In 2016, former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Louis Freeh gave $100,000 to a private trust for Joe Biden’s grandchildren and met with the then-US vice president in a bid to pursue “some very good and profitable matters” with him, the New York Post reports, referring to newly surfaced emails.
In October 2020, the newspaper published an article containing several emails allegedly retrieved from Hunter Biden’s laptop claiming that he had arranged meetings with foreign officials for his father when the latter served in the Obama administration.
The “donation” mentioned in the emails reported by the NY Post on Thursday, was sent to a trust for the children of Hallie Biden, the widow of Joe’s late son Beau, who later became Hunter’s lover.
The Daily Mail on Thursday referred to an email marked “confidential and privileged”, in which Freeh wrote to Hunter that he “would be delighted to do future work with” Biden’s son.
“I also spoke to Dad [Joe Biden] a few weeks ago and would like to explore with him some future work options. I believe that working together on these (and other legal) matters would be of value, fun, and rewarding”, the July 2016 email reportedly read.
The ex-FBI boss floated the idea again a month later, ostensibly saying he was working for then-Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, who was at the time embroiled in a scandal over one of the world’s biggest financial frauds, and was sentenced to 12 years in prison in 2020.
“I would like to talk with you and Dad about working together next year. No doubt both he and you have many options and probably some which are more attractive than my small shop”, Freeh purportedly wrote in August 2016, in an apparent nod to his consultancy firm.
The Daily Mail reported that the correspondence raises the question about whether Joe Biden was “discussing future private business deals while still in office” with Freeh, who was allegedly collaborating with “three men who were later found to be corrupt foreign criminals”. Apart from Razak, they include French-Israeli billionaire Beny Steinmetz and Romanian real estate tycoon Gabriel Popoviciu.
When publishing Hunter Biden’s alleged emails in mid-October 2020, the New York Post claimed that in one of the documents, Vadym Pozharskyi, then a top official at the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, thanked the president’s son for organising a meeting with his father, while in a second email, Pozharskyi asked Hunter how he could use his influence to support Burisma.
Former US President Donald Trump has repeatedly slammed the media for not covering the alleged corrupt dealings of Hunter Biden in Ukraine, since the story about possible misconduct on the latter’s part was mainly ignored by the mainstream media, apart from Fox News, and temporarily blocked from sharing on Twitter.
This is only a partial picture of the long reach of Bill Gates into our scientific institutions. On Monday I focused on three GF-funded universities which have informed Sage on doomsday Covid-19 modelling: Imperial College London (ICL), Warwick University and the London School of Tropical Hygiene and Medicine (LSHTM). There are many more academic universities and centres which have taken the GF dollar, including those involved in the research and manufacture of vaccines, who between them set parameters of approved research and gave their research leads significant clout.
They are thus able ‘to ignore or cherry pick science and indulge in anti-competitive practices that favour their own products and those of friends and associates’, as the executive editor of the BMJ Kamran Abbasi explained it recently. This toxic combination of scientific bias by commission and omission, exacerbated by GF funding, has led to the shutting down of science debate, to active censorship and even to dissemination of scientific untruths, as has been reported elsewhere in TCW pages.
Many scientists and academics have been worryingly silent about the government’s anti-science response to Covid-19. The few who have spoken out have been scorned and smeared by Sage and their nodding dogs, the MSM. Can this culture of silence can be traced back to the extensive GF funding of British universities?
Let’s take Britain’s pre-eminent universities, Oxford and Cambridge, first.
The GF’s funding of Oxford University goes back 21 years, to a first $4.7million grant for malaria and global health research in 2000. Its giving has risen exponentially since then. In 2019, the GF gave Oxford $40million, including $9.6million for vaccine development. In 2020 it gave $10.8million, including $310,970 to improve understanding of Covid-19. To date this year, Oxford has received $152,553 from the GF.
Oxford University is the site of the Covid-19 Recovery trial (Randomised Evaluation of COVid-19 thERapY), promoted as the world’s largest randomised clinical trial. The trial’s chief investigator, Professor Peter Horby, is a key member of Sage and Nervtag.
The Recovery trial is funded by the Wellcome Trust, the GF, the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and the ‘Covid-19 Therapeutics Accelerator’, the latter being a collaboration between the GF, Wellcome Trust and MasterCard. In March 2020, Oxford University was one of three institutions to share $20million from the GF via its Covid-19 Therapeutics Accelerator.
The deputy investigator of the Recovery trial, Professor Martin Landray, has further links to the GF. He is a Lead at the UK Biobank, which is partnered with the Wellcome Trust and also a Lead of the NIHR (National Institute for Health Research) Oxford Biomedical Research Centre at Oxford University.
The NIHR Centre is funded as well by the Covid-19 Therapeutics Accelerator, as noted above itself a collaboration between the GF, Wellcome Trust and MasterCard.
In March 2020, the Wellcome Trust gave £7.5million via the Covid-19 Therapeutics Accelerator to see if hydroxychloroquineand chloroquine ‘can prevent the spread of Covid-19’ (not treat it, strangely). During the same year the Covid-19 Therapeutics Accelerator also gave $9.5million to the University of Washington to study the effects of hydroxychloroquine on Covid-19.
Professor Horby has sold the Recovery Trial as a success story, but other scientists have disputed this. Last June, hard on the heels of the retraction by the Lancet of its now-notorious paper purporting to show that hydroxychloroquine not only did not help Covid-19 patients, but actually made them worse, came news of the termination of the hydroxychloroquine ‘arm’ of the UK’s Recovery clinical trials.
But the trial design had already been savaged within days of launch; it was never likely to help very sick late-stage Covid-19 patients and what Professor Landray found himself struggling to explain in an interview were ‘the very heavy doses of the drug that were given – 2400 mg in the first 24 hours, a ‘dose fit for a gorilla’ as one critic had it.
Needless to say Professors Horby and Landray glossed over the inadequacies of this particular trial and quickly dismissed the use of hydroxychloroquine, vowing to concentrate on ‘more promising drugs’. And the possibility of a cheap and easy early treatment for Covid-19, from re-purposed generic drugs, especially hydroxychloroquine to prevent hospitalisation, was trashed.
Probing alleged conflicts of interest, France Soir noted the co-authorship of Professor Horby on papers reporting trials of Gilead’s remdesivir (there was no benefit in mortality), an agreement between his department and AstraZeneca for development of Oxford’s vaccine candidate, and generous funding from the GF. Curiously, there is a connection too between Professor Landray’s interests in Big Data and Gilead, a pharmaceutical company which was in merger talks with AstraZeneca last year. Vaccines are profitable, hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine are not. No wonder the GF invests so heavily in the organisations which research, fund and manufacture vaccines, rather than pursuing investment in better constructed early treatment trials.
A further cluster of Sage members, Professors Dame Angela McLean, Michael Parker, Gideon Henderson, Charlotte Deane and Dr Laura Merson, all work at Oxford University.
Cambridge University’s GF’s funding started with an initial grant of $8.1million for agricultural development in 2012. The GF awarded a grant of $998,891 in 2019 to fund research into pneumonia, and $420,000 in 2020 for global education.
More significantly, Cambridge is the site of the Cambridge Science Park, another GF-funded venture. In May 2020, GF and Google Ventures gave $45million to Cerevance, a pharmaceutical company based at Cambridge Science Park.
The Wellcome Trust is also involved in scientific research at Cambridge. Together with the Medical Research Council Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, it awarded the Cambridge-based Institute of Metabolic Science £24million in 2013. Professor Julia Gog of Sage is employed at Cambridge University, as are Nervtag member Professor Ravindra Gupta and Independent Sage member Dr Tolullah Oni.
Professor Daniela DeAngelis and Dr Joshua Blake, members of SP-I-M, also work at Cambridge University.
The GF has also funded University College London (UCL), giving its first $25.2million in 2006 for HIV research. UCL was granted a total of $10.8million in 2019 and $484,000 in 2020, including $144,000 to research vaccines last March. The GF has committed funding from 2020-2023 to study postpartum haemorrhage. UCL also collaborates with the GF and the Wellcome Trust on a research project called Global Health.
Sage members Professors Dame Anne Johnson, Andrew Hayward and Alan Penn work at UCL.
Professor Susan Michie is the Director of the Centre for Behaviour Change at UCL and sits on both Sage and Independent Sage. Her fellow Independent Sage members Professors Anthony Costello, Christina Pagel, Deenan Pillay, Ann Phoenix and Robert West all work at UCL in some capacity.
Other less prominent academic institutions, such as the University of Southampton, are also beneficiaries of the GF’s vast financing. In 2009, Southampton received $100,000 for scientific research from the GF, and was also given specific grants of $335,800 in 2014, $3.6million in 2015 and $476,214 in 2020 for vaccine research. Sage member, Professor Guy Poppy, is employed at this university, as is Professor Lucy Yardley, a member of both Sage and SP-I-MO.
The UWE Bristol also has connections with the GF, the latter funding its climate change project called Robial. Peter Case, a UWE Bristol Law Professor, wrote a report on malaria for the GF. Sage member, Professor Jonathan Benger, is employed at the UWE Bristol.
It seems that no corner of British industry lies untouched by the long reach of the GF. As my research shows, it certainly seems to be the largest funder of British science, giving Gates influence and control exceeding all others, with an ownership of scientists and scientific research as a critical dimension of his global control agenda.
The level of dominance which Gates holds over British science companies, institutions and universities is more than concerning.
Could the combined anti-science and harmful responses to Covid-19 by members of Sage, Independent Sage and Nervtag have anything to do with their multitude of connections to the GF? This is certainly jackpot time for these GF-funded scientists and academics, some of whom are having their moment in the sun pontificating on television to the supine masses. Fame is an addictive drug.
Science and scientists that question the new groupthink or fall outside the parameters of the GF approved research have little chance. Neither do we while Bill Gates remains omnipotent.
We have written about this topic of no COVID-19 vaccination for children several times, raising our strong objections against vaccinating America’s children with the current COVID-19 vaccines, and our work was previously published in the American Institute of Economic Research (references 1, 2). Our core thesis for this op-ed offering encompasses a resounding “NO” against vaccination of children for COVID-19. There is zero science to support this, and there is potential serious harm. It is as simple as that. The benefits do not outweigh the harms, and the CDC and Dr. Fauci, and all who are pushing vaccinating our children with this set of COVID-19 vaccines are being very reckless, unscientific, specious, and dangerous with regard to our children. We call on them to reverse course. We argue that it is very dangerous and reckless to push to vaccinate low-risk children with untested vaccines for safety that could leave children with decades of severe disability if something goes wrong.
We make our argument now and we make it based on ‘No liability incurred by the CDC, NIH, FDA, and vaccine developers translates into no trust by parents’. Parents want to trust what is being done in this regard but how could they at this time when there is no basis for the vaccine? We ask the CDC in general, NIH, FDA, Dr. Fauci, the CDC’s new Director Walensky, and vaccine developers, to show us the evidence, show us and the public the data they are looking at, the science they are looking at, to warrant vaccinating our children. We can see none, we found none. If such exists, we certainly want to see it, if they would like to share it. These so-called ‘medical experts’ make statements and take positions often with no evidence or science to support what they are saying. In this case, we say no more. We want to see the evidence before we vaccinate our children.
Mask Mandate for Children
Firstly, let me/us be as clear as we can. All face masks must be removed from all children immediately unless you are a high-risk child and this is needed. Other than that, all other children, in the US, in Canada, Britain, France etc., all, must immediately rip up the masks and go on with life freely. Throw them away, they are not needed for our children. Nor is social distancing and definitely not in school. It is ridiculous. The CDC and the television medical experts, these talking head senseless and highly illogical people in these Task Forces like Fauci and Birx, have become (and became) contemptible with the drivel they spewed at the public 24/7 about these masks that are ineffective (they do not work and never worked, they just cannot as used) and very harmful. These experts in the CDC, NIH, FDA etc. costed jobs, businesses, and even lives with their corrupted pandemic response—denying early treatment when it existed. Especially the lives of our African-American and minority young people and children who could have least afforded the specious, unscientific, and unsound lockdown edicts.
Many good people and children lost their lives in desperation due to the crushing harms and devastation from the lockdowns and school closures that continue even today due to the CDC and the AFT teachers’ union collusion. Our statements on masks pertain to adults too but our focus here is on our children today, and urgently. These CDC, NIH, and similar agency and medical experts and advisors are all clueless, disgraceful, hysterical, illogical, irrational, specious, and patently absurd. Pure nonsense has been showcased with these masks mandates that they know do not work. After 20 minutes, they are garbage with the moisture they accrue. These CDC and NIH etc. experts reveal a depth of academic sloppiness and cognitive dissonance to any real science or anything that does not line up with their twisted unsound politicized narratives.
We always knew this. They the CDC, have never followed the science on masks as the science says it is junk and useless but do not tell “CDC 365” this (as described below). The surgical and cloth masks are and were all junk. We knew the science, reported it repeatedly, and spoke to it. How insane are these CDC experts? How embarrassing that they are the marque agency, and I am hoping the CDC can return to its former days of glory for at present, it is a non-scientific, pseudoscientific clubhouse for inept political representatives. The CDC does not do science, it does politics. The CDC is like the furniture store where with payment options, you do not pay for one year; you may think you are buying furniture, but they are really selling you ‘money’. You may think you are reading a scientific report from CDC when in fact, it is a political report.
Questions for Our Leaders
We open this op-ed with seven urgent questions for Dr. Fauci, Dr. Walensky (CDC’s Director), the NIH’s Dr. Collins, and the FDA, as well as the vaccine developers:
1) Would Dr. Fauci and Dr. Walensky as well as Dr. Collins of the NIH sign paperwork placing liability on themselves (their agencies) should any child be harmed or die from these vaccines?
2) Since the risk of Covid-19 infection is less than 1% and the Pfizer vaccine reduces the risk of infection by only 0.7% (absolute risk reduction), why are we vaccinating children with a non-FDA approved vaccine that is currently on EUA when their survival rate from Covid-19 is 99.997% according to the CDC? Near zero risk of severe illness or death. So, what is the benefit?
3) We have not seen any clinical trial data for children 12-15? Can we see it, can the public see it? What is the Absolute Risk Reduction measure, NOT the relative risk reduction?
4). How can the vaccine recipients (children) legally provide Informed Consent? Informed consent is not just ‘hey you, roll up your sleeves’…
5.) How do you plan to inform vaccine recipients about the Antibody-Dependent Enhancement risk (ADE) and similar risks, for if not properly informed of these “non-theoretical and ‘real’ compelling” risks, it violates medical ethics standards?
6.) Since studies show that those who have recovered from Covid-19 are at a greater risk of a severe vaccine reaction if they took the vaccine, do you plan to conduct antibody testing first of our children, to see if they have already been infected with Covid-19?
7). Are you aware that the vaccines cannot prevent infection or stop the spread according to Pfizer’s clinical trial data, and Topol/Doshi (New York Times )… it is and was only set up for mild COVID… nothing else… no transmission, no infection, no severe illness, no hospitalization, no death… so if children can get immunity harmlessly and naturally, and are at such low risk of spreading it or getting ill or dying, what is the benefit? It cannot be to drive herd immunity numbers for if you consider cross protection from common cold coronavirus and immunity from prior COVID infection that is cleared, then you do not need children for this… so why place our children at such unnecessary risk?
If our children are to take a vaccine that is not needed based on their risk (a child’s) of becoming infected and spreading the infection or becoming severely ill (and this is clear, stable global science), and a vaccine with questionable efficacy and very real potential harms based on emerging CDC VAERS adverse reporting database reports and anecdotal reports, then the CDC, NIH, FDA, and vaccine developers must take on the risk and consequent liability if our children are harmed.
Must be Held Accountable
We are vehement, that if any child dies or is harmed by these vaccines, then the CDC, NIH, FDA, Dr. Fauci, etc. must be held accountable. The CDC, NIH, FDA, and vaccine developers must be willing to immediately take on the risk if they stand by these vaccines for this is the safety of our children we are talking about. They must be willing to be accountable and put skin in the game. This is a very different situation than that for adults. No liability by the CDC, NIH, FDA, and vaccine developers equals no trust from parents and the public when it comes to our children. As a risk management question, we see no benefit from this vaccine and only potential downsides.
We consider vaccinating children for COVID-19 as dangerous and reckless, as reckless as the recent administering of this set of vaccines that lacks proper safety data, in pregnant women as per CDC’s guidance. We have read the enabling study and it raises many questions particularly the key one being the optimal time duration of study conduct was not done. How do you assess harms for a drug or medical device or vaccine when you are running studies for roughly 4 months? How? It is not possible. Safety signals (especially rare) cannot emerge during this time nor the optimal sample size for study (or event numbers). Where is the correct comparative group to assess the impact of vaccination on pregnant, vaccinated, positive women? Moreover, the initial decision for EUA for the vaccines was based on very small event numbers e.g. one key study had 170 events (162 placeboes and 8 in the intervention arm). This is incredible that such small event numbers enabled EUA for vaccinating hundreds of millions/billions of persons.
Many Questions Raised, With Little Answers
The vaccine trials have raised many methodological questions and we are concerned given the reports of over 3,000participants’ data being omitted in one study as they were ‘suspected’ but not ‘confirmed’ positive. We find this incredible especially how there is no full accounting by the vaccine developers of why this was done, and when we back calculate and do our own crude modeling, we find the efficacy declines from the reported 95% to 19-20%.
But here is the core issue as we look at the risk for children and this obsession by Fauci and Walensky to vaccinate our children:
i) children do not acquire it readily e.g. studies show less ACE 2 receptors in nasal epithelia
ii) children do not readily spread infection to other children
iii) children do not spread it readily to adults, it is the other way around
iv) children do not readily take it home; arises mainly from home clusters and the adults there
v) children do not become severely ill
vi) children do not die from it
vii) MISC is very rare, very treatable, and almost all leave the hospital… could it be that masking and locking kids down have driven MISC? how come nations with no lockdowns do not report MISC? or strong children masking?
So, given all of this, what is the benefit of vaccinating kids? It cannot be that kids are needed to drive herd immunity threshold for it can only be that, if you disregard cross protection that exists from prior common cold coronavirus, and also that there is existing immunity from persons who had COVID infection and cleared it. So, once you include those portions in the math, there is no need for children to achieve herd immunity, that’s a bogus reason, Dr. Fauci.
Children & the Risk of Spreading Infection
Let us for a moment, look at the issue of masking of our children and when outdoors. This will help demonstrate the ludicrousness and harmfulness of the CDC and what it is advocating for in vaccinating our children. The CDC’s guidance raises serious questions if harms emerge and comports itself to ridicule as much as wearing mask outdoors if vaccinated. As we view the CDC guidance from an eagle-eye perspective, we come to a conclusion that the CDC is not talking science anymore. It is purely nonsensical and confusing. For example, regarding the risk of outdoor transmission, the CDC knows of the Chinese study that showed only one of 7,324 infection events following careful contact tracing was linked to outdoor transmission. They, the CDC, know that the Irish analysis showed that only one in 1,000 infections out of 232,000 infections were linked to outdoor transmission. They know that outdoors has ample ventilation and thus spread is virtually non-existent (CDC originally reported that less than 10% of infection occurs outdoors and one is near 20 times more likely to be infected indoors than outdoors; however CDC’s 10% figure was inaccurate and proper research shows this to be 0.1% and CDC has now backtracked due to their startling error on outdoor transmission).
There remains an absence of evidence supporting the notion that children even spread the COVID-19 virus in any meaningful way, but there is direct evidence showing that they simply do not spread this infection and disease! This has been shown in school settings and as published in other papers. Children typically, if infected, have asymptomatic illnesses. It is well-noted that asymptomatic cases are not the drivers of the pandemic; something particularly important in relation to children as they are generally asymptomatic. A study published inthe journal Nature found no instances of asymptomatic spread from positive asymptomatic cases among all 1,174 close contacts of the cases, based on a base sample of 10 million persons. The World Health Organization (WHO) also made this claim that asymptomatic spread/transmission is rare. This issue of asymptomatic spread is the key issue being used to force vaccination in children. The science, however, remains contrary to this proposed policy mandate.
Supporting Evidence
In terms of masking children, which we are vehemently against (in school or out of school), Ludvigsson evidenced the low risk in children by publishing this seminal paper in the New England Journal of Medicine out of Sweden on COVID-19 among children one to 16 years of age and their teachers in Sweden. From the nearly 2 million children that were followed in school in Sweden, it was reported that with no mask mandates, there were zero deaths from COVID and a few instances of transmission and minimal hospitalization.
Similarly, a high-quality robust study in the French Alps examined the spread of the COVID-19 virus via a cluster of COVID-19. They followed one infected child who visited three different schools and interacted with other children, teachers, and various adults. They reported no instance of secondary transmission despite close interactions (to any child or teacher). These data have been available to the CDC and other health experts for over a year. It is not ‘new’ evidence as the CDC seems to allude to. We have science on deck for near 14 months now and the CDC is clearly out of step with the science. Each turn we make. Why?
They, the CDC, also know of a high-quality review study byMadewell published in JAMAthatsought toestimate the secondary attack rate of SARS-CoV-2 in households and determine factors that modify this parameter. The study was a meta-analysis of 54 studies with 77 758 participants. Secondary attack rates represented the spread to additional persons and researchers found a 25-fold increased risk within households between symptomatic positive infected index persons versus asymptomatic infected index persons. “Household secondary attack rates were increased from symptomatic index cases (18.0%; 95% CI, 14.2%-22.1%) than from asymptomatic index cases (0.7%; 95% CI, 0%-4.9%)”. This study showed just how rare asymptomatic spread was within a confined household environment.
The CDC also knows of a high-quality randomized controlled trial Danish Study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine sought to assess whether recommending surgical mask utilization outside of the home would help reduce the wearer’s risks of acquiring SARS-CoV-2 infection in a setting where masks were uncommon and not among recommended public health measures. The sample included a total of 3,030 participants who were assigned randomly to wear masks, and 2,994 who were told to not wear masks (i.e. the control arm). The authors concluded that there was no statistically or clinically significant impact of mask-use in regard to the rate of infection with SARS CoV-2.
As a result of the nonsense guidance by the CDC, Dr. Leana Wen (emergency physician and public health professor at George Washington University; former Baltimore City Health Commissioner) has just about had it with the nonsensical capricious CDC guidelines and is reportedly shocked’ by new CDC Mask Guidance and rightly so. “They went from this overly cautious, nonsensical approach to another nonsensical approach — but one that is dangerous, one that throws caution out the window”. We agree, what the CDC is putting out is utter nonsense and actually dangerous. Dr. Marty Makary (Johns Hopkins) has also weighed in stating that this is the “most political CDC in history”, where guidance is “based on discretion not science”. We argue, CDC guidance is based on whimsy and is as far removed from science as possible.
Even the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) is now saying to take off the mask when outside. The WSJknows that the gig is up with the ineffective masks but also that it is insane to consider masking outdoors when it is properly ventilated and the risk of spread is near zero, if at all. It is insane, illogical, irrational, and pure nonsense that the CDC and Dr. Fauci are advising children and teenagers to wear masks at summer camp, but not if they are vaccinated. It defies logic what is coming out of the CDC at present as to scientific guidance.
Disastrous Public Policy
It is incredible that a marque public health agency like the CDC could be making such disastrous public policy statements and guidance when they are constantly flat wrong and constantly having to reverse them or adjust them. What is going on at the CDC? We want the CDC to succeed and shine and be the ‘go to’ public health agency. But how could they, the CDC, provide guidance that masks are needed outdoors even ‘if vaccinated’. The totality of their argument remains meritless and absurd to date. It is nonsensical. We have argued that masks as currently used, the blue surgical and white cloth masks (or any cloth masks) are ineffective and essentially worthless. It is actually harmful and particularly for our children. We have raised this issue many times as to no benefit and possible harms of masking and it is catastrophic to our children, emotionally, socially, and health-wise. These masks do nothing and it is beyond being ‘neutral’, they are ineffective. It did nothing. Mask mandates have all failed. And now we refocus on the issue of vaccinating our children for COVID.
In this regard, the CDC knows (at least we would hope they do) that if fully vaccinated, if these vaccines do what they were purported to do by conferring sterilizing immunity (which we argue the vaccines fail to do), with the high titers of neutralizing antibodies, then you are effectively immune. You can toss your masks and you are liberated after your second shot. But do these vaccines really work as effectively as reported? Does the CDC know something that the public does not know, and hence the insistence on mask-wearing and distancing away from others, even if vaccinated? Ours is not merely a curiosity, but a legitimate question that remains without a scientific answer from the CDC. We are in full support of vaccines once developed properly with the proper safety testing.
We also find the current mechanisms being employed by the media and some people in shaming others for not being vaccinated is deplorable, while they take selfies and parade on the internet social media and denounce others. Why would you shame someone who is not vaccinated when you are fully vaccinated, if you are immune? If you are immune and, again, if you think you are, then why does it matter if someone else has not taken the vaccine, for they could be COVID recovered and have decided that they do not need the vaccine as they have robust and durable natural exposure immunity? They have this right to make a personal ‘informed’ decision. You are immune, so why be concerned with someone else’s vaccine status? Why infringe on others’ rights and freedoms and use public shaming as a venue to exploit your compliance.
Risk of Death?
But, what does the epidemiological data show as to the risk of death for children? Are children at such elevated risk to warrant vaccinating? Well, the most updated data by the American Academy of Pediatrics showed that “Children were 0.00%-0.19% of all COVID-19 deaths, and 10 [US] states reported zero child deaths. In states reporting, 0.00%-0.03% of all child COVID-19 cases resulted in death.” This is the data.
Based on reporting of CDC data, 266 children aged 0 to 17 years in the US have died of COVID-19 and we mourn each death and we cannot understand the pain for the grieving parents and family. But let us put this in perspective to yearly seasonal influenza. During the 2018-2019 influenza season, 477 children 0 to 17 died of the regular flu, and we did not mask the nation, did not close schools, and did not seek to mass vaccinate children, and did not push them to cower under their beds in fright. This is all so illogical and insane what they have done in terms of COVID-19! In 2019, 2,545 children died in traffic accidents, 776 died due to drowning often in their backyard pools by accident, and 2,156 died due to homicide. As a result, did we stop sending them to school? Did we pave over our swimming pools or ban the driving of cars? No, we have as a society accepted this level of risk and we have learned to live with it. Life goes on. We get up, dress, go to work or school, and we pray for each other daily that we get through the day and live to see another day and we make it home.
Esteemed Dr. Marty Makary out of Johns Hopkins weighed in with his expertise and appeared to suggest that children 12 to 15 years old should be vaccinated. We were surprised and disagree fully with Makary as the risk to these children which he also admitted, was essentially zero. Exceedingly rare. Then why would he advocate for vaccinations? This is confusing as we find no clear evidence, in fact none, that children are at any appreciable risk. He even stated that the ‘rare’ MISC inflammatory condition that is reported, typically ends with the children fully recovering. This is completely treatable also. Again, why would he recommend the vaccine when the risk is so low for severe outcomes and the children can develop natural robust immunity? The immunity conferred by this narrow ‘spike-specific’ immunity cannot provide the broad-based, robust, durable, comprehensive immunity that natural exposure immunity can.
This is basic immunology and the risk-management decisions for parents in our view suggests ‘no’ vaccines when there is no benefit and no potential for tremendous harms. There are adverse events and deaths being reported in the CDC’s own VAERS database due to the COVID-19 vaccines that the media medical cartel is not reporting. We find it is reckless and dangerous for CDC and Fauci and NIH to be advocating for these vaccines in children when they know there are no safety studies to rule out harms and what is planned cannot rule out harms.
At the same time, and we do applaud his bravery, Makary re-iterated that CDC has been ‘consistently late or wrong’ since the pandemic began and on most everything, and the latest CDC guidance on masks in summer camps and school reveals just how out of touch the CDC is with the science. We agree fully with Makary on this and advocate for a renaming of the CDC to ‘CDC 365’ given they are routinely at least nine months to one year behind the science! He claimed that we needed the updated guidance by Fauci 14 months ago. Overall, Makary says para CDC school guidelines are scientifically flawed and being used by Biden to stall reopening and appease teacher’s unions. We agree fully with this too! There is no sound, scientific, no good reason to keep schools closed, no sound reason to mask children in schools, and no sound scientific reason, none, no justification for children to wear masks indoors in school or in summer camps. It is illogical, irrational, hysterical, unscientific and actually absurd guidance by the CDC 365. As usual! What CDC and Dr. Fauci are advocating for in terms of children being vaccinated is dangerous and reckless in our opinion and has no basis, none!
Benefits Do Not Outweight Risks
We again argue that it is very dangerous and reckless to push to vaccinate low-risk children with untested vaccines for safety that could leave children with decades of severe disability if something goes wrong. We are for vaccines but they must be properly developed, and the emerging adverse effects and the lack of safety data raises serious concerns for these vaccines in children. The benefit just does not outweigh the risks and to claim that we need kids taking the jab to get to population-level herd immunity is absurd because you are not, Dr. Fauci and CDC and NIH, factoring in the natural immunity that already exists in the population, and you are not factoring in cross-protection from prior common cold coronaviruses etc. It is also very dangerous to mask our children. There is no basis for this, none! It defies basic common sense.
Thus, we cannot understand, once again, why public health agencies such as the CDC and Dr. Fauci, along with the nonsensical bureaucrats and technocrats would make such senseless statements and provide no basis for them, in that children require vaccination for prevention of COVID-19 when he and they know they are at little, vanishingly small risk! We have serious concerns about the safety of these vaccines for all persons (including questionable efficacy as it has been reported). Let us not pretend. Why? We applaud the tremendous feat under the Trump administration of seeking to bring vaccines in such a short period by cutting the regulatory red tape and circumventing and squeezing out the ‘dead’ time across the different phases of vaccine development. However, this does not obviate us from raising questions when there are troubling signs as to safety signals (rare or otherwise).
We are now seeing reports of the mRNA and adenovirus vector vaccines promoting blood clotting, blood disorders, variousbleeding disorders, and that the spike protein on its own is potentially pathogenic. Besides the real documented adverse effects, there are also theoretical risks such as to the brain from lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) that will not manifest for years. Such that we may be mistakenly injecting people with a pathogenic protein. The AAPS has also stated that “blood Clotting Needs to Be Watched with All COVID Vaccines”.
No Liability Means No Trust
With this, the phrase we want the public to adopt is ‘no liability means no trust’ and by this, we mean that we want the FDA and Dr. Fauci, and the vaccine developers to remove the liability waiver from the vaccines for children. We waiver is one thing for adults but not for children given the low risk for infection and spread. The benefit does not outweigh the risk and if our children are being asked to take this untested vaccine, then the vaccine developers must have risk in the game. They must be willing to stand up for the vaccine and as such, be willing to attest to its safety by removing the liability waiver. This will give parents the confidence they need for as it stands, they have none. No liability means no trust in the vaccine. It is that simple. If the vaccine developers and all linked to the vaccine have no liability, then we can have no trust in it. Furthermore, the criteria for emergency use authorization (EUA) in children is not met and thus no EUA is warranted for children.
Building on this, Dr. Patrick Whelan (UCLA pediatrician) (Regulations.gov) shares our grave concerns especially regarding the nascent evidence about the pathogenicity of the spike protein the vaccine is injecting. In December 2020, Whelan warned the FDA that mRNA vaccines could cause microvascular injury to the brain, heart, liver, and kidneys in ways NOT assessed in safety trials. He stated, “I am concerned about the possibility that the new vaccines aimed at creating immunity against the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein (including the mRNA vaccines of Moderna and Pfizer–BioNTech) have the potential to cause microvascular injury to the brain, heart, liver, and kidneys in a way that is not currently being assessed in safety trials of these drugs”. Yes, we are concerned the vaccine developers have been less than forthcoming, and the government and their medical experts are being evasive with their statements. And we are now going to play with the safety and lives of our children? We say NO. No liability equals no trust.
An Uninformed Public
The public is not properly informed about the risks and the safety data is not there. It is just not there and we are being asked to trust? Trust who, the CDC? When on one day the CDC says you do not carry COVID virus if vaccinated then the next day having to retract it? When on one day they advise all pregnant women to get the COVID vaccine and then the next day say only if they are eligible to get it? The CDC has lost its credibility. No liability equals no trust. And what about ‘informed consent’? It is not simply “hey you, roll up your sleeve’.
Alarmingly, additional evidence is emerging that COVID-19 is less of a respiratory disease and more of a vascular disease with the ensuing ill effects all generally having vascular underpinnings. But we are arguing that the spike itself may be ‘potentially’ pathogenic and if it has a role in the damaging of vascular cells (damaging/impairing vascular endothelial cells via downregulating the ACE 2 receptor), then by injecting mRNA code to build the spike protein to derive an immune response, or injecting the complete spike itself, then we may be naively or unwittingly injecting the very deleterious spike protein that will wreak havoc on vaccinated persons. Potentially, but there is a real theoretical risk and some may argue, it is already unfolding based on the nascent reports of blood clots and bleeding disorders. The spike protein may emerge as one of the more damaging ingredients in COVID disease and we are giving it to people deliberately, unknowingly.
Whelan further reports “that ACE-2 receptor expression is highest in the microvasculature of the brain and subcutaneous fat, and to a lesser degree in the liver, kidney, and heart. They have further demonstrated that the coronavirus replicates almost exclusively in the septal capillary endothelial cells of the lungs and the nasopharynx, and that viral lysis and immune destruction of those cells releases viral capsid proteins (or pseudovirions) that travel through the circulation and bind to ACE 2 receptors in these other parts of the body leading to mannan-binding lectin complement pathway activation that not only damages the microvascular endothelium but also induces the production of many pro-inflammatory cytokines. Meinhardt et al. (Nature Neuroscience 2020, in press) show that the spike protein in brain endothelial cells is associated with the formation of microthrombi (clots), and like Magro et al. do not find viral RNA in brain endothelium. In other words, viral proteins appear to cause tissue damage without actively replicating virus”.
Whelan as a pediatrician, has gone even further and must be applauded for his bravery by stating openly that “before any of these vaccines are approved for widespread use in children, it is important to assess in vaccinated subjects the effects of vaccination on the heart… vaccinated patients could also be tested for distant tissue damage in deltoid area skin biopsies… important as it is to quickly arrest the spread of the virus by immunizing the population, it would be worse if hundreds of millions of children were to suffer long-lasting damage to their brain or heart microvasculature as a result of failing to appreciate in the short term an unintended effect of full-length spike protein-based vaccines on these other organs”.
As we consider the implications of the spike itself being potentially pathogenic (and this has to be further validated), we have argued prior against children vaccination for COVID and that the science is clear and settled that children do not transmit COVID-19 virus and that the concept of asymptomatic spread has been questioned severely, particularly for children. Children rarely get infected and biologically, it seems, based on nascent findings, they may be unable to due to less expression of the Angiotensin-Converting Enzyme 2 receptor (ACE 2) in their nasal epithelium (references 1, 2).
The accumulated evidence suggests that children have been less impacted than adults in terms of severityandfrequency, accounting for <2% ofthecases. Children (as opposed to other respiratory illnesses) do not appear to be a major vector of viral transmission, with most pediatric cases described inside familial clusters. There has been no documentation of child-to-child or child-to-adult transmission and this has remained the trend across the last 15 months of the pandemic and reported pediatric data. This was demonstrated elegantly in a study performed in the French Alps. The pediatric literature is settled science on this.
NO Vaccination of Children for COVID-19
This brings us to our core thesis, this being NO vaccination of children for COVID-19. The reality is that our stance on children getting COVID vaccines is similar to our stance on why children must not be forced to wear masks, and especially children as young as two years old. There is no science or data to support this, vaccine or masks. Whatsoever. Israel has now released data showing that all age group infections have declined substantially, while not vaccinating children under 16. Why? Could it be a clear example that children are not the drivers but rather adults are and that by protecting adults using vaccines, children are automatically protected? The Israeli data seem to provide clear evidence why vaccines are not needed in US children.
We have been arguing this and we ask, why would we do this to children then? Why would CDC and Dr. Fauci take such steps when they know that the safety testing will not be suitable and that our children will be at risk to these vaccines if they are not tested properly? We may be setting vaccinated persons up for a disaster, naïvely, and as such, could we be doing the same to our children? We call for an immediate stop! We must not expose our children to ‘unnecessary’ harm. We must not expose them to a substance that has not been tested on children (or plan to be adequately) in the way it should be and for as long as necessary. We cannot circumvent ‘time’ with elevated sample size or any other tactic. This is a nonsensical methodology. These vaccines must be studied for the appropriate length of time. We must not expose children to a vaccine that based on their risk is absolutely not needed. Moreover, they can become infected naturally, if their immunity is needed.
As such, we are asking for a pause on vaccinating all persons with these vaccines until we understand what is emerging and safety is fully declared. Yet beyond that, we find it so very repugnant and dangerous an idea to submit children to these untested vaccine platforms, that once again we realized that we had to take a stand against testing and/or provision of any of the current vaccines for SARS-CoV-2 in children. Moreover, our view is that the risks of the vaccine far outweigh the benefits of persons under the age of 50, and we even argue up to 70 years of age. There should be no coercion or threat of reprisal if one does not want to be vaccinated and we call for a mass suspension of the vaccination in the US and maybe worldwide to assess the serious safety concerns we have. We are calling for proper ‘informed consent’ for all who decide to take the vaccine. We are being threatened when we raise this issue of safety and we are trying to inform the public.
We find it disturbing that the media has never pressed Dr. Fauci on overtly erroneous assertions and other major self-contradictory statements and continues to let him express an opinion without a deeper probing. We have great respect for his career and his bench work, but he is highly inaccurate and out of step with the science on most things COVID-19, the immunology, and the vaccinology, and I/we do not pretend to be any level of expert. Given what is at stake here now, this being the safety of our children, we felt we should take a stand and demand more. If this goes wrong as we think the potential is certainly there and based on what we are seeing with the adult administration of the vaccine, then our children may be left with a lifetime of morbidity, disability, and far worse, death. We demand that Dr. Fauci layout the childhood vaccination evidence for the scientific community (and the public, the parents) to evaluate.
Runinng Behind, and in the Wrong Direction
That said, we are being declarative in our position that our public health agencies like CDC, NIH, and FDA are running 9 to 12 months behind contemporary data and science and are routinely wrong. Dr. Fauci and CDC are wrong on the vaccination of children science as they were on all of the catastrophically destructive societal lockdown, school closure, and mask/mask mandate policies they advocated and implemented. We believe that the currently promulgated policies by the CDC and Dr. Fauci concerned with vaccinating pregnant women is both reckless and perhaps dangerous, since no long-term data exist on the mother or the fetus and the potential ill effects from mRNA and adenovirus vector vaccines. We believe they are wrong as it relates to our children as well, with these sub-optimally developed vaccines that are largely long-term safety untested and being administered as ‘investigational’ under the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) without the time-tested and honored Biological License Application.
For example, in the Daily Heraldarticle, whereby Dr. Fauci advocates for kids as young as first-grade to be vaccinated by September 2021, he was quoted stating when asked about vaccinating by September 2021, “I would think by the time we get to school opening, we likely will be able to get people who come into the first grade.” We find this by Fauci to be incredibly dangerous and without any merit. Is Dr. Fauci thinking clearly? We believe that the very low circulating virus especially among children prevents a proper study from being undertaken conclusively and would require a large “n” to get meaningful results. The study will also not be conducted for the proper duration to collect the safety data.
The article expressly admitted it will not be possible to do this by stating, “Since children rarely are hospitalized due to COVID-19, the vaccine’s ability to reduce severe cases would be hard to measure unless the trials enrolled an enormous number of children”. The potential harms to the children must always be considered for any intervention in children. This must not be construed as an anti-vaxxer stand, but a sane and logical argument that must be meted out with the requisite intellectual curiosity and scientifically proven evidence. We, therefore, call for no vaccine for our children in this illness and we only discuss this option after we have properly collected long-term safety data collected from children and including safety data from adults.
Current Vaccination Indications & Supporting Evidence
Currently, in the U.S., the vaccine is indicated only for those ages 16 and up. The article referred to several pediatricians and infectious disease experts opining that “vaccinating children is essential to helping the country, as a whole, reach herd immunity and decrease the threat of new variants”. This is a dangerous and inept statement. The global evidence is quite settled that children do not spread the infection or get severely ill if infected, and that they can become immune naturally with regular exposure that is natural and harmless. If children ‘numerically’ are needed to achieve population-level immunity, then why would they not be allowed to achieve immunity naturally, that confers robust protection e.g. T-cell immunity, for many years? Why expose them to an untested and potentially unsafe vaccine that could damage them lifelong? Moreover, we argue that their math is clearly wrong for they routinely discount the contribution made by prior exposure to coronaviruses (common cold) and thus the cross-protection they already have (T-cell immunity). They also discount in their math the vast amount of immunity that prior exposure and recovery from COVID-19 confers. Thus, the nation and states are potentially near or at herd immunity already.
Currently, we have no evidence that any variants are more lethal and the real issue with the variants is the mistake in making vaccines with a very narrow ‘spike-specific’ immunity. Selection pressures from the vaccine as well as from the natural immunity will cause mutations to continue to happen at a pace commensurate with the replicative ability of the virus. A broad natural immunity is more desirable as protection so long as there is minimal risk involved, as we believe is the case with children.
We are very concerned that the American Academy of Pediatrics has been pushing this childhood vaccination and “really advocating to try and make these trials happen with the same urgency that they happen for adults”. This is very troubling and we ask, do they read the science that is available and that has accumulated on the risk to children? Is the Academy of Pediatrics willing to take this safety risk with our children?
The article states that we are mistaken in thinking that children were immune from SARS-CoV-2. We never said this and we do not think anyone has meant this, for what we did state and still strongly believe is that the risk for children is very small, exceedingly rare in all aspects of this virus and illness (acquiring the infection, spreading it to other kids and to adults, and becoming seriously ill). “Children experience lower infection rates, accounting for less than 10 percent of cases in the United States”. If Dr. Fauci and the CDC think otherwise, again, we request such information to be made public. Stating that children spread the virus “to some extent” is grossly misleading. The CDC, Dr. Fauci, and the writer of this slanted inaccurate piece know that this should have been stated as ‘vanishingly small or exceedingly rare, if at all.’ These people know that evidence from Sweden with fully opened schools showed no significant evidence of spread and no deaths.
Key Drivers of SARS-CoV-2
In this regard, it is evident that neither children (nor asymptomatic adults) are the key drivers of SARS-CoV-2. In the rare cases where a child is infected with SARS-CoV-2, it is exceptionally rare for the child to get severely ill or die. And to reiterate, teachers are not at risk of transmission from children and schools are to be reopened immediately with no restrictions. Schools remain the safest place for children and teachers. They should have never remained closed and we knew this for 15 months now, and our children are being harmed by the unholy alliance between unions and government leaders in certain states. The New York Post recently reported of this relationship whereby the Teacher unions have a hand in the devising of CDC school re-open policy. “Emails show a call between Walensky and Weingarten — the former boss of New York City’s United Federation of Teachers — was arranged for Feb 7. The lobbying paid off. In at least two instances, language “suggestions” offered by the union were adopted nearly verbatim into the final text of the CDC document”. However, despite what the media and the CDC and unions are trying to tell the public, the pediatric literature suggests that this is now settled science as to low risk in children. This is not ‘new’ evidence, this has been settled for over one year now, and certainly since last fall 2020.
Dr. Sarah Lang stated para that the issue of children not being in school will be solved if they got immunized. We find this to be reprehensible for this is a blackmail of parents when the children are being denied schooling with no basis due to risk, but by both the Teacher’s unions and the respective state governments and the federal government. Exact words were “Our current chaos about children not being in schools is just terrible for children, and I think a lot of the concern would be assuaged if children were immunized”. We would ask Dr. Lang if she will like to state conclusively that the vaccines as currently devised are ‘safe’ and what is planned will be safe, knowing what is currently occurring in terms of the emerging adverse events and deaths due to the vaccine. Is she prepared to place our children at this unnecessary risk?
O’Leary also stated para that as young as 6-month-old infants can get vaccinated. He knows that the trials will not be powered to detect meaningful differences (a sample size of 3,000 will not allow for the statistical power) and that the duration will not allow for assessment of safety. What this expert has stated is very dangerous. “That’s enough to prove safety and benefit, experts said, in part, because the adult trials have already paved the way”. We find this statement to be incredibly flawed science and dangerous given there are now emerging adverse effects of the vaccines and also, Pfizer as an example, failed to include over 3,000 suspected but unconfirmed infections (with no explanation) and our own calculations showed that the efficacy for mild COVID would have dropped from 95% to 19% if this omitted data was included.
The article reported, “In the absence of a definitive immune correlate of protection, the trials would compare antibody levels in children with those found in adults and extrapolate that the efficacy should then be similar”. We argue that children are not adults and their biological response will differ and we must not extrapolate especially given the harms we see accumulating with these vaccines. Children are still in a growing phase when their brain, neural, vascular and other systems are developing and thus may be subject to developmental anomalies from these untested vaccines.
The article reported that “Pfizer’s and Moderna’s adolescent trials will focus on evaluating participants’ immune response by measuring antibodies”, and it is likely the trials with younger children will do the same. We ask the vaccine developers and Dr. Fauci, do they think this is an appropriate end-point? We do not, and feel that this does not tell us if the recipient will be protected from infection or from acquiring infection, or from getting seriously ill or dying from it. This in no way tells us if the recipient will be immune once vaccinated. This is what parents will want to know if they are going to make a risk management decision to give their child this vaccine. This again raises many questions as to how these trials will be run, what the end goal is, and why the vaccine is needed in our children in the first place.
The article reported, “In the absence of a definitive immune correlate of protection, the trials would compare antibody levels in children with those found in adults and extrapolate that the efficacy should then be similar”. We argue that children are not adults and their biological response will differ and we must not extrapolate especially given the harms we see accumulating with these vaccines.
It is unfortunate that we have arrived at this stage where untruths are elevated to a daily briefing.
And these daily briefings cause irrational fear, panic, and hysteria among the public. These briefings driven by the media cause unnecessary fear despite “a thousandfold difference in risk between old and young.” Such conflation of the risks between the young and the elderly population with comorbidities and at risk is wrong-headed and creates unnecessary fear for all. It is well known that there is a distinct stratified risk (strongly associated with increasing age and comorbidities).
Ending Statements
We end by again stating that the recent push by the CDC, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and other television medical experts who suggest that we can only get to herd immunity by vaccinating our children is absurd and patently false. They continue to inaccurately discount cross protection immunity from prior coronaviruses and common colds. They are pushing a vaccine that is potentially unsafe to our children especially since we have no data on their safety.
Furthermore, data thus far suggest that the COVID ‘variants’ do not drive infection in children and harm them any more than the original strain. There is no basis for such a statement. For those who are trying to frighten parents by the illogical and absurd statements that a lethal strain may emerge among the variants, then we argue that you are using terms like ‘may’ and ‘could’ and ‘might.’ We can find no evidence to support such claims. It is simply rampant supposition and speculation and fear-mongering! Making such claims is not science, and decisions based on such claims are not evidence-based. We need to see the actual science and not just rampant speculation and supposition by often nonsensical media medical experts. We regard the retraction of the double-mask needs as a rampant abuse of the term “science-based.” Because it wasn’t as was the statement that Covid-19 is 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu? A very prominent Professor out of Johns Hopkins, Dr. Marty Makary, gets it right now when he calls out these experts and agencies for their foolishness and fear mongering that is often inaccurate. He recently eviscerated CDC’s guidelines and called out Dr. Fauci for his inaccurate claims on herd immunity.
We advocate for the safety of all our children. Parents have a responsibility to ask for and get accurate information from the public sector that governs policy decisions. Parents, so armed, can make appropriate decisions for their children. It is better science to use a more ‘focused‘ protection and targeting that is based on age and known risk factors especially, regarding the children. We abide by the Hippocratic principle of “Primum Non Nocere.”
We conclude that our children must be exempt fully from any of the existing COVID-19 vaccines, and until proper studies are conducted with the proper safety data, and until it can be shown that the benefits far outweigh the risks in the need for the vaccine. There must be no vaccination of our children with these potentially unsafe, untested for safety vaccines. Period! No liability equals no trust and we close by again calling on the CDC, the NIH, the FDA, Dr. Fauci, and vaccine developers to remove the liability waiver. There is no benefit. None. In fact, we call on the CDC, the NIH, the FDA, Dr. Fauci, and vaccine developers to meet with us at any time, to their convenience, collectively or however, to discuss with us, debate with us, why our children should be vaccinated with these vaccines given their risk. We wish this open public discussion to your convenience.
Contact
Paul E. Alexander, PhD … email: elias98_99@yahoo.com
Howard Tenenbaum, DDS, PhD … email: hctkbt822@gmail.com
i) Paul E Alexander MSc PhD, McMaster University Canada, University of Oxford, and University of Toronto
ii) Howard Tenenbaum DDS, Dip. Perio., PhD, FRCD(C) Centre for Advanced Dental Research and Care, Mount Sinai Hospital, and Faculties of Medicine and Dentistry, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
iii) Parvez Dara MD, FACP, MBA, Consultant, Medical Hematologist and Oncologist
Emergent BioSolutions will be in the spotlight today during a House Select Subcommittee Meeting on the Corona Virus Crisis, today at 10:30 am. It can be watched here.
The first 2 million doses of anthrax vaccine came from a stockpile that had been made for the US army by Michigan’s state vaccine lab (Michigan Biologics Products Institute). What became known in November 1997, after the FDA performed an inspection, was that most of the army’s 11 million dose stockpile of anthrax vaccine, stored at the Michigan lab, was multiply expired, had been redated, and was contaminated, with visible bacterial and fungal growth in some of the lots. FDA immediately shut down the anthrax vaccine factory, and quarantined 9 million of the 11 million existing doses. Unfortunately, FDA allowed the Defense Department to use 2 million doses, which it did over the next two years.
The Conclusions from FDA’s 1998 and 1999 inspection reports of the facility can be read here.
The Michigan state lab was a massive affair with many buildings on a campus in downtown Lansing. It produced a large variety of vaccines and blood products for the state of Michigan. However, over the years the state had not made the required repairs and updates. After the 1997 FDA inspection, Michigan had to repair the place or close it. Michigan decided to sell, and looked for a buyer.
The former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral William Crowe, heard about the sale. He had come to know the el Hibri family when he was Ambassador to the UK. The el Hibri’s had purchased anthrax vaccine from the UK government laboratory at Porton Down just before the Gulf War, and resold it to the Saudi government at a 100x markup.
The new company, formed in the first half of 1998, was named Bioport. It chose to focus on its sales of anthrax vaccine to the Army. However, the new company was deeply concerned about potential liability for the lab’s products. The purchase was delayed until the Secretary of the Army signed an indemnification for injuries that might result from use of anthrax vaccine in soldiers, and it also indemnified the company against claims if the vaccine failed to provide the expected protection against anthrax. The state of Michigan had also been indemnified by the Army to produce the vaccine. But from its 1970 licensure until 1998, almost all the anthrax vaccine had only been used in animal experiments.
After FDA had shuttered the anthrax vaccine plant for manufacturing defects, the Army paid to bulldoze and then rebuild the factory in 1999. But even after it was rebuilt, FDA withheld its approval, and the plant lay idle.
Meantime, the 2 million doses that FDA had failed to quarantine were injected into 500,000 military service-members between 1998 and 2001. Many thousands became ill. An official report on the program, quoting unnamed government officials, claimed that 1-2% of recipients had developed permanent disabilities. The military vaccinations were mandatory, and refusers were punished with a court martial or loss of a month’s pay and performance of extra duties. Nonetheless, seeing the injuries sustained by their colleagues, many refused.
Five Congressional hearings were held throughout 1999 on different aspects of the anthrax vaccine program by the House Committee on Government Reform and National Security (now known as the House Committee on Oversight and Reform). Additional hearings held by other Congressional committees also touched on the vaccine program. The Government Reform and National Security Committee wrote up its findings in a report titled Unproven Force Protection. Its June 30, 1999 hearing dealt specifically with Bioport and its sole source contracts.
Despite this, Bioport has been very successful. Although the Pentagon was considering an end to the anthrax vaccine program in the summer of 2001, the sudden appearance of the anthrax letters after the September 11, 2001 attacks breathed new life into the vaccine program and turned Bioport’s fortunes around. DHHS Secretary Tommy Thompson announced in November 2001 that the anthrax vaccine plant would finally receive an FDA approval and begin production. At the end of January 2002 that is what happened.
But that was not the end of Bioport’s problems. Soldiers challenged the legality of the vaccine’s license in federal court. It was learned that while there had been efficacy testing of an earlier version of the vaccine, the current vaccine formulation had never undergone either efficacy or safety testing in a clinical trial. Aware of this major omission, FDA had withheld the issuing of a “final rule and order” for the anthrax vaccine for over thirty years.
The soldiers prevailed on the legal issues, and First District Court Judge Emmett Sullivan rescinded the vaccine license in 2004, based on the company’s failure to prove efficacy or meet basic FDA standards for licensure.
Unwilling to bow to judicial authority, the Defense Department rolled out a backup plan. A new regulatory authority had just been created, the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). An EUA was slapped on the unlicensed anthrax vaccine, and DOD quickly restarted its mandatory vaccinations. (There was no emergency: the issuing of an EUA required only the potential for an emergency.)
The attorneys for the soldiers took the case back to court, and Judge Sullivan ruled that even if an experimental medical product received an EUA, it was still investigational and could not be mandated. The law required that EUA products be offered with informed consent. To receive an EUA (unlicensed) product, the recipient must be apprised of the risks and benefits of the product, be informed of alternatives to the product, and no coercion in any form could be applied. Ergo, no mandate.
FDA waited about 18 months, and then issued a full license for Bioport’s anthrax vaccine, although there were still no efficacy data. FDA instead claimed that a 1950’s era trial of a very different anthrax vaccine was sufficient for licensure, even though that trial failed to show benefit against inhalation anthrax.
When the soldiers and their attorneys challenged the licensing decision in court, the next judge ruled in favor of FDA on the basis of “deference”—meaning that FDA could ignore its own regulations when making a determination on safety and efficacy, with or without acceptable data. In 2006 mandatory vaccination restarted.
Bioport then shed its old skin in an attempt to leave its baggage behind. It renamed itself Emergent BioSolutions. Its vaccine had been renamed BioThrax.
Emergent BioSolutions (EBS) then branched out, buying other companies, primarily those making other sole source biodefense products. The military continued to mandate anthrax and (in 2003) smallpox vaccines for service-members. Eventually EBS purchased the smallpox company as well, and the cholera and typhoid vaccines used in the US.
A 2010 report on Emergent BioSolutions, written by Scott Lilly for the Center for American Progress, was titled, “Getting Rich off Uncle Sucker.” It revealed 300% profit margins, unique for a government contractor.
In 2012 EBS got one of three DHHS contracts to house a so-called Center for Innovation in Advanced Development and Manufacturing (CIADM) that could be used to produce pandemic or biodefense products in the event of emergencies. With this grant EBS purchased and expanded what became its Bayview factory in Baltimore. The CIADM contract essentially guaranteed Emergent a big role in any future pandemic response.
Emergent acquired the maker of Narcan nasal spray, the opioid overdose antidote. Soon FDA began recommending to prescribers that they write a Narcan script whenever they wrote a narcotic script, just in case. States started buying large quantities for free distribution. Sales rose 600% after EBS bought the company.
Under the Trump administration, retired Air Force Colonel, physician and biodefense consultant Robert Kadlec was appointed to the position of Assistant Secretary of DHHS for Preparedness and Emergency Response (aka ASPR). Kadlec had also been a consultant and business partner of EBS’ founder and chairman Fuad el-Hibri. Kadlec had omitted this information from the required disclosures for Senate confirmation. Once confirmed as Assistant Secretary, Kadlec was able to transfer responsibility for the National Strategic Stockpile (containing the US stockpiles of pandemic remedies, masks and equipment) from the CDC to his own agency. Kadlec then gave multiple sweetheart deals to EBS, until the value of EBS’ contracts with ASPR exceeded those of every other contractor.
Covid-19 presented a huge opportunity for Emergent BioSolutions. EBS received $628 million from DHHS to retool its CIADM factory. It inked additional contracts with the Astra-Zeneca, Johnson and Johnson, Novavax, Providence Therapeutics and VaxArt companies to provide bulk manufacturing of their vaccines in its Baltimore facilities. Altogether its pandemic contracts were worth about $1.5 Billion. It was slated to manufacture 9 separate medical products to address Covid-19, all designed by other companies.
But there were serious potential problems.
While it had a storied Board of former federal officials, Emergent BioSolutions had never brought a single product to market. Its expertise was in contracting and acquisitions, not production. It had a history of production failures, and had demanded that the federal government bail the company out, or else the sole source products the company provided would become unavailable. Some of this was detailed in the Congressional report Unproven Force Protection. Entering the pandemic, EBS was still making the same mistakes it had been guilty of twenty years earlier:
EBS sold and continues to sell nerve gas auto-injectors to federal agencies which have been defective and are not licensed. According to the law, these products can neither be produced in the US nor sold here. Instead, Emergent manufactures them in Germany and restricts its sales to US embassies overseas.
EBS did not have an active workforce in Baltimore. On September 30, EBS held an online job fair which it titled “Warp Speed Careers Event.” The event sought to recruit 300 employees. Yet EBS had begun inking vaccine contracts 5 months earlier, and could have hired and trained a workforce that was ready to go when FDA gave it the go-ahead. Instead, doing things on the cheap, EBS hired late, failed to provide adequate training to its employees, and experienced a spectacular series of production failures. Many millions of doses of its Johnson and Johnson and its Astra-Zeneca Covid vaccines had to be dumped. J and J missed its 20 million dose quota for the end of March, and FDA, despite repeated inspections, would not give the plant an authorization so its products could be used.
Despite this, somehow millions of doses produced in the unauthorized plant were shipped to Canada, the European Union, South Africa and Mexico. The EU, at least, used the product. How did that occur? We don’t know. Did any get distributed in the US? We can’t be sure none did.
On April 4, 2021, EBS announced it would receive an additional $23 million from DHHS for new equipment to use in the manufacture of Johnson and Johnson’s Covid-19 vaccine.
As of last week, EBS was facing another lawsuit from its shareholders, and its stock price had fallen to $60 from the peak on February 12 of $125 per share. However, Emergent CEO Robert Kramer exercised his stock options in January and February, near the stock’s peak, earning himself over $7 million dollars in profit.
In summary, EBS, despite considerable manufacturing shortcomings, has been extremely successful at obtaining government contracts and earning huge profits. But its products have repeatedly been unreliable. The company has managed to turn failures into success, especially when its products, like civilian stockpiles of anthrax and smallpox vaccine, and nerve gas auto-injectors, are stockpiled but not used.
The public has only gradually been learning that the vaccines it thought were being produced by huge Pharma companies Astra-Zeneca and Johnson and Johnson were in fact being manufactured by the anthrax vaccine company, Emergent BioSolutions. How did it come to pass that the federal government, and these established pharmaceutical companies, bet the farm on EBS’ production of Covid-19 vaccines?
IN THE previous instalments I explored the extraordinary hold Bill Gates has over global health policy and the spread of its influence right into the heart of British public health policy via the funding by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (GF) of science businesses, foundations and public bodies through a complex web of interconnection and crossover of personnel.
This, however, is not the sum total of the GF’s reach into the world of British science and public health. It has been funding British university science departments, projects, and individuals for more than two decades. The topics involved include research into and manufacturing of vaccines.
No government-appointed science committee has influenced public health policy as much as Sage. Many of its members, who cross over with Independent Sage and Nervtag and are already somewhat compromised by connections to the GF-funded GlaxoSmithKline and Wellcome Foundation, are also employees of universities and colleges which have received massive GF grants and, in some cases, work in partnership with them. Three of Sage’s members, Professors Graham Medley, Andrew Rambaut and Matt Keeling, are individual recipients of grants from the GF.
Readers may remember the three modelling papers produced by Imperial College London (ICL), Warwick University and the London School of Tropical Hygiene and Medicine (LSHTM) which received considerable press attention at the end of March, and their dramatic simultaneous warnings of a ‘third’ Covid-19 wave and new lethal variants; cautioning (yet again) how this will put the NHS under stress. All recommended stricter lockdowns, Test and Trace and, tellingly, booster vaccines.
SPI-M-O had assigned each university a specific task: ICL’s was ‘Evaluating England’s Roadmap out of Lockdown’, Warwick’s to produce ‘Road Map Scenarios and Sensitivity’ and LSHTM’s to make an ‘Interim roadmap assessment: prior to Step 2’.
Promoting the ICL paper was none other than the multi-tasking Sage member Professor Neil Ferguson, co-founder and Principal Investigator of the Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis (MRC GIDA) at Imperial College, a centre that works closely with the GF, the Global Fund and Gavi, Vice Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, School of Public Health at ICL, a Director and Adviser at the World Health Organisation (WHO) and a recipient of cloud computing time from Microsoft and Amazon for Covid-19 modelling.
Warwick’s paper emphasised the ‘danger’ of new variants to an even greater degree than the ICL paper. It warned that ‘stringent methods’ would be needed to counteract them and that the current vaccination programme might not adequately contain them.
The paper produced by the LSHTM group was the most pessimistic of all. It warned that a ‘third wave’ and new variants would bring a high death toll. It also stressed the need for Test and Trace which, together with that other Sage recommendation, vaccine passports, is the new formula for digital slavery and a surveillance state.
How Ferguson, whose modelling methodologies and predictions had been so comprehensively discredited, was getting away with this repeat performance seemed baffling, but for the fact that as a key member of the SPI-M-O subgroup he had been able to commission the new modelling research as well as that of supportive colleagues at Warwick University and the LSHTM.
Curiously, several SPI-M-O members turn out to be affiliated to one or another of these three universities too and are the very same academics who wrote these modelling papers. Given that they have commissioned themselves and sit on the subgroup, no independent assessment or scrutiny of their work has taken place. This is the epitome of jobs for the boys and girls.
Here are the SPI-M-O members connected to ICL:
Professors Neil Ferguson (Sage), Stephen Brett, Nicholas Grassly, Steven Riley, Wendy Barclay (Sage) and Drs Marc Baguelin, Samir Bhatt and Tim Lucas. Ferguson and Baguelin contributed to the ICL paper.
Here are the SPI-M-O members who work at Warwick University:
Professor Matt Keeling and Drs Louise Dyson, Edward Hill, Michael Tildesley and Joe Hilton. Keeling, Dyson, Tildesley and Hill are four out of five authors of the Warwick paper.
The following SPI-M-O members are connected to the LSHTM:
Professors John Edmunds (Sage), Mark Jit, Graham Medley (Sage), Drs Nick Davies, Rosalind Eggo, Sebastian Funk, Thibaut Jombart, Petra Klepac, Adam Kurcharski, Rohini Mathur, Sam Clifford, Elizabeth Fearon, Gwen Knight and Bill Quilty. Edmunds, Jit and Davies are three out of four of the authors of the LSHTM paper.
The Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, is a member of both Sage and SPI-M-O.
It will surprise few readers to learn that ICL, Warwick University and the LSHTM, are historically heavily funded by the GF.
The GF made its first grant to ICL of $31.9million in 2000. ICL received a further $46.7million from the GF in 2006 to research tropical diseases. The GF granted ICL a total of $446,205 in 2019 for research into enteric and diarrhoeal diseases, technology solutions, malaria, and ‘Discovery and Translational Sciences’. In 2020 it gave ICL a total of $91.5million for studies into polio, tuberculosis, global health, technology solutions, malaria, HIV, Discovery and Translational Sciences and family planning.
Last January, Sage member Professor Sir Mark Walport was appointed chair of the Imperial College Academic Health Science Centre (AHSC) Strategic Partnership. His ICL colleagues Professor Robin Grimes and Dr David Halpern sit on Sage too. Professor Ferguson and two ICL colleagues, Professors Wendy Barclay and Peter Openshaw, are members of Nervtag as well.
Warwick University’s GF funding goes back to 2015. An initial grant of $20,000 from the GF rapidly increased to a current total of $8.3million. In 2017, the GF awarded Warwick University $3million to research disease modelling, and in 2020 $2.2million to study neglected tropical diseases.
Sage member Professor Yvonne Doyle works at the LSHTM as does Nervtag member Professor John Edmunds and Independent Sage member Professor Martin McKee. Professor Edmunds was recently a recipient of a grant worth £5million from UKRI, which collaborates with the GF, to study disease modelling in Africa.
The late Professor Val Curtis, a member of Independent Sage, also worked at the LSHTM.
Predictably, none of the recent modelling by this closed shop takes into account the economic damage, social disintegration or consequences of lockdown, or the neglect of non-Covid-19 diseases as a result of lockdown and social distancing policies. Yet all this is now extensively catalogued. The conflicts of interest and cross over with these government advisers and highly directed research in universities heavily funded by GF, which has one narrow vision global vaccination agenda, is alarming.
Even more alarming is that it is on this basis that an unaccountable and unelected body has effectively dictated Government policy and our lives this past year. Its controversially modelled predictions of worst-case scenarios, none of which to date have been borne out, have been useful for two things: terrifying the populace into submission and priming the government, and us, into further lockdowns next autumn and winter – and establish them as the ‘new normal’.
Whether the men and women named here are useful idiots for Gates, or self-servers without moral compass, such scientific narrow vision reflects very poorly on them and their institutions.
The tentacles of the GF are everywhere. In the final part of this series I will be looking at its funding of the Oxford Recovery trials, Cambridge Science Park, its interconnections with the AstraZeneca project, its funding of several other universities, and finally at its investment in Serco, one of the outsourcing companies behind the Test and Trace programme.
While the world’s media can’t get enough of India today, in its rush to support a narrative of terror about Covid-19, twelve years ago when there was a real story going on there, the world’s media was nowhere to be seen.
SOME BACKGROUND
In 2009, a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) funded NGO carried out unauthorised clinical trials of a vaccine on some of the poorest, most vulnerable children in the world. It did so without providing information about the risks involved, without the informed consent of the children or their parents and without even declaring that it was conducting a clinical trial.
After vaccination, many of the participating children became ill and seven of them died. Such were the findings of a parliamentary committee charged with investigating this wretched affair. The committee accused the NGO of “child abuse” and produced a raft of evidence to back up its claim. This entire incident barely registered on the radar of Western media.
PATH (formerly the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health) is a Seattle based NGO, heavily funded by BMGF but which also receives significant grants from the US government. Between 1995 and the time of writing (May 2021), PATH had received more than $2.5bn from BMGF.
In 2009, PATH carried out a project to administer the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine. The project’s aim was, in PATH’s own words, “to generate and disseminate evidence for informed public sector introduction of HPV vaccines”. It was conducted in four countries: India, Uganda, Peru and Vietnam. Another Gates-funded organization, Gavi, had originally been considered to run the project, but responsibility was ultimately delegated to PATH. The project was directly funded by BMGF.
Significantly, each of the countries selected for the project had a different ethnic population and each had a state-funded national immunisation program. The use of different ethnic groups in the trial allowed for comparison of the effects of the vaccine across diverse population groups (ethnicity being a factor in the safety and efficacy of certain drugs).
The immunisation programs of the countries involved provided a potentially lucrative market for the companies whose drugs were to be studied: should the drugs prove successful and be included on these countries’ state-funded national immunisation schedules, this would represent an annual windfall of profits for the companies involved.
Two types of HPV vaccine were used in the trial: Gardasil by Merck and Cervarix by GlaxoSmithKline(GSK). In this article, we are going to examine PATH’s trial of Gardasil in India.
It’s worth noting here the relationship between BMGF and one of the companies whose drugs were being tested. In 2002, BMGF had, controversially, bought $205m worth of stocks in the pharmaceutical sector, a purchase which included shares in Merck & Co. The move had raised eyebrows because of the obvious conflict of interest between the foundation’s role as a medical charity and its role as an owner of businesses in the same sector.
The Wall Street Journalreported, in August 2009, that the foundation had sold its shares in Merck between 31st March and 30th June of that year, which would have been around the same time that the field trials of the HPV vaccine were starting in India. So for the entirety of this project (which was already in operation by October 2006), right up to its final field trials, BMGF had a dual role: as both a charity with a responsibility for care, and as a business owner with a responsibility for profit.
Such conflicts of interest have been a hallmark of BMGF since 2002. When Gates was makingregularTVappearances last year to promote Covid-19 vaccination, giving especially ringing endorsements of the Pfizer-BioNTech effort, his objectivity was never brought into question. Yet his foundation is the part-owner of several vaccine manufacturers, includingPfizer, BioNTech and CureVac.
HPV VACCINE
HPV vaccine aims to prevent cervical cancer. Gardasil had been launched successfully by Merck in the US in 2006, but its sales suffered after a series of articles in American medical journals had judged that its risks outweighed its benefits. Especially damaging was an analysis of reports made to the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) about adverse reactions to Gardasil.
This analysis was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) on August 19th 2009. The 12,424 adverse reactions which had been reported included 772 which were considered serious, 32 of which were deaths. Other reported serious side effects included autoimmune disorders, venous thromboembolic events (blood clots) and Guillain-Barré syndrome.
In the same edition of JAMA, Dr. Charlotte Haug, then editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association, wrote,
Whether a risk is worth taking depends not only on the absolute risk, but on the relationship between the potential risk and the potential benefit. If the potential benefits are substantial, most individuals would be willing to accept the risks. But the net benefit of the HPV vaccine to a woman is uncertain. Even if persistently infected with HPV, a woman most likely will not develop cancer if she is regularly screened. So rationally she should be willing to accept only a small risk from the vaccine.”
Dr. Haug also noted, “When weighing evidence about risks and benefits, it is also appropriate to ask who takes the risk, and who gets the benefit”, in a clear dig at Gardasil manufacturer Merck.
Merck’s attempts to promote Gardasil had been controversial. Dr. Angela Raffle, one the UK’s leading experts on cervical cancer screening, described Merck’s marketing strategy as “a battering ram at the Department of Health and carpet bombing on the peripheries.”
Dr. Raffle was concerned that the push to mass vaccination would harm the successful screening programme which had operated in the UK since the 1960s.
“My worry is that the commercially motivated rush to make us panic into introducing HPV vaccine quickly will put us back and worsen our cervical cancer control programme.”
Professor Diane Harper
Professor Diane Harper, then of Dartmouth Medical School in New Hampshire, had led 2 trials of the vaccine and was adamant that Gardasil could not protect against all strains of HPV.
When Merck launched a huge public relations campaign in 2007 to persuade European governments to use the product to vaccinate all the continent’s young girls against cervical cancer, she said:
Mass vaccination programmes (would be) a great big public health experiment…. We don’t know a lot of things. We don’t know the vaccine will continue to be effective. To be honest, we don’t have efficacy data in these young girls right now. We’re vaccinating against a virus that attacks women throughout their whole life and continues to cause cancer. If we vaccinate girls at 10 or 11 we won’t know for 20 to 25 years whether it is going to work or not. This is a big thing to take on.”
So at the time that PATH was carrying out its trials in India, Uganda, Peru and Vietnam, Gardasil was a controversial vaccine: its safety, efficacy and Merck’s attempts to promote it were being questioned, not by “anti-vaxxers” and “conspiracy theorists”, but by the international medical establishment and the respected mainstream media.
THE GIRLS OF KHAMMAM
Children of the Koya tribe, Khammam
Khammam district, in 2009, was a part of the eastern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh (boundary changes made in 2014 mean that today Khammam district belongs to the state of Telangana). The region is predominantly rural and is considered to be one of the poorest and least developed parts of India.
Khammam is home to several ethnic tribal groups,with some estimates putting its tribal population at about 21.5% (approximately 600,000 people). As is common for indiginous people throughout the world, the tribal groups of Khammam suffer from a lack of access to education. Consequently, their level of literacy is of a standard considerably lower than that of the region as a whole.
Some 14,000 girls were injected with Gardasil in Khammam district during 2009. The girls recruited for PATH’s project were between 10 and 14 years of age and all came from low-income, predominantly tribal backgrounds. Many of the girls did not reside with their families; instead they lived in ashram pathshalas (government-run hostels), which were situated close to the schools the children attended.
Professor Linsey McGoey, of the University of Essex, later stated she believed girls at ashram pathshalas had been targeted for the project as this was a way of:
“side-stepping the need to seek parental consent for the shots.”
Although we have seen a lot of India in the news recently, coverage of this country and its affairs is usually low-key. Despite being home to almost one fifth of the world’s population, reporting on India is sparse.
Such failings have been taken advantage of by unscrupulous profit-seekers for decades. Western media only reports on the consequences of these actions when their magnitude is too great to ignore.
We learned that up to 7,000 people were killed and more than half a million were injured after being exposed to deadly methyl isocyanate gas, following a gas leak at the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal. But we learned nothing in the years leading up to it of the culture of poor standards and disregard for regulation which was ultimately responsible for the disaster.
So it was typical that PATH’s project to administer and study the effects of the HPV vaccine went unheralded in the West. Typical, too, that the same was true in India itself: the Indian media is no more renowned for its reporting on tribal groups than the Western media is for its coverage of Indians.
Despite concerns expressed about the project in October 2009 by Sama, a Delhi-based NGO that advocates for women’s health, the matter remained absent from India’s news.
Members of the advocacy group Sama
This project, then, couldn’t have been more off-the-map had it taken place on the moon, and it remained so for several months until, early in 2010, stories began to filter out from Khammam that something had gone terribly wrong: many of the girls who had been involved in the trials had subsequently fallen ill and four of them had died.
In March 2010, members of Sama visited Khammam to find out more about the emerging stories. They were told that up to 120 girls had experienced adverse reactions, including epileptic seizures, severe stomach ache, headaches and mood swings. The Sama representatives remained in Khammam to investigate the situation further.
The involvement of Sama finally brought the matter to the attention of the Indian media and, amid a barrage of negative publicity, the Indian Council of Medical Research (IMCR) suspended the PATH project.
At this point theIndian Parliament’s Standing Committee on Healthbegan an investigation into the affair.
On May 17th, Sama produced a damning report highlighting, among other things: that the trials had been promoted as a government immunisation programme and not a research project, that the girls had not been made aware that they could choose not to participate in the trials, and that parental consent had neither been asked for nor given in many cases.
The report stated that:
“Many of the vaccinated girls continue to suffer from stomach aches, headaches, giddiness and exhaustion. There have been reports of early onset of menstruation, heavy bleeding and severe menstrual cramps, extreme mood swings, irritability, and uneasiness following the vaccination. No systematic follow up or monitoring has been carried out by the vaccine providers.”
Sama also disputed the Andhra Pradesh State Government’s claim that the deaths of four of the girls who had participated in the trials had nothing to do with vaccination.
THE PARLIAMENTARY COMMITTEE
Parliament House, seat of the Parliament of India, New Delhi
The wheels of bureaucracy are slow to turn. It was more than three years later, on 30th August 2013, when the report of the Indian Parliament’s Standing Committee on Health was finally published. Although many had expected the report to be a whitewash, it was anything but: it made for shocking reading.
The report excoriated both PATH and the IMCR, concluding that the “safety and rights of children were highly compromised and violated.” The committee found that PATH, despite operating in India since 1999, had no legal permission to do so. It noted that although the organisation had finally received a certificate from India’s Registrar of Companies in September 2009, this certificate itself was in breach of the law.
“PATH… has violated all laws and regulations laid down for clinical trials…. its sole aim has been to promote the commercial interests of HPV vaccine manufacturers…. This is a serious breach of trust… as the project involved the life and safety of girl children and adolescents who were mostly unaware of the implications of vaccination. The violation is also a serious breach of medical ethics.This act of PATH is a clear cut violation of the human rights of these girl children and adolescents. It is also an established case of child abuse.”
The committee charged thatPATH had lied to it and had attempted to mislead it during the course of its investigation and recommended that the Indian Government report PATH’s violations of human rights to the WHO, UNICEF and the US Government.
The report declared that PATH’s whole scheme was a cynical attempt to ensure ongoing profits for Merck and GSK.
“The choice of countries and population groups; the monopolistic nature, at that point of time, of the product being pushed; the unlimited market potential and opportunities in the universal immunisation programmes of the respective countries are all pointers to a well-planned scheme to commercially exploit a situation. Had PATH been successful… this would have generated a windfall profit for the manufacturers by way of automatic sale, year after year, without any promotional or marketing expenses. It is well known that once introduced to the immunisation programme it becomes politically impossible to stop any vaccination.”
It went on:
“To achieve this end effortlessly, without going through the arduous and strictly regulated route of clinical trials, PATH resorted to an element of subterfuge by calling the clinical trials ‘Observational Studies’ or ‘a Demonstration Project’ and various such expressions. Thus the interest, safety and well being of subjects were completely jeopardized by PATH by using self-determined and self-servicing nomenclature which is not only highly deplorable but also a serious breach of the law of the land.”
Samiran Nundy, editor emeritus National Medical Journal of India
These charges were echoed by leading voices in India’s medical community. “It is shocking to see how an American organization used surreptitious methods to establish itself in India,” said Chandra M.Gulhati, editor of India’s influential Monthly Index of Medical Specialities, “(this) was not philanthropy”.
Samiran Nundy, editor emeritus of the National Medical Journal of India and a long-standing critic of corrupt practices in health, did not mince his words:
“This is an obvious case where Indians were being used as guinea pigs.”
The standing committee’s report was also highly critical of the relationship between PATH and members of several of India’s health agencies, highlighting multiple conflicts of interest.
On the issue of informed consent, the committee confirmed the allegations made by Sama to be true, finding that the majority of consent forms weren’t signed by either the children or their parents, that many consent forms were postdated or not dated at all, that multiple forms had been signed by the same people (often the caretakers of the hostels the girls lived in) and that many signatures didn’t match the name on the form. It found that parents had not been given information on the necessity of vaccination, its pros and cons or its potential side effects.
No insurance was provided for any of the children in the event of injury and “PATH did not provide for urgent expert medical attention in case of serious adverse events.”
Further, PATH seriously contravened Indian health regulations by carrying out a clinical trial of a drug on children before first conducting a trial of the drug with adults as subjects.
Regarding the girls who had died, the committee criticized PATH, Indian medical authorities and the Andhra Pradesh State Government for summarily dismissing the link between their deaths and vaccination without conducting thorough investigations. By 2016, some 1,200 of the girls who had been subjects in the two HPV vaccine trials in India were reporting serious long-term side effects, more than 5% of the total cohort of 23,500. By then, the total number of deaths had risen to seven.
A DEATHLY SILENCE
This appalling breach of medical ethics and human rights went almost completely unmentioned outside India. The Indian Parliament’s Standing Committee on Health had literally accused an American NGO of child abuse, providing extensive evidence to support their charge, yet practically no mention of this was to be found anywhere in the Western media.
Popular science publications Nature and Science each contained a brief article about the debacle, but neither goes into any detail about PATH’s legal and ethical breaches. While the Science article is at least slightly critical, the Nature piece gives more space to a rebuttal of the charges by PATH director Vivien Tsu.
The Guardian, for all its claims to give a voice to the most vulnerable in the world, stayed curiously silent about the young girls of Khammam. That is, except for one article, published in October 2013, about six weeks after the release of the standing committee’s report.
The article was written not by one of the girls or one of their parents, not by one of the women from Sama who had advocated on the girls’ behalf, not even by one of the Indian parliamentarians who had been charged with investigating the affair.
No. It was written by an American man called Seth Berkely. Berkely is the CEO of Gavi, another BMGF funded health behemoth.
Seth Berkley, CEO GAVI
Berkely used his forum in The Guardian to claim that the girls who had died after being vaccinated in Khammam had committed suicide. Speaking about the 14,000 subjects involved in the trials, he said, “it would have been unusual if none of them went on to kill themselves.”
Compassion wasn’t the only element missing from his article. Not once did Berkley address the multiple breaches of law and ethics which had occurred or the role of PATH and that of his employers, the Gates Foundation, in his dismissal of this iniquity.
The Guardianbegan receiving funding from BMGF in August 2010. Prior to that arrangement, in 2007, the newspaper had published two separate articles which were critical of the lobbying tactics used by Merck to promote Gardasil and which questioned the efficacy of its use in mass vaccination programs.
Subsequent to their arrangement with Gates, all coverage by the Guardian of this drug (and of HPV vaccination in general) has been positive.
HOW THINGS TURNED OUT
BMGF headquarters, Seattle
The Indian government was reluctant to take any of the measures recommended by the committee. After all, there were huge amounts of money being made available to the state, institutions and individuals from organisations likePATH.
So no official reports of human rights violations were ever made by the Indian government to the WHO, to Unicef or to the US government, as had been recommended by the standing committee.
However, in 2017, it announced it would no longer accept grants from BMGF for its Immunisation Technical Support Unit, an organisation which provides “vaccination strategy advice” in relation to an estimated 27 million infants. Nevertheless, the Indian government continues to accept the foundation’s grants in other areas.
Merck, and their HPV vaccine Gardasil, have done very well since the dismal events recounted in this article. The Khammam scandal never really affected the company, due to a lack of awareness about it outside India. In 2018 alone, Gardasil sales amounted to more than $3bn, thanks to its inclusion on immunisation schedules around the world, and its launch that year in China.
PATH has never been better. Just like Merck, the lack of reporting about what happened in Khammam meant the organisation didn’t suffer. Since 2010, it has continued to receive huge funding from BMGF and, to a lesser extent, the US Government. During this period, BMGF has provided PATH with more than $1.2bn in funding.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has continued expanding its web of influence. Describing the organisation’s practices around the time of the events outlined here, Jacob Levich said:
“In essence, BMGF would buy up stockpiled drugs that had failed to create sufficient demand in the West, press them on the periphery at a discount, and lock in long-term purchase agreements with Third World governments.”
The foundation has since moved on to even more lucrative pastures. The Covid-19 pandemic has really pushed BMGF to centre stage. Gates himself has seen his public profile and political influence grow to an extent that would have been unimaginable even in 2019.
Well, those poor children and their plight wasn’t even widely known outside of India back in 2010. To say they had been forgotten would be to imply that anybody knew about them or cared about them in the first place.
Bernard Marx is the pseudonym used by a writer and teacher based in Ireland. Bernard’s areas of interest include history, politics and popular music. You can read more of his work at Notes from the New Normal
BILL Gates’s company Microsoft has changed our lives. It turned him into one of the richest men in the world and allowed him to turn philanthropist. His endeavour began in 1994 when he established the William H. Gates Foundation, soon to be followed by the Gates Learning Foundation in 1997. He merged the organisations in 2000 creating the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (GF). After the couple transferred $20billion of their Microsoft stock to the GF it became the largest charitable foundation in the world and over the next twenty years the most powerful charity in the world. Its endowment as of 2019 was $50billion.
The GF made its first donation to the World Health Organisation (WHO) in 1998. Soon after Gates pledged a further $750million to set up the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (Gavi), the stated aim of which is to increase immunisation rates in low-income countries, with the WHO and the UK amongst its original founders and donors. Last year Boris Johnson pledged Gavi £1.65billion over five years at the June 2020 Global Vaccine Summit replenishment conference, which the UK hosted. Six months later Johnson met Gates and pharmaceutical bosses to discuss Britain’s vaccine rollout and future pandemic plans.
The GF holds a permanent seat on Gavi’s board. Gavi’s core partners today are the GF, the WHO, Unicef and the World Bank, with the GF giving Gavi $4.1billion since its inception. Gavi is also the fifth largest funder of the WHO, giving $355.4million last year. With the WHO, Gavi dominates global vaccination campaigns including the Covid-19 vaccine rollout.
The WHO’s list of top 20 donors for the two-year budget cycle of 2018 and 2019 shows the GF coming second only to the US (their $893million donation accounting for 20 per cent of the WHO’s budget) with a $531 million donation (equal to 12 per cent of WHO’s budget). The GF and Gavi together outstrip all single country donations, except that of the US.
Since its inception the GF has given $54.8billion to a multitude of organisations. It has expanded globally, opening offices in Beijing in 2007 and London in 2010, and funding works in 135 countries. A letter from President Xi Jinping to Bill Gates, which you can read here, suggests Gates’s closeness to the Chinese Communist Party.
Donations from billionaires over the past 25 years have extensively bolstered the GF’s finances. Between 1994 and 2018 Mr and Mrs Gates donated $36billion of their own money, and in 2006 Warren Buffet pledged $30billion.
Eight years after establishing Gavi, Gates stepped down in 2008 as Microsoft CEO to commit more of his time to his foundation. By that time the GF was the largest charitable foundation in the US, and questions were being raised even then about its long reach in shaping US government health policies. After going into financial partnership with the GF, the publicly funded US National Institutes of Health (NIH) shifted their focus from the health and welfare of American citizens to global health. Concerns about the power, complexity and lack of accountability of GF, and Gates’s potential – effectively now realised – to become WHO’s largest donor continue to be articulated.
In 2010, with Warren Buffett, the Gateses launched Giving Pledge, a vehicle through which the very wealthy could donate to charity. To date there are no public details of who donates what through Giving Pledge, though this endeavour has turned into a tax haven for billionaires.
The GF is also a co-founder and funder of CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations), as influential as Gavi but less known. CEPI is a Norwegian venture which invests in vaccines and is also funded by the Indian and Norwegian governments, the British-based Wellcome Trust and the World Economic Forum. Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust and member of Sage, sits on the CEPI board. In 2017 Gates said that the world was unprepared for pandemics and that CEPI’s investments in ‘DNA/RNA vaccines’ would mitigate that. Both the GF and Wellcome Trust have pledged to fund CEPI with $100million annually from 2017 to 2022.
The initial endeavours of the William H. Gates Foundation to support scientific research and local charities have morphed into a global juggernaut with unaccountable power. Vast amounts of money are being channelled according to the thoughts, passions and prejudices of one man with questionable judgment.
In 1998, Gates was hauled before the US Senate to answer questions about Microsoft’s anti-trust practices. His demeanour while giving testimony was dishonest and arrogant. His performance is disturbing to watch, captured in this clip (from 1 minute 29 seconds) where he rocked repeatedly in his chair and insisted he didn’t understand the word ‘concern’.
When the WHO was formed as an intergovernmental organisation, it would have been unimaginable that a private foundation could have such influence or set the global health agenda. Though awareness of the GF’s influence over the WHO and Gavi is growing, what is less well documented is its extensive reach closer to home and its control over British science, medicine and public health. This I will be reporting on in the coming days.
In this episode, Dr. Pierre Kory, Chief Medical Officer of the FLCCC Alliance, discusses the ways that public health organizations are manipulating scientific data on early COVID-19 therapeutics in order to sow uncertainty; and why they are doing it.
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A few months ago I wrote about the government’s Covid-related advertising expenditure. In late spring 2020, all Covid-19 media campaigns were centralised into the Cabinet Office, Michael Gove’s sprawling 8,000-plus strong department. By the end of the year, HM Government had become the country’s largest spender for media advertising. My estimate was a total government outlay on advertising for Covid-related purposes in 2020 of approximately £240million.
For media outlets facing a collapse in advertising revenue because of the closure of the economy, the government spending was a lifeline. Whether the Fourth Estate could objectively report on the government’s handling of the virus whilst simultaneously receiving copious funding from that same government was highly debatable.
Since my article in February, more data has come to light. The Cabinet Office has continued spending heavily on Covid media campaigns, mainly through its media buying partner Manning Gottlieb, laying out just over £87million in the first three months of 2021. This brings its Covid advertising spend to more than £280million between April 2020 and March 2021.
Since the beginning of the coronavirus scare, the Cabinet Office’s outlay on Covid media campaigns has increased steadily, with Q1 21’s figure (£87million) being more than double the amount spent in Q2 20 (£42.6million), and up significantly on both Q3 20 (£71.3million) and Q4 20 (£79.7million). (As noted, it was in Q2 20 that the Cabinet Office began centralising Covid-related media programmes.)
Approximately 88 per cent of the Cabinet Office’s advertising spend is done through Manning Gottlieb, with whom the government has had a close working relationship since awarding the company a £800million media buying services contract in October 2018.
At that time Alex Aiken, Executive Director for Government Communications, stated that the government’s communications team sees such media endeavours as an important way to counter ‘disinformation’ and ‘fake news’. As anyone with a decent grasp of history will know, it is of course governments who are the regular purveyors of truth and honesty: the Soviet Union’s Pravda (translating as ‘truth’) being a helpful example of such services rendered to the public by the benevolent state.
However, this is only part of the story. After this large contract, Manning Gottlieb were awarded a further three contracts specifically with the Cabinet Office.
The first of these was in November 2018 at a value of £183million: the primary focus of this appears to have been for media campaigns during the transition period following Britain’s exit from the European Union. Nevertheless, with an end date of 31 May 2022, a proportion of these resources were funnelled into Covid-19 media campaigns.
Subsequently, a £119million contract was signed (effective March 2020) purely for the provision of media buying services for Covid-19 related campaigns. This contract was later extended – until either March or August 2021 (the government’s website is unclear) – by a further £229million, bringing this contract to a total value of £348million.
A third contract, effective 1 April 2021, was signed for the same purpose, Covid-19 media campaigns. This contract is extendable until 21 May 2022 and has a maximum value of £320million. Whether it will be expanded in a similar fashion to the previous contract signed with Manning Gottlieb remains to be seen.
Taken together, the three contracts have a value of £851million. As noted, some of this figure was spent before the pandemic on information campaigns surrounding Brexit. Nevertheless, over the last two quarters Covid advertising spending has outweighed Brexit by a factor of about 4:1. To this sum should be added spending from bodies such as Public Health England before the Cabinet Office’s centralisation efforts, which appears to be in the region of £15million, a figure smaller than I previously estimated.
That said, if the most recent contract with Manning Gottlieb was extended in the same way as the previous one (by an additional £229million), there is no reason why the Cabinet Office’s Covid advertising spend could not hit a total of £1billion over the next year to year-and-a-half.
With a pandemic that appears all but finished – oh, but for an entirely unpredictable ‘Indian variant’ – one wonders what the government will do with hundreds of millions of pounds of advertising through to late May next year. One can only presume that it will be used to browbeat the public into accepting a vaccine for which the majority have no need, or for the increasingly probable reimposition of further lockdowns.
The first of these prompts the question: if you are spending hundreds of millions to persuade people to get a vaccine, perhaps it is not all that necessary in the first place. Were the vaccine of an ordinary type and of indisputable value, I dare say no media campaign at all would be necessary: there is little more than their own health that people care about.
That contracts are projected to last at least another year is indeed worrying. Along with councils advertising positions for ‘Covid marshals’ until 2023, one wonders if the government already has plans for further infringements on our liberties, the timeframe for which has been built into contracts such as those as agreed with Manning Gottlieb. Given the backtracking, twisting and turning that has been displayed to date, it would not appear unlikely.
With a remit to purchase advertising across all media types, companies such as Manning Gottlieb are central to the dissemination of information in the public sphere. It remains an open question whether, while receiving central funds important to their survival, the media will be able or willing to scrutinise government policy, both in the realms of further lockdowns and of the constant bombardment of vaccine propaganda.
The track record so far shows that the vast majority of the media is both unable and unwilling to ask difficult questions surrounding the government’s handling of the pandemic. With hundreds of millions of pounds sloshing around over the next few years, don’t expect that to change any time soon.
Awareness of ivermectin’s efficacy and its adoption by physicians worldwide to successfully treat COVID-19 have grown exponentially over the past several months. Oddly, however, even as the clinical trials data and successful ivermectin treatment experiences continue to mount, so too have the criticisms and outright recommendations against the use of ivermectin by the vast majority, though not all, of public health agencies (PHA), concentrated largely in North America and Europe.
The Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) and other ivermectin researchers have repeatedly offered expert analyses to respectfully correct and rebut the PHA recommendations, based on our deep study and rapidly accumulated expertise “in the field” on the use of ivermectin to treat COVID-19. These rebuttals were publicized and provided to international media for the education of providers and patients across the world. Our most recent response to the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and others recommendation against use can be found on the FLCCC website here.
In February 2021, the British Ivermectin Recommendation Development (BIRD), an international meeting of physicians, researchers, specialists, and patients, followed a guideline development process consistent with the WHO standard. It reached a consensus recommendation that ivermectin, a verifiably safe and widely available oral medicine, be immediately deployed early and globally. The BIRD group’s recommendation rested in part on numerous, well-documented studies reporting that ivermectin use reduces the risk of contracting COVID-19 by over 90% and mortality by 68% to 91%.
A similar conclusion has also been reached by an increasing number of expert groups from the United Kingdom (UK),Italy, Spain, United States (US), and a group from Japan headed by the Nobel Prize-winning discoverer of Ivermectin, Professor Satoshi Omura. Focused rebuttals that are backed by voluminous research and data have been shared with PHAs over the past months. These include the WHO and many individual members of its guideline development group (GDG), the FDA, and the NIH. However, these PHAs continue to ignore or disingenuously manipulate the data to reach unsupportable recommendations against ivermectin treatment. We are forced to publicly expose what we believe can only be described as a “disinformation” campaign astonishingly waged with full cooperation of those authorities whose mission is to maintain the integrity of scientific research and protect public health.
The following accounting and analysis of the WHO ivermectin panel’s highly irregular and inexplicable analysis of the ivermectin evidence supports but one rational explanation: the GDG Panel had a predetermined, nonscientific objective, which is to recommend against ivermectin. This is despite the overwhelming evidence by respected experts calling for its immediate use to stem the pandemic. Additionally, there appears to be a wider effort to employ what are commonly described as “disinformation tactics” in an attempt to counter or suppress any criticism of the irregular activity of the WHO panel.
The WHO Ivermectin Guideline Conflicts with the NIH Recommendation
The FLCCC Alliance is a nonprofit, humanitarian organization made up of renowned, highly published, world-expert clinician-researchers whose sole mission over the past year has been to develop and disseminate the most effective treatment protocols for COVID-19. In the past six months, much of this effort has been centered on disseminating knowledge of our identification of significant randomized, observational, and epidemiologic studies consistently demonstrating the powerful efficacy of ivermectin in the prevention and treatment of COVID-19. Our manuscript detailing the depth and breadth of this evidence passed a rigorous peer review by senior scientists at the U.S Food and Drug Administration and Defense Threat Reduction Agency. Recently published, our study concludes that, based on the totality of the evidence of efficacy and safety, ivermectin should be immediately deployed to prevent and treat COVID-19 worldwide.
The first “red flag” is the conflict between the March 31, 2021, WHO Ivermectin Panel’s “against” recommendation and the NIH’s earlier recommendation from February 12th of a more supportive neutral recommendation based on a lower amount of supportive evidence of ivermectin’s efficacy at that time.
Two flawed lines of analysis by the WHO appear to account for this inconsistent result:
The WHO arbitrarily and severely limited the extent and diversity of study designs considered (e.g., retrospective observational controlled trials (OCT), prospective OCTs, epidemiological, quasi-randomized, randomized, placebo-controlled, etc.).
The WHO mischaracterized the overall quality of the trial data to undermine the included studies.
The Severely Limited Extent and Diversity of Ivermectin Data Considered by the WHO’s Ivermectin Panel
The WHO Ivermectin Panel arbitrarily included only a narrow selection of the available medical studies that their research team had been instructed to collect when formulating their recommendation, with virtually no explanation why they excluded such a voluminous amount of supportive medical evidence. This was made obvious at the outset due to the following:
No pre-established protocol for data exclusion was published, which is a clear departure from standard practice in guideline development.
The exclusions departed from the WHO’s own original search protocol it required of Unitaid’s ivermectin research, which collected a much wider array of randomized controlled trials (RCT).
Key Ivermectin Trial Data Excluded from Analysis
The WHO excluded all “quasi-randomized” RCTs from consideration (two excluded trials with over 200 patients that reported reductions in mortality).
The WHO excluded all RCTs where ivermectin was compared to or given with other medications. Two such trials with over 750 patients reported reductions in mortality.
The WHO excluded from consideration 7 of the 23 available ivermectin RCT results. Such irregularities skewed the proper assessment of important outcomes in at least the following ways:
Mortality Assessment
WHO Review: Excluded multiple RCTs such that only 31 total trials deaths occurred; despite this artificially meager sample, an estimate of up to a 91% reduction in the risk of death was found.[1]
Compared to the BIRD Review: Included 13 RCTs with 107 deaths observed and found a 2.5% mortality with ivermectin vs. 8.9% in controls; estimated reduction in risk of death=68%; highly statistically significant, (p=.007).
Assessment of Impacts on Viral Clearance
WHO Review: 6 RCTs, 625 patients. The Panel avoided mention of the important finding of a strong dose-response in regard to this outcome.
This action in (i) is indefensible given that their Unitaid research team found that among 13 RCTs, 10 of the 13 reported statistically significant reductions in time to viral clearance, with larger reductions with multiday dosing than single-day, consistent with a profound dose-response relationship.[2]
Adverse Effects
WHO: Only included 3 RCTs studying this outcome. Although no statistical significance was found, the slight imbalance in this limited sample allowed the panel to repeatedly document concerns for “harm” with ivermectin treatment.
Compare (a) to the WHO’s prior safety analysis in their 2018 Application for Inclusion of Ivermectin onto Essential Medicines List for Indication of Scabies:
“Over one billion doses have been given in large-scale prevention programs.”
“Adverse events associated with ivermectin treatment. are primarily minor and transient.”[3]
The WHO excluded all RCTs studying the prevention of COVID-19 with ivermectin, without supporting rationale. Three RCTs including almost 800 patients found an over 90% reduction in the risk of infection when ivermectin is taken preventively.[4]
The WHO excluded observational controlled trials (OCT), with 14 studies of ivermectin. These included thousands of patients, including those employing propensity matching, a technique shown to lead to similar accuracy as RCTs.
One large, propensity-matched OCT from the US found that ivermectin treatment was associated with a large decrease in mortality.
A summary analysis of the combined data from the 14 available ivermectin OCTs found a large and statistically significant decrease in mortality.
The WHO excluded numerous published and posted epidemiologic studies, despite requesting and receiving a presentation of the results from one leading epidemiologic research team. These studies found:
In numerous cities and regions with population-wide ivermectin distribution campaigns, large decreases in both excess deaths and COVID-19 case fatality rates were measured immediately following the campaigns.
Countries with pre-existing ivermectin prophylaxis campaigns against parasites demonstrate significantly lower COVID-19 case counts and deaths compared to neighboring countries without such campaigns.
Assessment of the Quality of the Evidence Base by WHO Guideline Group
The numerous above actions minimizing the extent of the evidence base were then compounded by the below efforts to minimize the quality of the evidence base:
The WHO mischaracterized the overall quality of the included trials as “low” to “very low,” conflicting with numerous independent expert research group findings:
An international expert guideline group independently reviewed the BIRD proceeding and instead found the overall quality of trials to be “moderate.”
The WHO’s own Unitaid systematic review team currently grade the overall quality as “moderate.”
The WHO graded the largest trial it included to support a negative assessment of ivermectin’s mortality impacts as “low risk of bias.” A large number of expert reviewers have graded that same trial as “high risk of bias,” detailed in an open letter signed by over 100 independent physicians.
We must emphasize this critical fact: If the WHO had more accurately assessed the quality of evidence as “moderate certainty,” consistent with the multiple independent research teams above, ivermectin would instead become the standard of care worldwide, similar to what occurred after the dexamethasone evidence finding decreased mortality was graded as moderate quality, which then led to its immediate global adoption in the treatment of moderate to severe COVID-19 in July of 2020.[5]
Further, The WHO’s own guideline protocol stipulates that quality assessments should beupgraded when there is the following:
a large magnitude of effect (despite their data estimating a survival benefit of 81%, the low number of studies and events included allowed them to dismiss this finding as “very low certainty”) or;
evidence of a dose-response relationship. The WHO shockingly omits the well-publicized reports by their Unitaid research team of a powerful dose-response relationship with viral clearance.
In sum, the WHO’s recommendation that “ivermectin not be used outside clinical trials” is based entirely upon:
the dismissal of large amounts of trial data;
the inaccurate downgrading of evidence quality; and
the deliberate omission of a dose-response relationship with viral clearance.
Consequently, these actions formed the basis of their ability to avoid a recommendation for immediate global use.
Even more surprising is that based on their “very low certainty” finding, the panel goes on to “infer” that “most patients would be reluctant to use a medication for which the evidence left high uncertainty regarding effects on outcomes they consider important.”
This statement is insupportable in light of the above actions. No patient could ever rationally consent to a trial in which they were acutely ill and would be subject to the possibility of receiving a placebo, once informed of: the large amount of relevant and positive trials that the WHO removed from consideration, their avoidance of reporting a large dose-response relationship, and their widely contradicted “very low certainty” grading of large mortality benefits. Such a trial would result in a historic ethical research violation, causing both a widespread loss of life and a resultant loss of trust in PHAs and research institutions for decades to come.
The many methods employed by the WHO to distort the evidence base and arrive at a non-recommendation are made even more suspicious and questionable by the following:
The WHO GDG did not hold a vote on the use of ivermectin. This highly irregular decision was purportedly based on the Ivermectin Panel’s “consensus on evidence certainty.”
Unitaid Sponsors allegedly inserted multiple limitations and weakened the conclusions in the preprint, systematic review manuscript by the Unitaid research team, which has recently led to formal charges of scientific misconduct.
BIRD: Approved ivermectin in March, 2021, for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19 based on 21 RCTs and 2,741 patients.
Conclusion
As expert clinician-researchers in society, we are firmly committed to ensuring that public health policy decisions derive from scientific data. Disturbingly, after extensive analysis of the recent WHO ivermectin guideline recommendation, we could not arrive at a credible scientific rationale to explain the numerous irregular, arbitrary, and inconsistent behaviors documented above. Further, after consultation with numerous physicians, guideline reviewers, legal experts, and veteran PHA scientists, we identified two major socio-political-economic forces that serve as the main barrier influences preventing ivermectin’s incorporation into public health policy in major parts of the world. They are:
1) the modern structure and function of what we will describe as “Big Science” and;
2) the presence of an active “Political-Economic Disinformation Campaign.”
“Big Science”
Also known as “Big RCT Fundamentalism,” Big Science reflects a dramatic shift in the practice of modern evidence-based medicine (EBM). Beginning before COVID, it has since rapidly evolved into the current system that more tightly meshes the entities of “Big Pharma,” “Big PHA’s/Academic Health Centers” (AMC), “Big Journals,” “Big Media,” and “Big Social Media” into the public health system’s efforts at guiding patient care, research and policy.
The structure and function of “Big Science” in COVID-19 is most simply represented as follows:
Only arbitrarily defined, “large, well-designed” RCTs (Big RCT), generally conducted on North American or European shores, can “prove” the efficacy of a medicine.
Only Big Pharma/Big PHA/AMCs have the resources/infrastructure to conduct Big-RCTs. (Many equate Big PHA/AMC with Big Pharma, given the funding source of the former.)
Only Big RCTs by Big Pharma or Big PHA/AMC can publish study findings in high-impact, high-income country medical journals (Big Journals).
Only medicines supported by Big Journal publications are deemed to have “sufficient evidence” and “proven efficacy” to then be recommended by Big PHAs.
Only medicines recommended by Big PHAs are covered by “Big Media” or escape censorship on “Big Social Media.”
Conversely, repurposed, off-patient medications such as ivermectin do not attract Big PHA or Big Pharma sponsors to conduct the mandatory Big RCT. Given this structural handicap, many effective medicines including ivermectin are consequently incapable of ever meeting Big PHA standards for approval in such a system. In the case of ivermectin, it is then considered, first by Big PHAs, then throughout Big Media and Big Social media, to be “unproven” given it lacks “sufficient evidence” and is thus heavily censored from public discussion and awareness. Mentions of ivermectin on Big Social Media led to the removal of a popular Facebook group (“Ivermectin MD Team” with over 10,000 followers). Additionally, all YouTube videos mentioning ivermectin in treatment of Covid-19 were removed or demonetized, as well as Twitter pages locked. Further, in Big Media, even the most credentialed independent and expert groups who recommend ivermectin based on a large body of irrefutable evidence are labeled as “controversial” and purveyors of “medical misinformation.”
A health system structured to function in this manner is clearly vulnerable to and overly influenced by entities with financial interests. Further, in Covid, such systems have evolved into rigidly operating via top-down edicts and widespread censoring. This allows little ability for emerging scientific developments not funded by Big Pharma to be disseminated from within the system or through media or social media until years later when, and if, a Big RCT is completed. This barrier has presented as an enduring horror throughout the pandemic given the widespread loss of life caused by the systematic withholding of numerous rapidly identified, safe and effective, repurposed medicines for fear of using “unproven therapies” without “sufficient evidence” for use. Alternatively, and for the first time in many physicians’ careers, those who seek to treat their patients with such therapies, based on their professional interpretation of the existing evidence are restricted by their employers issuing edicts “from above.” They are then forced to follow protocols that rely predominantly on pharmaceutically engineered therapeutics.
It must be recognized that distinct from “regulatory” agencies such as the FDA, whose system often relies upon the primary importance of a “Big RCT,” stronger foundations used by PHAs are available. One of the long-standing tenets of modern evidence-based medicine is that the highest form of medical evidence is a “systematic review and meta-analysis” of RCTs and not a sole Big RCT. Disturbingly, not one of the Big PHAs mention this established principle or their long-standing reliance on such evidence-based practices for issuing recommendations. In the case of ivermectin, they willfully ignore the multiple published expert meta-analyses of ivermectin RCTs, including almost two dozen trials and thousands of patients, reporting consistent reductions in mortality, time to clinical recovery, and time to viral clearance.
These improvements are found consistently and repeatedly, no matter the RCT design, size, or quality, and from varied centers and countries throughout the world. All studies were done without any identified conflict of interest with the vast majority of double-blind, single-blind, quasi-randomized, open-label, standard of care comparison, combination therapy comparisons, etc., reporting benefits. Satoshi Omura, Nobel Prize-winning discoverer of ivermectin, wrote in his team’s recent review paper that “the probability of this judgement on ivermectin’s superior clinical performance being false is estimated to be 1 in 4 trillion.” This supports our public warnings against further “placebo-controlled trials” given the near absolute certainty of harm to research subjects included in a placebo Big RCT.
Conversely, despite sitting atop the highest form of medical evidence, many non-regulatory Big PHAs around the world cry out for a Big RCT. This is while avoiding the issuance of even one of the several “weaker” recommendation options available to them in the setting of a low-cost, widely available medicine with an unparalleled safety profile and a constantly surging humanitarian crisis, even in the interim. Insufficient evidence, unproven — these are comments from WHO, NIH, Europe’s EMA, South Africa’s SAPHRA, France’s ANSM, United Kingdom’s MHRA, and Australia’s TGA.
Most disturbing to contemplate is our estimation that if the use of penicillin in bacterial infection were to have been tested in these same numbers and types of trials in the 1940s, the graphical display of benefits would look nearly identical to those found with ivermectin. Further, the U.S Cures Act of 2016, “specifically designed to accelerate and bring new innovations and advances faster and more efficiently to the patients who need them” emphasized the importance of using various forms of “real-world evidence” data to aid in regulatory decision-making. We can find no evidence of an organized effort to examine the more than 14, often large OCTs that show evidence of the substantial beneficial use of ivermectin. Further, no PHA has cited the numerous convincing epidemiological analyses that find rapidly falling case fatality rates following ivermectin distribution campaigns.
With the lack of a credible explanation for the absence of even a weak recommendation for ivermectin in the setting of widespread increased death rates from COVID-19, numerous citizens have speculated that this can only be explained by the presence of an active disinformation campaign by entities with nonscientific and largely financial objectives dependant on the non-recognition of ivermectin’s efficacy. We explore the near certainty of this occurring below.
Active Political-Economic “Disinformation” Campaign
“Disinformation” campaigns, best described in the article, “The Disinformation Playbook,” are initiated when independent science interferes with or opposes the interests of corporations or policymakers. Although thankfully rare, in certain cases these entities will actively seek to manipulate science and distort the truth about scientific findings that imperil their profit or policy objectives. First developed by the tobacco industry decades ago, these deceptive tactics include the following;
The Fake: Conduct counterfeit science and try to pass it off as legitimate research.
The Blitz: Harass scientists speaking out with results inconvenient for industry.
The Diversion: Manufacture uncertainty about science where little or none exists.
The Screen: Buy credibility through alliances with academia/professional societies.
The Fix: Manipulate government processes to influence policy inappropriately.
Numerous examples of the above disinformation tactics by corporations and policymakers, particularly within the pharmaceutical industry, have been documented:
Georgia Pacific publishing “fake science” on the dangers of asbestos (The Fake)
Most worrisome is that ivermectin appears to be up against one of the largest financial and global policy oppositions in modern history, including but not limited to:
Numerous Big Pharma companies and sovereign nations selling billions of vaccine doses.
Scale of market for vaccines now exponentially increasing due to the developing market for “booster shots” against rapidly appearing variants.
Concerns of numerous Big Pharma and Big PHA’s that if ivermectin is approved as effective treatment for COVID-19, EUAs for all vaccines would be revoked.
Disinformation: EMA erroneously claims effective concentrations are unattainable.
Numerous Big Pharma/Big PHA concerns that ivermectin’s potential as an alternative to vaccines may increase vaccine hesitancy and disrupt mass vaccination rollouts.
Opponents include large philanthropic sponsors with global vaccination goals.
Disinformation: WHO Panel does not review ivermectin prevention trials.
Numerous Big Pharma company investments in novel, engineered therapies (i.e., oral antivirals by Merck and Pfizer and Gilead) directly compete with ivermectin.
Disinformation: Merck places a post on their website, without scientific supporting evidence or named scientist authors that: “No evidence of either a mechanism of action, clinical efficacy or safety in COVID-19 exists.”
Big Pharma company’s (Astra-Zeneca) investment into a long-acting antibody product for prevention and treatment of COVID-19, which competes with ivermectin.
Big Pharma’s Remdesivir demand would rapidly decline once hospitalizations were to decrease after ivermectin approval.
Based on the lack of a rational explanation for the above actions by WHO, Merck, FDA, and Unitaid, we conclude that they result from an active disinformation campaign, executed both through the PHA’s, media and the WHO Guideline group recommendations. As highly published researchers, we find the allegations of scientific misconduct in the writing of the WHO/United research team’s meta-analysis manuscript to be deeply disturbing. It clearly represents a disinformation tactic with an intent to distort and diminish the reporting of a large magnitude benefit on mortality among many hundreds of patients. Further, Merck’s demonstrably and blatantly false statements against ivermectin deserve no further discussion. It is yet another entry into the disturbing historical record of actions committed by a Big Pharma entity with the primary intent of protecting profit at the expense of the welfare of global citizens.
For These Compelling and Irrefutable Reasons, The FLCCC Makes a Call to Action
This call to action is no longer just to health authorities, but to citizens everywhere to fight back against these disinformation tactics. We find the advice of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) to be an excellent guide to action in this regard:
Global Citizens
Share the playbook with your social media networks when you see new examples like those outlined above.
Set the record straight. When you see someone spreading disinformation on a topic, counter it. There are millions around the world who either have studied the data or have experience with the potent efficacy of ivermectin in COVID-19. It is important to correct false assertions.
Consider divesting your retirement funds and other investments from companies engaging in disinformation.
If a governmental or NGO scientist, report actions that diminish their role in policymaking.
Media
Avoid false equivalencies that distort scientific consensus.
Correct the record when scientific information is misrepresented, particularly by Big PHA/Big Pharma.
Report abuses of science in government.
As an expert group of ivermectin researchers, we are unsure of what else to offer in order to correct or counteract this misrepresentation of an important drug. Our belief is that, of the above actions, the most effective counter to the disinformation campaign would be that a whistleblower become active from within WHO, the FDA, the NIH, Merck, or Unitaid. This moment in history demands a man or woman with the courage and conviction to step forward. Urgently.
In both the interests of humanity and to motivate and inspire such a citizen of the world, we leave you with the words of Albert Einstein: “The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them and do nothing.”
[1]Special emphasis must be placed on this decision; selecting only trials where very few deaths occurred.
(n.b., the number of events observed within trials is a primary criterion for judging the “certainty of evidence”). This action provides almost the entire basis for the panel’s assessment of a “very low certainty of evidence.” It is in effect, a “smoking gun,” one of the many actions above demonstrating that the primary objective of the Panel was to recommend against use of ivermectin. [2]This omission is the second most important action allowing the panel to find a “very low certainty of evidence,” given that, per WHO protocol, if a dose-response relationship is found, the certainty of evidence must be upgraded. [3]Special emphasis must be placed on the harm of excluding trials data supporting ivermectin in the prevention of COVID-19. If the preventive efficacy of ivermectin were to be known or accepted, this would allow deployment in regions without vaccines.
[4]British Ivermectin Recommendation Development (BIRD) panel (2021). The BIRD Recommendation on the Use of Ivermectin for COVID-19. Full report. https://tinyurl.com/u27ea3y
[5]The FLCCC Alliance recommended, as well as gave U.S. Senate testimony in support of, the use of corticosteroids in COVID-19 months before this announcement, during the prolonged period when all PHAs recommended against its use
Sincerely,
The Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance
Pierre Kory, MD
Keith Berkowitz, MD
Paul E. Marik, MD
Fred Wagshul, MD
Umberto Meduri, MD
Scott Mitchell, MBChB
Joseph Varon, MD
Eivind Vinjevoll, MD
Jose Iglesias, DO
At base, the markets are a con game where the rich and powerful employ a raft of confidence men to lure suckers into the latest mania. In this game, the suckers are the general public who are left holding the bag as the market bubble bursts while the smart money swoops in to buy up the leftover assets at pennies on the dollar. In this week’s edition of The Corbett Report, James Corbett pulls back the curtain on the Wall Street casino and reveals how the house always wins the rigged games.
For those with limited bandwidth, CLICK HERE to download a smaller, lower file size version of this episode.
For those interested in audio quality, CLICK HERE for the highest-quality version of this episode (WARNING: very large download).
TRANSCRIPT
In December of 2020, video game retailer GameStop reported an operating loss of $63 million in the previous quarter on the back of an 11% reduction in the store base. The story—just one of dozens of such reports flooding the financial newswires—meant little to the general public and went largely unnoticed.
Two groups did show an interest in the news, however: the Wall Street vultures who see every faltering company as an easy source of money in the futures markets and a small band of retail investors who saw the potential for the floundering gaming franchise to turn things around.
Within a matter of weeks, these two groups would clash in one of the most spectacular stock market face offs in recent memory. Even the White House got drawn into the saga.
REPORTER: I was concerned about the stock market activity we’re seeing around GameStop and now with some other stocks as well, including the subsidiary or whatever—the company that was . . . Blockbuster?—and have there been any conversations with the SEC about how to proceed?
JEN PSAKI: Well, I’m also happy to repeat that we have the first female treasury secretary and a team that’s surrounding her and often questions about market we’ll send to them. But our team is of course—our economic team, including Secretary Yellen and others—are monitoring the situation.
The human drama in the story made it easily recognizable as a David vs. Goliath narrative. Here was a ragtag band of mom-and-pop—or, in this case, millennial—investors going up against the hudge fund billionaires. And, just as it seemed they may actually have an effect, the full power of the financial and political system seemed to swoop in to suppress them.
But the “revelation” that retail investors are fighting a rigged game against the Wall Street hedge fund behemoths is hardly a revelation at all. In fact, it is merely the latest example in a long series of events showing that the stock market was never meant to bring riches and fortune to the average investor.
Instead, when the story is told in its full context, there is only one obvious conclusion to be drawn:
The stock market is often portrayed in the financial media as a magical crystal ball that can not only tell us about what is happening in the economy, but predict geopolitical events, forecast elections, or even reveal to us the inner workings of the minds of men.
BECKY QUICK: Alright, so polls are one way of trying to figure out who’s going to win. Watching the markets are another. They’re pretty good at predicting elections sometimes, too.
LESLIE PICKER: Valuations on a price-to-earnings basis are below post-crisis averages leading some to believe that decent fundamentals could—emphasis on could—jumpstart the shares higher.
DOMINIC CHU: You’re telling me you don’t have a crystal ball . . .
PICKER: I don’t.
CHU: . . . And I don’t blame you.
PICKER: I don’t. But even I did I couldn’t say it here.
KRISTINA HOOPER: Well, we could very well see some gains, some pullbacks, more gains. Certainly animal spirits are alive and well, but I would argue it’s a very different spirit animal than last year. Since the start of February our spirit animal is probably the chihuahua.
But this is a lie. In reality, the markets are driven not by underlying economic fundamentals, as the public is asked to believe, but by the actions of the central banks.
This is not even a controversial point.
In 2014, the Bank for International Settlements warned that central banks were causing “elevated” asset prices.
A report from the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum that same year warned that “Central banks around the world, including in Europe, are buying increasing volumes of equities” and “The same authorities that are responsible for maintaining financial stability are often the owners of the large funds that have the potential to cause problems.”
And in 2016—in the midst of the historic bull run that has seen the Dow Jones and S&P indexes reach all-time record high after all-time record high—economist Brian Barnier published a report documenting that between the beginning of the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing program in 2008 and the 1st quarter of 2015, the Fed was directly responsible for 93% of equity value growth in the US.
This modern era of central bank-dominated markets, however, is only the latest version of a game that is as old as the markets themselves. At base it’s a con game where the rich and powerful employ a raft of confidence men to lure suckers into the latest market mania. In this game, the “suckers” are the general public who are left holding the bag as the market bubble bursts while the “smart money” swoops in to buy up the leftover assets at pennies on the dollar.
The game was being played as far back as 1814 when a uniformed man posing as the aide-de-camp of Lord Cathcart landed in Dover spreading the false rumour that Napoleon had been killed by a detachment of Cossacks. When the rumours reached London later that day, three men dressed up as French officers in white Bourbon cockades were parading across Blackfriars bridge proclaiming the end of the Napoleonic empire and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. By the time the British government officially dispelled the rumour later that afternoon, an elaborate fraud had already played out in the London stock markets. The rumour had kicked off a buying frenzy and the perpetrators of what is now known as The Great Fraud of Cowley—the ones who had started the rumours and hired the actors to help spread them—had already sold 1.1 million pounds worth of government stock into the market peak.
Another bit of market manipulation centering around Napoleon’s military fortunes played out again the next year, in 1815. Nathan Rothschild of the infamous Rothschild banking dynasty used the smuggling network that he and his brothers had built to funnel gold and silver to Wellington’s army to get news of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo back to London 24 hours before the official word reached the British government. Although a fancified version of the story involving homing pigeons and Nathan’s acting abilities at the stock exchange are easily dismissed as anti-Semitic slurs by the mainstream press, even the official Rothschild Archive treatment of the incident admits that Nathan Rothschild did receive early warning of Wellington’s victory and he did profit from that foreknowledge in the stock market. Historian Niall Ferguson has written on the subject in detail in his authorized biography of the Rothschilds and even the BBC published a story in 1998 outlining how the conspiracy functioned and how the brothers communicated in secret by writing their letters in the Judendeutsch script they had learned in their childhood in the Frankfurt Jewish ghetto.
The stock market con game isn’t just an historical relic, though. Those with advance knowledge of world events continue to profit from their insider information, sometimes in the most macabre way imaginable.
ANTONIO MORA: What many Wall Street analysts believe is that the terrorists made bets that a number of stocks would see their prices fall. They did so by buying what they call ‘puts.’ If you bet right the rewards can be huge. The risks are also huge unless you know something bad is going to happen to the company you’re betting against.
DYLAN RATIGAN: This could very well be insider trading at the worst, most horrific, most evil use you’ve ever seen in your entire life.
In the wake of 9/11, researchers began to uncover a money trail that proved those with advance knowledge of the attack had indeed used their insider information to profit from the events of that day.
In addition to the Securities and Exchange Commission in the United States, the governments of Italy, Germany, Belgium and other countries began their own investigations into a series of trades betting against companies that were hurt by 9/11—like Boeing, Merrill Lynch, United Airlines, Munich Re and others—and betting on companies that profited from the attacks—including a six-fold increase in call options on the stock of defense contractor Raytheon on September 10, 2001.
In subsequent years, not one, not two, but three separate, peer-reviewed papers concluded that the unusual trading in the weeks prior to 9/11 were “consistent with insiders anticipating the 9/11 attacks.” But incredibly, the SEC investigation into this money trail was abruptly terminated and the records of that investigation were subsequently destroyed.
Why? Because, as researchers like Kevin Ryan, Michael Ruppert and others later discovered, the trail led them to the doorstep not of Al Qaeda, but well-connected American businessmen and intelligence officials.
MICHAEL C. RUPPERT: So right after the attacks of 9/11 the name Buzzy Krongard surfaced. It was instant research that revealed that Buzzy Krongard had been allegedly recruited by CIA Director George Tenet to become the Executive Director at CIA, which is the number three position, right before the attacks.
And Alex Brown was one of the many subsidiaries of Deutsche Bank, one of the primary vehicles or instruments that handled all of these criminal trades by people who obviously knew that the attacks were going to take place, where, how and involving specific airlines.
KEVIN RYAN: I came across this document that had been released: a memorandum for the record of the 9/11 Commission. It was prepared by a staff member of the 9/11 Commission. His name is Douglas Greenberg and he reviewed simply the FBI’s meetings on their communications related to this. This document identified a couple of companies that were flagged by the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) and one of them—this was September 21st just ten days after the attacks—one of these companies that was flagged was called Stratesec. And this is a very interesting company because it’s a security company that had contracts for the World Trade Center and Dulles Airport where one of the planes took off on 9/11, as well as United Airlines, which owned two of the other three planes. So this security company, Stratesec, was a very central player in in the events of 9/11, you could say, because they ran security for these different areas in the years leading up to 9/11.
So for them this company stopped to be flagged by the SEC was very compelling and when I looked at this document—prepared by the 9/11 Commission which wasn’t released until 2007—I noticed that the names had been redacted of the stock traders, but I could make out who they were. In particular, one of them was a director of the company Stratesec. He was also a director of a company in Oklahoma, an aviation company. He was also a director of a Washington, DC-based financial organization. With just that information you could tell very clearly that this man was Wirt Dexter Walker. He was the Chief Executive Officer of Stratesec and also a director there. His wife, Sally Walker, was also named in the flagging by the SEC. So I began looking into that.
JEREMY ROTHE-KUSHEL: …the last thing I want to leave you with is the National Reconnaissance Office was running a drill of a plane crashing into their building and you know they’re staffed by DoD and CIA…
ROBERT BAER: I know the guy that went into his broker in San Diego and said “Cash me out, it’s going down tomorrow.”
JEREMY ROTHE KUSHEL: Really?
ROBERT BAER: Yeah.
STEWART HOWE: That tells us something.
ROBERT BAER: What?
STEWART HOWE: That tells us something.
ROBERT BAER: Well, his brother worked at the White House.
Horrific as these instances of insider trading are, an even deeper layer of the story lies in the fact that these trades—unlike the high-profile show trials of Martha Stewart and other stories-of-the-week—never result in prosecutions. The protection afforded the 9/11 inside traders speaks to an even deeper layer of the problem: the use of the markets to line the pockets of insiders and their political cronies is not a bug in the system, but a feature. In fact, the entire system has been designed to be manipulable, ensuring that the little guys never have a chance against the billionaire bankers and hedge funds.
A clue to this story goes back to the most well-known event in stock market history: the Great Crash of 1929. Even there, in the midst of one of the most devastating financial collapses in human history, there was money to be made by insiders who knew what was coming.
One such insider was Albert Henry Wiggin, Chairman of the Chase National Bank and the man who had been instrumental in attracting the Rockefeller family to begin their century-long involvement in Chase. When the market began plummeting on Black Thursday 1929, Wiggin and his fellow banking associates were lauded as heroes for their actions to restore order to the market, which culminated in New York Stock Exchange Vice President Richard Whitney stepping out on the floor of the Exchange and making a great commotion by yelling out orders for key stocks at above-market prices.
Wiggin knew he was covered no matter what happened. Shortly before the Crash, he shorted shares in his own bank by borrowing shares from various brokers at prices he anticipated would fall, at which time he would buy the shares in the market at lower prices and return them to the brokers, making money on the difference. When the Dow stood at 359 on September 23, 1929 (the market had topped out twenty days earlier at 381), he placed what would be a hugely profitable bet that Chase’s stock would fall.
[. . .]
Before shorting those shares, Wiggin executed another profitable and shady strategy, using his bank’s funds to plump the shares up. He placed $200 million of his depositors’ money into trusts that speculated in Chase stock, thus participating in the very pool operations that artificially boosted its price during the run-up to the Crash. He pocketed $10.4 million from these trades, including $4 million from shorting the shares he drove up (after he drove them up) during the two-week period preceding the Crash. His justification for selling his own shares while Chase Securities was pushing customers to buy them was that the price was “ridiculously high.” He had, in effect, bet against all the other Chase shareholders who had trusted in his hype about the firm.
Another person who profited greatly from the financial crash was Joseph P. Kennedy, father of future president John F. Kennedy. The famous story, likely apocryphal but parroted by NPR, The Washington Post, PBS and any number of mainstream outlets, is that Kennedy, a savvy stock trader, knew the market was overheated when a random shoeshine boy gave him stock tips.
If this story is to be believed, Joe’s random interaction with a shoeshine boy in 1929 was one of the most profitable conversations of his life. Not only did Kennedy sell off most of his stock holdings shortly before the crash, he aggressively shorted the markets, meaning that while most of America—and much of the world—was plunged into one of the deepest and most prolonged financial crises in the history of the country, the Kennedy family flourished. In 1977, eight years after Joe’s death, the New York Timesestimated the family fortune to be somewhere between $300 and $500 million.
There are more than enough reasons to doubt that it was actually a brief chat with a shoeshine boy that led to Kennedy’s remarkable good fortune, however. The patriarch of the Kennedy dynasty had a reputation as an unscrupulous businessman, including the persistent allegations that he made his fortune in bootlegging during the Prohibition era. And so it was a shock to the nation when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed Kennedy to head the newly created Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934.
Even the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Historical Society struggles to explain the choice. “Kennedy had profited handsomely from financial manipulation,” their website frankly admits, “but he understood keenly the need to balance the interests of the people with the imperatives of the financial markets.” For his part, when asked why he had tapped a well-known scoundrel like Kennedy to head such an agency, President Roosevelt is said to have replied: “Takes one to catch one.”
That the SEC, the “independent federal agency” tasked with regulating the markets, should have an admitted market manipulator as its first chair should not be surprising when the agency’s track record is examined. Time and again, the SEC has not just allowed market manipulation to take place, but actively facilitated it.
When the largest Ponzi scheme in market history, Bernie Madoff’s unbelievable $64.8 billion investment fraud scam, came to a crashing halt with his arrest in December of 2008, attention turned to the SEC. How could the agency, which had investigated Madoff’s investment firm multiple times, not have halted the scam earlier?
A subsequent Inspector General report made the scope of this “failure” even more unbelievable, finding that “between June 1992 and December 2008 when Madoff confessed, the SEC received six substantive complaints that raised significant red flags concerning Madoff’s hedge fund operations and should have led to questions about whether Madoff was actually engaged in trading.” After excoriating the agency for its incompetence time and again over the course of two decades of failed opportunities, the report concludes:
As the foregoing demonstrates, despite numerous credible and detailed complaints, the SEC never properly examined or investigated Madofi’s trading and never took the necessary, but basic, steps to determine if Madoff was operating a Ponzi scheme. Had these efforts been made with appropriate follow-up at any time beginning in June of 1992 until December 2008, the SEC could have uncovered the Ponzi scheme well before Madoff confessed.
HARRY MARKOPOLOS: I gift wrapped and delivered the largest Ponzi scheme in history to them and somehow they couldn’t be bothered to conduct a thorough and proper investigation because they were too busy on matters of higher priority. If a $50 billion Ponzi scheme doesn’t make the SEC’s priority list, then I want to know who sets their priorities.
Similarly, when Enron shook the markets in 2001 by declaring the then-largest bankruptcy in history after its systemic accounting fraud was exposed, the question of the SEC’s role in the scandal arose. Why had the agency not caught on to the scam? A subsequent Senate Committee report excoriated the commission, noting that the “watchdog” had only opened one (unrelated) investigation into Enron in the past decade, that it repeatedly missed warning signs of corporate misconduct, that it granted the company unusual leeway in using mark-to-market accounting for its transactions and did not even seek to validate the models employed by the energy giant. In the end, the committee concluded that the entire affair represented a “systemic and catastrophic failure” of the SEC.
But the SEC did not use the lessons learned in these “systemic and catastrophic failures” to stop such fraud from taking place in the future. In fact, the Commission responded to these “failures” not by stringently cracking down on these scams, but by helping to facilitate new kinds of untraceable accounting trickery.
In the wake of the signal “failures” of SEC and other regulators to prevent the scandalous accounting fraud and subsequent catastrophic failures of Enron, Worldcom and Tyco, the US Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a federal law intended to “protect investors by improving the accuracy and reliability of corporate disclosures made pursuant to the securities laws, and for other purposes.” The nature of those “other purposes” soon became apparent as the devil emerged from the details of the software that promised to streamline the Sarbanes-Oxley compliance process for companies operating in the new regulatory environment.
One of these software solutions was EmailXtender, an email archiving program designed to help companies comply with Sarbanes-Oxley reporting requirements. The program was supposed to create a permanent record of emails so that auditors would be able to access all communications in the future, but, according to Richard Grove, who was working as a software salesman selling the program to prospective corporate clients, the program actually provided companies with a way to permanently and untraceably delete those records.
RICHARD GROVE: So a few weeks later in August of 2003 I was at a client called the NASD— which later changed its name so it’s now called the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority—and the NASD was looking at our product and they wanted to use it internally. And one of the guys across the table says to me, “Hey, wait a minute. This product has a back door! Because right here where you’re supposed to take this information and put it on the write-once-read-many storage, which is a type of permanent storage,” he said, “There’s this jar file and you can delete the jar file and then there’s no evidence of that transaction whatsoever.”
So he was showing me across a table that there’s a loophole, there’s a back door in a software that allows nefarious transactions to go on and subsequently they didn’t buy the software they’re like, “This is bullshit, this isn’t worth the money. This is not what it’s supposed to be and you should do something about that.” Now, I had management from my side in the meeting so I went to my managers afterwards and I’m like, “What’s this all about and why what’s going on with this?” and I was told not to talk about it.
Concerned with the possibility for mass financial fraud that was being enabled by this software, Grove took his concerns to the SEC. But instead of acting on this information to launch an investigation into the company and the software, the SEC not only dismissed Grove’s warning, but went out and bought that very software for their own use.
RICHARD GROVE: Right now the SEC reports to the President. So at the end of the day when the SEC was telling me they’re not interested, they’re telling me they’re not interested because I’m tying the Bush administration in with billionaire Richard Egan and his company that’s helping these companies do this. Of course they don’t want to sponsor that getting out to the public.
I filed a lawsuit, I represented myself in court against a multi-billion dollar international corporation and after three years—and after proving my case in court, including the fact that the SEC acted with complicity to protect the perpetrators—my case was dismissed on a technicality. Recognizing that the events I proved in court actually happened but were conveniently “outside the statute of limitations for the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.”
And once I understood the purpose of Sarbanes-Oxley regulations was to keep these companies from deleting files and that the back door in the software allow these companies to delete files— and more importantly the fact that someone outside of the company that’s not even associated with the company but has access to that software could launder money or steal money or just delete money from corporations and switch financial records all around without anyone, any investigator, any auditor being able to audit that—those things I thought were interesting. But when the SEC, after I told them, bought the software with the back door in it and started to use it for itself then I knew that the SEC was not there to regulate like I thought it was. They were also, “Hey, we can find a benefit from this back door in a software. We can delete files now. Now we’re above the law!”
But of all the various schemes for manipulating the markets, none have been quite so brazen as the Plunge Protection Team.
Formally known as the “Working Group on Financial Markets,” the Plunge Protection Team, or PPT, was born in the wake of another stock market crash: Black Monday of October 1987. Far from a “conspiracy theory” or “internet rumour,” the formation of the group was announced in the pages of the Federal Register on March 22, 1988, which contained, on page 9421, the text of Executive Order 12631, a seemingly mundane announcement signed by President Reagan on March 18, 1988.
The order, citing “the major issues raised by the numerous studies on the events in the financial markets surrounding October 19, 1987,” goes on to establish a working group of the treasury secretary, the Fed chair, the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). It empowers the group to “consult, as appropriate, with representatives of the various exchanges, clearinghouses, self-regulatory bodies, and with major market participants to determine private sector solutions wherever possible” and to report back to the president.
Hidden behind this innocuous-sounding rhetoric is an organization that has been at work for the last three decades, quietly but documentably intervening to prop up the markets whenever they start plunging—or even sagging.
The name “Plunge Protection Team” comes from a Washington Post article that ran under that headline in February 1997. In that piece, staff writer Brett D. Fromson revealed how the Working Group on Financial Markets (like “defense planners in the Cold War period”) war-game various market cataclysms and their response to them. One scenario Fromson described involves a large sell-off on a Monday morning after a week of tanking markets.
“The chairman of the New York Stock Exchange has called the White House chief of staff and asked permission to close the world’s most important stock market. [. . .] In the Oval Office, the president confers with the members of his Working Group on Financial Markets—the secretary of the treasury and the chairmen of the Federal Reserve Board, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The officials conclude that a presidential order to close the NYSE would only add to the market’s panic, so they decide to ride out the storm. The Working Group struggles to keep financial markets open so that trading can continue. By the closing bell, a modest rally is underway.”
The article acknowledged that each of the Plunge Protection Team’s constituent agencies (the treasury, the Fed, the SEC and the CFTC) have a “confidential plan” on file to deal with a market meltdown. But aside from trivial details (the SEC’s plan is called the “red book,” for example, after the color of the document’s cover) nothing of substance is revealed. How, exactly, do the agencies plan to “keep financial markets open so that trading can continue”?
A major clue to the PPT manipulation puzzle came in the form of a 1989 Wall Street Journal op-ed by Robert Heller, who was at the time exiting a three-year stint as Federal Reserve System governor. Entitled “Have Fed Support Stock Market, Too,” Heller’s op-ed argued that the so-called “circuit breakers” set up after the Black Monday 1987 scare were not sufficient to prevent another recurrence of panic. “Instead,” he opined, “an appropriate institution should be charged with the job of preventing chaos in the market: the Federal Reserve.” In Heller’s vision, the Fed could prevent a market rout by stepping in to purchase stock futures contracts during sell-offs.
Rather than regarding Heller’s piece as a mere op-ed offering a proposal for something the Fed could do in the future, however, some reporters—like John Crudele, the man who drew attention to Heller’s “proposal” in the first place—have suggested that the Wall Street Journal piece was in fact a trial balloon, preparing the public for the eventual revelation that the Fed was already intervening in the markets.
If Heller’s op-ed was a trial balloon, the full truth was finally revealed to the public in the wake of “the day that changed everything.” After all, if the PPT was ever going to intervene to prop up the markets, the pandemonium of 9/11 and the ensuing market sell-off presented them with the perfect opportunity to do so.
And so it was that George Stephanopolous appeared on ABC’s Good Morning America on September 17, 2001, to blithely announce to the American public that their markets were a sham:
GEORGE STEPHANOPOLOUS: What I wanted to talk about for a few minutes is the various efforts that are going on in public and behind the scenes by the Fed and other government officials to guard against a free-fall in the markets. [. . .] The Fed in 1989 created what is called the ‘Plunge Protection Team’—which is the Federal Reserve, big major banks, representatives of the New York Stock Exchange and the other exchanges—and they have been meeting informally so far. And they have a kind of an informal agreement among major banks to come in and start to buy stock if there appears to be a problem. They have in the past acted more formally . . . I don’t know if you remember, but in 1998, there was a crisis called the Long-Term Capital Crisis. It was a major currency trader, and there was a global currency crisis. And they, with the guidance of the Fed, all of the banks got together when it started to collapse and propped up the currency markets. And they have plans in place to consider [doing] that [again] if the markets start to fall.
And, just like when it was calmly admitted in 2016 that the “record bull run” since 2008 had been a Federal Reserve-created mirage, the public was flat-out told in 2001 that the Fed would coordinate with the banks to interfere in the markets as needed. And in both cases, these revelations were promptly memory-holed and ignored in all future reporting of the market’s gyrations.
So what do the manipulations of the Plunge Protection Team actually look like?
On Monday, February 5, 2018, things were playing out on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange much like the “nightmare scenario” painted in the 1997 Washington Post article by Fromson. After a 666-point decline the previous Friday, the Dow Jones was down a further 1,600 points on the day, as big a decline as the index had ever seen. . . . And then, miraculously, late in the afternoon “[s]omeone arbitrarily and aggressively started buying stocks and halved the loss.”
As John Crudele, the journalist that has been covering the PPT and its machinations for decades now, observed at the time:
Nobody has ever proven that the Fed and its friends actually protect Wall Street against plunges. It is, you might say, the Loch Ness monster of the financial world — people get glimpses of something but never see a clear picture.
That’s what happened during the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008. Telephone records I obtained showed numerous calls between then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and contacts on Wall Street on days when the stock market was tanking and the decline needed to be stopped.
The action in stocks on those days looked a lot like what happened on Monday, when the Dow was down nearly 1,600 points and was suddenly jerked back to a smaller loss.
For decades now, a similar scene has played out on days of dramatic market plunges. After an initial sell off, a late afternoon rally by a mystery buyer would reassure the markets and claw back the loss. Sometimes, the manipulation was so obvious it left literal straight lines in the charts. But still, no official word ever came from the Plunge Protection Team itself.
. . . until December 2018, that is. Ten months after Crudele called out the PPT’s actions to prop up the Dow Jones after its 1600 point plunge, then-Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin openly announced that he was calling on the Plunge Protection Team to “assure normal market operations” during a December stock slide that was on track to be the worst December in the US markets since 1930. As Forbes put it in their headline about the move: “Mnuchin Calls Plunge Protection Team; Stocks Soar One Day Later.” In the article, Forbes writer Adam Sarhan noted of the events following Mnuchin’s open call to the PPT:
“The market was closed on Tuesday for Christmas but stocks soared 1,000 points (the largest gain since the last bear market during the financial crisis) on Wednesday. Literally, the first day after that call was made. I can’t make this up.”
With a gift for understatement, Sarhan concludes that: “One important lesson investors can learn from the market action over the past decade is that the government plays a very important role.”
From crooked regulators to outright manipulation, from “failed” investigations to insider trading windfalls, the markets have been one big con job on the American public, and the people of the world, since their inception. In fact, there are many more examples of fraud, deception and manipulation that could be documented.
There is, for example, the testimony of Bill Murphy to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission during a hearing on suppression of precious metal prices.
BART CHILTON: But can you give the Commission some specific evidence, some specific examples of how you think that’s occurring, when you think that’s occurring?
BILL MURPHY: Yes I can and I had 11 years worth of evidence that all hangs together here. But somebody came to my attention two days ago of a whistleblower nature that we’re going to handle hand to the press afterwards and we think it’s very important for the American public and this hearing to have this information.
On March 23rd, 2010, GATA Director Adrian Douglas was contacted by a whistleblower by the name of Andrew Maguire. Mr. McGuire, formerly of Goldman Sachs, is a metal trader in London. He has been told first hand by traders working for JPMorgan Chase, that JPM manipulates the precious metals markets and they brag how they make money doing so.
In November 2009, he contacted the CFTC Enforcement Division to report this criminal activity. He described in detail the way JPM signals to the markets its intentions to take down the precious metals. Traders recognize these signals and make money shorting the metals alongside JPM. Maguire explained how there are routine market manipulations at the time of option expiry, non-farm payroll data releases, and COMEX contract rollover, as well as ad-hoc events.
On February 3 he gave two days’ advance warning by email to Eliud Ramirez, a senior investigator for the CFTC’s Enforcement Division, that the precious metals would be attacked upon the release of the non-farm payroll data on February 5. Then on February 5, as it played out exactly as predicted, further e-mails were sent to Ramirez while the manipulation was in progress.
It would not be possible to predict such a market move unless the market was manipulated.
In an email on that day, Mr. Maguire wrote: “It is common knowledge here in London amongst the metals traders that it is JPM’s intent to flush out and cover as many shorts as possible prior to any discussion in March about position limits. I feel sorry for all those not in the loop. A serious amount of money was made and lost today and in my opinion as a result of the CFTC [allowing] by your own definition an illegal concentrated and manipulative position to continue.”
Or there was the 2010 Flash Crash, the harrowing 35-minute window from 2:32 PM to 3:07 PM on May 6, 2010, when the Dow plunged nearly 1,000 points . . . and then gained most of it back. The incredible and unprecedented swing left traders and financial talking heads completely stymied, but after five years of relentless investigation, the Department of Justice presented the man that they framed as the arch-mastermind that set off the most alarming collapse-and-recovery in the history of the markets: a day trader living in his parent’s house in Hounslow.
NARRATOR: 15 minutes of chaos that shook the world’s biggest markets.
NEWS ANCHOR: What the heck is going on down there?
REPORTER: I don’t know. There is fear. This is capitulation, really.
LIAM VAUGHN: On May 6th, 2010, without warning, the U.S. stock market and futures markets just crashed.
REPORTER: It can’t be there. That is not a real price.
ANCHOR: The flash crash, which wiped a trillion dollars off the value of American companies in five minutes. . . .
LIAM VAUGHN: To look at a price chart, it looked like a kind of runaway elephant.
ANCHOR: It took authorities five years, guys, to track down this lone British trader, allegedly involved in a 2010 flash crash.
REPORTER: Navinder Singh Sarao, dubbed the hound of Hounslow, has been accused of manipulating the market.
REPORTER: U.S. regulators claim he made about $40 Million
Despite the fact that multipleprofessors, mainstream newspapers and even a former rogue trader himself all testified to the impossibility that the incredible rollercoaster of the Flash Crash was really caused by the “spoofing” antics of a lone trader, the story was effectively shelved and the underlying issue of the algorithmically-driven High Frequency Trading—which involves bots performing large numbers of orders in fractions of a second and requires traders to pay millions of dollars to co-locate their servers with the exchanges’ computers to give them a head start on their competitors that is measured in milliseconds—was never addressed.
Or there was the insider trading scandal of 2020, when multiple senators were probed for insider trading after being briefed by the senate’s health and foreign affairs committees about the likely effects of the coronavirus scare in the US.
JESSICA SMITH: Yeah, Adam, several senators are facing criticism this morning after reports that they sold stock after being briefed about the coronavirus. But before the market started tanking, four senators are said to have made trades. But two in particular are facing a lot of criticism.
The first is Senator Richard Burr. ProPublica reports on February 13th he sold between $628,000 to $1.7 million dollars worth of stock in 33 separate transactions. He is the chairman of the Senate Intel committee and he was getting daily briefings about the coronavirus at that time according to Reuters. So there are a lot of questions about why he made those trades.
In fact, there are many, many such examples of market rigging, insider trading and manipulation of stock and commodity prices for the benefit of the bankers and their political allies that could be detailed, not just in the US markets, but in markets around the world. But such an exhaustive list would be, by this point, unnecessary. The markets are rigged, and that rigging is pervasive and systemic.
So it should come as no surprise that the GameStop pandemonium began when it was observed that another common method of market manipulation was taking place on GameStop’s stock: naked shorting.
Naked shorting involves traders taking advantages of loopholes and discrepancies in paper and electronic trading systems to short shares that don’t even exist. In this case, hedge funds, convinced that the flailing gaming retailer was going to go the way of BlockBuster Video and seeing the December 2020 reports of operating losses, began aggressively shorting the stock. By the time the “wallstreetbets” community on reddit discovered the naked shorting operation, the hedge funds were already 140% short on shares of GameStop, meaning that 40% more stock was being sold short than even existed.
This led to the massive short squeeze in January, with redditors and other retail investors buying up shares in GameStop and running up the stock price, forcing the hedge funds to buy up stock to cover their shorts and exposing them to billions of dollars in losses.
But that was only the beginning of the revelations of market rigging in the GameStop saga. The remarkable squeeze was brought to an abrupt halt when Robinhood—the electronic trading platform that burst on the scene in 2014 promising to “democratize the stock market” with its zero-commission trading app—stopped trading on GameStop and other wallstreetbets-driven trades like AMC Entertainment, BlackBerry and Nokia. The official explanation for the trading halt—that Robinhood had to suspend trading in the stocks until it could increase its collateral with the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation—merely underlines the point that the average mom-and-pop investor will continue to be thwarted from trading while the massive hedge funds and market makers with direct access to the markets will always be able to cover their positions in the event of any popular, “democratic” market activity.
This point was further underlined when yet another aspect of the retail investing scam was revealed: payment for order flow, or PFOF, in which hedge funds pay retail brokerages for access to their customers’ trades. With this information, hedge funds can not only buy orders before they are processed and flip the trade back to the market, pocketing the spread between the buy and sell price, but they can front run orders, effectively cutting in front of the brokerages’ clients to buy hot stocks before the retail investors. As it turns out, Robinhood made nearly $700 million selling their clients’ trade data to the big hedge funds in 2020 alone.
Nor was it a surprise when it was learned that Biden’s Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, was paid over $800,000 in speaking fees by Citadel LLC which operates both Citadel—a hedge fund that provided a $2 billion emergency backstop for GameStop short seller Melvin Capital—and Citadel Securities—”a market maker that handles about 40% of U.S. retail stock order flow, including from brokerages like free-trading app Robinhood.” When asked whether Yellen would recuse herself from advising the president on the GameStop situation, White House press secretary Jen Psaki responded that she wouldn’t, saying that Yellen was an expert and that she deserved the money.
REPORTER: . . . And I had a follow-up on the markets and everything that’s happening with GameStop. You did mention, I believe yesterday, that the treasury secretary is monitoring the situation and she’s, kind of, on top of it. There have been some kind of concerns about her previous engagements with Citadel and speaking fees that she has received from Citadel. Are there any plans to have her recuse herself from advising the President on GameStop and the whole Robinhood situation?
PSAKI: Well, just to be clear, what I said was that we have—the treasury secretary is now confirmed. Obviously, we have a broad economic team. The SEC put out a statement yesterday that I referred to. But I don’t think I have anything more for you on it, other than to say, separate from the GameStop issue, the secretary of treasury is one of the world-renowned experts on markets, on the economy. It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone she was paid to give her perspective and advice before she came into office.
The entire affair grew even more absurd when internet researchers discovered that Jen Psaki’s relative, Jeff Psaki, himself worked for Citadel. The “fact checkers” at Newsweek were quick to rule the story as false, however, not because Psaki’s relative did not in fact work for Citadel, but because “a source close to Jeff” told Newsweek that “Jen and Jeff Psaki are distant second cousins but have no relationship.”
Whatever further twists and turns the GameStop saga takes, the conclusion is foregone: the “little people” may be able to get one past the goalkeepers of the manipulated markets here and there, but those deviations from the standard will always return to the status quo. In the end, the hedge funds and their billions will be protected while the little guy will be misinformed, steered down blind alleys, panicked, tricked into investing in bubbles, and, ultimately, fleeced for the benefit of the financial vultures and their bought-and-paid-for politicians and regulatory friends.
At last the David and Goliath story that has been woven around the GameStop insurrection is revealed for what it is: a story, a fable, a convenient narrative to trick the public back into the phoney, manipulated markets to once again take their place at the casino table. It is designed to trick people into thinking that this time they’ll be able to win against the house. But that is not how a casino works. In the central-bank inflated, derivatives-laden mystery markets of Wall Street, the games are rigged, the dice is loaded, and the house always wins in the end.
None of this is surprising to those who have known for decades that the markets are rigged. But every generation needs to see the deception play out in real time to understand just how deep and pervasive the systemic rot is. From this point on, those who have experienced the effects of this deception only have to answer one question: Are you going to continue to play Wall Street’s rigged game, or are you going to take your chips off the table and invest in local businesses and projects with the people on Main Street?
In honour of Michael Parenti (1933–2026), who passed away on 24 January 2026 at the age of 92. He spent his life naming what power prefers to leave unnamed.
In 1837, Abraham Lincoln remarked: “These capitalists generally act harmoniously, and in concert, to fleece the people.”
Today, he would be dismissed as a conspiracy theorist.
That dismissal—reflexive, automatic, requiring no engagement with evidence—is not a mark of sophistication. It is a tell. The question worth asking is not whether conspiracies exist (they are a matter of public record and a recognised concept in law) but why acknowledging their existence provokes such reliable hostility. What work does the label “conspiracy theorist” actually do?
The late political scientist Michael Parenti spent decades answering that question. His conclusion was blunt: “’Conspiracy’ refers to something more than just illegal acts. It serves as a dismissive label applied to any acknowledgment of ruling-class power, both its legal and illegal operations.” The term functions not as a descriptor but as a weapon—a thought-terminating cliché that protects the powerful from scrutiny by pathologising those who scrutinise them.
Conspiracy denial, in Parenti’s analysis, is not skepticism. It is the opposite of skepticism. It is credulity toward power dressed up as critical thinking. As he wrote in Dirty Truths: “Just because some people have fantasies of conspiracies does not mean all conspiracies are imaginary.” … continue
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