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?
A new HBO documentary called ‘The Crime of the Century’ lays bare how firms like Purdue used bribery, dodgy marketing, and shady political deals to make fortunes by getting millions hooked on super-strong painkillers.
What would it look like if an illegal international drug cartel were allowed to advertise? Perhaps it might take the form of slick music videos and glossy magazine ads promising an ‘end to pain’. Certainly, they would minimise the negative effects of their drugs on your life, your future, and your loved ones. If questioned about what they were doing, we can imagine them blaming those who use their drugs, not themselves for providing them.
It sounds mad – madder still that anyone would believe them – but this is exactly what has been allowed to happen with large pharmaceutical companies and their marketing of highly addictive opioid drugs.
At least, this is the argument put forward in a new two-part HBO documentary series released this week entitled, ‘The Crime of the Century’. Across its nearly four-hour run-time, director Alex Gibney lays bare the bribery, underhanded marketing tactics, and shady political dealings that enabled the devastating overproduction and over-distribution of synthetic opiates. In devastating detail, the documentary portrays American pharmaceutical companies and the doctors who recklessly doled out prescriptions as elements of a glorified drug cartel – dealers in lab coats, suits and ties.
Systematically overselling the benefits of synthetic opioids and downplaying the risk of addiction, the documentary traces how drug companies are driven to pursue ever stronger and more exotic medications as patents on old treatments run out and profits dry up. In many ways, it traverses territory that is already well known, but is no less useful for highlighting in shocking detail just how much these companies have become a major risk to public health.
This is particularly true in their penchant for ‘discovering’ and treating ever more chronic conditions. While the efficacy of opioids for treatment of acute pain and end-of-life care has been well known, there is little incentive to develop and provide drugs solely for such patients, who tend to be few and far between and whose needs are often short-term. No, the real money is in long-term use in greater numbers. And this is where the dangers of pushing these drugs on patients with any kind of pain became increasingly clear.
Through heart-rending stories of suffering and loss, Gibney adeptly shows how a deadly cocktail of business incentives to push for over-prescription at escalating doses, inherent addictiveness, and, in some cases, communities facing economic despair, combined to produce the ‘perfect storm’ that became the opioid crisis.
In one story, a former heroin addict details his experience being used as a human guinea pig, prescribed a daily dose of pills equivalent to 200 hits of heroin. In another, a victim whose family described her as living a happy, functional life using nothing more than Tylenol was prescribed high doses of a range of opioids and muscle relaxants that regularly rendered her unconscious. One day her husband found her dead next to a phone that she’d attempted to use to call for help.
What could possibly fuel such enormous failure of caution? The obvious answer is greed and profit. Indeed, the meagre payouts and settlements companies like Purdue Pharma were ordered to pay over the years paled in comparison to the eye-watering profits they made misrepresenting their drugs. But the story is much deeper. The ‘opioid epidemic’ itself was preceded by claims that most Americans were actually being undertreated. What is more, they were being left callously to suffer in an ‘epidemic of pain’. Throughout the series, company representatives and even policymakers refer over and over to a ‘growing epidemic’ of pain suffered by millions.
This is what prepared the ground for the epidemic of over-prescription, permitting claims detailed in the documentary like “chronic pain patients can’t be addicts”, and the development of pseudoscientific terms like ‘pseudoaddiction’. The latter reflects an attempt to assuage the growing fears of prescribing physicians that the person before them is indeed becoming addicted to the drugs they were being prescribed. No, they only appear this way because they are in so much pain. You must help them. Prescribe more.
And prescribe more they did.
While it is easy to blame this situation on the greed of companies like Purdue Pharma and the owning Sackler family that lived luxuriously in its shadow, they would not have found such a ready market had they not been able to feed and exploit a culture with a preexisting aversion to pain. Indeed, many of the physicians and sales executives responsible for pushing large doses of highly addictive pain medications justified their actions with their belief that a life with pain was a life not worth living. They had convinced themselves that any pain was worse than death.
Supplanting everything that once made life meaningful, the pursuit of health and even mental health have become ultimate goals. The notion that one might tolerate pain, whether physical or psychic, is seen as beyond the pale. It is no longer, ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’ Any pain or negative experience is seen as intensely damaging to the human psyche.
In a life without meaning, any pain becomes unbearable. We all become patients in waiting. Easy targets for these drug dealers in suits and ties.
Ashley Frawley is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Social Policy at Swansea University and the author of Semiotics of Happiness: Rhetorical Beginnings of a Public Problem.
You see, bloggers and reporters, here is the problem (one among many, actually). You have no background.
You don’t understand that every time you write a medical piece, there is a context which should inform your every move:
The modern medical system kills and maims huge numbers of people.
To put it another way, THE MODERN MEDICAL SYSTEM KILLS AND MAIMS HUGE NUMBERS OF PEOPLE.
Let me help you out.
ONE: “The Epidemic of Sickness and Death from Prescription Drugs.” The author is Donald Light, who teaches at Rowan University, and was the 2013 recipient of ASA’s [American Sociological Association’s] Distinguished Career Award for the Practice of Sociology. Light is a founding fellow of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2013, he was a fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard. He is a Lokey Visiting Professor at Stanford University.
Donald Light: “Epidemiologically, appropriately prescribed, prescription drugs are the fourth leading cause of death, tied with stroke at about 2,460 deaths each week in the United States. About 330,000 patients die each year from prescription drugs in the United States and Europe. They [the drugs] cause an epidemic of about 20 times more hospitalizations [6.6 million annually], as well as falls, road accidents, and [annually] about 80 million medically minor problems such as pains, discomforts, and dysfunctions that hobble productivity or the ability to care for others. Deaths and adverse effects from overmedication, errors, and self-medication would increase these figures.” (ASA publication, “Footnotes,” November 2014)
TWO: Journal of the American Medical Association, April 15, 1998: “Incidence of Adverse Drug Reactions in Hospitalized Patients.”
The authors, led by Jason Lazarou, culled 39 previous studies on patients in hospitals. These patients, who received drugs in hospitals, or were admitted to hospitals because they were suffering from the drugs doctors had given them, met the following fate:
Every year, in the US, between 76,000 and 137,000 hospitalized patients die as a direct result of the drugs.
Beyond that, every year 2.2 million hospitalized patients experience serious adverse reactions to the drugs.
The authors write: “…Our study on ADRs [Adverse Drug Reactions], which excludes medication errors, had a different objective: to show that there are a large number of ADRs even when the drugs are properly prescribed and administered.”
So this study had nothing to do with doctor errors, nurse errors, or improper combining of drugs. And it only counted people killed or maimed who were admitted to hospitals. It didn’t begin to tally all the people taking pharmaceuticals who died as consequence of the drugs, at home.
THREE: July 26, 2000, Journal of the American Medical Association; author, Dr. Barbara Starfield, revered public health expert at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health; “Is US health really the best in the world?”
Starfield reported that the US medical system kills 225,000 Americans per year. 106,000 as a result of FDA-approved medical drugs, and 119,000 as a result of mistreatment and errors in hospitals. Extrapolate the numbers to a decade: that’s 2.25 million deaths. You might want to read that last number again.
In 2009, I interviewed Dr. Starfield. Here is an excerpt:
What has been the level and tenor of the response to your findings, since 2000?
The American public appears to have been hoodwinked into believing that more interventions lead to better health, and most people that I meet are completely unaware that the US does not have the ‘best health in the world’.
In the medical research community, have your medically-caused mortality statistics been debated, or have these figures been accepted, albeit with some degree of shame?
The findings have been accepted by those who study them. There has been only one detractor, a former medical school dean, who has received a lot of attention for claiming that the US health system is the best there is and we need more of it. He has a vested interest in medical schools and teaching hospitals (they are his constituency).
Have health agencies of the federal government consulted with you on ways to mitigate the [devastating] effects of the US medical system?
NO.
Since the FDA approves every medical drug given to the American people, and certifies it as safe and effective, how can that agency remain calm about the fact that these medicines are causing 106,000 deaths per year?
Even though there will always be adverse events that cannot be anticipated, the fact is that more and more unsafe drugs are being approved for use. Many people attribute that to the fact that the pharmaceutical industry is (for the past ten years or so) required to pay the FDA for reviews [of its new drugs]—which puts the FDA into an untenable position of working for the industry it is regulating. There is a large literature on this.
Aren’t your 2000 findings a severe indictment of the FDA and its standard practices?
They are an indictment of the US health care industry: insurance companies, specialty and disease-oriented medical academia, the pharmaceutical and device manufacturing industries, all of which contribute heavily to re-election campaigns of members of Congress. The problem is that we do not have a government that is free of influence of vested interests. Alas, [it] is a general problem of our society—which clearly unbalances democracy.
Would it be correct to say that, when your JAMA study was published in 2000, it caused a momentary stir and was thereafter ignored by the medical community and by pharmaceutical companies?
Are you sure it was a momentary stir? I still get at least one email a day asking for a reprint—ten years later! The problem is that its message is obscured by those that do not want any change in the US health care system.
Are you aware of any systematic efforts, since your 2000 JAMA study was published, to remedy the main categories of medically caused deaths in the US?
No systematic efforts; however, there have been a lot of studies. Most of them indicate higher rates [of death] than I calculated.
Did your 2000 JAMA study sail through peer review, or was there some opposition to publishing it?
It was rejected by the first journal that I sent it to, on the grounds that ‘it would not be interesting to readers’!
Do the 106,000 deaths from medical drugs only involve drugs prescribed to patients in hospitals, or does this statistic also cover people prescribed drugs who are not in-patients in hospitals?
I tried to include everything in my estimates. Since the commentary was written, many more dangerous drugs have been added to the marketplace.
—end of interview excerpt—
FOUR: BMJ June 7, 2012 (BMJ 2012:344:e3989). Author, Jeanne Lenzer. Lenzer refers to a report by the Institute for Safe Medication Practices: “It [the Institute] calculated that in 2011 prescription drugs were associated with two to four million people in the US experiencing ‘serious, disabling, or fatal injuries, including 128,000 deaths.’”
The report called this “one of the most significant perils to humans resulting from human activity.”
The report was compiled by outside researchers who went into the FDA’s own database of “serious adverse [medical-drug] events.”
Therefore, to say the FDA isn’t aware of this finding would be absurd. The FDA knows. The FDA knows and it isn’t saying anything about it, because the FDA certifies, as safe and effective, all the medical drugs that are routinely maiming and killing Americans. Every public health agency knows the truth.
FIVE: None of the above reports factor in death or injury by vaccine.
The US system for reporting severe adverse effects of vaccines is broken.
Barbara Loe Fisher, of the private National Vaccine Information Center, has put together a reasonable analysis:
“But how many children have [adverse] vaccine reactions every year? Is it really only one in 110,000 or one in a million who are left permanently disabled after vaccination? Former FDA Commissioner David Kessler observed in 1993 that less than 1 percent of doctors report adverse events following prescription drug use. [See DA Kessler, ‘Introducing MEDWatch,’ JAMA, June 2, 1993: 2765-2768]”
“There have been estimates that perhaps less than 5 or 10 percent of doctors report hospitalizations, injuries, deaths, or other serious health problems following vaccination. The 1986 Vaccine Injury Act contained no legal sanctions for not reporting; doctors can refuse to report and suffer no consequences.”
“Even so, each year about 12,000 reports are made to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System [VAERS]; parents as well as doctors can make those reports. [See RT Chen, B. Hibbs, ‘Vaccine safety,’ Pediatric Annals, July 1998: 445-458]”
“However, if that number represents only 10 percent of what is actually occurring, then the actual number may be 120,000 vaccine-adverse events [per year]. If doctors report vaccine reactions as infrequently as Dr. Kessler said they report prescription-drug reactions, and the number 12,000 is only 1 percent of the actual total, then the real number may be 1.2 million vaccine-adverse events annually.”
SIX: Here is a stunning quote from a doctor who has quite probably read and analyzed as many medical-drug studies as any other doctor in the world:
“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.” (Dr. Marcia Angell, NY Review of Books, January 15, 2009, “Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption)
Compare that quote with one from “the father of COVID science,” Tony Fauci. In an interview with the National Geographic, Fauci stated: “Anybody can claim to be an expert even when they have no idea what they’re talking about… If something is published in places like New England Journal of Medicine, Science, Nature, Cell, or JAMA—you know, generally that is quite well peer-reviewed because the editors and the editorial staff of those journals really take things very seriously.”
They take things so seriously at the New England Journal, they routinely publish glowing studies of medical drugs which, as evidence shows, are killing people in great numbers.
So… you medical bloggers living in mommy’s basement, and you medical reporters who live in New York and Georgetown and pull down nice paychecks, you now have some background. Every time you write a Mockingbird article (aka puff piece), you can fathom how deep your lies really go, and how much crime you’re really involved with.
It’s never too late to tell the truth. I’m offering you a way out.
Nuremberg Trial 2.0 is in preparation, with a class action lawsuit supported by thousands of lawyers and medical professionals worldwide, led by the American-German lawyer Reiner Fuellmich, who is prosecuting those responsible for the Covid-19 scandal manipulated by the Davos Forum.
In this respect, it is worth recalling that Reiner Fuellmich is the lawyer who succeeded in condemning the automobile giant Volkswagen in the case of the tampered catalytic converters, as well as succeeding in condemning Deutsche Bank as a criminal enterprise.
According to Reiner Fuellmich, all the frauds committed by German companies are derisory compared to the damage that the Covid-19 crisis has caused and continues to cause. This Covid-19 crisis should be renamed the “Covid-19 Scandal” and all those responsible should be prosecuted for civil damages due to manipulations and falsified test protocols. Therefore, an international network of business lawyers will plead the biggest tort case of all time, the Covid-19 fraud scandal, which has turned into the largest crime against humanity to ever be committed.
A Covid-19 commission of inquiry was set up in July 2020 on the initiative of a group of German lawyers with the aim of bringing an international class action lawsuit using Anglo-Saxon law.
Here’s what Reiner Fuellmich had to say on the findings of the inquiry and the questions to be answered in the forthcoming trial against the WHO and World Leaders for crimes against humanity –
The hearings of around 100 internationally renowned scientists, doctors, economists and lawyers, which have been conducted by the Berlin Commission of Inquiry into the Covid-19 affair since 10.07.2020, have in the meantime shown with a probability close to certainty that the Covid- 19 scandal was at no time a health issue.
Rather, it was about solidifying the illegitimate power (illegitimate because it was obtained by criminal methods) of the corrupt “Davos clique” by transferring the wealth of the people to the members of the Davos clique, destroying, among other things, small and medium-sized enterprises in particular. Platforms such as Amazon, Google, Uber, etc. could thus appropriate their market share and wealth.
The three major questions to be answered in the context of a judicial approach to the Corona Scandal are:
1) Is there a corona pandemic or is there only a PCR-test pandemic? Specifically, does a positive PCR-test result mean that the person tested is infected with Covid-19, or does it mean absolutely nothing in connection with the Covid-19 infection?
2) Do the so-called anti-corona measures, such as the lockdown, mandatory face masks, social distancing, and quarantine regulations, serve to protect the world’s population from corona? Or do these measures serve only to make people panic so that they believe, without asking any questions, that their lives are in danger — so that, in the end, the pharmaceutical and tech industries can generate huge profits from the sale of PCR tests, antigen and antibody tests and vaccines, as well as the harvesting of our genetic fingerprints?
3) Is it true that the German government was massively lobbied, more so than any other country, by the chief protagonists of this so-called corona pandemic (Mr. Drosten, virologist at Charité Hospital in Berlin; Mr. Wieler, veterinarian and head of the German equivalent of the CDC, the RKI; and Mr. Tedros, head of the World Health Organization or WHO) because Germany is known as a particularly disciplined country and was therefore to become a role model for the rest of the world for its strict and, of course, successful adherence to the corona measures?
Answers to these three questions are urgently needed because the allegedly new and highly dangerous coronavirus has not caused any excess mortality anywhere in the world, and certainly not here in Germany.
But the anti-corona measures, whose only basis are the PCR-test results, which are in turn all based on the German Drosten test, have, in the meantime, caused the loss of innumerable human lives and have destroyed the economic existence of countless companies and individuals worldwide.
These were the conclusions of the committee –
‘The corona crisis must be renamed the “Corona Scandal”
It is:
• The biggest tort case ever
• The greatest crime against humanity ever committed
Those responsible must be:
• Criminally prosecuted for crimes against humanity
• Sued for civil damages
Deaths:
• There is no excess mortality in any country
• Corona virus mortality equals seasonal flu
• 94% of deaths in Bergamo were caused by transferring sick patients to nursing homes where they infected old people with weak immune systems
• Doctors and hospitals worldwide were paid to declare deceased victims of Covid-19
• US states with and without lockdowns have comparable disease and mortality statistics
Autopsies showed:
• Fatalities almost all caused by serious pre-existing conditions
• Almost all deaths were very old people
• Sweden (no lockdown) and Britain (strict lockdown) have comparable disease and mortality statistics
Health:
• Hospitals remain empty and some face bankruptcy
• Populations have T-cell immunity from previous influenza waves
• Herd immunity needs only 15-25% population infection and is already achieved
• Only when a person has symptoms can an infection be contagious
Tests:
• Many scientists call this a PCR-test pandemic, not a corona pandemic
• Very healthy and non-infectious people may test positive
• Likelihood of false-positives is 89-94% or near certainty
• Prof. Drosten developed his PCR test from an old SARS virus without ever having seen the real Wuhan virus from China
• The PCR test is not based on scientific facts with respect to infections
• PCR tests are useless for the detection of infections
• A positive PCR test does not mean an infection is present or that an intact virus has been found
• Amplification of samples over 35 cycles is unreliable but WHO recommended 45 cycles
Illegality:
• The German government locked down, imposed social-distancing/ mask-wearing on the basis of a single opinion
• The lockdown was imposed when the virus was already retreating
• The lockdowns were based on non-existent infections
• Former president of the German federal constitutional court doubted the constitutionality of the corona measures
• Former UK supreme court judge Lord Sumption concluded there was no factual basis for panic and no legal basis for corona measures
• German RKI (CDC equivalent) recommended no autopsies be performed
• Corona measures have no sufficient factual or legal basis, are unconstitutional and must be repealed immediately
• No serious scientist gives any validity to the infamous Neil Ferguson’s false computer models warning of millions of deaths
• Mainstream media completely failed to report the true facts of the so-called pandemic
• Democracy is in danger of being replaced by fascist totalitarian models
• Drosten (of PCR test), Tedros of WHO, and others have committed crimes against humanity as defined in the International Criminal Code
• Politicians can avoid going down with the charlatans and criminals by starting the long overdue public scientific discussion
Conspiracy:
• Politicians and mainstream media deliberately drove populations to panic
• Children were calculatedly made to feel responsible “for the painful tortured death of their parents and grandparents if they do not follow Corona rules”
• The hopeless PCR test is used to create fear and not to diagnose
• There can be no talk of a second wave
Injury and damage:
• Evidence of gigantic health and economic damage to populations
Anti-corona measures have:
• Killed innumerable people
• Destroyed countless companies and individuals worldwide
• Children are being taken away from their parents
• Children are traumatized en masse
• Bankruptcies are expected in small- and medium-sized businesses
Redress:
• A class action lawsuit must be filed in the USA or Canada, with all affected parties worldwide having the opportunity to join
• Companies and self-employed people must be compensated for damages’
Is the writing on the wall for Gates, Hancock, Fauci and friends? Well the lawsuits have been filed and Reiner Fuellmich’s track record certainly suggests they don’t stand a chance.
We spoke to Dr Mike Yeadon about his views on the experimental Covid-19 vaccines, the medicine regulators approving them and his fears for the future.
From the outset, Dr. Yeadon said “I’m well aware of the global crimes against humanity being perpetrated against a large proportion of the worlds population.
“I feel great fear, but I’m not deterred from giving expert testimony to multiple groups of able lawyers like Rocco Galati in Canada and Reiner Fuellmich in Germany.
“I have absolutely no doubt that we are in the presence of evil (not a determination I’ve ever made before in a 40-year research career) and dangerous products.
“In the U.K., it’s abundantly clear that the authorities are bent on a course which will result in administering ‘vaccines’ to as many of the population as they can. This is madness, because even if these agents were legitimate, protection is needed only by those at notably elevated risk of death from the virus. In those people, there might even be an argument that the risks are worth bearing. And there definitely are risks which are what I call ‘mechanistic’: inbuilt in the way they work.
“But all the other people, those in good health and younger than 60 years, perhaps a little older, they don’t perish from the virus. In this large group, it’s wholly unethical to administer something novel and for which the potential for unwanted effects after a few months is completely uncharacterized.
“In no other era would it be wise to do what is stated as the intention.
“Since I know this with certainty, and I know those driving it know this too, we have to enquire: What is their motive?
“While I don’t know, I have strong theoretical answers, only one of which relates to money and that motive doesn’t work, because the same quantum can be arrived at by doubling the unit cost and giving the agent to half as many people. Dilemma solved. So it’s something else. Appreciating that, by entire population, it is also intended that minor children and eventually babies are to be included in the net, and that’s what I interpret to be an evil act.
“There is no medical rationale for it. Knowing as I do that the design of these ‘vaccines’ results, in the expression in the bodies of recipients, expression of the spike protein, which has adverse biological effects of its own which, in some people, are harmful (initiating blood coagulation and activating the immune ‘complement system’), I’m determined to point out that those not at risk from this virus should not be exposed to the risk of unwanted effects from these agents.”
The Israel Supreme Court decision last week cancelling COVID flight restrictions said: “In the future, any new restrictions on travel into or out of Israel need, in legal terms, a comprehensive, factual, data-based foundation.”
“The most likely duration of immunity to a respiratory virus like SARS CoV-2 is multiple years. Why do I say that? We actually have the data for a virus that swept through parts of the world seventeen years ago called SARS, and remember SARS CoV-2 is 80% similar to SARS, so I think that’s the best comparison that anyone can provide.
“The evidence is clear: These very clever cellular immunologists studied all the people they could get hold of who had survived SARS 17 years ago. They took a blood sample, and they tested whether they responded or not to the original SARS and they all did; they all had perfectly normal, robust T cell memory. They were actually also protected against SARS CoV-2, because they’re so similar; it’s cross immunity.
“So, I would say the best data that exists is that immunity should be robust for at least 17 years. I think it’s entirely possible that it is lifelong. The style of the responses of these people’s T cells were the same as if you’ve been vaccinated and then you come back years later to see if that immunity has been retained. So I think the evidence is really strong that the duration of immunity will be multiple years, and possibly lifelong.”
In other words, previous exposure to SARS – that is, a variant similar to SARS CoV-2 – bestowed SARS CoV-2 immunity.
The Israel government cites new variants to justify lockdowns, flight closures, restrictions, and Green Passport issuance. Given the Supreme Court verdict, do you think it may be possible to preempt future government measures with accurate information about variants, immunity, herd immunity, etc. that could be provided to thelawyers who will be challenging those future measures?
Yeadon: “What I outlined in relation to immunity to SARS is precisely what we’re seeing with SARS-CoV-2.The study is from one of the best labs in their field.” So, theoretically, people could test their T-cell immunity by measuring the responses of cells in a small sample of their blood. There are such tests, they are not “high throughput” and they are likely to cost a few hundred USD each on scale. But not thousands. The test I’m aware of is not yet commercially available, but research only in U.K.
“However, I expect the company could be induced to provide test kits “for research” on scale, subject to an agreement. If you were to arrange to test a few thousand non vaccinated Israelis, it may be a double edged sword. Based on other countries experiences, 30-50% of people had prior immunity & additionally around 25% have been infected & are now immune.
“Personally, I wouldn’t want to deal with the authorities on their own terms: that you’re suspected as a source of infection until proven otherwise. You shouldn’t need to be proving you’re not a health risk to others. Those without symptoms are never a health threat to others. And in any case, once those who are concerned about the virus are vaccinated, there is just no argument for anyone else needing to be vaccinated.”
My understanding of a “leaky vaccine” is that it only lessens symptoms in the vaccinated, but does not stop transmission; it therefore allows the spread of what then becomes a more deadly virus.
For example, in China they deliberately use leaky Avian Flu vaccines to quickly cull flocks of chicken, because the unvaccinated die within three days. In Marek’s Disease, from which they needed to save all the chickens, the only solution was to vaccinate 100% of the flock, because all unvaccinated were at high risk of death. So how a leaky vax is utilized is intention-driven, that is, it is possible that the intent can be to cause great harm to the unvaccinated.
Stronger strains usually would not propagate through a population because they kill the host too rapidly, but if the vaccinated experience only less-serious disease, then they spread these strains to the unvaccinated who contract serious disease and die.
Do you agree with this assessment? Furthermore, do you agree that if the unvaccinated become the susceptible ones, the only way forward is HCQ prophylaxis for those who haven’t already had COVID-19?
Would the Zelenko Protocol work against these stronger strains if this is the case? And if many already have the aforementioned previous “17-year SARS immunity”, would that then not protect from any super-variant?
“I think the Gerrt Vanden Bossche story is highly suspect. There is no evidence at all that vaccination is leading or will lead to ‘dangerous variants’. I am worried that it’s some kind of trick.
“As a general rule, variants form very often, routinely, and tend to become less dangerous & more infectious over time, as it comes into equilibrium with its human host. Variants generally don’t become more dangerous.
“No variant differs from the original sequence by more than 0.3%. In other words, all variants are at least 99.7% identical to the Wuhan sequence.
“It’s a fiction, and an evil one at that, that variants are likely to “escape immunity.”
“Not only is it intrinsically unlikely – because this degree of similarity of variants means zero chance that an immune person (whether from natural infection or from vaccination) will be made ill by a variant – but it’s empirically supported by high-quality research.
“The research I refer to shows that people recovering from infection or who have been vaccinated ALL have a wide range of immune cells which recognize ALL the variants.
“This paper shows WHY the extensive molecular recognition by the immune system makes the tiny changes in variants irrelevant.
“I cannot say strongly enough: The stories around variants and need for top up vaccines are FALSE. I am concerned there is a very malign reason behind all this. It is certainly not backed by the best ways to look at immunity. The claims always lack substance when examined, and utilize various tricks, like manipulating conditions for testing the effectiveness of antibodies. Antibodies are probably rather unimportant in host protection against this virus. There have been a few ‘natural experiments’, people who unfortunately cannot make antibodies, yet are able quite successfully to repel this virus. They definitely are better off with antibodies than without. I mention these rare patients because they show that antibodies are not essential to host immunity, so some contrived test in a lab of antibodies and engineered variant viruses do NOT justify need for top up vaccines.
“The only people who might remain vulnerable and need prophylaxis or treatment are those who are elderly and/or ill and do not wish to receive a vaccine (as is their right).
“The good news is that there are multiple choices available: hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, budesonide (inhaled steroid used in asthmatics), and of course oral Vitamin D, zinc, azithromycin etc. These reduce the severity to such an extent that this virus did not need to become a public health crisis.”
Do you feel the MHRA does a good job regulating ‘big pharma’? In what ways does ‘big pharma’ get around the regulator? Do you feel they did so for the mRNA jab?
“Until recently, I had high regard for global medicines regulators. When I was in Pfizer, and later CEO of a biotech I founded (Ziarco, later acquired by Novartis), we interacted respectfully with FDA, EMA, and the MHRA.
Always good quality interactions.
“Recently, I noticed that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) had made a grant to the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA)! Can that ever be appropriate? They’re funded by public money. They should never accept money from a private body.
“So here is an example where the U.K. regulator has a conflict of interest.” The European Medicines Agency failed to require certain things as disclosed in the ‘hack’ of their files while reviewing the Pfizer vaccine.
“You can find examples on Reiner Fuellmich’s “Corona Committee” online.
“So I no longer believe the regulators are capable of protecting us. ‘Approval’ is therefore meaningless.
“Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg and I petitioned the EMA Dec 1, 2020 on the genetic vaccines. They ignored us.
“Recently, we wrote privately to them, warning of blood clots, they ignored us. When we went public with our letter, we were completely censored. Days later, more than ten countries paused use of a vaccine citing blood clots.
“I think the big money of pharma plus cash from BMGF creates the environment where saying no just isn’t an option for the regulator.
“I must return to the issue of ‘top up vaccines’ (booster shots) and it is this whole narrative which I fear will he exploited and used to gain unparalleled power over us.
“PLEASE warn every person not to go near top up vaccines. There is absolutely no need to them. As there’s no need for them, yet they’re being made in pharma, and regulators have stood aside (no safety testing), I can only deduce they will be used for nefarious purposes.
“For example, if someone wished to harm or kill a significant proportion of the worlds population over the next few years, the systems being put in place right now will enable it.
“It’s my considered view that it is entirely possible that this will be used for massive-scale depopulation.”
Back in January I wrote an article about four randomized controlled trials of ivermectin as a treatment for covid-19 that had at that time released their results to the public. Each of those four trials had promising results, but each was also too small individually to show any meaningful impact on the hard outcomes we really care about, like death. When I meta-analyzed them together however, the results suddenly appeared very impressive. Here’s what that meta-analysis looked like:
It showed a massive 78% reduction in mortality in patients treated with covid-19. Mortality is the hardest of hard end points, which means it’s the hardest for researchers to manipulate and therefore the least open to bias. Either someone’s dead, or they’re alive. End of story.
You would have thought that this strong overall signal of benefit in the midst of a pandemic would have mobilized the powers that be to arrange multiple large randomized trials to confirm these results as quickly as possible, and that the major medical journals would be falling over each other to be the first to publish these studies.
That hasn’t happened.
Rather the opposite, in fact. South Africa has even gone so far as to ban doctors from using ivermectin on covid-19 patients. And as far as I can tell, most of the discussion about ivermectin in mainstream media (and in the medical press) has centred not around its relative merits, but more around how its proponents are clearly deluded tin foil hat wearing crazies who are using social media to manipulate the masses.
In spite of this, trial results have continued to appear. That means we should now be able to conclude with even greater certainty whether or not ivermectin is effective against covid-19. Since there are so many of these trials popping up now, I’ve decided to limit the discussion here only to the ones I’ve been able to find that had at least 150 participants, and that compared ivermectin to placebo (although I’ll add even the smaller trials I’ve found in to the updated meta-analysis at the end).
As before, it appears that rich western countries have very little interest in studying ivermectin as a treatment for covid. The three new trials that had at least 150 participants and compared ivermectin with placebo were conducted in Colombia, Iran, and Argentina. We’ll go through each in turn.
The Colombian trial (Lopez-Medina et al.) was published in JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association) in March. There is one thing that is rather odd with this study, and that is that the study authors were receiving payments from Sanofi-Pasteur, Glaxo-Smith-Kline, Janssen, Merck, and Gilead while conducting the study. Gilead makes remdesivir. Merck is developing two expensive new drugs to treat covid-19. Janssen, Glaxo-Smith-Kline, and Sanofi-Pasteur are all developers of covid vaccines. In other words, the authors of the study were receiving funding from companies that own drugs that are direct competitors to ivermectin. One might call this a conflict of interest, and wonder whether the goal of the study was to show a lack of benefit. It’s definitely a little bit suspicious.
Anyway, let’s get to what the researchers actually did. This was a double-blind randomized controlled trial that recruited patients with mildly symptomatic covid-19 who had experienced symptom onset less than 7 days earlier. Potential participants were identified through a statewide database of people with positive PCR-tests. By “mildly symptomatic” the researchers meant people who had at least one symptom but who did not require high-flow oxygen at the time of recruitment in to the trial.
Participants in the treatment group received 300 ug/kg body weight of ivermectin every day for five days, while participants in the placebo group received an identical placebo. 300 ug/kg works out to 21 mg for an average 70 kg adult, which is quite high, especially when you consider that the dose was given daily for five days. For an average person, this would work out to a total dose of 105 mg. The other ivermectin trials have mostly given around 12 mg per day for one or two days, for a total dose of 12 to 24 mg (which has been considered enough because ivermectin has a long half-life in the body). Why this study gave such a high dose is unclear. However, it shouldn’t be a problem. Ivermectin is a very safe drug, and studies have been done where people have been given ten times the recommended dose without any noticeable increase in adverse events.
The stated goal of the study was to see if ivermectin resulted in more rapid symptom resolution than placebo. So participants were contacted by telephone every three days after inclusion in the study, up to day 21, and asked about what symptoms they were experiencing.
398 patients were included in the study. The median age of the participants was 37 years, and they were overall very healthy. 79% had no known co-morbidities. This is a shame. It means that this study is yet another one of those many studies that will not be able to show a meaningful effect on hard end points like hospitalization and death. It is a bit strange that studies keep being done on young healthy people who are at virtually zero risk from covid-19, rather than on the multi-morbid elderly, who are the ones we actually need an effective treatment for.
Anyway, let’s get to the results.
In the group treated with ivermectin, the average time from inclusion in the study to becoming completely symptom free was 10 days. In the placebo group that number was 12 days. So, the ivermectin treated patients recovered on average two days faster. However, the difference was not statistically significant, so the result could easily be due to chance. At 21 days after inclusion in the study, 82% had recovered fully in the ivermectin group, as compared to 79% in the placebo group. Again, the small difference was not statistically significant.
In terms of the hard end points that matter more, there were zero deaths in the ivermectin group and there was one death in the placebo group. 2% of participants in the ivermectin group required “escalation of care” (hospitalization if they were outside the hospital at the start of the study, or oxygen therapy if they were in hospital at the start of the study) as compared with 5% in the placebo group. None of these differences was statistically significant. But that doesn’t mean they weren’t real. Like I wrote earlier, the fact that this was a study of healthy young people meant that, even if a meaningful difference does exist in risk of dying of covid, or of ending up in hospital, this study was never going to find it.
So, what can we conclude?
Ivermectin does not meaningfully shorten duration of symptoms in healthy young people. That’s about all we can say from this study. Considering the conflicts of interest of the authors, my guess is that this was the goal of the study all along: Gather together a number of young healthy people that is too small for there to be any chance of a statistically significant benefit, and then get the result you want. The media will sell the result as “study shows ivermectin doesn’t work” (which they dutifully did).
It is interesting that there were signals of benefit for all the parameters the researchers looked at (resolution of symptoms, escalation of care, death), but that the relatively small number and good health status of the participants meant that there was little chance of any of the results reaching statistical significance.
Let’s move on to the next study, which is currently available as a pre-print on Research Square (Niaee et al.). It was randomized, double-blind, and placebo-controlled, and carried out at five different hospitals in Iran. It was funded by an Iranian university.
In order to be included in the trial, participants had to be over the age of 18 and admitted to hospital because of a covid-19 infection (which was defined as symptoms suggestive of covid plus either a CT scan typical of covid infection or a positive PCR test).
150 participants were randomized to either placebo (30 people) or varying doses of ivermectin (120 people). The fact that they chose to make the placebo group so small is a problem, because it makes it very hard to detect any differences even if they do exist, by making the statistical certainty of the results in the placebo group very low.
The participants were on average 56 years old and the average oxygen saturation before initiation of treatment was 89% (normal is more than 95%), so this was a pretty sick group. Unfortunately no information is provided on how far along people were in the disease course when they started receiving ivermectin. It stands to reason that the drug is more likely to work if given ten days after symptom onset than when given twenty days after symptom onset, since death usually happens around day 21. If you, for example, wanted to design a trial to fail, you could start treating people at a time point when there is no time for the drug you’re testing to have a chance work, so it would have been nice to know at what time point treatment started in this trial.
So, what were the results?
20% of the participants in the placebo group died (6 out of 30 people). 3% of the participants in the various ivermectin groups died (4 out of 120 people). That is an 85% reduction in the relative risk of death, which is huge.
So, in spite of the fact that the placebo group was so small, it was still possible to see a big difference in mortality. Admittedly, this is a pre-print (i.e. it hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet), and the absolute numbers of deaths are small, so there is some scope for random chance to have created these results (maybe people in the placebo group were just very unlucky!). However, the study appears to have followed all the steps expected for a high quality trial. It was carried out at multiple different hospitals, it used randomization and a control group that received a placebo, and it was double-blinded. And death is a very hard end point that is not particularly open to bias. So unless the researchers have falsified their data, then this study constitutes reasonably good evidence that ivermectin is highly effective when given to patients hospitalized with covid-19. That’s great, because it would mean that the drug can be given quite late in the disease course and still show benefit.
Let’s move on to the third trial (Chahla et al.), which is currently available as a pre-print on MedRxiv. It was carried out in Argentina, and funded by the Argentinean government. Like the first trial we discussed, this was a study of people with mild disease. It literally boggles my mind that so many researchers choose to study people with mild disease instead of studying those with more severe disease. Especially when you consider that these studies are all so small. A study of people with mild disease needs to be very large to find a statistically significant effect, since most people with covid do well regardless. The risk of false negative results is thus enormous. If you’re going to do a small-ish study, and you want to have a reasonable chance of producing results that reach statistical significance, it would make much more sense to do it on sick hospitalized patients.
The study was randomized, but it wasn’t blinded, and there was no placebo. In other words, the intervention group received ivermectin (24 mg per day), while the control group didn’t receive anything. This is a bad bad thing. It means that any non-hard outcomes produced by the study are really quite worthless, since there is so much scope for the placebo effect and other confounding factors to mess up the results. For hard outcomes, in particular death, it should be less of a problem (although we wouldn’t expect any deaths in such a small study of mostly healthy people with mild disease anyway).
The study included people over the age of 18 with symptoms suggestive of covid-19 and a positive PCR test. The average age of the participants was 40 years, and most had no underlying health issues. A total of 172 people were recruited in to the study.
The researchers chose to look at how quickly people became free of symptoms as their primary endpoint. This is enormously problematic, since the study, as already mentioned, wasn’t blinded and there was no placebo. Any difference between the groups could easily be explained by the placebo effect and by biases towards treatment benefit among the researchers.
Anyway, the study found that 49% in the treatment group were free of symptoms at five to nine days after the beginning of treatment, compared with 81% in the control group. However, the lack of blinding means that this result is worthless. The methodology is just too flawed.
No data is provided on the number of people who died in each group. Since it isn’t reported, I think it’s safe to assume that there were no deaths in either group. Nor is any data provided on the number of hospitalizations in each group.
So, what does this study tell us?
Absolutely nothing at all. What a waste of time and money.
Let’s move on and update our meta-analysis. The reason we need to do a meta-analysis here is that none of the trials of ivermectin is large enough on its own to provide a definitive answer as to whether it is a useful treatment for covid-19 or not. For those who haven’t heard of meta-analyses before, basically what you do is just take the results from all different studies in existence that fulfill your pre-selected criteria, and then put them together, so as a to create a single large “meta”-study. This allows you to produce results that have a much higher level of statistical significance. It is particularly useful in a situation where all the individual trials you have to work with are statistically underpowered (have too few participants), as is the case here.
In this new meta-analysis, I’ve included every double-blind randomized placebo-controlled trial I could find of ivermectin as a treatment for covid. Using only double-blind placebo-controlled trials means that only the highest quality studies are included in this meta-analysis, which minimizes the risk of biases messing up the results as far as possible. In order to be included, a study also had to provide mortality data, since the goal of the meta-analysis is to see if there is any difference in mortality.
I was able to identify seven trials that fulfilled these criteria, with a total of 1,327 participants. Here’s what the meta-analysis shows:
What we see is a 62% reduction in the relative risk of dying among covid patients treated with ivermectin. That would mean that ivermectin prevents roughly three out of five covid deaths. The reduction is statistically significant (p-value 0,004). In other words, the weight of evidence supporting ivermectin continues to pile up. It is now far stronger than the evidence that led to widespred use of remdesivir earlier in the pandemic, and the effect is much larger and more important (remdesivir was only ever shown to marginally decrease length of hospital stay, it was never shown to have any effect on risk of dying).
I understand why pharmaceutical companies don’t like ivermectin. It’s a cheap generic drug. Even Merck, the company that invented ivermectin, is doing it’s best to destroy the drug’s reputation at the moment. This can only be explained by the fact that Merck is currently developing two expensive new covid drugs, and doesn’t want an off-patent drug, which it can no longer make any profit from, competing with them.
The only reason I can think to understand why the broader medical establishment, however, is still so anti-ivermectin is that these studies have all been done outside the rich west. Apparently doctors and scientists outside North America and Western Europe can’t be trusted, unless they’re saying things that are in line with our pre-conceived notions.
Researchers at McMaster university are currently organizing a large trial of ivermectin as a treatment for covid-19, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. That trial is expected to enroll over 3,000 people, so it should be definitive. It’s going to be very interesting to see what it shows when the results finally get published.
You first heard of ‘too big to fail’ banks in 2008 when the global economic collapse destroyed lives and businesses and few, if any fraudster bankers went to jail.
Don’t be surprised to learn that ‘too big to fail‘ also applies to those Big Pharma entities in cahoots with corrupt politicians. This short video explains how Pfizer, conspiring with bent regulators, uses shell companies to get away with their vaccine crimes.
Here is a perfect example of the tactics that Big Pharma uses to incentivize doctors to push vaccines on the public. Insurance company Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBS) pays pediatricians $400 for EACH fully vaccinated child under the age of 2. This means that for every 100 vaccinated patients, the doctor gets a $40,000 bonus!
Moreover, it is now very difficult to find a pediatrician who will accept a family who doesn’t vaccinate. Even parents who partially vaccinate or follow a different schedule have a hard time finding a doctor. Here’s why: doctors have to vaccinate a certain percentage of their patients or they don’t get their bonus. BCBS says doctors need to vaccinate 63% of their patients to get the payout.
BCBS outlines the incentive program for vaccinating babies in the BCBS doctor incentives booklet. Below is an image of the childhood immunization incentives page.
The program specifies that patients under the age of 2 must receive 24 inoculations for the doctor to receive the $400 per-patient payout. Notice the list includes the flu vaccine, even though evidence suggests that the flu vaccine actually weakens the immune system long-term. Furthermore, during the 2012-2013 flu season, the flu vaccine’s effectiveness was found to be just 56 percent across all age groups reviewed by the CDC.
Exorbitant Payouts for Vaccinating Babies
So how much money can a doctor make by pushing vaccines on trusting parents? Here’s the breakdown:
The average American pediatrician has 1546 patients, though some pediatricians see many more. The vast majority of those patients are very young, perhaps because children transition to a family physician or stop visiting the doctor at all as they grow up. As they table above explains, Blue Cross Blue Shield pays pediatricians $400 per fully vaccinated child. If your pediatrician has just 100 fully-vaccinated patients turning 2 this year, that’s $40,000. Yes, Blue Cross Blue Shield pays your doctor a $40,000 bonus for fully vaccinating 100 patients under the age of 2. If your doctor manages to fully vaccinate 200 patients, that bonus jumps to $80,000. (source: CongitiveTruths.com)
Doctors Receive Bribes for More Than Vaccinations
The complete BCBS doctor incentives booklet was posted by CognitiveTruths.comhere.
The booklet shows that payouts aren’t available just for vaccines. Doctors receive bonuses for making sure that patients “adhere to their prescribed drug therapy.” This falls under BCBS category of “disease management” and includes statins, drugs for hypertension, and oral diabetes medications. Doctors also receive bonuses for helping patients manage depression… but only if they do so using drugs.
These types of practices by the medical establishment give rise to many questions. First, are doctors more concerned about earning their bonus than about children’s health? That would explain why so many doctors are no longer taking families that do not vaccinate. Further, do doctors even care if the one-size-fits-all approach to vaccination is safe?
Finally, if doctors receive payouts for disease management, then why would they want to cure their patients? This approach definitely illustrates the biggest problem of our medical establishment. Let’s face it, the establishment is creating long-term customers instead of curing patients.
You don’t think things are going to go back to normal on the 21st June 2021 do you? The evidence is mounting to the contrary and the latest piece of the puzzle has cost the British tax-payer £320 million.
Previous pieces of the puzzle have come in the form of a document produced for the UK Government entitled ‘Summary of further modelling of easing of restrictions – Roadmap Step 2’, and a contract currently out for tender for the employment of ‘Covid Marshals’.
The former declares that a third wave is inevitable and that it will be the fault of children and those who refuse the experimental Covid-19 vaccines. Whilst the latter confirms that Covid Marshals will be employed from the 1st July 2021 until the end of January 2022 at the earliest, to the tune of £3 million of tax-payers money.
The latest evidence that things will not be returning to normal on the 21st June 2021 comes in the form of a contract which has been awarded to a single company, costing the British tax-payer £320 million. The contract has a start date of 1st April 2021 and is due to run until the 31st March 2022. It’s stated purpose? “The provision of Media buying services for COVID 19 campaigns.”
The closing date for applications was 12am on the 31st March 2021 and the contract was awarded to ‘OMD Group Limited’. The company is based in London and has a financial director named ‘BELL, Ronald James‘ who has been with the company since the 1st November 2017. But we can also see that there have been three new appointees to the board on the 22nd February 2021. These include FENTON, Laura Claire who has been appointed as CEO. PANESAR, Ravinder who has been appointed as a financial director. And STURGEON, Natalie who has been appointed as CEO.
The three new appointees have certainly struck gold rather quick. We wonder if these people have any ties or links to any members of Boris Johnson’s current Cabinet? Track record would suggest so.
The Government has already spent hundreds of millions of tax payers money since March 2020 to advertise the fact that there is a pandemic and now plan to carry on the tradition for at least another year. The question is, if there was really a deadly pandemic would authorities need to advertise it?
The answer of course lies in the fact that this has never been about a virus, and has always been about control. This £320 million contract is to fund propaganda and maintain the level of fear that they have created in a large amount of the UK population.
The contract also explains why the mainstream media have remained largely silent and toed the line at all times in regards to the narrative being portrayed by the UK Government and their circle of scientific advisors. It would cost them millions of pounds in advertising fees if they refused to do so.
Think things will go back to normal on the 21st June 2021? Think again. This won’t end until we all say it does.
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