Statement From Medical Professionals & Scientists Supporting Parental Rights and Medical Freedom
Brownstone Institute | January 22, 2023
This letter has been signed by Dr. Rachel Corbett, Dr. George Fareed, Dr. Melanie Gisler, Dr. Brian Hooker, Dr. Pierre Kory, Dr. Katarina Lindley, Dr. James Lyons-Weiler, Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Peter McCullough, Dr. Liz Mumper, Dr. Meryl Nass, Dr. David Rasnick, Dr. Richard Urso and hundreds more physicians, scientists and medical professionals.
The original authors are Michael Kane and Meryl Nass, M.D., and it is being distributed by Children’s Health Defense. Medical and scientific professionals can sign the letter, which is a basic statement of principles that should be at the core of medicines but which have sidelined or violated since the beginning of the crisis.
Executive Summary
- There is no scientific rationale for continuing any COVID-19 mandates in 2023 and beyond.
- Mask and vaccine exemptions must be offered at the discretion of the physician and patient as opposed to one-size-fits-all government edicts.
- Parental rights and decisions must be preserved to ensure the health and well-being of their children.
- The ability of medical professionals to speak freely to their patients and the public must not be compromised.
Informed consent is the basis of medical ethics. Shared decision-making is a model of the patient-physician relationship that is considered the most desirable by both the US and UK government health establishments. Patients want to make their own medical decisions, and they have the legal right to do so. They expect their physicians to share knowledge with their patients to inform the best choices.
The corollary to informed consent is that medical decisions ought to be made by individual patients based on their individual situation and personal best interest. ‘One-size-fits-all’ medicine is incongruent with these principles. It denies informed consent and personal autonomy.
During the last three years, we have experienced unprecedented interference with the doctor-patient relationship by the government. Considerable financial incentives were paid to medical industries and medical providers to offer certain treatments and to refuse others.
When financial incentives did not achieve universal vaccination, mandates were imposed. One way this was done was by requiring COVID-19 vaccinations for healthcare workers whose employers received Medicare payments after we had learned that vaccinations did not protect patients or coworkers from infection.
Grants to school districts were conditioned on mask mandates in schools. These newly imposed incentives, and punishments for noncompliance, fly in the face of long-established medical ethics, especially informed consent and shared decision-making. They must end.
COVID-19 Mandates
There is general agreement that all available COVID-19 vaccines fail to prevent viral transmission and only briefly reduce cases. After several months, people who are vaccinated become more susceptible to COVID-19 infections than the unvaccinated. Therefore, mandates for COVID-19 vaccines are scientifically and logically indefensible.
In response, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) adapted its guidelines for managing COVID-19, quietly suggesting that both vaccinated and unvaccinated Americans should be treated identically with respect to isolation, quarantining and testing. Yet the CDC continues to exhort Americans to receive more COVID-19 vaccine booster doses and supports federally imposed vaccine mandates.
Essentially everyone in our country has been exposed to COVID-19 by now, and nearly everyone has been infected at least once. We can anticipate that the US will continue to face evolving COVID-19 variants, but we can also anticipate that COVID-19’s severity will keep weakening over time.
Yet patients and doctors are still not permitted to choose the COVID-19 therapies best suited to each patient. Mandates must end, and patients and doctors must reassert their human and legal rights to determine the medical care each patient receives.
Vaccine and Mask Exemptions
Patients are individuals. They experience different risks from vaccinations and may have medical or psychological issues that preclude safe masking. Pretending that these differences don’t exist is denying reality. Historically, doctors were able to issue waivers for masks and vaccinations, as they were considered to have the best knowledge and judgment to issue such waivers.
Although every state by law accepts that doctors can issue medical waivers for vaccines and masks, many health and education departments have started nullifying these waivers, superseding physician authority. States have also been investigating and punishing doctors for issuing medical waivers. It appears that federal and state governments want to make themselves the arbiters of these medical decisions. This must not stand.
Parental Rights
States decide on the age of consent, and until that age is reached, parents are wholly responsible for their children, with a few limited exceptions. But during the past two years, we have seen a dangerous trend. State requirements that parents must consent to vaccinations given to their underage children are being ignored in multiple jurisdictions. This happened in Washington, DC, for children ages 11 and older by order of the Mayor and City Council. The law they passed kept the fact that their children had a medical procedure secret from the parents. While Congress, which oversees the law in the District of Columbia, could have said no, it instead failed to act. A lawsuit challenging this law was won in November 2021, so the law no longer stands in DC.
However, in Philadelphia, PA, San Francisco, CA and Kings County, WA, the local health officers issued guidelines in early 2021 allowing local medical providers to vaccinate children as young as age 12 without parental permission, which still stand.
This is a dangerous usurpation of parental rights by local public health authorities. It also violates state and federal law. Furthermore, there has been a recent accompanying trend by ‘medico-legal’ professionals to assert in published journal articles that 12-year-olds have the maturity to decide on their own medical procedures.
Most states don’t allow children to consent to use tanning salons or get tattoos below the age of consent. To bypass parents and allow underage children to decide what gets injected into them is inconsistent with state laws, medical ethics, common sense, and optimal medical care of children. It needs to end.
Free Speech for Medical Professionals
An attack on the free speech of doctors and medical scientists is being waged across America today. While controversy is inherent in scientific advancement, and scientific knowledge continuously evolves, disagreement with the federal public health recommendations has led to draconian censorship and suppression. Doctors have been investigated, lost their specialty board certifications, and even lost their medical licenses for speaking out publicly against federal guidelines.
Yet no health authority is infallible, and the COVID-19 pandemic proved this. In fact, both the World Health Organization (WHO), NIH and CDC changed their COVID-19 policies, guidelines, and recommendations numerous times throughout the pandemic.
The suppression of medical professionals’ speech is illegal, according to the First Amendment and state statutes, and must immediately end.
This letter continues to be signed by medical professionals and scientists around the world. View the growing list of signatures.
53-Year-Old Woman Details Aftermath of COVID Vaccine Injury
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | January 24, 2023
Julie Gamble had a fulfilling life: a stable career, the freedom to travel, and three children and one grandbaby to cherish.
But that life was disrupted in the spring and summer of 2021 when Gamble developed severe adverse reactions after getting the two-shot COVID-19 vaccine primary series — which resulted in her losing her job.
Gamble, now 53, spoke to The Defender about the vaccine injuries she sustained, the symptoms and challenges she is still experiencing, the ongoing difficulties finding doctors willing to treat her and classify her symptoms as vaccine-related, and the supportive role online groups for vaccine-injured individuals have had in her life.
The Defender reviewed documentation and photographic evidence verifying Gamble’s claims prior to publishing her story.
‘I felt really, really tired … anesthetic tired’
Gamble, who lives in Ontario, Canada, received the first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine on May 17, 2021. For the second dose, she received the Moderna vaccine on July 18, 2021.
Her symptoms appeared almost immediately after the first dose, she said:
“I came home and I was really, really tired. It felt like an anesthetic tired, it didn’t feel like a ‘regular’ tired.
“I had developed a rash all over my body. I was itchy and my eyelids swelled up. I recall the bottoms of my feet being extremely itchy, more so than anywhere else, and I was sweating profusely. I started getting Charley horses in my calves. So, of course I was drinking a lot of water. I recall losing my vision in my right eye.”
Variations of the symptoms lasted for about a week after her first dose. She called a pharmacist who told her to take an antihistamine and, “if my tongue started to swell up, go to the ER.”
Soon afterward, Gamble developed other symptoms, including weakness in her ankles and a fluctuating heart rate.
“I also recall I was wearing my Fitbit. I’d walk into work, and I’d check my heart rate and sometimes it was at 140 and then it would drop down to regular, about 70 beats per minute. I’d be sitting down and I felt a little odd and I’d look at my Fitbit and my heart rate would shoot right up and then it would come right back down. And I stopped wearing it because I assumed my Fitbit was broken.”
The leg cramps kept getting worse, but Gamble attributed them to dehydration because where she worked “was quite hot, and so that’s what I thought was happening.”
‘I felt guilted’ into getting second dose
Gamble said her reactions to the Pfizer shot made her “leery” of getting a second dose — even her pharmacist recommended against it, she said.
“I spoke to the pharmacist about it, and I told him what had happened to me and about my muscles cramping up,” Gamble said. Her pharmacist recommended she see an immunologist before he would administer the second shot.
However, the doctor Gamble saw was far less sympathetic, she said:
“I didn’t have a family doctor, so I went down to the hospital thinking the receptionist or somebody would just book me an appointment with an immunologist.
“Instead, they put me in a waiting room. I saw a doctor and he told me right from the get-go he was not going to give me an exemption, he wasn’t going to give me an appointment with an immunologist. He told me to take an antihistamine and I would be fine.”
A combination of “nudging” from her doctor and Canada’s strict COVID-19-related restrictions led Gamble to go ahead with the second dose — especially after her doctor lectured her about “being a good citizen and not killing people,” she said.
“So, I felt guilted into it, and I knew I couldn’t leave Canada unless I was fully vaccinated.”
Gamble’s pharmacist was uncomfortable administering the second dose but proceeded on the doctor’s recommendation. Though Gamble didn’t develop a rash this time, she did experience fatigue and blurry vision again.
“I felt like, okay, I’m going to sleep this off. And once again, after about three days I started to feel a little bit better. But then I started dropping things all over the place. At first, I just kind of thought it was weird.
“But then I noticed my sense of perception was off. I’d go to open a door and where I thought the door was, my hand would be two inches away from the door. I started having brain zaps. I still tried to work, and so I was at work, and I tried to write a report and I could barely hold my pen. My hands were cramping up.”
Gamble also noticed slurred speech and changes in her ability to swallow food. “At that point, I decided obviously I can’t go to work. And I noticed muscles were starting to atrophy between my pinky finger and my ring finger.”
A neurologist at her local hospital, the London Health Sciences Centre in London, Ontario, “looked at my hands and said, ‘There’s something going on here.’” He admitted her for the night.
However, in the morning, another doctor dismissed her concerns, telling her she was ‘bending my arms too much.” She then made an appointment with a doctor she had seen during a previous adverse reaction to medication. But by that point, her condition had deteriorated further.
“I was losing the muscles rapidly,” Gamble said. “Within two months, I went from having normal-looking hands to completely skeleton-looking hands. The muscles in my arms started to atrophy, [and] in my feet behind my kneecaps. I could really feel it. My balance was off. My blood pressure was low.”
Trying to get a diagnosis ‘has been hell’
During one of several hospital visits, Gamble said doctors were particularly dishonest to her.
“One of the doctors said to me that some people are getting Guillain-Barré syndrome and he was going to check me for that. So, he gave me blood work.” But Gamble later learned that’s not even the right test for Guillain-Barré.
“They have to do it with a spinal tap,” she said. “I kind of feel like every doctor I saw had a reason to try to make up something different other than it was the vaccine.”
Gamble is still having trouble finding a doctor willing and able to treat her — and medication that will be effective and not cause further adverse reactions.
Meanwhile, she is dealing with multiple health-related challenges. “Just trying to get to the bottom of what is going on has been hell,” she said.
She has since found a family doctor who prescribed prednisone, but Gamble said she had a “horrible” reaction to it. “My hands turned blue, my tongue turned blue, I was getting brain zaps. I was passing out and my husband took me to the hospital.”
Doctors then told Gamble she had Raynaud’s disease, but “I don’t have that because [the symptoms were] on both sides of my hands and on my tongue,” she said.
She added:
“They sent me home like that. I tried to get help at one point, and I couldn’t get help. My husband, I guess I got a message out to him, but it was all gibberish. He came home thinking I’d had a stroke. He took me to the hospital; they did a CT scan, and everything came back normal. Apparently, my blood work comes back normal.”
Canada’s healthcare system, in conjunction with the country’s COVID-19-related restrictions, has made it challenging to even get treatment, Gamble said.
“I’m just trying to figure out what happened and am trying to get medical care,” Gamble said, “but I’m just hitting roadblocks everywhere. I figured maybe I could start physiotherapy, but in Canada you have to be 16 and under, or 65 and over, in order to qualify for free physiotherapy.”
Gamble said the pressure on doctors to look the other way when it comes to potential vaccine injury cases, and “a whole lot of doctor drama,” has been “frustrating.”
A neuromuscular doctor who previously worked at the London Health Sciences Centre confided in Gamble that she “got in trouble” with the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada for writing COVID-19 vaccination exemptions. “And so, her hands are tied, pretty much,” Gamble said.
Meanwhile, Gamble’s symptoms continue to evolve, and doctors continue to reject the possibility that the vaccines are to blame. Recently, her tongue started “turning white and swelling up” and her ears became “really itchy and scabby.”
“My doctor thought this must be an allergy, so I went and I saw an immunologist,” she said. “But as soon as I showed him my hands and said, ‘vaccine,’ he told me he wasn’t interested in that. He was only interested in things that put you in instant anaphylactic shock.”
Gamble asked for a second appointment, during which it was noted that her heart rate had dropped to between 44 and 52 beats per minute. Doctors suggested she was experiencing a reaction to the prednisone.
Gamble asked to be tested for an allergy to polyethylene glycol, or PEG, because it’s unusual to have a reaction to prednisone, she said.
However, the response she got from her doctor was similar to the “gaslighting” reported by others who experienced vaccine injuries.
“The second doctor tested me and I said to him, since I’ve had this vaccine, I’m not doing well with certain foods or medications,” said Gamble. “And I talked to him about the muscle wasting, and he looked at my hands and he said he didn’t see it, which is ridiculous because it’s so obvious.”
Instead, the doctor “kind of wondered if it was psychosomatic,” said Gamble. She responded with, “no, I’ve had the nerve conduction studies done. It’s proven that my muscles are wasting.”
Gamble also saw a spine surgeon “who said she believes it’s a back injury.”
But one doctor Gamble saw later — a rheumatologist — was willing to draw a connection between her injuries and her vaccination.
“[The] rheumatologist said, ‘I don’t know what the big issue is. This is a vaccine injury.’ And she wrote me a letter to show people that I can’t be boosted.”
‘You kind of lose everything, don’t you?’
Unfortunately, Gamble said, Canada’s COVID-19 regulations restrict the extent to which exemptions are recognized.
Gamble told The Defender :
“I still can’t get a legal exemption, which is kind of important in a way because in Canada you can be refused a job. So, if I get better and I’m hoping I can go find employment again, they have the right to tell me that they’re not going to hire me because I’m not up to date on my booster. Or even traveling to another country — it’s up to them if they’re going to let me in if I’m not up to date on all this stuff.
“This government doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge the neurological damage. They only — from what I was told — give you an exemption if it’s a PEG allergy or if you have myocarditis, but not for neurological damage.”
As a result, said Gamble, “I’m going in circles here.” She described being told by a doctor that she “just happen[s] to be one of the people who ‘fall through the cracks’” — an obstacle that has also prevented her from collecting employment insurance.
She said:
“I don’t qualify for anything in my own country. And they have a vaccination injury support program, but very few people are getting paid out from that. It has to be ‘severe’ and it has to be permanent, and I don’t know if they’re going to consider this ‘severe,’ but right now I can’t work because I have no muscles left in my hands.”
Gamble did get severance pay, she said, but everything else “has been denied, denied.”
“The government in Canada, they certainly aren’t doing anything for people who are injured by the vaccine,” Gamble said. “So, you kind of lose everything, don’t you? And then you’re put in this category that you never wanted to be a part of.”
Despite these challenges and obstacles, Gamble perseveres, even though she can’t work.
“There are things that I want to do,” she said. “I want to start exercising, but I’m even scared of that because you see these videos [of people who] died suddenly … a lot of people apparently have died while they’ve been playing sports. So that’s a little bit concerning for me, and just in general, just still not knowing what happened to me.”
Online support groups for vaccine-injured individuals ‘a godsend’
In contrast to her experience with most doctors and many friends, who dismissed her condition, Gamble praised the support she’s received from members of online support groups for vaccine-injured individuals.
“It’s been a godsend,” she said. “For the first seven or eight months, I’m on my couch and I’m feeling my muscles wasting and I’m struggling to walk. Anybody that I tried to talk to that didn’t have an injury, they assumed it had to be something else, because they’ve been told that these vaccines are ‘safe and effective.’”
But participation in online groups, such as the Vaccine Injury/Side Effects Support Group on Facebook, has allowed Gamble to interact with “decent” people who “don’t judge” and who have experienced similar symptoms and conditions as her.
“I have found a few women with the exact same injuries that I have,” she said. “It was nice to know that there are other people out there, that you’re not alone. We don’t all share the same symptoms, but we share a lot of similar symptoms, and so I can say, ‘so-and-so tried this, well I’m going to try it.’”
Gamble said she’s not sure the medical system will ever regain her trust. But she had some advice for others experiencing vaccine injuries.
“People need to realize if they get injured by this vaccine, probably medically they’re not going to get a lot of help or [doctors] are going to try to tell them it wasn’t the vaccine.”
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.
The War on Doctors and Patients
By Pierre Kory | Brownstone Institute | January 27, 2023
Whenever I republish my newspaper op-eds on this Substack, I tend to introduce them with some comments on “how I really feel,” instead of the more staid language and arguments used in those pieces. In this one, I essentially argued that the new Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government should be ground zero for investigating how the administration is using COVID-19 to wage war on doctors who won’t follow its orthodoxy.
Although I am not under the delusion that its actions will actually result in meaningful changes in public health policy, I felt I should provide some guidance to them in the support we doctors (and thus patients) really need. I highlighted some of the most harmful actions taken to silence and suppress physicians, which would have been absolutely unthinkable a few years ago but now are becoming the norm, what with Clownifornia’s new bill (which just got slapped with an injunction!) threatening doctors’ livelihoods if their speech does not support the dominant consensus, er, I mean “narrative.”
I am doing this while every week new data piles up showing the immense toxicity and lethality and negative effectiveness of the latest vaccines. Yet the Biden administration and its allies in media and medicine only push them harder, inventing batshit crazy narratives to explain their shortcomings. Imagine their gratitude learning about this Canadian physician’s discovery of a “stroke season!”
By now we all understand that these profoundly anti-scientific, unethical positions are driven by an unholy and terrifying alliance of government, the pharmaceutical industry, and media. The evidence is damning in how they have co-opted public health institutions to suppress dissent so they can continue raking in astronomical profits. The American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM), a nonprofit organization that certifies physicians’ medical licenses, is chief among the once-trusted institutions that has bent the knee.
Last year, the ABIM accused myself, Paul Marik, and Peter McCullough of spreading “misinformation” and threatened our ability to practice medicine, ignoring the ever-widening disconnect between the Biden administration’s statements and the reality on the ground.
A reality which literally amounts to a humanitarian catastrophe with young people dropping dead “unexpectedly” and the best analyses estimating over 500,00 having died directly from the vaccine in the US alone with further millions disabled. And we wonder why restaurants often cannot open or ski mountains can only run half their lifts on even the most bluebird of powder days (of course there are multiple factors leading to this reality, but the vaccine lethality is the only “never mentioned” one).
As an aside, although it is devastating to do so, I think that everyone should read Mark Crispin Miller’s Substack and his daily series entitled “In Memory of Those Who Died Suddenly.” He compiles and presents media reports of human deaths at a frequency and regularity that is difficult to behold (especially for an expert in sudden cardiac death, a subject I studied deeply during my years as an expert in therapeutic hypothermia in post-arrest patients, an event which was distinctly rare in active healthy people outdoors prior to the vaccination campaign).
I feel responsible to read/witness what he is presenting to the world. I am tired of dueling and conflicting medical papers and agency data, cherry-picked or manipulated to support the dominant delusion that these vaccines are benign. When you read Mark’s Substack, you are faced daily with reading about the untimely and sudden ends to the lives of real people, every day, around the world, amidst this terror of a global vaccination campaign.
They are dying “unexpectedly” at enormous rates and falling ill with cancer at enormous rates. He seems to be the only one who is presenting these data in such a human, highly personal way by compiling individual media stories of the sudden ending of human lives at ever younger ages with an unimaginable regularity. Unfortunately, as per the most visited English language media outlet in the world, doctors don’t know why yet and the vaccines are not even mentioned as a possibility in this clown article published in the Daily Mail.
Unrelenting reports of people in largely perfect health, out in society doing routine or pleasurable activities and then dropping dead or unconscious, often being captured on television studio sets, auditorium stages, subway platforms, street surveillance cameras, playgrounds, sporting events, athletic fields, and even broadcaster desks. To date, I am not aware of a single newspaper report (even from tiny local papers) which openly implicates the vaccine as even a possible cause let alone an almost certain one. An unimaginably dystopian nightmare all around us… while society seemingly carries on as normal.
Back to the ABIM: despite its status as a private organization with no statutory authority (insane right?), the ABIM has morphed into an “enforcement” arm of the government, wielding the ability to control certification and the livelihood of doctors, who are subject to career-ending threats for trying to alert the public to all the death and disability resulting from the vaccine campaign. Paul and I are fighting those charges tooth and nail. I am looking forward to soon sharing on this Substack the brilliant response we worked on with our assassin of an FLCCC lawyer, Alan Dumhof. I predict a clown world of a response and will share with you as soon as we get it.
Anyway, here is my Op-Ed:
Two years of one-party rule in Washington are over, and the new Republican House majority must now restore balance through vigorous oversight. The Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government is expected to focus on allegations of collusion between social media companies and the Biden administration.
But it should expand its focus to include the government’s use of COVID to wage war against doctors — which continues to this day.
The suppression of doctors’ freedom to advise and treat patients began early in the pandemic. Promising alternative courses of treatment, such as generic drugs like ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine, were shouted down by false news narratives.
Media companies took their cues from public health agencies, which exaggerated concerns over people using medicines to treat COVID in ways that were not intended and against medical advice. Positive clinical data was ignored.
The next major front in the war on doctors opened up with the vaccine rollout. President Joe Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci and other public officials promised these novel, rushed vaccines would prevent illness and even transmission.
Biden’s declaration that, “If you get vaccinated, you won’t get COVID” has now been exposed as a lie, but it’s crucial to understand how it came to this.
In the past, broad skepticism would have greeted plans to mass distribute a “safe and effective” vaccine that was developed and approved in just 12 months.
And society would have flatly rejected government mandates that pushed people to get vaccinated or risk losing their jobs and becoming social outcasts. Science and medicine, practiced correctly, should challenge the powers that be, not blindly follow them.
But in our ongoing ordeal, no skepticism has been allowed, no discussion, no options. Those who raised questions or suggested different approaches were smeared as “deniers” or even worse, “anti-vaxxers.”
Even as the public learned more about the virus’s actual threat, the vaccines’ disappointing performance, and the tragic reality of vaccine injuries which began occurring at an unprecedented scale, the political imperative from Biden and Fauci never wavered.
They continued to preach a single-minded focus on the experimental vaccines. More and more vaccine products were rushed through Emergency Use Authorizations from the Food and Drug Administration, resulting in astronomical profits for their manufacturers.
This unholy alliance of government, the pharmaceutical industry and media deprived the public of full and fair advice from the medical community. The American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM), a nonprofit organization that certifies physicians’ medical licenses, has issued letters to me and my colleagues threatening our ability to practice medicine.
They accused us of spreading “misinformation” — ignoring the huge disconnect between the government’s statements and the medical reality on the ground. Despite their status as a private organization with no statutory authority, the ABIM has morphed into the “enforcement” arm of the government, wielding the ability to control certification and the livelihood of doctors, who are subject to career-ending threats for veering from the government’s narrow and singular approach.
And this month, California’s new law empowering state agencies to disbar medical professionals who deviate from the party line has taken effect. Gov. Gavin Newsom recently called California the “True Freedom State.” The scores of its residents—and its doctors—fleeing for Florida and Texas know better.
A “one-size-fits-all” approach to vaccines, or to any other health issue, is almost never warranted. Here, proponents of vaccine (and of government and Big-Tech coercion and censorship) flatly refuse to consider patient factors, such as age, medical history, and overall health, to determine who needs what treatment.
By virtue of their professional training, doctors must advise patients on available treatments and known risks of any treatment or procedure. By threatening doctors who might provide information different than their preferred worldview, ABIM is disrupting the doctor-patient relationship.
When allowed to practice their craft freely, physicians can prevent societal disaster by focusing on individual patients, informed by clinical experience.
Groups like the ABIM, and public medical officials like Fauci, should support and encourage evidence-based debate and patient-centered care.
Instead, they have suppressed both that debate and treatment approach by persecuting its proponents. This campaign must be stopped, its origins and evolution must be thoroughly documented, and it must never be allowed to recur. Physician autonomy must be restored lest all patients suffer.
Oversight is a core congressional function, and it’s particularly important when the government is under divided party control.
The new Select Subcommittee has a long to-do list, but the people deserve a thorough accounting of the ongoing war on doctors.
Pierre Kory is a Pulmonary and Critical Care Specialist, Teacher/Researcher. He is also the President and Chief Medical Officer of the non-profit organization Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance whose mission is to develop the most effective, evidence/expertise-based COVID-19 treatment protocols.
Bill Gates — After Reaping Huge Profits Selling BioNTech Shares — Trashes Effectiveness of COVID Vaccines
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | January 27, 2023
Bill Gates, long recognized as one of the world’s foremost proponents of vaccines, raised some eyebrows at a recent talk in Australia when he admitted there are “problems” with current COVID-19 vaccines.
Speaking at Australia’s Lowy Institute as part of a talk entitled “Preparing for Global Challenges: In Conversation with Bill Gates,” the Microsoft founder made the following admission:
“We also need to fix the three problems of [COVID-19] vaccines. The current vaccines are not infection-blocking. They’re not broad, so when new variants come up you lose protection, and they have very short duration, particularly in the people who matter, which are old people.”
Such statements came as a surprise to some in light of Gates’ longstanding support of — and investments in — vaccine manufacturers and organizations promoting global vaccination. However, they were the latest in a string of developments in recent weeks that have increasingly called the COVID-19 vaccines, in particular, into question.
‘This is a grift’: Gates’ investments in mRNA vaccines reveal ‘conflict of interest’
Several analysts and commentators were critical of Gates — but not due to disagreement with the statements he made in Australia. Instead, they argued that he had previously heavily invested in mRNA vaccines at the same time he encouraged a global COVID-19 vaccination campaign and supported mandatory vaccination.
Speaking Jan. 25 on The Hill TV’s “Rising,” co-hosts Briahna Joy Gray and Robby Soave addressed Gates’ statements. Soave initially agreed at face value with Gates’ criticism of current mRNA vaccines, saying:
“He really nails it on the issues that we’re having: the short duration of protection, not a significant discernable impact on the transmission of cases … not a massive benefit for a lot of otherwise healthy and younger people.”
However, Soave — who on Jan. 19 revealed “Facebook files” indicating the CDC significantly influenced content moderation and censorship on the platform pertaining to COVID-19 vaccines — then pointed out Gates’ prior investments that contributed to the development of mRNA vaccine technology.
Soave said, “Bill Gates was a major proponent of mRNA technology … he was an investor in BioNTech, which developed the mRNA vaccine for Pfizer.”
“We were just doing some digging,” continued Soave, “[and] we saw that he sold a lot of those shares at … how much profit was that?”
“10x,” replied Gray. “He invested $55 million in BioNTech back in 2019 and it’s now worth north of $550 million. He sold some stock … at the end of last year, I believe it was, with the share price over $300, which represented a huge gain for him over when he invested.”
Soave then unleashed critical comments directed at Gates:
“Let’s follow that trajectory: [Gates] invests heavily in BioNTech, ‘mRNA vaccines are great, this is the future,’ he talks about the vaccine timeline and how we can develop it faster, ‘we might have to cut some corners on safety’ … All in … sells it … makes a huge amount of money … but now it’s ‘yeah, it’s okay, it could be better, but what we really need is this breath spray.’”
Soave was referring to a statement Gates made during his recent talk in Australia, immediately prior to his remarks regarding the mRNA vaccines, where he said:
“We think we can also have, very early in an epidemic, a thing that you can inhale that will mean that you can’t be infected, a blocker, an inhaled blocker.”
Gray raised the issue of conflicts of interest between individuals such as Gates who hold significant positions with drug and vaccine manufacturers, and the federal government’s spending of large sums of taxpayer money to purchase these products. She said:
“This is a grift. These companies are extracting money, taxpayer money as it were, to pay for medical treatments that are not indicated by medical professionals and are less useful than what we already have.
“At the same time, the Biden administration is opening its doors, revolving doors, to people from these various industries like Jeff Zients, who is the new chief of staff for Joe Biden … who has spent his entire career at the kinds of companies, investing in the kinds of companies, that have been overcharging the government for Medicare and Medicaid payments and exact kinds of overpayments. It is an enormous grift and one that is incredibly common.”
Zients was formerly the Biden administration’s “COVID czar” and publicly pushed for universal vaccination.
Soave then said that Gates’ statements, and the broader issue of conflicts of interest between drug and vaccine proponents and the federal government, give credence to the assertions long made by “anti-vaxxers and the like.” He said:
“For there not to be more interrogation of his conflict of interest here by the mainstream is deeply disturbing, and for people who have been skeptical of this aspect of Pfizer and the drug development around COVID and who have been shot down in the media as kooks, anti-vaxxers and the like, I frankly think that this issue of pharmaceutical corruption and people pushing various interventions, having an investment in profit, should have been an issue that the left was leading on.
“We have to be more transparent about the fact that people who are having input in what the government policy is going to be, what’s going to be required people, the Biden administration tried to require people to get this, shouldn’t it be known at least when there are hundreds of millions of dollars of financial interests at stake for the people advising this? And their tune changes as it follows the money!”
Investigative journalist Jordan Schachtel also had scathing remarks following Gates’ statements in Australia, writing on his blog:
“Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who served as one of the architects of Covid hysteria and had more of an impact than any other individual on the disastrous global pandemic policies, has finally acknowledged that the mRNA shots he’s been promoting for two years are nothing more than expired pharma junk.
“Translation: Gates admits that the shots are impossible to align with rapidly developing variants, they expire in lighting speed, and they don’t stop transmission. And they don’t work for the only at-risk portion of the population.”
Schachtel called this “an incredible reversal from the man who once advertised the shots as the cure to the coronavirus,” drawing upon Gates’ previous statement: “everyone who takes the vaccine is not just protecting themselves but reducing their transmission to other people and allowing society to get back to normal.”
In 2021, Gates described the mRNA vaccines as “magic,” saying they would be a “game changer” in the next five years.
Gates warns about ‘next pandemic,’ praises lockdowns, calls for more pandemic simulations
As reported by the Daily Mail Jan. 23, Gates’ talk in Australia was notable for some additional statements he made.
Gates “called for greater global cooperation using the COVID-19 pandemic as an example of how countries could improve on their response if they worked together,” arguing that “political leaders needed to set aside their differences and work together to prepare for the next virus.”
He also praised Australia’s strict lockdown policies, saying:
“Some of the things that stand out are that Australia and about seven other countries did population scale diagnostics early on and had quarantine policies.
“That meant you kept the level of infection low in that first year when there were no vaccines.”
Gates also called for more “pandemic simulations” to assist world leaders in dealing with “future pandemics.” He said:
“The one thing that still hangs in the balance is will we have the global capacity and at the regional and country levels that would mean that when an (infectious disease) threat comes up we act in such a way that it doesn’t go global.
“We need to be doing every five years a comprehensive exercise at both country and regional levels of pandemic preparedness and you need a global group that’s scoring everybody.”
As part of such preparedness, Gates called upon countries to have “standby tools,” including vaccines, in place for the next pandemic:
“So there’s a class that’s got measles in it, a class of flu, a class of coronavirus, and a fourth class, all of which we need to have standby tools, both antivirals and vaccines that can deal with those. It’s very doable. So on the tools front, we can be far more prepared.”
Schachtel noted that Gates was a sponsor of Event 201, a simulation conducted Oct. 18, 2019, which “predicted” a global coronavirus pandemic. One of the sponsors of Event 201 was the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF).
The BMGF is a partner of Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance and holds a seat on its board. In turn, Gavi closely collaborates with the ID2020 Alliance, a strong proponent of “vaccine passports,” as previously reported by The Defender. Microsoft and the BMGF are founding members of ID2020.
According to the same report by The Defender, the BMGF in September 2022 pledged $1.27 billion in support of “global health and development projects.”
And as previously reported by The Defender, the BMGF previously committed, in June 2020, $750 million toward the development of the AstraZeneca vaccine at Oxford University, and conditional funding of $150 million to the Serum Institute of India — the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer by number of doses produced and sold.
The Serum Institute also received a $4 million grant from the BMGF in October 2020 to support research and development as part of the COVID-19 response, while in August 2020, the Serum Institute, in partnership with the BMGF and Gavi, agreed to produce up to 100 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines for low- and middle-income countries.
In a posting on his official blog in December 2020, Gates wrote that his foundation “took on some of the financial risk” for the vaccine, so that if the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was not approved, the Serum Institute wouldn’t “have to take a full loss.”
Gates’ remarks latest in a string of negative press for COVID, mRNA vaccines
Gates’ remarks in Australia — and the attention they received from the press — represent the latest in a series of less-than-flattering media portrayals about COVID-19 and mRNA vaccines in recent weeks.
On Jan. 22, the Wall Street Journal published a highly critical editorial regarding the FDA’s non-disclosure of data pertaining to the efficacy of the COVID-19 bivalent boosters. Allysia Finley, a member of the newspaper’s editorial board, wrote:
“Federal agencies took the unprecedented step of ordering vaccine makers to produce them and recommending them without data supporting their safety or efficacy.”
She also accused vaccine makers of “deceptive advertising.”
On. Jan 13, during a live television appearance on the BBC, cardiologist Dr. Aseem Malhotra “truthbombed” the network when he made the “unprompted” suggestion that mRNA vaccines pose a cardiovascular risk.
An undercover video released by Project Veritas released Jan. 25 showed Jordon Trishton Walker, Pfizer’s director of research and development, strategic operations, admitting the pharmaceutical company is “exploring” mutating COVID-19 “ourselves” via “directed evolution,” to then “preemptively develop new vaccines” against them.
A follow-up video showed Walker assaulting Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe when confronted with the recording of his statements.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) on Thursday called for a Congressional investigation against vaccine manufacturers and the COVID-19 vaccine approval process, in response to the Project Veritas revelations.
“Federal health agencies have been captured by Big Pharma and grossly derelict in their duties throughout the pandemic,” said Johnson.
“It’s time for Congress to thoroughly investigate vaccine manufacturers and the entire COVID vaccine approval process,” he added.
And today, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) sent a letter to Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla in response to the Project Veritas videos, stating:
“I write in response to troubling reports on Pfizer’s intention to mutate the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID) virus through gain-of-function, or ‘directed evolution,’ as detailed by Pfizer Director of Research and Development, Jordan Walker.
“As has been proven time and time again, attempts to mutate a virus, particularly one as potent as COVID, are dangerous. If the claims detailed in the video are true, Pfizer has put its desire for profit over the concern of national and global health and must hold itself accountable.”
Statements made by cartoonist Scott Adams of “Dilbert” fame regarding the COVID-19 vaccines also garnered attention. In a video dated Jan. 22, Adams said, “The anti-vaxxers clearly won, you’re the winners!” due to their distrust of the government and corporations.
And Elon Musk, owner and CEO of Twitter, responding to separate comments made by Adams about the significant prevalence of COVID-19 vaccine-related adverse events, tweeted: “I had major side effects from my second booster shot. Felt like I was dying for several days. Hopefully, no permanent damage, but I dunno.”
Musk followed up with a second tweet, stating: “And my cousin, who is young & in peak health, had a serious case of myocarditis. Had to go to the hospital.”
Several comments from journalists tweeted in response to Musk’s statements anecdotally referred to increasing numbers of individuals experiencing such COVID-19 vaccine injuries.
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.
Who really killed RT France
The French establishment media took on the role of political commissars, making sure the outlet was not allowed to operate
By Matthieu Buge | RT | January 26, 2023
After a year of censorship, RT has now had to officially stop its activities in France. But would the French authorities have made this move without the influence of some prominent French journalists who put aside their ethics for the occasion?
From the very beginning, RT France had been a target of the French authorities and the mainstream media. In a notorious 2017 press conference, Emmanuel Macron, standing next to Vladimir Putin, said RT and Sputnik were “organs of influence and false propaganda.” At the time, RT France had already been working as an online media outlet for some years, and was merely criticized by other media for being financed by Moscow. But the accusations became more and more frequent and harsh as Macron took the lead of the country and RT France was about to launch its channel from studios in Boulogne-Billancourt, outside Paris. In 2018, the work of RT journalists during the Yellow Vest protests was the most exhaustive coverage by any media. This has been widely acknowledged, and the audience of the channel received a considerable boost. The Russian outsider annoyed the establishment media more and more when star television host Frédéric Taddeï started collaborating with RT and stated that it was the only channel that gave him carte blanche in an informational landscape where real debate had totally disappeared.
Although Taddeï is a very knowledgeable man, he forgot to underline that every outlet is in essence propaganda. The word comes from the Latin verb propagare (to spread) and was first used in the denomination of a Vatican department, the Propaganda Fide, dedicated to the propagation of the Catholic faith. Anything written or spoken for an audience is propaganda. Advertising is propaganda. Hollywood is the biggest propaganda machine in the world. Political rallies are propaganda. Even a good debate with friends at the bar is propaganda, as one tries to persuade others to agree with his views and understanding of the world. Taddeï’s show on RT France “Interdit d’interdire” (Forbidden to forbid) had this very open-minded spirit. Its name, though, was perhaps like a rabbit on a boat, a bearer of misfortune.
Four years later, on 27 February 2022, three days after the beginning of Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine, the non-elected president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, declared that RT and Sputnik were to be banned in the European Union. The attack on free speech was unprecedented. But in order to appease the worried journalist unions, the logic of this attack was such: RT France had its license revoked, but its reporters could keep working. RT France went on to appeal the ban to the European Court of Justice. On 27 July the court rejected the appeal, arguing that the ban did not infringe on free speech. Give an artist the right to paint, but not to exhibit his work. Give a baker the right to make bread, but not to sell it. They will then turn to the black market – in RT France’s case, the internet. Its team of remaining journalists kept working in difficult conditions and broadcasting on Odysee.
I personally know most of them and must say that their attitude, in such a context, has been remarkable. They are not tied to Russia. Some of them aren’t even interested in Russia – they simply wanted to tell the French public about French issues, an opportunity they weren’t given by other French-language media. They know that the world is complex and understand the origins of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. While their management struggled (and managed) to keep paying their salaries, they kept on working, in a state of utter uncertainty and job insecurity, knowing that it would be almost impossible to find new jobs as journalists in France. They are young French men and women who dedicated all these years to only one thing: giving French-speaking audiences another point of view. That was apparently too much for their colleagues in the mainstream media.
On 18 January 2023, “the General Directorate of the Treasury decided to freeze RT France’s bank accounts, making it impossible to continue our activity,” said the president of the channel, Xenia Fedorova. What’s interesting about this new development is that it wasn’t so much a push by the French authorities, who for a while have shown an indifference to the idea of free speech. The French authorities knew that RT France was still operating and did not care, believing it had lost its visibility anyway. The establishment media, however, were not going to just let it slide.
It was a sudden shootout. On 6 January, the major left-wing newspaper Libération published an article titled: “Forbidden RT France remains reachable and keeps on producing its Russian propaganda.” On the 14th, one of the country’s top newspapers, Le Monde, published an article on the issue: “The counterattack of pro-Russia media.” Both articles went on to show how RT was still operating, its journalists working, and their reports being broadcast and reachable through VPNs. Then came (for anyone who knows French affairs) the ultimate verdict. On the 16th, the influential journalist Patrick Cohen talked about this issue live on TV. He criticized people who gave interviews to RT France, including a French member of the European parliament who thinks the EU needs to engage in diplomacy and dialogue with Moscow. Commenting with sarcasm on these views, he added: “It is not surprising, but we are talking about a channel which is forbidden to operate.” As said previously, RT France was not forbidden to operate; it only lost its license. Moreover, Cohen was commenting on this issue in front of one of his guests, Nicolas Tenzer, one of the most prominent pro-US figures in France, who once declared that NATO never harassed anyone. Two days later, the Treasury made its move. Cohen is the journalist who in 2013 famously called some guests of Frédéric Taddeï’s talk show “sick-brains”. That was the beginning of the end for Taddeï in the mainstream media. Now, Cohen has again pronounced a ruling on who could and who could not talk. RT France had to share Taddeï’s fate.
Governments’ decisions and interests are one thing. The influence of journalists behaving like political commissars is another. Propaganda is one thing. Enforcing propaganda is another.
The Tragic Consequences of believing Anti-Science
The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | January 17, 2023
I try not to write about anyone who has died because if it was my family member I would not want to read any speculations about their death. However, in this case I feel that justice has not been given a chance and therefore it needs highlighting.
The tragic story begins on 10 May 2020. Stephanie Warriner, who had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) attended Toronto hospital because she was struggling to breath.
This is where the first piece of anti-science takes place. A population whipped up into a frenzy about Covid is on high-alert. They have been convinced that touching a parcel which hasn’t been quarantined for at least 72 hours, is likely to be riddled with the new virus and will cause them to die. Therefore, anyone with a cough is a walking weapon.
Due to Stephanie’s cough she was assumed to be COVID positive – anti-science mistake no.1. She was therefore placed in the Covid ward. Later, after testing it was found that she was in fact negative.
After a night in hospital, Stephanie left the Covid ward to go and get some food. Sitting in the hospital lobby she committed the terrible anti-science crime of wearing her mask around her neck.
Anti-science mistake no.2. People have been told that useless masks will stop people transmitting a virus. There’s no need to go into the science of it but let’s put it this way, an asbestos removal man doesn’t wear a loose piece of cloth to stop him getting lung cancer.
This was in 2020, before vaccines, so people couldn’t release their pent up fear by getting aggressive with the vaccine hesitant. Instead this pressure-release valve was opened up on the maskless.
At 6.38 a.m. a nurse and a security guard approach Stephanie and are seen talking to her. Another security guard and another member of staff are close behind. Remember Stephanie has her mask on her chin so is extremely dangerous, four people are required.
In the video, it seems like the nurse is angrily telling Stephanie something, to which Stephanie stands up, gently pushes the nurse and tries to walk off. The nurse then bundles her against a wall and the security guard assists.
At this point, the CCTV operator turns the camera away from the scene. Moments later, at 6:41, the video captures a motionless Stephanie being wheeled away from the scene by the pair that bundled her into the wall. Her feet drag along the floor showing that she is clearly unconscious.
As CBC News reports, much of this information has been subject to a publication ban until now. The reason being that the case has now been quashed and the Crown won’t appeal.
That’s despite the available video footage, two security staff who testified the accused placed weight on her upper body while she was held chest down, a forensic pathologist who testified Warriner would still be alive had she not been restrained that day — and revelations one of the guards admitted he falsely claimed Warriner threw the first punch.
Toronto criminal lawyer, Frank Addario, said “to see a judge decide to quash a case in this way is rare”. ”It’s not common for a judge to screen out a case before it’s set for trial… The system is set up so after a preliminary inquiry, the cases are generally sent on to trial because the bar to get a case sent on to trial is very low.”
There was no CCTV footage of the incident because the guard in charge of the camera “panicked” and “got really anxious”, so panned away.
The nurse claimed she took Warriner to the wall “as a last resort, after extensive efforts to verbally de-escalate an aggressive patient”. However, the nurse’s supervisor testified that he felt her actions were wrong.
Two eye witnesses said that 125-pound Stephanie was held down by her upper body despite training and policies warning not to. Both guards claimed this was because Stephanie repeatedly assaulted the nurse but during an internal investigation this turned out to be false. The guard said Stephanie punched the nurse’s face and was kicking but after being confronted with footage he sobbed “I’m sorry. I would have never said the things I said in there if I knew there was a video”. Got to love genuine remorse.
A coroner’s report would conclude Warriner died from a brain injury resulting from a lack of oxygen “due to restraint asphyxia following struggle and exertion,” with her underlying lung disease a possible factor.
Disgusting behaviour.
Tragically, Stephanie lost her life because of anti-science. Anti-science, together with fear, made people believe that the world would end if a piece of cloth was not worn on one’s face correctly. It also gave the power-hungry an excuse to target people who were just minding their own business.
And it seems anti-science is playing its part in the justice system as well. Whilst we don’t know all of the facts that made the Judge quash the case, the CBC article hints at this not being normal. The Judge even noted that “there is evidence that death could have been the culmination of the factors he [the forensic pathologist] described”.
Anti-science killed a lot of people over the last few years and this is just one, tragic and specific example of that.
Fortunately, with enough data analysis and push back, the anti-science was shown for what it truly was. Otherwise, tragic stories, such as Stephanie’s, would still be happening today (maybe they still are but hopefully to a lesser extent).
Judge calls California’s medical misinformation law “nonsense,” blocks it
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | January 25, 2023
A federal judge questioned the new California law that penalizes doctors for sharing COVID-19 “misinformation.”
The new law, which came into effect on January 1 this year, prohibits doctors from spreading what the state deems to be misinformation to patients, or risk being penalized for “unprofessional conduct,” which could result in their licenses being revoked.
Here’s a summary of the case so far if you’re not up to date.
The law has been challenged through separate lawsuits filed by two organizations and a group of doctors on the grounds of First Amendment violations. They filed a motion at the US District Court of Sacramento to hold the law until the cases are concluded.
In a hearing, Senior Judge William Shubb described the law’s definition of misinformation as “nonsense.”
We obtained a copy of the order for you here.
“Because AB 2098 [the misinformation law] implicates [plaintiff’s] First Amendment right to receive information, she has standing,” the court wrote.
“Vague statutes are particularly objectionable when they involve sensitive areas of First Amendment freedoms because they operate to inhibit the exercise of those freedoms,” the court added, referring to a 2001 case, California Teachers Association v. State Board of Education.
“When the challenged law implicates First Amendment rights, a facial challenge based on vagueness is appropriate.”
The court granted the plaintiffs a hearing to challenge the law and blocked the enforcement of the law until the case is decided.
The law defines misinformation as “false information that is contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus contrary to the standard of care.”
Shubb noted that “standard of care” is not a new principle, but argued, “contemporary scientific consensus” is.
According to Deputy Attorney General Kristin Liska, who is representing Gov. Gavin Newsom, a medical professional has to violate all three aspects of the definition of misinformation for punishment to be applicable; share misinformation, contradict scientific consensus, and go against the standard of care.
However, she refused to give examples of statements that would fit the definition, saying that it would depend on the circumstances. Shubb then asked how she expects medical professionals to know what would violate the law.
Supporting the vaccine injured and bereaved
Health Advisory & Recovery Team | January 25, 2023
On Saturday 21st January 2023, the vaccine injured and bereaved gathered with people who support them in marches across the UK organised by Truth be Told. The London march saw thousands of protestors who began at BBC broadcasting house before a silent memorial procession. White roses were then thrown over the railings into Downing Street. Speakers included Andrew Bridgen MP, many vaccine injured individuals and those who have been trying to help amplify their voices like Mark Sharman, former ITV and BSkyB executive, who funded and produced the film Safe and Effective a Second Opinion.
Those campaigning for better compensation without huge barriers and delays have found themselves in conflict with those who want to stop vaccination completely. It is in the interest of the former to downplay the numbers affected and the latter would benefit from a larger number. There is nothing to be gained by such conflict when both sides are trying to hold politicians to account and struggling to do so. While data is suppressed it is not possible to quantify the extent of harm but the extent can’t remain hidden forever. Whatever figure is finally put on it, it will be too high for an intervention that many of the injured did not need and which was oversold in terms of its ability to prevent infection. Whatever figure is reached, those who are injured deserve compensation and the companies who have profited do not deserve indemnity.
Unvaccinated German care home worker, accused of sparking a November 2021 outbreak that left three elderly women dead, faces criminal trial
eugyppius: a plague chronicle | January 18, 2023
From the Deutsche Presse-Agentur :
After a Corona outbreak that left three dead in a Hildesheim care home, a former employee will face trial in February…. She stands accused of one count of negligent homicide and two counts of negligent bodily injury, as well as forgery. The 45-year-old allegedly faked double vaccination against Corona by presenting a fake vaccine certificate …
Despite the infection of her son, the woman was at first allowed to continue working in late November 2021. … She is alleged to have been infected without noticing, and initially transmitted the virus to a colleague during a coffee break. Thus, a “chain of infection is alleged to have been set in motion.” Three female residents aged 80, 85 and 93 died in the outbreak.
According to the indictment, forensic medical examination revealed that Corona was the cause of death in the case of the 80-year-old. Other causes could not be ruled out for the other two victims … The woman has admitted to falsifying her vaccine certificate, but denies responsibility for the outbreak.
There were three other infections among home staff, and 11 among residents … Because the woman was known to oppose vaccination, her employer obtained information about the the date and batch numbers [listed on her certificate]. These … made it clear it was a forgery.
I’ve followed this case for a while, but I’ve avoided writing about it, because it just makes me depressed.
There’s the little things that irritate me, like the contact-tracing hocus-pocus and the ridiculous assumption that moments of transmission can be located as precisely as a coffee break. Or the awkward fact, that of the three Covid deaths this incident achieved for our un-unpluggable mortality ticker, medical examiners could assign only one to the virus with any confidence. The main thing, though, is just the incredible injustice of blaming fellow humans for infections with pervasive seasonal respiratory pathogens. This poor woman only faked vaccination to keep her job, and the outbreak at her home occurred well after the myth of vaccine efficacy against infection had collapsed. There’s just no reason to bring charges here.
If anything killed those old women, it was the care home and their decision to keep employees with positive close contacts at work. They almost certainly had no choice: These places suffer chronic staffing shortages, vastly exacerbated by pandemic-era mismanagement. And indeed, why should anyone work in a care home now? The pay is poor, you endure unusual levels of harassment over personal medical choices, and you can even face prosecution for passing on viruses your kids pick up at school.
Davos’ Damndest Delusion: FBI As Good Guys?
By Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute | January 24, 2023
You can judge an audience by how much bullshit they accept from the podium. By that standard, the World Economic Forum attendees in Davos, Switzerland last week were either depraved or craven. Why else would FBI chief Christopher Wray not get hooted down for portraying his agency as “good guys?”
Why was the FBI boss even making an appearance at a conference chockful of political weasels, billionaires, and depraved activists like former Vice President Al Gore? Actually, Wray was part of a panel on national security that included luminaries such as Ukrainian Vice-Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko, who could have offered insights from her government’s perpetual failed war against pervasive corruption. Wray boasted that “the level of collaboration between the private sector and the government, especially the FBI has, I think, made significant strides.”
A month before Wray’s appearance, Americans learned that “collaboration” meant the FBI massively censoring Twitter in recent years. As journalist Matt Taibbi revealed, “As the election approached in 2020, the FBI overwhelmed Twitter with requests, sending spreadsheets with hundreds of accounts.” The official browbeating continued until very recently. In an internal email from November 5, 2022, the FBI’s National Election Command Post sent the FBI San Francisco field office (which dealt directly with Twitter) “a long list of accounts that ‘may warrant additional action’” — i.e., suppression. The FBI pressured Twitter to torpedo parody accounts that only idiots or federal agents would not recognize as humor. Taibbi wrote, “The master-canine quality of the FBI’s relationship to Twitter comes through in this November 2022 email, in which ‘FBI San Francisco is notifying you’ it wants action on four accounts.”
The FBI condemned the TwitterFiles as “conspiracy theorists… feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.” But Taibbi and his colleagues didn’t fabricate the emails the FBI sent to Twitter.
On that Davos panel last week, Wray dramatically placed both hands on his chest and declared, “The good guys are constrained by the rule of law and international norms. The bad guys aren’t.” But that self-evident truth is tricky to reconcile with the history of FBI surveillance crime sprees.
In October 2001, the Patriot Act gave the FBI a green light to cannibalize the nation’s email with its Carnivore email wiretapping system. Carnivore was contained in a black box that the FBI compelled Internet service providers to attach to their operating system. Though Carnivore might be authorized for a single person, Carnivore could automatically impound the email of all the customers using that service. The ACLU’s Barry Steinhardt observed, “Carnivore is roughly equivalent to a wiretap capable of accessing the contents of the conversations of all of the phone company’s customers, with the ‘assurance’ that the FBI will record only conversations of the specified target.”
The Patriot Act authorized life sentences in prison for computer hackers who maliciously spread viruses but federal agents were exempt from the law. The FBI created a special program to send emails to individuals to infect their computers with malware that enabled keystroke monitoring and automatic detection of all passwords. Norton, McAfee, and other computer security firms secretly agreed to leave a backdoor for the FBI to exploit with no warning to computer users. James Dempsey of the Center for Democracy and Technology observed, “In order for the government to seize your diary or read your letters, they have to knock on your door with a search warrant. But [FBI malware] would allow them to seize these without notice.” The FBI also developed malware permitting it to covertly turn on a computer’s camcorder “without triggering the light that lets users know it is recording,” as The Washington Post reported in 2013.
The Patriot Act made it far easier for FBI agents to snatch personal data via National Security Letters (NSLs). These subpoenas compel individuals, businesses, and other institutions to surrender confidential or proprietary information that the FBI claims is related to a national security investigation. NSLs enable the FBI to seize records that reveal “where a person makes and spends money, with whom he lives and lived before, how much he gambles, what he buys online, what he pawns and borrows, where he travels, how he invests, what he searches for and reads on the Web, and who telephones or e-mails him at home and at work,” The Washington Post noted in 2005.
The number of NSLs increased by a hundredfold after 9/11. There is no judicial oversight of this power, and each FBI field office is entitled to dictate its own NSLs. Almost every NSL was accompanied by a gag order: Anyone who discloses that their data had been raided by the FBI could be sent to prison for five years.
By 2006, the FBI was issuing 50,000 NSLs a year. A single NSL can lasso thousands of people’s records, including all the clients of public libraries or book store customers. In 2007, an Inspector General report revealed that more than 10,000 NSLs may have violated federal law. Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin (D-IL), declared that the IG report “confirms the American people’s worst fears about the Patriot Act.” Rather than arresting FBI agents who brazenly broke the law, FBI chief Robert Mueller created a new FBI Office of Integrity and Compliance.
But the FBI was just getting warmed up. In 1978, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to outlaw political spying (such as the FBI had committed) on American citizens. FISA created a secret court to oversee federal surveillance of suspected foreign agents within the U.S., permitting a much more lenient standard for wiretaps than the Constitution permitted for American citizens.
FISA warrants authorize the FBI to “conduct, simultaneous telephone, microphone, cell phone, e-mail and computer surveillance of the U.S. person target’s home, workplace and vehicles. Similar breadth is accorded the FBI in physical searches of the target’s residence, office, vehicles, computer, safe deposit box and U.S. mails,” a court decision noted. People surveilled under FISA orders rarely learn the feds have been intruding unless they are arrested as a result. And the FISA court rubberstamps 99.9% of all FBI search warrant requests.
The FISA court “created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans,” The New York Times reported in 2013 after Edward Snowden leaked court decisions. The court rubber-stamped FBI requests that bizarrely claimed that the telephone records of all Americans were “relevant” to a terrorism investigation under the Patriot Act, thereby enabling N.S.A. data seizures later denounced by a federal judge as “almost Orwellian.” In 2017, a FISA court decision included a 10-page litany of FBI violations, which “ranged from illegally sharing raw intelligence with unauthorized third parties to accessing intercepted attorney-client privileged communications without proper oversight.”
After the 2016 election, FBI officials devoted themselves to crippling Trump’s presidency with fabricated evidence on Russia collusion. Kevin Clinesmith, a top FBI lawyer, was convicted for falsifying evidence to secure a FISA warrant to unjustifiably target Trump campaign officials. A 2019 Inspector General report concluded that FBI officials made 17 “significant inaccuracies and omissions” in its application to the FISA court to spy on former Trump advisor Carter Page. The FBI withheld details from the court that would have crippled the credibility of the warrant request.
In 2021, a FISA court report revealed that the FBI has conducted warrantless searches of a massive data trove compiled by the National Security Agency for “public corruption and bribery,” “health care fraud,” and other targets — including people who notified the FBI of crimes and even repairmen entering FBI offices. Even people who volunteered for the FBI “Citizens Academy” program were illegally tracked by the FBI. In 2019, an FBI agent conducted an unjustified database search “using the identifiers of about 16,000 people, even though only seven of them had connections to an investigation,” The New York Times reported. In 2021, the FBI carried out more than 3 million warrantless searches on U.S. persons, according to data revealed in early 2022.
Maybe FBI boss Wray believes that the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable warrantless searches doesn’t apply to “good guys.” The audience in Switzerland might have cheered him for making that assertion. Has the World Economic Forum ever seen a government surveillance scheme that it didn’t like?
Instead of swallowing Wray’s piffle, Americans should heed former FBI chief James Comey. In 2015, Comey told a congressional committee: “You should not trust me…because you cannot trust people with power.” President Trump followed that advice and fired Comey two years later. But Comey’s point remains a better lodestar for judging the FBI than the hokum currently prevailing in the mainstream media, on Capitol Hill, or at scheming Swiss confabs.
Jim Bovard is the author of Public Policy Hooligan (2012), Attention Deficit Democracy (2006), Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (1994), and 7 other books. He is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors and has also written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Washington Post, and other publications. His articles have been publicly denounced by the chief of the FBI, the Postmaster General, the Secretary of HUD, and the heads of the DEA, FEMA, and EEOC and numerous federal agencies.
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From the Archives
Politicians lie
By Mazin Qumsiyeh | Popular Resistance | August 18, 2013
There is no way to say this truth nicely: Politicians lie. That includes Japanese, American, Egyptian, Israeli, and Palestinian politicians! Is there something more common sense than that? Yet, so many citizens around the world believe their own politicians or wistfully acknowledge lies but think it is part of the job needed to run things. They believe even when politicians contradict themselves blatantly. This phenomenon is rather remarkable. It is a dissonance and disconnect from reality that many seem oblivious to. It is very dangerous because it can lead to accepting rationales for going to war. These can be deadly wars that lead to millions of lives lost as happened in what was called World War 1 and WW2. Even when incredible and declassified evidence abound, politicians continue to lie and old mythologies refuse to die. Here are just a few of the countless lies told to us over the past few decades… continue
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- Trump betrayed voters with his campaign lies and prioritized a foreign country once he took office
- Netanyahu calls Israel’s war in Gaza ‘opposite of genocide’ in UN speech to near-empty hall
- Settler Kidnappings: Torture, Sexual Abuse and Terrorisation of Palestinian Abductees as Israel Deepens Annexation of West Bank
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- Israel’s US-Backed Assault on Gaza Has Created the ‘World’s Most Severe Economic Crisis on Record’: UN
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- In UN Speech, Iran’s President Displays Pictures of Children Killed by US, Brings Attention to Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal
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- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
- Economic Masterminds: German Socialists Suggest Taxing Productivity Gains Stemming From Using AI
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- Energy Crisis: Germany Enters Heating Season With Historically Low Gas Reserve Fill Levels
- New Study: The Antarctic Ice Sheet Gained Mass From 2020-2024 Due To Staggering Snow And Ice Accumulation
- Study: Ocean Heating Rates From Thousands Of Years Ago ‘Dwarf’ Modern Ocean Heating Rates
- Climate Extremists Target, Attack Large-Scale Power Grid Infrastructure In Germany!
- New Study: Antarctic Ice Melt Has Contributed Less Than 1 Centimeter To Sea Level Rise In The Last 30 Years
