that is normally used against stationary objects. Even the much lighter Soviet-era APCs (armored personnel carriers) have trouble moving through the steppe mud, making it virtually impossible to conduct off-road maneuvers for either side. In turn, this forces military units to use roads, making them easier targets for warplanes, drones, artillery, attack helicopters and the aforementioned ATGM-armed infantry, etc.

With this in mind, fielding the much heavier Western-made tanks such as the “Challenger 2” (and other NATO-sourced armor) has proven to be not only militarily useless for the Kiev regime, but also quite deadly for countless forcibly conscripted Ukrainians that have been pointlessly killed during recent counteroffensive operations against the Russian military. With that in mind, by denying or at least postponing the usage of its “Challenger 2” MBTs in Ukraine, the UK might be sparing the lives of many Ukrainians. Of course, this is being done completely inadvertently, as London is one of the most prominent proponents of the “to the last Ukrainian” approach.

Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

July 8, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | , | Leave a comment

Russian Troops Seize Near Intact UK Storm Shadow Missile, To Be Checked By Specialists

Sputnik – 07.07.2023

On May 11, Ukraine affirmed that it had received the first, long-anticipated, British-made Storm Shadow cruise missiles, which were sent by the United Kingdom. The weapon is designed to destroy bunkers and other rugged, hard-to-reach targets.

Russian servicemen from the BARS-11 volunteer unit and the Tsar’s Wolves captured an almost intact British Storm Shadow cruise missile from the line of contact and handed it over to specialists for examination, said Dmitry Rogozin, head of the Tsar’s Wolves military and technical center.

“I’m glad it was our unit that did it. Now our air defense will shoot this thing down, and it will gradually become useless,” Rogozin stressed.

According to him, the missile was almost undamaged.

“The missile was dismantled into several parts by our technicians right on the battlefield, the high-explosive and shaped-charge parts separately, and the control unit separately, while the wing was folded up for easy transportation,” Rogozin clarified.

“A functioning GPS tracker was there, which could have directed the strike team to the opponent. Even though we blocked it, our fighters had to relocate all the time and even engaged in battle — the enemy’s sabotage and recon unit tried to catch the car with the rocket and an accompanying vehicle on the road,” Rogozin added.

It took two days to evacuate the captured missile, but now it will benefit the Russian Armed Forces.

July 7, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | , , | Leave a comment

Leading US think tank admits Russia unlikely to ever run out of missiles

By Drago Bosnic | July 6, 2023

For approximately a year and a half, we have been listening to tall tales about Russia running out of munitions of various kinds due to its supposed “inability” to produce advanced weapons, particularly long-range missiles and other sorts of PGMs (precision-guided munitions). According to mainstream propaganda, Moscow is allegedly “so desperate” that it had to “arm” its soldiers with shovels and resort to the expropriation of washing machines, smartphones, laptops and other devices that contain microchips in order to maintain production. Such ludicrous claims would never be accepted by anyone remotely familiar with how advanced military technologies work.

However, they are an important segment of the rabidly Russophobic infowar that aims to present the Eurasian giant as supposedly “technologically backward”. And yet,  after Moscow’s long-range and tactical aviation, as well as naval and ground-based units, spent the entire special military operation (SMO) launching high-precision strikes by using advanced PGMs that quite literally nobody else has (the United States included), the mainstream propaganda machine simply had to admit something was seriously off with their assessment of Russia’s technological and industrial capacity. The latter should have been destroyed by Western sanctions close to a year and a half ago.

And yet, it’s still standing. The answer as to why this is the case was recently given by CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies), a Washington DC-based think tank that is among the most prominent ones in the US. According to their assessment, Moscow is extremely unlikely to run out of PGMs and other long-range high-precision weapons, either for itself or its numerous export customers. Somewhat surprisingly, with no ambiguity or sugarcoating, Ian Williams, a Fellow of the International Security Program and Deputy Director of the Missile Defense Project at CSIS, has made it perfectly clear that it would be “unrealistic to expect Russia to ever run out of missiles”.

The author further notes that Moscow will be able to continue building long-range PGMs, which will enable it to sustain constant long-range strike capability, “despite sanctions and export restrictions”. And while the CSIS report parroted the usual propaganda narratives about Russia, such as that its military supposedly “regularly attacked a range of military and civilian targets throughout Ukraine with costly, long-range missiles”, its findings should certainly not be dismissed. It admitted that numerous weapons experts found conclusive evidence of recently manufactured Russian cruise missiles and other PGMs that have been used in the SMO.

Still, once again, the US think tank obviously didn’t want to let another opportunity to fight the infowar go to waste, so it claims that this supposedly “indicates that Russia’s arsenal has become so depleted that weapons are being used in the conflict just a few months after manufacturing”. And while most US and other Western high-ranking officials insisted that “rebuilding the Russian stockpile will be a lot harder” due to sanctions, particularly when it comes to acquiring microchips, the latest CSIS report disproves such claims, with the author complaining that export restrictions didn’t have the desired effect on Russian missile production.

“There is no one-off fix for this problem. At most, sanctions and export controls can limit the quantity and quality of strike assets Russia can acquire,” the report admits while simultaneously parroting the regular propaganda narrative. The author then continues with the mental gymnastics by trying to “rationalize” the said propaganda narrative in line with the actual situation on the battlefield, claiming that “it’s likely Russia swiftly used up the portion of the long-range missiles that it had originally designated for the SMO”. However, he admits that “despite this, Russia continued to launch missiles against Ukraine, perhaps by withdrawing munitions from other theaters of operation”, without specifying which ones.

The report concedes that Russia continued to produce missiles during the SMO and that the evidence suggests that the majority (or maybe even all) of cruise missiles in its current arsenal were made after the SMO started. Still, the author once again insists that the supposed “depletion” of pre-SMO stocks “has altered the composition of modern Russian strike salvos” and that “Russian missile attacks have shifted from high-end missile systems like cruise missiles towards less effective, less expensive low-end systems like ‘Shahed-136/Geranium 2’ kamikaze drones”.

However, the author fails to accept the fact that these systems are simply much more cost-effective, which is why they’re being used in the first place. The report admits that despite export restrictions, particularly on crucial microelectronic components, Russia has continued manufacturing advanced long-range missiles and PGMs. Still, the author insists this is because Russia is supposedly “acquiring these Western-produced components via friendly third parties”. According to the report, the result is that “Russia will continue having the capacity to build missiles and drones and will continue to use them” and that “this reality will not change until the war ends”.

Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

July 6, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | , | Leave a comment

IAEA issues results of probe into Kiev’s claim mines were laid at nuclear plant

RT | July 5, 2023

Specialists from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have found no signs of any mines at Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP), the UN agency said in a statement on Wednesday, following an inspection carried out by its staff at the site.

The experts checked some parts of the facility, including “sections of the perimeter of the large cooling pond,” over the past days and weeks, the statement said, adding that they also “conducted regular walkdowns across the site.”

So far, no “visible indications of mines or explosives” have been observed, IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said in the statement. The agency’s team requested additional access to certain parts of the facility, including the rooftops of reactor units 3 and 4, as well as turbine halls and cooling system facilities, he added.

“Their independent and objective reporting would help clarify the current situation at the site,” he said, pointing to some “unconfirmed allegations” indicating some potential security risks at the site. The director general also confirmed that the team stationed at ZNPP had not reported any recent shelling or explosions near the site.

The facility, which is Europe’s largest, returned to the spotlight in recent weeks after senior officials in Kiev claimed that Russia was planning a nuclear incident at the facility. Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky alleged that Moscow wanted to cause a “radiation leak” at the plant. A key aide to Vladimir Zelensky, Mikhail Podoliak, also accused the Russian military of laying mines at the plant’s cooling pond.

Moscow has rejected these claims as “yet another lie.” The UN nuclear watchdog previously denied the claims about mines in the cooling pond as well.

On Wednesday, the Kremlin warned about a “high threat of sabotage” at the plant in Kiev. Such an action could lead to “catastrophic” results, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, adding that the situation around ZNPP remains “tense.”

On Tuesday, Renat Karchaa, a senior official at Russia’s nuclear power plant operator Rosenergoatom, warned that the Ukrainian military might strike the facility with long-range, high-precision weapons or kamikaze drones. He also claimed that Kiev might target the plant with a Soviet-made ballistic missile loaded with radioactive waste.

Moscow and Kiev have repeatedly accused each other of shelling the Zaporozhye plant throughout their conflict. The facility has been under Russian control since March 2022.

July 5, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | , , | Leave a comment

Russia is jamming HIMARS rockets – Ukraine’s defense chief

RT | July 5, 2023

Russia has found a way to interfere with GPS-guided artillery rounds, including munitions for US-made HIMARS multiple rocket launchers, Defense Minister of Ukraine Aleksey Reznikov has claimed.

When those systems first arrived on Ukrainian battlefields last year they were “highly accurate,” Reznikov recalled, in an interview with the Financial Times on Wednesday.

However, Russia, which has strong radio-electronic systems, eventually found a way to jam GPS-guided artillery and HIMARS projectiles, he acknowledged.

“It’s like a constant pendulum. This is a war of technology,” the minister said, describing the ongoing conflict between Kiev and Moscow.

“The Russians come up with a countermeasure, we inform our partners and they make a new countermeasure against this countermeasure,” he explained.

Reznikov reiterated Kiev’s earlier claim that “for the military industry of the world, you can’t invent a better testing ground” than Ukraine.

Kiev’s Western backers “can actually see if their weapons work, how efficiently they work and if they need to be upgraded”, he said.

Ukraine has been supplied with several dozen High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), which have a range of 85 kilometers (53 miles), by its foreign backer since June last year. Western outlets described the system as a game-changer in the conflict.

In May, CNN reported, citing five sources from the US, Britain and Ukraine, that the US-designed multiple rocket launchers had been rendered “increasingly less effective” from the intensive blocking by the Russian forces. The electronic jammers throw off the GPS-guided targeting system of HIMARS rockets to cause them to miss their targets, the channel said.

Throughout the conflict, the Russian Defense Ministry reported destroying dozens of HIMARS systems through the use of kamikaze drones and artillery fire. However, these claims have been disputed by Kiev and Washington.

Moscow has repeatedly warned that deliveries of more sophisticated weapons to Ukraine by the US and its allies could cross its ‘red lines’ and lead to a major escalation of hostilities. According to the Russian side, the supply of arms, intelligence sharing and training to Kiev’s troops already means that Western nations are de facto parties to the conflict.

July 5, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | , , | Leave a comment

Laid Low by the COVID Vaccine, Now They’ve Got a Bad Case of Federal Unresponsiveness

By Christian Britschgi | RealClear Investigations | June 28, 2023

In April 2021, Adele Fox received a single shot of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine. Within a few hours, the 60-year-old resident of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, started feeling shooting pains in her legs, arms, and neck. The pain didn’t abate over the next few days. Instead, it got worse and was accompanied by nausea and debilitating fatigue.  

Within a few weeks, neurologists affiliated with Massachusetts General Hospital diagnosed her with several serious conditions they say were a result of her COVID-19 vaccine, including small-fiber neuropathy (which causes a painful tingling in the extremities) and Sjögren’s Syndrome (which leaves patients pained and fatigued, and in extreme cases, can damage internal organs).  

This shot, which was supposed to get Fox back to normal, instead left her with diminished ability to work and enjoy life. Persistent physical therapy and experimental treatments she’s taken since have done little to alleviate her symptoms.  

“I used to do so much, and now it’s a struggle,” she says. “Sometimes you just get down.” 

With her medical bills mounting and her condition not improving, Fox sought compensation for her damaged health. Federal liability protections prevent the vaccine-injured from directly suing vaccine manufacturers like Johnson & Johnson. Instead, claimants have to go to the federal government for compensation.  

But as Fox would soon learn, the government has two starkly different injury programs for vaccines. One operates like a civil court with a neutral judge, lawyers on both sides, and a guaranteed right of appeal. In recent decades, it has approved about 75% of claims and pays out hundreds of millions of dollars per year.  

The other, which handles COVID-19 vaccines, has rejected almost every claim brought to it, awarding less than $10,000 since the pandemic. And in a nation nearly numb to the pandemic’s toll and its scandals, the program is adding seething frustration atop lasting injury to Fox and people like her in a little reported aftermath to the government’s much criticized performance on vaccines – ranging from erratic booster advice to broad-brush vaccine mandates that cost people their jobs. 

Fox filed her claim two years ago, submitting hundreds of pages of medical documents about her condition and diagnoses. She’s nevertheless one of the 10,887 people still waiting on a decision. “You’re not even hearing anything from the organization that’s supposed be helping you,” she says. “The phone keeps ringing, no one is emailing, nobody is doing anything.”   

The federal agency overseeing the program, the Health Resources and Services Administration, said in a statement to RealClearInvestigations that the current number of claims “significantly exceeds the previous volume in the program” and that the program has “hired additional staff to address this growth in claims, and the President’s budget requests additional funding to support the additional staffing needed to process claims.”  

Tale of Two Compensation Programs 

The government’s two contrasting vaccine compensation programs are similarly named and thus easily confused. The first, Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) was created in the 1980s and covers most routine vaccines. The second, the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP), is a result of war-on-terror legislation in 2005 and now covers COVID-19 vaccines. Their bureaucratic differences help explain why a nation that has spent trillions of dollars on COVID relief programs has provided almost no assistance to people harmed by the vaccines that the government encouraged, and sometimes required, them to take. 

The earlier program was supposed to shore up pharmaceutical companies’ willingness to make childhood vaccines in the face of persistent vaccine injury lawsuits, while also giving the vaccine-injured a fair and expedited process for compensation.  

The vaccine-injured would not sue pharmaceutical companies. Instead, they’d petition the government in Federal Claims Court, where special masters (judges) would decide cases. Compensation came from a government-administered trust fund paid for by excise taxes levied on vaccine manufacturers.  

Between 2006 and 2021, this court adjudicated cases from 10,602 petitioners and issued compensation to 7,618 of them. The compensation trust fund sits at $4 billion and pays out about $200 million in compensation and attorneys’ fees each year.  

This earlier program bears little resemblance to the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program, where the COVID-vaccine cases of Fox and many others are languishing. 

It was meant to incentivize pharmaceutical companies to be part of the federal response to one-off, one-in-a-million events like a bioweapon attack or an outbreak of a deadly pandemic. Although almost one billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered in the United States, and health authorities say boosters could become as common as the annual flu shot, it remains the only way people harmed by the shot can receive compensation. 

It’s far from guaranteed they’ll get it. 

Before the pandemic, this program received a little over 500 claims and had paid out compensation to only 30 people – mostly for H1N1 (swine flu) vaccine injuries. In just the past two years, it has been asked to make decisions on over 10,000 injury claims related to COVID countermeasures.  

As of June, it made decisions on just 919 of these COVID-related claims and rejected 894 of them. It has so far paid out only $8,593 in compensation to just four people who were injured by a COVID vaccine. The program has deemed another 20 people eligible for compensation, but has yet to pay them.  

It’s not a judicial process either. Rather, it’s an administrative process overseen by Health Resources and Services Administration, which is housed within Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). People file a claim and government medical reviewers decide whether to pay out or not. That’s an awkward arrangement, given that HHS is deciding whether to pay for damages caused by products it approved and in some cases mandated.  

Because it’s an administrative process, there’s no right to counsel and no neutral arbitrator. A denied claimant can file for reconsideration with HRSA, but otherwise has no right to appeal. 

Unlike the earlier program, the CICP offers no compensation for pain and suffering and doesn’t pay attorneys’ fees. Most successful claimants have received compensation totaling a few hundred dollars or a few thousand dollars. The highest award for a COVID-19 vaccine injury sufferer was $3,957.66 to a person who got myocarditis (a heart condition) from a vaccine.  

It also has shorter filing deadlines. People have to file a claim within one year of vaccination, a much shorter window than the earlier program’s standard of three years from the onset of symptoms. Of the 894 claims that CICP has rejected, 444 of them were for missing the filing deadline.  

CICP also only awards compensation in cases where there’s “compelling, reliable, valid, medical, and scientific evidence” that someone’s injury is linked to a covered countermeasure. HRSA describes this as “a high evidentiary standard.” Renée Gentry, a practicing vaccine injury lawyer who directs the Vaccine Injury Litigation Clinic at George Washington University, says it’s a much higher bar than what the earlier vaccine injury compensation program requires, which contributes to a much lower rate of successful claims.  

The Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program’s nature as a small emergency program has seen its capacity strained by a flood of COVID-related injury claims. Of the 11,806 COVID-related claims filed, 10,887 are still pending. Those four cases where COVID compensation was paid out didn’t come until after April 2023, over two years since the first vaccines were administered.    

Pain and Suffering  

The shortcomings of CICP are all too apparent for the people who are forced to wade through it. Even folks who seem to have done everything right are left waiting or disappointed by the program.  

Fox filed her claim in May 2021, which was relatively early in the immunization campaign. She also had clear diagnoses from well-credentialed doctors linking her conditions to her COVID-19 vaccination. Fox says she provided the program with no shortage of documentation as well. 

After filing all that paperwork, she hasn’t been idle either. After months of not hearing anything back from CICP, Fox started to reach out repeatedly to anyone she thought might be able to move the needle. She spoke repeatedly with representatives from Sen. Jeanne Shaheen’s and Rep. Chris Pappas’ offices. She also kept calling program administrators, trying to figure out what was taking so long.  

“I’m sure they saw my number, and said ‘Ah, Fox, oh no, not her [again]’,” she jokes.  

Her congressional representatives did reach out to CICP on her behalf. That was at least effective at getting program administrators to call Fox personally twice, once in July 2022 and again in June 2023. But each time, they could only offer her reassurance that her paperwork had been received. On both calls, Fox says she was told that the program was vastly overburdened by the flood of COVID-19 claims it had received. She, like thousands of others, would have to wait.  

The few decisions on COVID-19 claims that have trickled out haven’t offered much relief to the people who’ve received them. That includes Cody Flint, one of the 894 people who’ve had their COVID-related claims rejected.  

Flint was vaccinated in February 2021, when he received a single Pfizer dose. He says that he started to feel headaches and had affected vision within 30 minutes of the shot. He was still experiencing symptoms two days later when he headed to his job as a crop-dusting pilot.  

While flying that day, he started to experience extreme tunnel vision, followed by a sensation he describes as “a bomb [going] off in my head.” He barely managed to get his plane back to his runway, where his coworkers found him slumped over his controls and shaking. 

He was diagnosed with perilymphatic fistula (or tear of the inner ear) caused by elevated intracranial pressure – which could only be relieved through repeated draining of his spinal fluid. Given the timing of his symptoms and the fact that he’d passed a flight physical just a couple weeks prior, his doctors said his condition was almost certainly caused by the vaccine. His injury prevented him from returning to work as a pilot, and his mounting medical bills saw him draw down all of his savings.  

In April 2021, Flint filed a claim. In May 2022 – just a few weeks after Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith asked HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra about his case specifically in a committee hearing – Flint’s claim was rejected. The program’s medical reviewers told Flint that it was more likely his injuries were caused by barotrauma from flying a plane.  

He petitioned for a reconsideration of his case. His doctors argued that there was no way he’d have experienced barotrauma from flying just a few hundred feet off the ground. Commercial airliners, they noted, are pressurized at 6,000 to 8,000 feet of elevation. Flint’s lawyers also submitted recent studies linking the symptoms he’d experienced to COVID-19 vaccinations.  

Nevertheless, a separate medical reviewer at HRSA upheld the CICP’s initial denial in January 2023. That letter succinctly stated that HHS has “no appeals process beyond this reconsideration” and “there is no judicial review of a final action concerning CICP eligibility.”  

Efforts at Reform  

The federal government’s liability protections for COVID-19 vaccines aren’t scheduled to expire until the end of 2024. Once they do, those claiming a vaccine injury will be able to pursue claims against vaccine manufacturers in state courts.  

While liability protections remain in effect, the federal program is injured claimants’ only potential source of compensation.  

Whether or not the HRSA succeeds in boosting staffing in line with its statement to RCI, those seeking compensation have started to get organized. They’ve formed the group React19, which is dedicated to advocating for additional research into the side effects of COVID-19 vaccines. It’s grown into a network of tens of thousands of people who say they suffered adverse injuries from the shot. Flint, the pilot, is on its board of directors.  

“It’s a very pro-vaccine community,” says Christopher Dreisbach, the group’s legal affairs director. “You say anything about vaccine injuries, you’re branded as anti-vaxxers. We are pro-science, we are not political. We’re just dealing with a very politicized issue.”  

He says the politicization of vaccines has made their efforts at compensation reform a challenge.  

When the CICP, and the 2005 Pandemic Response and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act that created it, were first being debated, Republican lawmakers were its main advocates, while its main critics were Democrats. The partisan politics of the program and liability protections for pharmaceutical companies has done a 180 since COVID.  

In 2005, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee argued during the House floor debate on the PREP Act that the law’s liability shield would leave injured healthcare workers with little protection or chance of compensation. Come 2023, she would return to the floor of the House to argue in favor of mandating those same healthcare workers receive a vaccine covered by the PREP Act’s liability shield.   

The PREP Act’s harshest critics during COVID, meanwhile, have mostly been Republicans.  

“I call the PREP Act medical malpractice martial law,” says Rep. Thomas Massie, who complains that its liability shield is both incredibly broad and improperly preempts state law. “I think it’s sort of anathema to the way our government is set up. I found it hard to believe that Congress would pass something, much less that a Republican president would invoke it.”  

In March 2022, Sen. Mike Lee introduced a bill that would have amended CICP to give claimants the same framework for pursuing compensation as the VICP. They could file in Federal Claims Court and receive an expedited, judicial adjudication of their injury claim.  

Gentry argues that it would be far simpler to just move the COVID-19 vaccines into the VICP program, which already has a successful track record of adjudicating injury claims. In order for that to happen under the law that created the VICP, the CDC needs to recommend the vaccines for routine administration to children (which has already happened) and vaccine manufacturers would have to start paying excise taxes. That latter condition will require action from Congress.   

VICP needs a number of updates as well, says Gentry, including expanding the number of special masters to handle the backlog of cases and increasing the available levels of compensation (which haven’t been updated since the 1980s).  

Increasing the number of special masters is particularly important if the VICP program is going to be expected to process tens of thousands of COVID claims, she says. But she argues it’s the best way of getting the vaccine injured out of CICP and into a program that will work for them. “If you’re taking away someone’s constitutional right to sue, you really have to give them a reasonable and meaningful alternative and that’s what this program is, for all of its faults,” says Gentry.  

While efforts at reform in Washington lumber on, React19 has started a privately funded compensation program that’s thus far paid out $552,000.  

“Is that making a meaningful difference to all the vaccine injured everywhere? No, that’s not enough,” says Dreisbach, but he notes that it’s far more than what CICP has paid out. “That should be pretty embarrassing to the federal government.”   

July 2, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | , | Leave a comment

Study Finds Xanax, Valium Associated With Brain Injury, Suicide

By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | July 1, 2023

About 30 million Americans are taking benzodiazepines like Xanax, Valium, and Klonopin- about 12.5% of the adult population. Doctors and psychiatrists have prescribed these drugs for decades to treat anxiety. But a new study reveals “benzodiazepine usage and discontinuing usage” can create “nervous system injury and negative life effects.”

Researchers from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus said as patients enter the discontinuation phase of Xanax, Valium, and Klonopin, they face significant withdrawal symptoms.

“Despite the fact that benzodiazepines have been widely prescribed for decades, this survey presents significant new evidence that a subset of patients experiences long-term neurological complications,” said Alexis Ritvo, M.D, M.P.H., an assistant professor in psychiatry at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and medical director of the nonprofit Alliance for Benzodiazepine Best Practices. She said the medical community must reevaluate how it prescribes benzodiazepines.

The study was a collaborative effort between CU Anschutz, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and several drug advocacy that specializes in raising awareness of benzodiazepine harms.

“Patients have been reporting long-term effects from benzodiazepines for over 60 years. I am one of those patients. Even though I took my medication as prescribed, I still experience symptoms on a daily basis at four years off benzodiazepines. Our survey and the new term BIND (benzodiazepine-induced neurological dysfunction) give a voice to the patient experience and point to the need for further investigations,” said Christy Huff, MD, one of the paper’s coauthors and a cardiologist and director of Benzodiazepine Information Coalition.

About 76.6% of the respondents had long-lasting symptoms after discounting the use of benzodiazepines. Almost half of the respondents had these ten symptoms for more than a year:

  1. low energy
  2. difficulty focusing
  3.  memory loss
  4. anxiety
  5. insomnia
  6. sensitivity to light and sounds
  7. digestive problems
  8. symptoms triggered by food and drink
  9. muscle weakness
  10.  body pain

The most alarming part of the study was the symptoms listed above were new and distinct and weren’t experienced before respondents used Xanax, Valium, and Klonopin. Many respondents reported damaged relationships, job loss, and increased medical costs. Also, 54.4% of the respondents reported suicidal thoughts or attempted suicide.

But don’t worry because doctors and the government tell us benzodiazepines are safe, just like they said OxyContin wasn’t addictive in the 1990s.

July 1, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | | Leave a comment

Kennedy Campaign Supporters Sound Like My Kind of People

By Adam Dick | Ron Paul Institute | June 30, 2023

Columnist Michelle Goldberg makes her disdain for presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. clear in her Friday New York Times editorial. She paints Kennedy as a dangerous “crank.” But, when Goldberg wrote in the editorial generally about supporters of Kennedy she encountered at a June campaign event in New Hampshire, her description seems to be closer to objective and is in line with what I have observed from afar.

Goldberg’s general description of the Kennedy supporters is also, in my view, quite positive. For Goldberg and many of her regular readers, though, her description is likely negative. The difference springs from differing views regarding the United States government and its expansive exercise of power.

Describing the people she encountered at a campaign speech by Kennedy in New Hampshire this month, Goldberg wrote:

The people I encountered believe that they are living under a deeply sinister regime that lies to them about almost everything that matters. And they believe that with the Kennedy campaign, we might be on the cusp of redemption.

This description of Kennedy supporters’ assessment of the situation Americans face makes me think they are my kind of people.

Also wrote Goldberg, “the movement around [Kennedy] represents a significant post-Covid social phenomenon: a coalition of the distrustful that cuts across divisions of right and left.”

That sounds like what America needs.

Copyright © 2023 by RonPaul Institute

June 30, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | | Leave a comment

The climate scaremongers: What is a normal climate anyway?

By Paul Homewood | TCW Defending Freedom | June 23, 2023

We are told we must limit global warming to 1.5 deg C. The target became official when the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate was signed. Its overarching goal was to hold ‘the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels’ and pursue efforts ‘to limit the temperature increase to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels’.

Why 1.5C? The previous threshold of 2C was a far too distant one, and few people would have been worried about something which might not happen for several decades, so the UN decided they needed to come up with something much more imminent. Hence their claim that ‘crossing the 1.5C threshold risks unleashing far more severe climate change impacts, including more frequent and severe droughts, heatwaves and rainfall’. A recent study even claims that global warming above 1C is already causing significant harm to humans.

What does this mythical figure of 1.5C really mean? As noted above, it is measured from pre-industrial levels, even though we have no clue what global temperatures were then. Indeed, we don’t know what they are now, despite scientists trying to convince us by coming up with global temperatures to hundredths of a degree.

We are said to have already reached about 1.2C of warming, which to be fair broadly corresponds with the long-running Central England Temperature series. But why choose pre-industrial times at all? What evidence is there that there was anything ‘normal’ about the climate 200 years ago?

The reason is very simple. 1.5C sounds a lot, and the whole objective is to scare the public. The reality is that everybody is used to today’s climate, and it is from this that any increases should be measured. But nobody would be scared by a threat of warming of a tenth of a degree or so in 30 years’ time.

The implication is that the climate was normal and unchanging before we started burning fossil fuels. But that period was known as the Little Ice Age (LIA) for a very good reason. We know from multiple sources that the LIA was probably the coldest period since the last Ice Age ended. Evidence from ice cores in Greenland, glacial records in Europe, Greenland, Iceland and Alaska, upper tree line studies in the Alps and North America and other data overwhelmingly supports this conclusion.

Even New Zealand did not escape the clutches of the LIA. Eminent historian Brian Fagan wrote in his seminal book, The Little Ice Age, that the Franz Joseph glacier there was ‘a mere pocket of ice on a frozen snowfield nine centuries ago . . . Then Little Ice Age cooling began and the glacier thrust downslope into the valley below, smashing into the great rain forests that flourished there, felling giant trees like matchsticks. By the early 18th century, Franz Joseph’s face was within 3 km of the Pacific Ocean . . . The high tide of glacial advance at Franz Joseph came between the late 17th century and early 19th century, just as it did in the European Alps’.

Fagan also described how the advance of glaciers in Switzerland obliterated thousands of acres of farming land, and what remained was far too cold to grow anything. As a result famine was rife.

It was not just glaciers that were the problem. A couple of years ago, a Portuguese scientist wrote a synthesis of the LIA in Europe in general and Portugal in particular. He tells a story of heavy rainfall and floods, heatwaves, droughts, cold wet summers, snow storms, famines and malaria.

It is clearly nonsensical and dishonest to claim that the climate was somehow ‘normal’ in pre-industrial times. And it is certainly deranged for anybody to suggest that the world’s climate is now worse.

The year in review – perfectly ordinary

THE Global Warming Policy Foundation has just published my annual review of the UK’s weather. Once again, I find little to be alarmed about.

Although 2022 was a comparatively warm year, the long-term mean temperature has been largely unchanged since the turn of the century. Rainfall and storm trends are, respectively, unexceptional and favourable.

Here is the report’s executive summary:

According to the Met Office, the UK climate ‘is continuing to change’, while weather is becoming more extreme.

But what does the actual evidence tell us?

Using official data up to 2021, from the Met Office and other sources, this paper examines UK climate trends, and assesses the truth of these claims.

The results are as follows:

•    Although 2022 was the warmest on record in the UK, there has been no increase in long-term averages since the early 2000s.

•    The annual temperature in 2022 was well within the bounds of natural variability, and was largely due to long spells of sunny weather in spring and summer.

•    The summer of 2022 was only the fourth hottest according to CET, and not as hot as 1976, 1826 and 2018.

•    Annual rainfall last year was only slightly below average.

•    The number of days with extreme temperatures is not increasing, as fewer cold days are offsetting more hot ones.

•    Long-term averages in rainfall in England and Wales, which have been rising since the 1970s, are similar to the 1870s and 1920s.

•    While winters have become slightly wetter, there is little change in the other seasons. In particular, summers are not getting drier, as projections have suggested.

•    Rainfall is not becoming more extreme, whether on an annual, monthly or daily basis.

•    Sea levels have been rising at around 1.7mm a year around the UK, after taking account of vertical land movement, and there has been no acceleration in the rate of rise on multi-decadal scales.

•    Wind storms have been declining in frequency and intensity since the 1990s.

In short, although it is slightly warmer than it used to be, the UK climate has changed very lit­tle. Long-term trends are dwarfed by the natural variability of weather.

Nor is there any evidence that weather is becoming more extreme. Nothing in the data indicates that climate will become more extreme in future.

The full report can be downloaded here.

June 25, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | Leave a comment

Biden assesses impact of calling Xi a ‘dictator’

US ‘President’ Joe Biden appears at a White House welcoming ceremony for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday. © Getty Images / Anna Moneymaker
RT | June 23, 2023

US President Joe Biden has dismissed concerns that his comment this week referring to Chinese leader Xi Jinping as a “dictator” could hinder his administration’s efforts to mend Washington’s strained relationship with Beijing.

Asked about the remark at a White House press conference with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday, Biden denied that insulting Xi would undermine relations with China. “I expect to be meeting with President Xi sometime in the future, in the near term, and I don’t think it’s had any real consequence,” he said.

At issue was Biden’s comment on Tuesday at a political fundraiser in California, where he claimed that Xi had not known about an alleged spy balloon that was shot down after entering US airspace in February. “That’s a great embarrassment for dictators, when they didn’t know what happened.” The remark came just one day after US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken concluded a long-awaited and rare visit to Beijing, where Washington’s top diplomat met with Xi and sought to ease tensions between the superpowers.

The Chinese embassy in Washington delivered a formal protest on Thursday, just hours before Biden spoke dismissively of the controversy. “With the latest irresponsible remarks about China’s political system and its top leader, people cannot help but question the sincerity of the U.S. side,” the embassy said in a statement. “The Chinese government and people do not accept any political provocation against China’s top leader and will resolutely respond.”

The statement echoed criticism earlier this week by Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning, who said Biden’s comment was an “open political provocation” and had “seriously violated China’s political dignity.”

Asked about becoming the first US president in recent memory to call his Chinese counterpart a “dictator,” Biden appeared to suggest that he was merely speaking his mind. “When we’re talking to our allies and partners around the world, including India, we let the idea of my choosing and avoiding saying what I think is the facts . . . is just not something I’m going to change very much.” He added that fears of a collapse in Sino-US relations were “hysteria.”

Beijing cut off military and climate ties with Washington last August, after then US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made a controversial visit to Taiwan. Blinken’s planned trip to China earlier this year was postponed in the aftermath of the balloon incident. Ning blasted Biden’s decision to shoot down the balloon, saying Washington had “abused force, fully reflecting the US bullying and hegemonic nature.”

Republicans mocked Biden for appearing to read his answer to a reporter’s question about his “dictator” comment. There was also an awkward moment during Thursday’s welcoming ceremony for Modi’s state visit, where Biden slowly lowered his hand from over his heart after apparently mistaking the Indian national anthem for the “Star Spangled Banner” for about 20 seconds.

June 23, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | , | Leave a comment

Polish-German dispute on the rise

By Uriel Araujo | June 23, 2023

German-Polish relations have been in a crisis, and the climate just keeps getting uglier, as exemplified by recent developments. For instance, Alice Weidel, spokesperson for Alternative for Germany (AfD), Germany’s third-strongest political force today, called in a tweet the area of former East Germany a “Central Germany” – thus implying that territories which today belong to Poland are German lands. This has sparked outrage: Poland’s former PM Beata Szydło, in response, said the AfD could in the future power over all of Germany, thus creating a “dangerous scenario for Europe”, because, she claims, it is a party “whose leaders openly negate the existing borders.” She added that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has recently demanded the abolition of the right of veto within the EU and asked: “Should Europe go in this direction? Towards a German-dominated federation?” This provocation from a German political figure takes place in the context of a rising Polish campaign against Berlin.

Meanwhile, two families of Polish WWII victims are suing German companies Bayer and Henschel for €4.3 million over the persecution of Polish businessmen during the Nazi occupation of Poland. Brzozowska-Pasieka, head of the War Compensation Foundation (Fundacja Odszkodowań Wojennych), the Polish organization which  represents the claimants, claims that these lawsuits are groundbreaking because they have been filed against private companies instead of the German state. Further claims on behalf of other families are being prepared. Commenting on the lawsuits, deputy culture minister Jarisław Sellin, lent his support, saying that “German companies which used forced laborers and actually participated in crimes during World War Two were never legally held accountable for what they did.”

Considering that Polish officials back these initiatives, one must see them as also part of a larger trend and context. Last month I wrote on the legal campaign Warsaw has been launching against Berlin for wartime reparations. It is accompanied by harsh anti-German rhetoric, which often describes Germany’s prominent role within the European Union as a “Fourth Reich”.

Polish discourse on the issue is not without its dose of hypocrisy: while criticizing Ukraine for celebrating genocidal Nazis, as recently as 2019, with Polish President Andrzej Duda’s support, Warsaw opened ceremonies honoring the Holy Cross Mountains Brigade of the National Armed Forces – an underground force which, in the end of Second World War, collaborated with the Nazis in their anti-Soviet struggle. This was denounced by Poland’s chief rabbi as “dangerous revisionism”. Moreover, Warsaw so far has refused to publish state archives which would expose the degree of Polish collaboration with the Nazi persecution of Jews. It is no wonder the German ambassador to Poland, Thomas Bagger, warned the country not to “open Pandora’s box”.

Behind the weaponization of WWII resentments lie also geopolitical goals. As I wrote in September 2022, Washington has apparently been promoting Warsaw’s ambitions regarding regional hegemony as mainly a means to counter Berlin, Poland in turn also benefits from this situation. For a while, Warsaw has, for example, been urging Washington to support the Three Seas Initiative (3SI) as a Western “counterweight” to Chinese investments in “critical infrastructure” – as  Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau and his Romanian counterpart, Bogdan Aurescu, both wrote in a June 2021 piece published in Francis Fukuyama’s “American Purpose”.

Already in 2020, during the “Defender Europe 2020” military exercises, it had become clear that Poland aspired to become the main stronghold of American military presence in Eastern Europe – and the current conflict in Ukraine, since February 2022, has opened a window of opportunity in that regard.

By doing so, Poland aspires to establish itself as a new EU geopolitical center, while challenging Germany’s leading role in the continent. From a German perspective, this is ironic in itself, considering the fact that Berlin’s contribution to the EU budget has been the highest of any other member state, and therefore one could argue that the more recent EU member states such as Poland itself have been able to implement sustainable development policies largely thanks to Berlin’s disproportionate financial injections into the European budget. Therefore, according to this reasoning, Warsaw basically strives to get the maximum financial and economic benefits from its EU membership, at the expense of its “allies”, Germany especially.

For decades, Poland has arguably been on the path of refusing to contribute with the building of an intra-European system of relations. Warsaw pursues exclusively its own interests and shows no interest in building pan-European cooperation within a framework of mutual respect. Germany and France today are potentially forces for strategy autonomy in the European bloc (at least up to a certain point); Poland, on the other hand, is perhaps the main promoter of European “alignmentism”.

Warsaw, for instance, actively opposed the (now gone) Russian-German gas pipeline Nord Stream 2. The pipeline’s still unexplained explosion, denounced by journalist Seymour Hersh as an act of sabotage carried out by Washinton, remains an open wound in Germany – and a German investigation into allegations that Poland could have been used as a hub for the sabotage only make German-Polish tensions even worse. The Polish National Prosecutor’s Office said in a statement that such suspicions are “not supported by the evidence.”

In any case, Polish-German and intra-Europeans tensions in all likelihood will keep building up, because the Polish government weaponizes anti-German feelings, as it also does with Russophobia, in its rewriting of history. These tensions mirror a short-circuit in the European narratives as well as the continent’s own ideological and geopolitical contradictions.

June 23, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | , , | Leave a comment

Why China ignores the US

By Fernando Gaillardo – New Eastern Outlook – 22.06.2023

Beijing rejected Washington’s offer to conduct negotiations between Ministers of Defense on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue Summit against the background of mutual misunderstanding.

The Singapore Security Summit for many years has served as a neutral forum for discussing controversies in the Asia-Pacific region, where even outspoken opponents can meet and clarify their mutual grievances without sacrificing credibility. This is why the PRC’s refusal to hold a meeting between Li Shangfu and Lloyd Austin has attracted increased global attention.

The formal reason for rejecting the request was that the Chinese Ministers of Defense was under US sanctions. Li Shangfu previously supervised the revamp of the PLA and promoted the purchase of Russian Su-35 fighter jets and S-400 air defense systems, which angered the Trump administration at the time.

Beijing’s neat diplomatic move is a camouflage for Washington’s complete disregard for China’s foreign policy approaches and interests, including a hint of encroachment on sovereignty. US Air Force conducts about 1,000 surveillance missions per year near China’s maritime borders, while checking the readiness of Chinese air defense forces. The Navy also seeks to come up big in its area of responsibility by regularly sending ships to areas contested by China. Remarkably, even during the persistent attempts of the State Department to organize a meeting at the forum, the ships coming from the US to Japan for exercises could not resist and circled around Taiwan, just in case.

The problem of the island that does not recognize Beijing’s authority is most revealing. Technically, the fact that Taiwan is part of the PRC was stated in The Joint Communiqué on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations between China and USA, 1979, and then in the 1982 Communiqué, which reaffirmed the provisions of the previous document. The duplication was necessary because after the establishment of diplomatic relations with the PRC, the United States passed a separate law that allowed to continue to pour weapons into Taiwan and justifying its military presence without recognizing it as a state.

Washington constantly broadcasts an interest in reducing tensions or even “resetting” relations, but is it worth trusting a partner that is constantly looking for loopholes to avoid even documented agreements? Given the recent demarches, Beijing has decided that there is nothing to talk about with the United States.

A few days after the event, the US media reported that the ministers did meet and, allegedly, discussed pressing issues, but there was no coverage of the event by officials of either country. According to “eyewitnesses” the ministers, in fact, crossed paths between venues and simply exchanged pleasantries, as required by protocol. It all sounds like a wounded hegemon is trying to make up for the reputational costs.

June 22, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | , | Leave a comment

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