Understanding Your Rights and Responsibilities in Childhood Vaccination: A Guide for Parents
Are vaccines required for your child to attend school?
Photo by Daiga Ellaby on Unsplash
BY PAUL THOMAS MD (RETIRED) | AUGUST 3, 2023
With summer winding down and schools about to open, parents around the country (USA) have received or will receive letters of exclusion from their child’s school. The letter will state that your child is required to be up to date on their childhood immunizations according to the CDC, or they will not be allowed to attend school.
You are not told that other than a handful of states that have eliminated both the religious and the philosophical exemptions, you are free to do whatever you believe is best for your child. You can do some, all, or none of the childhood vaccines. Each state may have a different form or process but rest assured; it is the law of your state that you have this right; the freedom to choose.
To learn more about the specifics for your state, NVIC (National Vaccine Information Center) https://www.nvic.org has all the information you need.
If you live in California, New York, West Virginia, Maine, and possibly Mississippi, the only exemption allowed is a medical exemption. All states allow medical exemptions, which is where a doctor writes a medical exemption.
The challenge for doctors is that the states only allow medical exemptions according to the CDC guidelines, which means you can only get exemptions for a vaccine that has caused death or a severe anaphylactic reaction. They essentially don’t allow exemptions for all vaccines. More importantly, doctors who write medical exemptions invite an investigation by their state medical board and risk losing their medical license. This has made medical exemptions something, in theory, one could hope to get, but in reality, and practically speaking, medical exemptions no longer exist.
So, what do you do if you live in one of the states that only allow medical exemptions?
Basically, you either must get your child up to date, home school, or leave the state for one that allows religious or philosophical exemptions. If you feel you have no choice but to get your child up to date, I highly recommend that you consult a medical provider to help you figure out the safest way to do this.
I am available for coaching at https://www.kidsfirst4ever.com. I don’t diagnose or treat as I am retired and relinquished my license.
Parents and guardians, there is nothing more important in your role to nurture and protect your children than how you handle the vaccine situation. There is no one size fits all that makes sense. Each vaccine should be looked at individually, and you should determine if it makes sense for your child, given the prevalence of the disease for which there is a vaccine and the risks and benefits of giving the vaccine or not giving the vaccine.
Biden Regime Pressured Facebook To Suppress The Daily Wire, Boost Legacy Outlets Like The NYT
New internal documents reaveal
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | August 3, 2023
In a significant blow to the principle of free speech, recently disclosed documents reveal that President Joe Biden’s administration exerted considerable pressure on tech giant Facebook to constrain the reach of The Daily Wire and The New York Post, and promote content from established news outlets, within months of occupying the White House in January 2021. This revelation, coupled with the administration’s alleged intentions to alter the Facebook algorithm, has raised substantial concerns about government-sanctioned censorship.
These documents shed light on the Biden administration’s campaign to promote its Covid vaccine strategy, sidelining dissenting viewpoints.
The dialogues memorialized in the disclosed documents underline the charged interactions between then-White House Digital Director Rob Flaherty and Facebook representatives. The focus of these discussions was curbing The Daily Wire’s considerable influence on Facebook while simultaneously elevating legacy news outlets such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
For context, The Daily Wire’s popularity on Facebook had outstripped that of both NYT and WSJ, drawing significantly more audience engagement, and casting a more amplified conservative alternative.
The meeting notes underline the Biden administration’s apprehensions about “misinformation” leading to vaccine hesitancy, sparking a quest to mold public sentiment using Facebook’s vast reach.
White House representative Flaherty’s frustration with Facebook’s inability to readily produce data to support the administration’s agenda becomes evident in the correspondence.
Highlighting the confrontational tone of these correspondences, Representative Jim Jordan, chairing the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, reinforced the troubling indication of the administration’s attempts to stifle free speech via social media control.
CIA moderating Wikipedia – former editor
RT | August 2, 2023
Wikipedia is one of many tools used by the US liberal establishment and its allies in the intelligence community to wage “information warfare,” the site’s co-founder, Larry Sanger, has told journalist Glenn Greenwald.
Speaking on Greenwald’s ‘System Update’ podcast, Sanger lamented how the site he helped found in 2001 has become an instrument of “control” in the hands of the left-liberal establishment, among which he counts the CIA, FBI, and other US intelligence agencies.
“We do have evidence that, as early as 2008, that CIA and FBI computers were used to edit Wikipedia,” he said. “Do you think that they stopped doing that back then?”
Activity by the CIA and FBI on Wikipedia was first made public by a programming student named Virgil Griffith in 2007. Griffith developed a program called WikiScanner that could trace the location of computers used to edit Wikipedia articles, and found that the CIA, FBI, and a host of large corporations and government agencies were scrubbing the online encyclopedia of incriminating information.
CIA computers were used to remove casualty counts from the Iraq War, while an FBI machine was used to remove aerial and satellite images of the US prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. CIA computers were used to edit hundreds of articles, including entries on then Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, China’s nuclear program, and the Argentine navy.
Some edits were more petty, with former CIA chief William Colby apparently editing his own entry to expand his list of accomplishments.
“[The intelligence agencies] pay off the most influential people to push their agendas, which they’re already mostly in line with, or they just develop their own talent within the [intelligence] community, learn the Wikipedia game, and then push what they want to say with their own people,” Sanger told Greenwald.
“A great part of intelligence and information warfare is conducted online,” he continued, “on websites like Wikipedia.”
Earlier this year, Twitter owner Elon Musk released a trove of documents showing how the platform’s former executives colluded with the FBI to remove content the agency wanted hidden, assisted the US military’s online influence campaigns, and censored “anti-Ukraine narratives” on behalf of multiple US intelligence agencies. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also admitted that Facebook censored information damaging to President Joe Biden’s 2020 election campaign at the direct request of the FBI.
Australia’s Intelligence Agencies Are Instructed To Tackle Online “Misinformation”
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | August 2, 2023
In a robust appeal for accountability, Australian intelligence agencies have been encouraged to counter online “misinformation” that potentially endangers national security. The recommendation comes from a parliamentary committee overseeing Australia’s six intelligence bodies, including the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), the Australian Signals Directorate, and the Australian Secret Intelligence Service.
The committee’s chair, Peter Khalil, announced the recommendation during a parliamentary session. “The committee sees an opportunity for Australia’s intelligence agencies to take an increasing role in sharing information with the Australian public – where appropriate – on matters relating to misinformation, disinformation, and harmful propaganda,” Khalil stated, as reported by Perth Now.
This push follows a significant increase in misinformation during the turbulent years of 2020 and 2021, a period accompanied by COVID-19 lockdowns and a rapidly fluctuating security environment. Surprising to some, the parliamentary committee found that this wave of misinformation significantly amplified security concerns, necessitating its robust redressal.
The suggestion to publicly tackle misinformation, while controversial to many free-speech advocates who caution about overreach, is among four recommendations proffered in the committee’s recent annual review. These include enhancing inter-agency information sharing and finding effective solutions to workforce issues within the intelligence community.
Khalil remains steadfast in his conviction that this human-centric approach could be transformative. “The people who work in Australia’s intelligence agencies are our greatest asset,” he said. “By developing a whole of national intelligence community recruitment and retention strategy, Australia will be better positioned to deliver on its intelligence priorities.”
US journalist missing after trying to flee Ukraine
RT | August 2, 2023
Chilean-American reporter Gonzalo Lira, who claimed to be about to attempt to flee Ukraine after being subjected to physical abuse and extortion in custody, has gone missing, a source confirmed to RT.
Lira, a vocal critic of the Ukrainian government, resurfaced this week, months after being arrested by the nation’s security service, the SBU. In a series of posts on Twitter and YouTube, he stated his intention to cross the border into Hungary and apply for political asylum there.
He claimed that since early May he had been kept incommunicado in pre-trial detention. He said he was deprived of sleep as well and beaten and tortured by other inmates on instructions from the prison authorities.
Lira apparently never made it to the other side of the border. Mark Sleboda, a political expert and frequent guest at RT, confirmed to the channel that Lira was stopped on the Ukrainian side and has not been heard from since.
Lira said that he had been released on bail and told not to leave the city of Kharkov. However he added he was given his passport back and an electronic shackle was not put on him, contrary to the formal terms of his conditional release.
“Maybe I’m being set up by them so they can justify putting me away in a labor camp – so no one will ever know about their sordid extortion scheme,” he said. “I simply don’t know.”
If he made it across the border, he said he expected Ukraine to issue an international arrest warrant for him for skipping bail and that he hoped that Hungary would be willing to defy Kiev and not hand him over, unlike other EU nations.
“If you don’t hear from me in the next 12 hours—whelp! I’m on my way to a labor camp!” he concluded. There have been no further updates on his social media since.
Lira has been accused by Ukraine of “publicly justifying” the Russian military operation and “disseminating fakes [false stories] about the war in Ukraine”. He said the charges were bogus and that he did nothing but explain his opinions about Kiev’s policies and report what was happening in Ukraine.
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Australia’s Draconian “Misinformation” Bill Threatens to Usher in Unprecedented Era of Illiberal Double Standards
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | July 31, 2023
The Australian Government’s tyrannical Communications Legislation Amendment (Combating Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2023 is facing formidable resistance from the Victorian Bar, as it sounds the alarm over a grave assault on freedom of speech and expression.
This Orwellian legislation, pushed by the communications minister since January, seeks to arm the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) with oppressive powers to tackle online “misinformation and disinformation.” Its draconian provisions include a mandate for the ACMA to hawkishly monitor progress in stifling online “misinformation” on various digital platforms, and enforce industry standards designed to muffle free speech under the guise of fighting disinformation.
The Victorian Bar has courageously voiced “serious objections” to this bill in a recent deposition to the Law Council of Australia. Their argument? The bill woefully neglects to respect the sanctity of free expression and associated privacy rights.
Victorian Bar president, Sam Hay KC, drove home the significance of this protest, underscoring the Bar’s trepidation about the invasive impact of the proposed bill on free speech and privacy. The Bar is particularly concerned about the threat to freedom of speech, calling it “the lifeblood of democracy.”
The Bar’s thorough critique continues, predicting a wave of self-censorship as users of online services retreat in fear of being branded as purveyors of misinformation. The bill’s very necessity is challenged, as it points out the effectiveness of recent countermeasures against the propagation of online falsehoods.
The Bar paints a grim picture of the bill’s proposed solution, arguing it could worsen the problem by alienating those already suspicious of the state and marginalized in small online communities. It cautions against a silencing approach and promotes persuasion and the dissemination of accurate information as a counter to misinformation.
They raise the issue of an “illiberal double standard,” potentially advantaging government supporters at the expense of critics. Moreover, the Bar criticizes the bill’s vague and impracticable definition of misinformation. While they say they recognize a need to counter harmful online information, the Victorian Bar takes a stand, asserting the proposed measures are disproportionately intrusive and likely ineffective against their intended targets.
‘Facebook Files’ Reveal Despicable Disregard for the Constitution
By Ron Paul | July 31, 2023
Last week’s revelation that Facebook took orders from the Biden Administration to censor even accurate information about Covid is the latest example of the US government’s disregard for our Constitution. Thanks to Rep. Jim Jordan, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, we now know the extent to which the Biden Administration went in its proxy war against the First Amendment.
Getting the information wasn’t easy. It was only after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was threatened with being held in contempt of Congress that he relented and shared information with the Judiciary Committee about Biden Administration pressure to censor Americans on Facebook who disagreed with White House policy on Covid.
What we have discovered thus far is disgusting. For example, in April 2021, a Facebook employee sent a message to top executives in the company complaining that, “we are facing continued pressure from external stakeholders, including the [Biden] White House” to remove posts. In another example, senior executive Nick Clegg complained that Andy Slavitt, a Senior Advisor to President Biden, was “outraged… that [Facebook] did not remove” a particular post, according to Rep. Jordan’s report.
Rep. Jordan revealed that the “offending post” that the Biden Administration wanted removed was simply a joke making fun of possible vaccine injury down the road. The Biden Administration even wanted to “protect” us from jokes that it didn’t like.
The Administration did not stop at targeting what it called “misinformation.” As Constitutional Law Professor Jonathan Turley noted in a recent column, “the administration also demanded the removal of ‘malinformation’ that is ‘based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.’” So the Biden Administration wanted to “cancel” even truthful information counter to its own preferred narrative.
This level of contempt for our Constitution is shocking. As Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. – who was himself censored at the behest of the Biden Administration – testified recently before Congress: “A government that can censor its critics has license for every atrocity. It is the beginning of totalitarianism.”
Who knows how many thousands of Facebook accounts were banned or restricted at the behest of the Biden White House. Early last year I received notice that my own Facebook Page was “restricted” for 90 days because I pointed out that the CEO of Pfizer once claimed that his Covid shot was “100 effective” but later changed his story. The post was completely accurate but still my page was targeted.
Although some are using this information for partisan gain against the Democrats in power, Americans should not delude themselves: left unchecked, there is little reason to believe a Republican Administration would show any more respect for the Constitution than the Biden Administration. Both parties have shown themselves to be selective in their pledged oath to uphold and defend the US Constitution.
It is just as unconstitutional – and thus illegal – for the US Government to violate the First Amendment by proxy – through so-called private companies – as if the government directly attacked our free speech. We must remember that the unprecedented US government censorship of Americans during Covid was just the test run. Be assured that when the next “crisis” comes – and it will – the authoritarians in charge will again ramp up the censorship machine unless we do something about it.
Copyright © 2023 by RonPaul Institute
RFK Jr. Says Biden DHS Won’t Provide Secret Service Protection
By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | July 29, 2023
RFK Jr., whose father was assassinated on the presidential campaign trail in 1968, says the Biden Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has denied his request for Secret Service protection.
“Since the assassination of my father in 1968, candidates for president are provided Secret Service protection. But not me,” Kennedy tweeted.
“Our campaign’s request included a 67-page report from the world’s leading protection firm, detailing unique and well established security and safety risks aside from commonplace death threats.”
A misleading community note was added to the tweet, which suggests that candidates will only be protected within 120 days of the general election…
The Secret Service’s website suggests the same:
The actual text of the law, however, makes clear that the 120-day guidance is for spouses.
“Major Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates and, within 120 days of the general Presidential election, the spouses of such candidates.“
Punctuation matters.
Meanwhile, an argument for why Kennedy should receive SS protection:
(continued, emphasis ours)
The law authorizes Secret Service protection for major presidential and vice presidential candidates and their spouses within 120 days of the general presidential election. However, the evolution of the protective detail is based upon actual threats and acts of aggression against both the highest public office in the land and those who seek the position.
History shows there is precedent for candidates receiving protection >120 days ahead of the general election.
Donald Trump & Ben Carson were provided Secret Service protection 365 days before Election Day in 2015
Barack Obama was provided Secret Service protection 551 days before Election Day in 2007
RFK Jr is within the time range of the precedent set by the candidates above (465 days from Election Day) and is arguably under even greater threat given the Kennedy family’s tragic history of assassinations.
The Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS Sec. Alejandro Mayorkas) has the discretion and the ability to approve or deny Secret Service coverage to presidential candidates at any point in the campaign.
Given that the Biden Administration began to censor RFK Jr within days of getting into the White House and is continuing that censorship even through last week’s censorship hearing, it is not surprising that a Biden appointee has denied a political opponent’s request for Secret Service protection.
There’s No Need to Ban These Vaccines
By David Bell | Brownstone Institute | July 28, 2023
Individual sovereignty means that people can make their own choices, based on their own assessment of risk. It means that others can advise them, but not compel them. It is a basis for modern human rights and natural law.
Public health practitioners like to voice support for these principles, but also really feel good about telling people what to do, based on their expertise and superior knowledge. This is why fascism tends to have a strong healthcare component.
Covid Vaccines are Part of Life
Health bureaucrats have really found their feet during the Covid years, prohibiting children from going to school, families and friends from meeting, and people walking in more than one direction in supermarket aisles or sitting alone on park benches. They banned the use of safe repurposed medicines, claiming they were fit only for animals whilst continuing to use them for other human diseases. Then they mandated injections with novel pharmaceutical products, banning people from working or traveling without them. They have benefitted their sponsors but impoverish the majority with virtual impunity. They rightly feel important, the guardians of society.
But all is not well. While medical fascism has paid well for three years, the public are starting to show signs of lack of trust – perhaps they are sick of being told what is best for them. They may be starting to think they are best placed to assess their own risks and priorities, and act accordingly.
Growing mistrust may stem from a realization that few of the Covid response measures seem to have brought much benefit. They successfully promoted poverty whilst transferring wealth upwards, disproportionately benefiting those promoting the response. They had old people locked up in solitary confinement, so they died alone rather than with family. They declared that those calling for informed consent are a threat to society, and children a threat to adults. Perhaps mistrust is justified.
Now many are proposing a ban on Covid-19 vaccines. They are convinced, on reasonable evidence, that these novel pharmaceuticals probably do net harm overall. They note the unprecedented rate of adverse events associated with the vaccines, from rising mortality to falling birth rates. They worry about mRNA vaccines concentrating in ovaries and adrenal glands, and crossing the placenta to unborn babies, with no long-term data on safety. Many who were standing for freedom of choice regarding ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine are now backing this movement.
Understanding safety and effectiveness of the Covid-19 vaccines is complicated, as the initial randomized clinical trials were damaged by evidence of incompetence and lack of transparency. The manufacturers themselves were unable to show all-cause benefits. Trials for carcinogenicity and genotoxicity, normally mandatory for the genetic therapeutic class to which these substances belong, were also avoided simply by changing the name from genetic therapeutic to ‘vaccine.’ This renaming had required a broadening of the definition of vaccine, as mRNA must co-opt the person’s cellular machinery, like a medicine, in order to eventually stimulate an immune response.
Pharma in general, including these vaccine manufacturers, have appalling histories of fraud. This is shaky ground for trusting a new class of pharmaceuticals, and considerable propaganda and censorship have been required to project a positive image.
However, for better or worse, Covid-19 vaccines do now exist. Lots of people have had them and lots of people, for reasons best known to themselves, continue to request boosters. The vast majority are clearly not dying. People also skydive, go rock climbing and base jumping, risky activities but with generally non-mortal outcomes. While a marketed pharmaceutical is not quite equivalent to a cliff face, both carry inherent risk and theoretical benefits. Anyone partaking of them should be fully aware of the risks and provide informed consent.
The Right to Choose
Truly informed consent is one of the most unpopular ideas in medicine. The idea that the health professional is there merely to inform a patient’s sovereign, independent decision is difficult for a self-entitled profession to accept. Most believe they have a right to limit the public’s freedom when they deem it necessary. While many on both sides of the Covid vaccine debate act with good intent (and sometimes switch sides accordingly), their positions on mandates or bans require that governments use authoritarian approaches to implement public health policy.
As this article will upset well-meaning people, my argument needs further explanation. A belief common to those for and against the Covid response holds that people need to be protected from toxic substances and from malfeasance by doctors or pharmaceutical companies. It assumes that health professionals have a special place in society, shielding the public from areas where they lack knowledge and therefore cannot make sound judgment.
These arguments are reasonable, and in a world where all people live by high standards of integrity and ethics they might represent the safest approach. Unfortunately none of us seem able to infallibly uphold such standards. As 1930s Germany showed, and the Covid response reiterated, the public health establishment is particularly vulnerable to influence and abuse by political or corporate sponsors.
While a penchant for authoritarianism is well-established within medicine, the inclination to ban pharmaceuticals is relatively new. The doctor-patient relationship previously determined use based on context and history, informed (one hoped) by an honest regulatory system. Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine would have been managed similarly to occasionally deadly penicillin; available at the doctor’s discretion with the patient’s agreement.
Many in the West are getting fat on carbohydrates. However, we don’t ban sugar, but we do encourage the public to eat less, because it’s slowly killing them. We ban smoking where it directly affects others, but don’t ban people from taking risks when alone or among those who consent. Some would like to, but there are always people who wish to ban books, limit free speech, and impose their preferences on others. Decent societies should tolerate them but not indulge them.
Who Should be in Charge?
The primacy of decision-making within the doctor-patient relationship was based on recognition that illness is not just about a virus. It is the result of these within a body with particular genetic makeup, past exposure history, and underlying immune competence. Its severity further depends on the cultural context and value system of the sick person. Lastly but most importantly, it was based on the principle that the patient is a free, independent being, with primary rights over their own body. A doctor could refuse to perform a requested service, but could not force one. Insanity was the only exception. This is fundamental to medical ethics.
Medical practice also traditionally assumed that the doctor has a responsibility to help the patient, or a requirement to cause no harm. This requires expertise and may involve refusal to do all that a patient requests; the doctor is an advisor of the individual and not their subordinate. For this relationship to work, it must be free of conflict of interest and provided with reliable evidence and opinion. Various professional governing boards are supposed to support this process, so these boards and regulators must also be free of conflict of interest.
Public health should be no different – public health practitioners have a role in providing evidence-based guidance to help populations make decisions on health in their own interest. But in the end, the population’s values – cultural and religious – and its weighing of this advice against other priorities it faces, will determine the response. Within this community response, each sovereign individual has a right to decide their participation and actions.
The Nuremberg Code was written to address the harm caused when these principles are abrogated, even if ‘for the greater good.’ Opposing them requires a belief that one person should have rights over another. This may manifest as preventing those considered less desirable from giving birth, destroying an ethnic group considered inferior, studying untreated disease outcomes at Tuskegee, or coercing vaccination as a criteria to earn a living. Like any other group, the health professions simply have no right to impose their will on others. The historic results of ignoring this are obvious.
Market Forces are Preferable to Self-Entitlement
Here we are in 2023 with the Covid vaccines established on the market, amidst allegations of fraud and misrepresentation of data, poor safety and efficacy, and a lack of clear overall benefit. Their target illness is confined in severity to a small segment of the population, nearly all of whom now have good post-infection immunity. The vaccines do not stop or substantially reduce transmission, and may over time increase it.
Mass vaccination in this context is obviously a flawed policy. Mandating a non-transmission blocking vaccine for immune people at minimal intrinsic risk could only be driven by gross ignorance or corporate profit. The use of behavioral psychology to instill fear and the use of coercion are clearly unethical by any modern ethical standard. The many people who have lost their jobs and homes, and were publicly vilified for standing on principle and refusing to submit to such practice, have a clear right to redress. Those who committed fraud should have to answer for it. Those who abandoned the precautionary principle and informed consent should be required to justify their actions and their right to continue to practice.
None of this should remove the right of the public to make their own decisions on accessing these new genetic vaccines as a currently marketed commodity. Where expected harm clearly outweighs benefit, no medical practitioner should offer it, just as it would be inappropriate to offer Thalidomide to a pregnant woman with nausea. Where there are plausible grounds for overall benefit, if should be available as an option. These individuals can decide, based on the information available. While this group of potential beneficiaries appears diminishingly small, it remains conceivable that elderly obese diabetics with no prior Covid infection may benefit. Market forces can then decide whether the product is viable, rather than authoritarian dictates.
In the meantime, the Covid vaccines must pass full regulatory approval as a valid, reasonably safe product. This opens a can of worms, as most were only accepted under emergency use authorization (EUA) and the companies aborted their Phase 3 clinical trials, normally required for approval, by vaccinating the control arms. Valid approval would require submission of data at least confirming overall benefit in people who remain at high risk for Covid. Large trials involving non-immune people would now seem impossible.
A Way Out
To fix the health and societal disaster of the past three years, the public does not need more dictates from the self-appointed medical guardians who caused it. Too many have proven unworthy and incompetent. The problem is deeper than the availability or withdrawal of a vaccine. Public health professionals have forgotten the primacy of individual freedom – of the right of each person to set their own priorities and manage their own bodies. The public are sovereign, not the doctors who wish to lead or mislead them.
With reducing interest in vaccine boosters, it appears the public may solve the vaccine access issue themselves. A free flow of information and genuine informed consent will probably accelerate this. So would a responsible attitude from medical journals and regulatory agencies, if they can emerge from the yoke of their sponsors.
These are problems caused by the public health establishment. This establishment should reform itself, and never again presume it has the right, or the character, to dictate to others. The public will make mistakes, but these will pale beside the mess the health professions have already created.
David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a public health physician and biotech consultant in global health. He is a former medical officer and scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO), Programme Head for malaria and febrile diseases at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, Switzerland, and Director of Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in Bellevue, WA, USA.
Elizabeth Warren and Lindsey Graham team up to tackle “cyberbullying,” “physical, emotional, developmental” online harms
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | July 28, 2023
Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina have jointly proposed a strategy to rein in Big Tech companies, reignite competition, and curb the spread of what they call “harmful” online content.
“Our legislation would guarantee common-sense safeguards for everyone who uses tech platforms. Families would have the right to protect their children from sexual exploitation, cyberbullying, and deadly drugs. Certain digital platforms have promoted the sexual abuse and exploitation of children, suicidal ideation, and eating disorders or done precious little to combat these evils; our bill would require Big Tech to mitigate such harms and allow families to seek redress if they do not,” the senators wrote in a New York Times opinion piece.
We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.
The senators aim to establish a new federal agency tasked with cracking down on what they call potential harms originating from tech behemoths, such as Amazon, Google, Meta, and beyond, encompassing everything from social media to ecommerce and artificial intelligence.
Warren and Graham’s collaborative venture comes in response to mounting concerns about the overreach of Big Tech, which they argue have shown a pattern of flouting privacy, threatening national security, and exterminating competition.
“For too long, giant tech companies have exploited consumers’ data, invaded Americans’ privacy, threatened our national security, and stomped out competition in our economy,” stated Warren.
The proposed federal watchdog, however, raises concerns about potential censorship and individual free speech infringement. Industry advocates worry that authoritative regulation could enable government manipulation and compromise the essence of an open, unbiased digital ecosystem that advances innovation and public discourse, particularly when the senators refer to “harms” such as “cyberbullying.”
“A covered entity shall mitigate the heightened risks of physical, emotional, developmental, or material harms posed by materials on, or engagement with, any platform owned or controlled by the covered entity,” the bill states.
The proposal, titled the Digital Consumer Protection Commission Act, delineates the power of this new agency to initiate lawsuits against platforms for their potential harms, establish industry regulations, investigate alleged wrongdoings, and enforce compliance. For significant violators, the commission could have the power to revoke operating licenses, marking a move towards directing the course of the digital era.
In addition to these sweeping powers, the legislation would also prescribe outright bans on certain practices. For instance, Google would be restrained from privileging its own applications in search results. The data mining practices of these companies would also be scrutinized, restricting their ability to use personal data for targeted advertising.
Moreover, the proposal addresses the increasing national security anxieties tied to dominant tech platforms like TikTok. The legislation would require such platforms to be based in the United States or be controlled by US citizens and would curb their ability to store data in designated countries.
Senator Elizabeth Warren stated the congruity of this proposed tech-focused commission with the Federal Communications Commission and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which specifically regulate different sectors. However, clarity regarding potential collaboration or synergy with existing agencies such as the FTC and the Department of Justice remains to be seen, fostering doubt about potential jurisdictional conflicts.
In their New York Times op-ed, Senator Graham and Warren claimed, “Enough is enough. It’s time to rein in Big Tech.” Despite this, while there is some need to curb Big Tech practices, critics call for caution over measures that could undermine free expression and technological innovation in an era where they seem more intertwined than ever before. Free speech, not censorship should be promoted.
‘Health Program or Military Program’? White House Taps Military Official to Lead New Pandemic Policy Office
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 26, 2023
Just weeks after ending the COVID-19 national and public health emergencies and the resignation of COVID-19 Response Coordinator Ashish Jha, the White House launched its Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy (OPPR).
Retired Major General Paul Friedrichs, a military combat surgeon, will lead the office, the White House said.
According to the White House, the OPPR will be “a permanent office in the Executive Office of the President (EOP) charged with leading, coordinating, and implementing actions related to preparedness for, and response to, known and unknown biological threats or pathogens that could lead to a pandemic or to significant public health-related disruptions in the United States.”
The OPPR will take over the duties of President Biden’s COVID-19 and monkeypox response teams, including “ongoing work to address potential public health outbreaks and threats from COVID-19, Mpox, polio, avian and human influenza, and RSV [respiratory syncytial virus],” the announcement stated.
The OPPR also will oversee efforts to “develop, manufacture, and procure the next generation of medical countermeasures, including leveraging emerging technologies and working with HHS [U.S. Department of Health and Human Services] on next generation vaccines and treatments for COVID-19 and other public health threats.”
According to The New York Times, Friedrichs, set to take office Aug. 7, will have the authority to “oversee domestic biosecurity preparedness.” He will work on the development of next-generation vaccines, ensure adequate supplies in the Strategic National Stockpile and “ramp up surveillance to monitor for new biological threats.”
Several medical, biosecurity and civil liberties experts questioned the selection of a career military and biosecurity individual to head a new office charged with pandemic preparedness.
They also told The Defender they saw parallels between the White House’s establishment of the OPPR and ongoing United Nations (U.N.) efforts to draft a global declaration on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response (PPPR).
‘Is OPPR a health program or a military program?’
Friedrichs, a board-certified physician, is currently a special assistant to the president and senior director for Global Health Security and Biodefense at the National Security Council.
He previously served as joint staff surgeon at the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) and as medical adviser to the Pentagon’s COVID-19 task force.
Throughout his career, the White House said, Friedrichs worked closely with federal, state, tribal, local and territorial government partners, as well as industry and academic counterparts.
According to the White House:
“As the United States’ representative to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Committee of Military Medical Chiefs, he worked closely with many of America’s closest allies and partners throughout the pandemic and in developing medical support to the Ukrainian military.”
In his previous roles at the National Security Council and DOD, Friedrichs was a strong proponent of COVID-19 vaccines and countermeasures.
The Times reported that, in a February speech, Friedrichs said, “The military health system became the pinch-hitter that stepped in to help our civilian partners as we collectively struggled to work through that pandemic.”
In a February 2022 podcast, Friedrichs praised the COVID-19 vaccines and also appeared to blame those who were unvaccinated for placing “stress on our system.”
And in remarks shared in January 2022 with the Association of the United States Army, Friedrichs asked military families to continue holding off on gatherings so that service members are “able to do the things that our nation depends on them to do.”
Does Friedrichs’ appointment signal more vaccine mandates?
Describing Friedrichs’ appointment as “a joke and a fraud,” Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., a bioweapons expert and professor of international law at the University of Illinois who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, told The Defender :
“DOD has routinely enforced experimental medical vaccines on U.S. Armed Forces, in gross violation of the Nuremberg Code on Medical Experimentation — that is, a Nuremberg crime against humanity — from today’s COVID-19 ‘vaccines’ and going all the way back in recent history to the ‘vaccines’ that produced Gulf War sickness starting in 1990-1991, when Friedrichs was a U.S. Military medical doctor.
“Of 500,000 U.S. troops inoculated, 11,000 died and 100,000 were disabled. I do not recall that Friedrichs was among the handful of courageous and principled military medical doctors who refused, as a matter of principle, to inflict Nuremberg crimes on our own troops. Did he? That needs to be investigated.”
Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D., author of “Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom,” said the selection of Friedrichs, who supported military vaccine mandates, may signal similar future mandates for the general public.
“We should not forget that the DOD mandated the COVID-19 vaccine for service members,” Rectenwald said. “The OPPR will mandate vaccines for the nation.”
And writing on her blog, Dr. Meryl Nass, an internist, biological warfare epidemiologist and member of the Children’s Health Defense scientific advisory committee, questioned if the OPPR plans “to use the military’s OTA [other transaction] authority again to bypass the FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] and vaccinate us with untested junk that turned out to be poison, like it did for COVID.”
Is OPPR “a health program or a military program?” Nass wrote.
Nass told The Defender that if the main purpose of the OPPR was to respond to pandemics and pandemic threats, an epidemiologist or infectious disease doctor would have been tapped to head the office instead of a military general.
Similarly, Dr. David Bell, a public health physician, biotech consultant and former director of Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund, told The Defender :
“COVID-19 demonstrated that the sort of interventions envisioned by the pandemic preparedness lobby such as lockdowns and coerced mass vaccination, have poor public health outcomes.
“Public health should be concentrated on informing the public to make personal decisions about health, rather than the population-control approaches we saw for COVID-19 that are most profitable to the corporate world. We must hope this new health bureaucracy is more independent of vested interests, and will take an evidence-based approach.”
Nass suggested that Friedrich’s selection belies a broadly encompassing biosecurity agenda, which would include censorship of non-establishment medical information, surveillance and mass, or mandatory, vaccination, tied to U.N. and World Health Organization (WHO) “pandemic preparedness and response” efforts.
A ‘WHO globalist worldwide medical and scientific police state’ here in the U.S.?
Other experts also noted the similarities between the name of the OPPR, the U.N.’s draft PPPR and a similar recent agreement among WHO member states.
Still in “zero draft” form, the PPPR is scheduled to be discussed by the U.N. General Assembly in September 2023. It would also be tied to the WHO’s proposed pandemic treaty and amendments to the International Health Regulations.
Similarly, a June 28 document from the WHO said, “Member States … have agreed to a global process to draft and negotiate a convention, agreement or other international instrument under the Constitution of the World Health Organization to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.”
And a separate but similar set of proposals — part of the U.N.’s “Pact for the Future” and “Our Common Agenda” — would give the U.N. secretary-general unprecedented emergency powers not only for pandemics but seemingly for an unlimited range of other potential crises. The U.N. will discuss these proposals in September 2024.
Boyle told The Defender the OPPR is “obviously being coordinated with the U.N. [and] the Biden administration to establish the effective functioning of a WHO globalist worldwide medical and scientific police state here in the United States.”
“You need the mentality of an unprincipled military medical major general to do that,” Boyle said. “All the trains will run on time.”
Rectenwald drew similar connections, telling The Defender the OPPR and Friedrichs’ selection:
“Signifies the militarization of pandemic responses in the U.S., in line with the ‘global governance’ measures outlined by the U.N.’s Pandemic Preparedness, Prevention and Response declaration.
“This new wing of the executive branch is the means by which this ‘global governance’ (read: one-world totalitarian system) is being introduced to the U.S., using pandemic preparedness as the pretext.”
Notably, proposals for a government “pandemic preparedness” office date at least as far back as October 2020, when the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) issued an extensive set of recommendations calling upon the U.S. government to “adopt a robust strategy for domestic and global pandemic preparedness.”
The report recommended that the U.S. “finally treat pandemics as a serious national security threat, translating its rhetorical support for pandemic preparedness into concrete action.”
According to the CFR, this would entail “bolstering the White House’s leadership role in preparing for and responding to pandemics, improving congressional input into and oversight over executive branch efforts, reforming the CDC so that it can perform more effectively, and clarifying the often confused division of labor across federal, state, and local governments in pandemic preparedness and response.”
“The president should designate a focal point within the White House for global health security, including pandemic preparedness and response,” the report added. “This office would have lead responsibility for coordinating the multiple federal departments and agencies in anticipating, preventing, and responding quickly to major disease outbreaks.”
OPPR reports to Congress required only every 5 years, not annually
The establishment of the OPPR resulted from the passage of the PREVENT Pandemics Act in December 2022.
The bill, introduced by Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and the now-retired Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), passed as part of an omnibus spending bill, contained a requirement for the creation of a White House pandemic preparedness and response office.
Though the bill was passed in December 2022, the White House was unable to immediately establish a pandemic preparedness office and name a director.
A Politico report in May said these efforts were “hindered by concerns over whether [the office] will have the influence within the administration and the financial resources needed to fulfill its broad mission — especially as COVID plummets down the list of political priorities.”
According to the White House announcement, OPPR will “Develop and provide periodic reports to Congress” as required by law, including drafting and delivering to Congress “a biennial Preparedness Review and Report and Preparedness Outlook Report every five years.”
On her blog, Nass wrote, “Instead of the more customary yearly reports, the reporting to Congress is being delayed considerably, perhaps until after many of us have died from the countermeasures — a great way to evade oversight.”
In a separate blog post, Nass also observed that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention requested $20 billion for “pandemic preparedness” in its fiscal year 2024 budget.
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
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From the Archives
Woolsey Fire started at Santa Susana Field Lab — where “radioactive materials released were never accurately measured”
By John Laforge | CounterPunch | November 30, 2018
In my Nov. 16 column, I reported on potential radiation risks posed by California’s Woolsey wildfire having burned over parts or all of the Santa Susana Field Laboratory—south of Simi Valley, Calif., 30 miles outside Los Angeles—site of at least four partial or total nuclear reactor meltdowns.
The field laboratory operated 10 experimental reactors and conducted rocket engine tests. In his 2014 book Atomic Accidents, researcher James Mahaffey writes, “The cores in four experimental reactors on site … melted.” Reactor core melts always result in the release of large amounts of radioactive gases and particles. Clean up of the deeply contaminated site has not been conducted in spite of a 2010 agreement.
Los Angeles’s KABC-7 TV reported Nov. 13 that the Santa Susana lab site “appears to be the origin of the Woolsey Fire” which has torched over 96,000 acres. Southern Calif. Public Radio said, “According to Cal Fire, the Woolsey Fire started on the afternoon of Thursday, Nov. 8 … on the Santa Susana site.” … continue
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