Like other aspects of medicine, public health is about dealing with life and death. In the international sphere, this involves big numbers. If, as a group, a few million dollars is allocated here, it may save thousands of lives. Actual people living rather than dying, or grieving. If it’s allocated there, it may even promote death – diverting other resources from a more useful approach or causing direct harm.
Dealing with such issues affects people’s egos. Humans are prone to think themselves important if they seem to have power over the lives of others. With international public health staff this is reinforced by people they meet, and the media glorifying their work. The public hears little of the high, often tax-free salaries or the travels and 5-star hotels that boost these egos still further, but instead are fed pictures of (usually brown) children lining up to be saved by people in (usually blue) vests with nice logos. It all feels good.
The result, inevitably, is an international public health workforce that has a very high opinion of itself. Possessing values that it considers superior to those of others, it feels justified in imposing its beliefs and values on the populations who are the target of its work. As their role seems to them more important than bringing up kids in some random village or working at an airport check-in counter, they can feel virtuous when seeking to impose their superior opinions on others. The WHO’s insistence that countries globally embrace certain Western cultural values supporting abortion on request until time of delivery are a powerful example, irrespective of what one considers its ‘rightness.’ More so as the WHO also claims to support ‘decolonization.’
Things get tricky when the ultimate source of funding has its own commercial or geopolitical priorities. As an example, expenditure of the World Health Organization (WHO) is now over 75% specified by the funder, including those who stand to gain financially from such work. Large organizations that helped the WHO run its Covid-19 response, such as Gavi (vaccines) and CEPI (vaccines for pandemics), were jointly set up by private and corporate interests who are now represented on their boards and directing them.
The interface between these self-interested funding sources and the populations upon whom they seek to impose their will is where the self-righteousness culture of the public health workforce becomes so important. They need enforcers whose culture renders them willing to impose harm and restrictions upon others. Apologists and sanitizers who are in a position of trust.
A Captured but Willing Workforce
If you are going to sell a product, you can advertise it and hope potential buyers are interested. This carries a commercial risk. If a product can be mandated – essentially force the market to buy it – then this risk is eliminated. If you can then remove any liability for harm done, you are simply printing money with no risk at all. This is such a ridiculous and indecent approach that it would never fly in a normal commercial context. You would need a workforce capable, en-masse, of putting aside the moral codes that prevent such practices. A shield between the people being managed and the commercial or political interests standing to gain.
Historically, public health has often provided such a shield – a way of sanitizing vested interests that would otherwise appear repulsive to the public. In the United States, it implemented racist and eugenic policies to sterilize and send into decline ethnic groups it considered inferior, or individuals considered to have lesser mental capacity (or socially inferior).
The Johns Hopkins University psychology laboratory was founded by proponents of just such an approach. The fascists in Italy and Germany were able to extend this to active killing first of the physically ‘inferior,’ then whole ethnic groups claimed by governments and health professions to be threats to the purity of the majority. Examples such as the Tuskegee study show that this attitude did not stop with World War Two.
Most of the doctors and nurses implementing eugenics and other fascist policies will have convinced themselves that they were acting for the greater good, rather than demons. Medical schools told them they were superior, patients and the public reinforced this, and they convinced each other. Having the power to directly save or not save lives does that, while carting trash and repairing sewers (equally important to public health) does not. It enables people to tell others what to do for a perceived greater good (even sterilization or worse) and to then stand together as a profession to defend it. They will do this for those who direct them, as health professionals are also trained to follow guidelines and superiors.
Accepting Humility
The hardest thing in public health is accepting that none of the above is actually for the public’s health. It is about unleashed human ego, a large part of greed, and a trained and frequently reinforced willingness to bow to authority. Hierarchies feel good when you are near the top.
In contrast, health depends on mental and social well-being, and all the multiplicity of influences from within and without that determine whether each person experiences, and how they deal with, disease. It requires individuals to be empowered to make their own choices, irrespective of human rights, because mental and social health, and a large part of physical health, are dependent on the social capital this agency enables. Public health can advise but once it steps over the line to coerce or force, it ceases to be an overall positive influence.
To provide sensible public health, you must therefore be comfortable allowing others to do what you consider to be against their physical interests or some ‘greater good.’ When you are convinced that you have superior intellect, this can feel wrong. It is harder again when deferring to the public means breaking ranks with, and losing standing with, peers who consider themselves superior and more virtuous.
To do this, one has to accept that intellect has no standing when assessing human worth, and that each human has some intrinsic characteristic that puts them above all considerations regarding greater societal good. This is the basis of fully informed consent – a very difficult concept when considered deeply. It has its basis in the Nuremberg Code and post-1945 medical ethics and human rights, and is a concept with which many in our health professions and their institutions disagree.
Facing Reality
We are now entering one of those more extreme periods, where the hierarchy really becomes clear. Those pulling the public health strings have gained enormous power and profit from Covid-19 and are focused on getting more. Their chosen enforcers did their job during Covid-19, turning a virus outbreak that kills near an average age of 80 years and at a rate globally perhaps slightly higher than influenza into a vehicle to drive poverty and inequality. They continue to do this, pushing ‘boosters’ associated with rising rates of the infection they are aimed against, and with unusual evidence of harm, ignoring prior understanding of immunology and basic common sense.
Now public health is moving further in response to the same masters, the Covid profiteers, promoting fear of future outbreaks. With near-total obeisance, they are now supporting a reordering of society and health sovereignty through amending the WHO IHR regulations and negotiating a pandemic treaty to build a permanent health technocracy to sustain concentration of wealth and power through recurrent pharmaceutical profit.
This reordering of our democracies into Pharma technocracies, with the public health bureaucracy being aligned to enforce it, will make the right to travel, work, go to school, or visit sick relatives dependent on compliance to health dictates passed down from a massively wealthy corporate aristocracy. Those health dictates will be enforced by people whose training was funded and careers supported by those who directly profit. The modelers who will produce the numbers needed to scare will be similarly funded, while a sponsored media will continue to promote this fear unquestioningly. The institutions above this, the WHO and the big public-private partnerships, take funding and direction from the same sources. The proposed pandemic regulations and treaty are just cementing all in place, repeating the massively harmful restrictions on human rights applied during Covid whilst ensuring that there is less room for dissent.
We need legislators, and the public, to reclaimpublic health ethics and to return to credible concepts of health and well-being – as the WHO once did – “physical, mental and social.” This is what was intended when previous generations fought to overthrow dictators, striving for equality and for the rights of individuals over those who would control them. History tells us that public health professions tend to follow self-interest, taking the side of those who would be dictators. If our democracies, freedom, and health are to survive, we must accept reality and address this as a basic issue of individual freedom and good governance for which we are all responsible. There is too much at stake to leave this to self-interested corporatists and the notorious enforcers they control.
David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a public health physician and biotech consultant in global health. He is a former medical officer and scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO), Programme Head for malaria and febrile diseases at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, Switzerland, and Director of Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in Bellevue, WA, USA.
An “elite” and influential group of obesity specialists over the last decade pocketed at least $25.8 million in payments from Novo Nordisk, maker of weight loss drugs Wegovy and Saxenda, in exchange for promoting the drugs in their lectures, treatment guidelines, clinics and medical societies, according to an investigation by Reuters.
“Those payments are part of a campaign to convince U.S. doctors to make Wegovy one of the most widely prescribed drugs in history — and to persuade skeptical insurers to pay for it,” according to the report.
Wegovy and Saxenda have rapidly transformed the treatment of obesity in the U.S., with a boom in prescriptions so big in 2023 that JP Morgan doubled its 10-year sales projection, predicting sales of $71 million for the drugs by 2032.
‘They have pushed for urgent prescribing of Wegovy’
Reuters examined data from the federal Open Payments database, which reports payments made by pharmaceutical companies to doctors, other medical professionals and teaching hospitals for consulting, speaking, research, travel or meals. It analyzed payments for speaking, consulting, food and travel for two of Novo’s obesity drugs, Wegovy and Saxenda.
The analysis also excluded payment for research.
Overall, Reuters found at least 57 U.S. physicians each accepted a minimum of $100,000 from Novo in payments related to the two drugs over 10 years. It also found Novo made other large payments to some of those same doctors, but the payments were not classified as related to a particular drug and were not counted in the $25.8 million total.
Of that group, 41 of the physicians run weight-management clinics, work at academic hospitals, write obesity-treatment guidelines or hold top positions at medical societies.
Collectively, the report said:
“[They] have pushed for urgent prescribing of Wegovy and similar medicines to a large proportion of patients with obesity and for comprehensive coverage by government and private insurers. The company and some of its paid experts have called denying coverage tantamount to discrimination against people with obesity, rooted in the faulty notion that they are to blame for their condition.”
Reuters also analyzed Novo’s spending among experts involved in writing five prominent sets of obesity-treatment guidelines for doctors. Among the 109 guideline writers and editors, 53 had accepted payments from companies selling or developing obesity drugs — $8 million of the total $12.4 million of those payments were from Novo.
In a statement provided to Reuters, Novo said, “Responsible engagement between pharmaceutical companies and the medical community is good for patients and advances care and science.”
Since the Affordable Care Act created the Open Payments system over a decade ago, it has been easier to expose the kinds of financial conflicts of interest identified in the report.
However, the increased transparency hasn’t stemmed the flow of industry money, Reuters found. “Companies’ annual payments have surged from $6.5 billion in 2014, the first full year data were collected, to $12.6 billion last year,” the report stated.
Dr. Arthur Kellermann, a health administrator and former dean of the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences, the U.S. military’s medical school, told Reuters the investigation sheds light on a long-standing problem in the drug industry.
He called the payments “morally and ethically way over the line,” adding:
“The pharmaceutical industry still sees value in paying medical thought leaders to promote their products, and too many of them are happy to sign up for a six- or seven-figure check …
”As sales grow, Medicare and the insurance industry come under intense pressure to pay for these hugely expensive drugs … The end result is that everybody’s healthcare costs go up.”
Another recent report by investigative journalist Lee Fang similarly found a wide network of celebrities, physicians, patient advocacy groups, public health experts, academics, and community leaders have appeared in dozens of media outlets to tout the drugs without disclosing their financial ties to Novo Nordisk.
Which doctors take money from Novo Nordisk?
The report profiled several key physicians taking money from Novo.
For example, Novo paid Lee Kaplan, M.D., Ph.D., chief of obesity medicine at Dartmouth’s medical school, former head of Obesity, Metabolism and Nutrition Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital, and associate professor of medicine at Harvard, $1.4 million for consulting work and travel related to the two drugs between 2013 and 2022.
It also paid him another $976,019 million during that same period for unspecified reasons.
Kaplan, who teaches a popular obesity course taken by physicians seeking certification in obesity medicine or continuing education credits — for which Novo contributed $10,000 this year — dismissed the idea that he is a mouthpiece for the drugmaker. He told Reuters he accepts money from numerous companies and “that he’s not beholden to any one drugmaker.”
Ryan was instrumental in persuading the U.S. Office of Personnel Management to cover Wegovy and similar drugs for millions of federal workers, an agency official told Reuters.
In the process, she connected government officials with two key groups: the Obesity Action Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy group, and the STOP Obesity Alliance at George Washington University. Both have ties to drugmakers.
Novo is the Obesity Action Coalition’s top corporate donor, paying it more than $500,000 annually.
STOP medical director Dr. Scott Kahan, who will assist in writing The Obesity Society’s new “standards-of-care” guidelines that primary-care doctors commonly use as a quick-reference guide, has accepted more than $300,000 from Novo.
Dr. Jamy Ard, of Wake Forest University, the incoming president of The Obesity Society who will oversee the guideline writing, has taken over $200,000 from Novo.
Ryan told Reuters she had no qualms about taking such payments, “Being a purist isn’t helping anyone,” she told Reuters.
The report also quoted Ryan speaking to a group of doctors at a conference, where she argued that these blockbuster drugs have been positive for both patients and investors. “There is nothing wrong with money,” Ryan said.
She and obesity specialist Dr. Ken Fujioka, director of the Scripps Clinic Nutrition and Metabolic Research Center in San Diego, have taken 130 Novo-paid trips over the past decade, traveling to make speeches and do consulting.
They said the travel allows them to provide medical advice that is valuable to patients, physicians and the manufacturer.
But other doctors disagreed. Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman, a professor of pharmacology and physiology at Georgetown University Medical Center who studies pharmaceutical marketing practices, told Reuters :
“These highly paid doctors end up drowning out the voices of people who aren’t being flown around to every medical meeting. As a result, there’s not a lot of resistance to the prevailing industry-funded view.”
‘Serious and under-discussed risks for pregnant women’
This was followed, in June 2021, by the licensing of Wegovy, and less than a year later of Ozempic, which is indicated for Type 2 diabetes, but contains the same active ingredient, semaglutide, as Wegovy, and is prescribed off-label for weight loss.
Semaglutide drugs are taken as a once-weekly injection, which is considered a benefit compared to a once-daily jab. Liraglutide is a daily shot. Semaglutide is also available as a once-daily pill under the brand name Rybelsus, another Novo drug.
These drugs mimic the GLP-1 hormone, which assists patients in losing weight by regulating their appetite.
In November 2023, the FDA approved Eli Lilly’s Zepbound, another injectable diabetes drug, for weight loss. The active ingredient in Zepbound, tirzepatide, sets this drug apart from Wegovy and Ozempic but it works similarly through a weekly injection.
Tirzepatide is sold by Eli Lilly as a diabetes drug under the trade name Mounjaro.
These approvals were accompanied by what Fang called a Novo Nordisk-driven “aggressive campaign to persuade Americans of the merits of semaglutide.”
According to a KFF Health poll, 45% of adults would take a “safe and effective prescription weight loss drug,” including 59% of those trying to lose weight.
Enthusiasm fell to just 23%, however, when they learned that treatment involved a routine injection, to 16% if either insurance did not cover the high monthly cost or if the drug was not specifically approved for weight loss.
The surging popularity of the medication led to shortages and made Novo Nordisk one of the most valuable global pharmaceutical companies, behind Johnson & Johnson and Eli Lilly.
The shortages raised concerns because the drugs are not made for short-term use. Studies show that when people stop taking them, they regain much of the weight they lost, or potentially gain even more weight. Most people who start taking the drugs and want the effects to last will have to stay on them long-term.
But recent pharmacy claims data shows that most people who start taking Wegovy stop taking it within a year, some because of side effects and some because of the high cost of the drugs.
In addition to suicidal ideation and thoughts of self-harm, pancreatic cancer and gastrointestinal disorders, other adverse effects linked to semaglutide are also becoming apparent. A study using data from EudraVigilance, also found metabolic, nutritional, eye, renal, urinary and cardiac disorders were also reported.
Despite the high drug cost and the associated risks, there is an ongoing debate about whether insurance companies and Medicare should cover the cost of weight loss drugs, which would increase profits exponentially.
Reuters reported that Wegovy’s U.S. prescribing label recommends the drug for anyone with a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or higher, the threshold for obesity and for people with a 27 BMI who also have a weight-related medical condition.
That would cover about 46% of American adults — about 120 million people, according to the report.
A study published in March in the NEJM estimated that if Medicare were compelled to cover Wegovy, with an estimated 23% discount, it would cost $27 billion to treat just 10% of patients with obesity enrolled in Medicare. That would equal nearly a fifth of the yearly spending for Medicare’s program covering prescription drugs.
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
Achieving Net Zero means building 80 million kilometres of new and refurbished power lines within 17 years, equivalent to wrapping the Earth 2,000 times with new electricity grid capacity. All the high voltage lines built in the last century will need to be built again by 2040 to benefit from all the intermittent power produced by the vast number of wind turbines. The ecological costs of all this can only be guessed at. Electricity cables are made of aluminium and copper and strung on giant pylons made of steel and supported by large concrete bases. For their part, wind turbines are a menace to both avian and oceanic wildlife, consume vast quantities of raw materials, have a limited lifespan and are an increasing blight on both inland and offshore landscapes.
If the International Energy Agency (IEA) gets its way, you ain’t seen nothing yet. The roll-out of high voltage lines will be on an unprecedented scale. In a report on global electricity grids issued to coincide with COP28, the IEA states that “an unprecedented level of attention from policymakers and business leaders is needed to ensure grids support clean energy transitions and maintain electricity security”. Major changes in how grids operate and are regulated are said to be essential. Annual investment in grids, which has remained broadly stagnant, needs to double to more than $600 billion a year by 2030.
The Australian science journalist Jo Nova is in no mood to be understanding: “Remember, it’s not their fault that renewables need far more land, more space, more backup and more infrastructure – it’s our fault we didn’t build a world ready for their holy energy.”
The IEA paints a world where electricity grids are becoming a “bottleneck” for transitions to Net Zero emissions. While investment in renewables has been increasing rapidly, global investment in grids “has barely changed”. In Europe, policymakers can speed up progress on grids by “enhancing planning, ensuring regulatory risk assessments allow for anticipatory investment, and streamlining administrative processes”. In plain English this means ripping up local planning laws in over-populated Britain and blanketing the country with millions of giant electricity pylons. These will be required to bring energy to urban areas from power intermittently generated far away in the North Sea and off the Scottish coast.
It is perhaps no coincidence that the British Government recently set out “major plans” to speed up connections and rapidly increase capacity on the electricity grid. The press release cunningly linked it with a £960 million government investment in “green industries”. The new package is “expected” to bring forward £90 billion of investment over the next 10 years. The Government promised that it will “reward” those living closest to new infrastructure with up to £1,000 a year off their electricity bills. In another part of the release, this is downgraded to communities “could” benefit, and the bung is limited to 10 years.
Whatever the money is spent on, it is likely to be chickenfeed compared with the growing £12 billion annual subsidy paid by electricity consumers to the producers of renewable energy. But the next British government will face an empty exchequer and soaring state debt. Lack of finance along with the end of low interest rates and free money printing is likely to kill many of the green fantasises currently being peddled by collectivist Net Zero fanatics. It is becoming clearer by the day, to an increasing number of people, that renewable energy is unreliable and uneconomic, and has an insatiable requirement for financial subsidy.
Emeritus Cambridge Professor Michael Kelly has long been a critic of the blind, un-costed rush to Net Zero. The U.K. electricity grid will require upgrading from top to bottom, he wrote in a recent GWPF essay. Leaving aside the massive roll out of long-distance transmission lines required, he noted the inadequacies of all the local cabling and sub-stations built before the need to charge electric cars and run heat pumps. “The whole distribution system will need to be upgraded… the work will be extraordinarily expensive, but without it there will either be regular brownouts, or drivers will be told where and when they can charge their batteries,” he explained.
Professor Kelly believes it is a failure of the British political machinery, notably the work of the unelected Climate Change Committee. “We have set out to decarbonise the economy without anyone having thought through all the engineering issues, let alone put a cost on the exercise,” he concluded.
But as Jo Nova observes, it is all our fault. “Apparently, we should have paid attention and built the right grid and now due to our laziness we will have to rush in another 80 million kilometres of interconnectors, just like that,” she writes. Tell the children they’ve been lied to, she concludes. “The Green future is an industrial wasteland of concrete and steel built to line the pockets of billionaires and bankers.”
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
In the European Commission, the procurement of Pfizer vaccines has been surrounded by suspicions of corruption for some time, especially regarding negotiations between EC President Ursula von der Leyen and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, which were conducted over text messages that subsequently “disappeared.”
“It is clear that these vaccines were ordered and forced on member states in unnecessarily large quantities,” the Hungarian Government Information Center said in response to a request from daily Magyar Nemzet, after it emerged that Pfizer and BioNTech had filed a lawsuit against the Hungarian government in January this year over the purchase of some of the Covid-19 vaccines.
According to documents obtained by Politico, the plaintiffs are demanding payment from Hungary for 3 million BioNTech/Pfizer vaccines worth around €60 million.
Von der Leyen held preliminary talks with the head of Pfizer in March 2021 on the purchase of the coronavirus vaccine, and virtually agreed to the details by text message with the pharmaceutical giant’s CEO, Albert Bourla. An investigation into the deal, worth around €35 billion, was launched in January 2022, but the European Commission president’s team failed to find the text messages in question.
EU Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly concluded that von der Leyen had deliberately obstructed her work by claiming not to have found any text message between the EU commission president and Bourla. It later emerged that they had allegedly only reviewed internal document registers, not text messages, saying they were too short-lived and therefore not covered by EU law on the retention of policy documents.
The anti-Hungarian EU commissioner Vera Jourová, also previously suspected of corruption, could only defend von der Leyen, citing the short-lived, ephemeral nature of text messages.
However, according to the Ombudsman, Emily O’Reilly, the behavior of the committee members did not comply with the transparency required by EU rules, and no attempt was made to carry out a comprehensive investigation into the matter.
The European Commission president also defended herself by saying that she was not involved in the negotiations and that the messages did not influence the course of the deal. It is no coincidence that von der Leyen has tried to play down the importance of the text message negotiations, as the purchase of Pfizer vaccines has also caused a financial loss for the European Union: Under the terms of the mega-contract with Pfizer and BioNTech, Brussels will buy 900 million doses of vaccines worth $35 billion between the end of 2020 and 2023, with an option for a further 900 million doses.
Getting the Republican-majority House of Representatives to approve additional funding for Ukraine would require first securing the US border with Mexico, Speaker Mike Johnson told the White House on Tuesday.
The Louisiana Republican was responding to Monday’s public letter from Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Shalanda Young, who warned that the US was “out of money—and nearly out of time” in terms of aid to Ukraine and Israel. Young argued that cutting off US aid would “kneecap Ukraine on the battlefield” and increase the “likelihood of Russian military victories.”
Johnson first addressed Israel, noting that the House approved the Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act (HR 6126) on November 2, but that Democrats who control the Senate “voted to block consideration of the bill.”
As for Ukraine, Johnson wrote, the Republican position has remained unchanged since his meeting with Young and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on October 26, when he laid out “two essential prerequisites: security at our border, and critical answers regarding the funds requested.”
Six days prior, President Joe Biden had announced the proposal to bundle the funding for Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan and immigration and border enforcement in a $106 billion package, of which about $60 billion would go to Kiev.
Additional funding for Ukraine is “dependent upon enactment of transformative change to our nation’s border security laws,” Johnson wrote on Tuesday. The House passed the Secure the Border Act of 2023 (HR 2), “more than six months ago,” he noted, but the Senate Democrats have “refused to act” on it.
Pointing to over 6.5 million “illegal alien encounters” along the southern US border since Biden took office, of which 294 involved people “on the terrorist watchlist,” Johnson called the situation “an unconscionable and unsustainable catastrophe.”
In addition to “madness” on the border, Johnson noted that the White House still owed Congress “a full accounting of how prior US military and humanitarian aid” to Ukraine was spent “and an explanation of the president’s strategy to ensure an accelerated path to victory.” He accused Biden of “failure thus far to present clearly defined objectives,” and to provide Kiev the weapons it needed on time.
“Rather than engaging with Congressional Republicans to discuss logical reforms, the Biden Administration has ignored reality, choosing instead to engage in political posturing,” the House speaker said.
Talks on a border security bill in the Senate collapsed earlier in the day, as Democrats denounced the Republican proposal as “extreme,” claiming it would “end asylum as we know it.”
Washington (State) Secretary of State Steve Hobbs is facing a formal legal challenge in the form of a complaint filed by local Republicans, alleging the use of public funds to launch spying and censorship against political opponents (but mostly, it would seem, those opposed to Hobbs.)
The election period surveillance, introduced through what is known as a sole source contract, was awarded for at least $147,600 and the company was able to put its tools in motion even before the contract was approved.
The Washington State Republican Party (WSRP) on Thursday announced that it, in cooperation with a Long Law office attorney, had submitted its complaint to the Washington State Ethics Board.
Hobbs is accused of spending public money to bankroll the AI company whose “specialty” is voter surveillance via methods like “fact-checking” and subsequent suppression of information unfavorable to the state secretary and her political camp.
The company, called Logically, is registered offshore.
The complaint makes a note of the fact that as secretary of state, regardless of political affiliation, Hobbs has a duty to act in an unbiased and fair manner when it comes to elections.
The state Republicans, however, allege that she violated these (state and federal) constitutional requirements and her oath of office.
One of the provisions that Hobbs is accused of ignoring is the obligation stemming from the US Constitution, specifically its First Amendment, about the government (i.e., its officials at various levels) not being allowed to take any action that “abridges freedom of speech.”
Proper discharge of office and electioneering at public expense are some of the other unlawful behaviors that the Washington Republicans want her investigated for.
What Hobbs was doing was through a creation of her own, known as Information Security & Response Division; the AI company’s task was surveillance of citizens/opponents of Hobbs’ policy who were expressing themselves on the internet.
According to the complaint, terms as “threats to electoral integrity and (those) targeting the (Washington State) secretary of state or staff” were used as justification for “monitoring voter communications in order to alert Secretary Hobbs of critical or unwelcome ‘narratives’, providing bi-weekly analysis and producing reports of citizen comments, trends, and statistics.”
These bi-weeklies were available to Hobbs, and “outside stakeholders.”
Logically was scouring X, Rumble, Truth Social, Substack, etc, but it was on Facebook where it “conspired to label citizen comments as false, apply warning labels, and suppress distribution of the unwelcome speech” which let Hobbs “suppress and abridge free speech on a massive scale.”
“This is nothing but state-funded electioneering with no public benefit and an Orwellian Totalitarian State promoting the views of the Democrat party and censoring their rivals. WA SoS (secretary of state) actions are part of the destruction of civil society and have absolutely no consideration for the people or the Constitution,” reads the complaint.
Americans remain largely ignorant about the extent to which foreign influence pervades the United States government, and I am not referring to the fraudulent claims made by Hillary Clinton that Russian has interfered materially in US elections. The real threat comes from elsewhere. Few outside the government itself are likely to be aware of the extent to which the state of Israel and its domestic affiliate-lobby operating out of Washington and New York have corrupted the United States political system, to the point where nurturing and enabling the Jewish state in its ambitions to dominate much of the Middle East has become effectively US policy. As the exchanges surrounding the recent fighting in Gaza, rightly referred to as a war crime and ethnic cleansing, perhaps even the first steps in a planned genocide, demonstrate that even when the US has genuine interests at stake Israel believes itself empowered to say “no” to the president of the United States. The assault on Gaza and the ongoing killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians started again on Friday after a week long pause for hostage/prisoner exchanges. It will continue and Washington is complicit in the deaths as it has politically shielded Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government no matter what it does while also arming and funding the Israeli actions.
Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon once said that “We the Jewish people control America.” Indeed, the Israeli dominance of the “fools on the hill” in DC has been carefully contrived, cultivated and sustained. One prime example is the regular rush to the Israeli door whenever Congress is in recess. It is not widely reported how large gaggles of congressmen usually drawn in separate groups from each major party travel to Israel on all expenses paid trips where they are wined and dined and subjected to round after round of presentations that drill into their otherwise empty heads all the virtues of Israel and what it represents. This is propaganda combined with indoctrination at its finest with many “facts” presented by the speakers conveniently fabricated to support Israel’s perpetual victimhood and to hide the fact that Israel is a strategic liability for the US rather than an actual ally or asset. Nor is it a democracy. It is a formula for dissimulation and lying that worked with the Jewish officials in the Pentagon under George W. Bush to provoke a war against Saddam Hussein that killed one million Iraqis and cost the US taxpayer nearly $2 trillion.
The trips to Israel are funded by the “educational” affiliate of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) called the American Israel Education Foundation (AIEF). One might reasonably ask why an organization connected to AIPAC, which describes itself on its website as having the “mission” to “…strengthen, protect and promote the US-Israel relationship in ways that enhance the security of the United States and Israel,” should be able to fund the annual mass migration of congress-critters to promote Israeli interests without having to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) as an agent of the Jewish state’s government? The answer is actually quite simple. Congress and the Justice Department have been so corrupted by pro-Israel money and other manifestations of Jewish power that they do not enforce the law when it comes to Israel. The venal creatures in Congress are a large part of why that is so.
And the trips are structured in a way that discourages any actual discussions of real issues affecting the two countries. The payoff is exceptional from Israel’s point of view, with the United States serving as, in Netanyahu’s own words, a near unlimited source of money and weapons from a country in thrall, an “America [that] is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction” possessing “an inherently dupable people.”
One particularly tone-deaf recent trip to Israel occurred in 2019. In the wake of two heavily reported mass killings in Dayton and El Paso that were attributed both by the media and the Democrats to “racism” a senior US Congressman led a delegation of 41 of his Democratic Party colleagues plus spouses on a week-long luxury all-expenses-paid trip to Israel, which is one of the few countries in the world that defines its full citizenship as a matter of race and religion and which was at that time as now widely criticized for its human rights record. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland led the annual excursion, having made the pilgrimage to Israel more than fifteen times. “I am pleased to join so many House Democrats in traveling to Israel to reaffirm our support for a critical US ally and to continue learning about the opportunities and the challenges facing Israel and the Middle East,” he said shortly before departing for Tel Aviv.
Other politicians at state levels have followed the federal government lead by making their way to Israel to kiss Benjamin Netanyahu’s ring. Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, who is a presidential aspirant, has gone way overboard in expressing his love for the Jewish state. He transported his whole cabinet to Jerusalem to publicize his legislation to combat what he views as antisemitism and has followed through on that by banning Palestinian student groups at the state universities. He also opposes allowing Palestinian immigrants into the US because they are “antisemites.”
More recently, California governor Gavin Newsom has made the pilgrimage trip and his office has released his comments on just how wonderful Israel is. He wrote his heart out, meaning that the memo is totally phony and contrived bullshit which demonstrates no sympathy at all for the tens of thousands of Palestinian victims: “As I reflect back on the extraordinary people I just met today in Israel, I am reminded of the deep connections between my home state and this country. A country that has faced many dark times before, and certainly is in one now. But amid this present struggle against terrorists are stories of unimaginable heroism — and unspeakable tragedy. I grieved with families in mourning, I met with young soldiers fresh from bomb shelters and battlefields, and I sat with leaders who bear the responsibility of response to it all. Despite the horror, what I saw and heard from the people of Israel was a profound sense of resilience. A commitment to community and common purpose, especially in these most difficult of times. That’s the Israeli spirit. And it’s also the California spirit…”
Republican presidential wannabe Chris Christie has also recently shown up in the Jewish state to kiss the ring and we expect that Nikki Haley will soon arrive bowing and scraping, particularly as it is Jewish money honoring her passion for Israel that is floating her campaign. And there is lots of love even at the bureaucratic level in a number of states to make sure Israel is getting enough American money. In some states including Virginia Israel trade commissions have been funded which have benefited Israeli businesses and investors much more than local workers or companies. In Virginia the commission is staffed by American Jews and Israelis even though it is funded by the state.
The Israeli power over Congress is also reflected in billions of tax dollars that flow from the US Treasury to the Jewish state each year in spite of the fact that Israel is a wealthy country. Also one might consider the White House’s supine behavior vis-a-vis Netanyahu and its large percentage of senior level staff appointments that are given to Jews. Donald Trump gave away the house to Netanyahu by moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem, approving the annexation of the Golan Heights, and giving the Israeli government a free hand to “deal with” the illegally occupied Palestinian areas on the West Bank and Gaza, which has produced thousands of Arab arrests without trial. Trump’s Ambassador to Israel was his lawyer David Friedman, who spent four years covering for Israel and represented its interests rather than those of the United States. Biden arguably has done even worse by becoming complicit in war crimes by enabling Netanyahu and his band of criminals to perform a developing genocide in Gaza.
One must look at how the power of the Lobby has influenced senior staffing decisions coming from the White House in Israel’s favor because that is where foreign policy is made. President Joe Biden personally considers himself to be a “Zionist.” The president’s Chief of Staff and the State Department’s top three officials have been Zionist Jews. Jews also head Treasury, Homeland Security, the Office of National Intelligence, the Justice Department, the National Security Council and the deputy director slot at CIA.
Regarding some other appointments that smell very bad, two recent stories stand out. The first, entitled “Tel Aviv’s Man in Washington”, comes from journalist James Carden. It concerns Amos Hochstein who, has been reportedly tapped as President Joe Biden senior adviser for consultations with top Israeli officials in order to mediate between Israel and Lebanon. Hochstein is an odd choice as he was born and raised in Jerusalem and is a Jewish Israeli-US dual national who served in the Israeli Defense Forces in the early 1990s and who still has a mother and father living in Israel. He moved to Washington after military service and began his unusually rapid ascent to the highest levels of the US government, beginning with a staff position for Jewish Congressman Sam Gejdenson and then as Staff Director of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. It is not clear how he obtained a security clearance given his background, but he obviously was given highly sensitive assignments. Carden cites the Lebanese news source L’Orient which reported that Hochstein, as a congressional staffer in the 1990s,” met with an Iraqi Foreign Ministry official to discuss a plan to resettle Palestinians in Iraq in return for sanctions relief.” This background suggests that Hochstein is a bit of a specialist in removing Palestinians from Israel.
After that job, Hochstein joined the Obama administration, eventually being placed in charge of the energy portfolio at the State Department, an astonishing leap in status for a man billed as “Biden’s favorite energy guy” who appears to have no college degree. And what about a biographical sketch that mentions Hochstein’s ownership interests in two Washington restaurants and a movie theater? And then there is his obtaining a well remunerated board seat on the Ukrainian state oil and gas giant Naftogaz, which positively exudes a Hunter Biden odor? And it was reported that early in the Biden administration, Hochstein was the president’s choice to lead efforts to block or destroy the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which presumably would have inter alia enhanced his own likely financial interests in Ukrainian energy companies.
Carden also poses the big question, which is “How could someone of Hochstein’s (opaque) background possibly be viewed as an honest broker in the Middle East?” He responds to that himself with “He isn’t” and then goes on to explain “The practice of appointing foreign nationals in sensitive positions of public trust are wildly inappropriate and lead, inevitably, to a subversion of US national interests. As Biden and his staff of bought and paid for political appointees drag us deeper and deeper into two wars 5,000 miles from our shores, the pernicious influence of foreign nationals at the highest levels of the US government is a danger the American people need to awaken to.”
To that expert analysis I would add that naming an Israeli as US-envoy for dealing with a highly manipulative Israel is completely delusional. Hochstein will lean strongly towards benefitting his country, which is Israel, and when it comes to energy there are large gas and oil fields just off the Gazan coast, which would fall into Israeli hands if the Gazans were completely eliminated. The fields are worth many billions of dollars. It will be interesting to watch the development of what Hochstein will contrive to hand them over to his Jewish countrymen while also benefitting his own interests.
The other story is similar in that it illustrates why you should not send Israelis or even American Jews who feel very strongly about Israel to deal with the Israeli government or even anywhere near the Middle East. I say this not to punish them for being Jewish but rather to avoid placing them in situations where there would be a presumption of serious potential conflict of interest. A former senior US official fitting that profile is facing a backlash after being caught on video included on the link repeatedly harassing a halal food vendor in New York and aggressively calling for the deaths of more Gazan children. Stuart Seldowitz previously served as deputy director of the United States Department of State’s Office of Israel and Palestinian Affairs where he must have been quite a lot of fun to be around. How does a man like that get a senior diplomatic post dealing with the Middle East? Well, the only answer must be that he is given the job precisely because he is Jewish and will do the “right thing” for the state of Israel. And you wonder why US foreign policy might be politely described as “completely screwed up”? It did not happen by accident!
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
The Grattan (‘We change the nation – for good’) Institute, has released a shallow, disingenuous report calling for the government to spend lots of money, because vaccination rates are not high enough, according to them.
Not once in this report is any consideration given to the personal needs or wishes of individual Australian patients who are the ultimate targets of the recommendations. The recommendations focus solely on getting more people vaccinated, for more illness or conditions, more often.
The report’s authors are either ignorant of, or wilfully blind to, the concept of free will. So much of the language and framing of the report bends in this direction, with many examples where ‘the government’ is exhorted to take this or that action in order to bring about a behaviour change in people which results in more ‘jabs’. Even the use of the term ‘jabs’ is a sneering shorthand and betrays a desire to normalise through colloquialism the idea of blindly accepting participation in a clinical trial of a novel gene-based therapy.
The overview sets the scene. There is no evidence that the authors feel any compunction about using manipulative techniques, like bald assertions, emotional blackmail and appeals to authority:
Each year, vaccines save thousands of lives and prevent countless sick days. But millions of older Australians at high risk of serious illness are missing out.
Then the good cop routine, with a side of gaslighting:
The pandemic has left many of us sick of vaccination, confused about which jabs we need, misled by misinformation, or complacent about the risks of not being vaccinated.
Sick ‘of’ vaccination, or sick from vaccination? Now it’s our fault, because we’re ‘confused’, or ‘misled’ or ‘complacent’.
COVID vaccination rates have plunged. At the start of winter 2023, 2.5 million people over 65 weren’t up-to-date with their vaccinations – two million more than a year earlier.
Again, our fault for not being ‘up-to-date’ – a term which is imbued with more rigour than it deserves.
The tone-deaf nature of this kind of language is astonishing. But the report isn’t really addressed to those who are not ‘up-to-date’. It’s a rent-seeking sales pitch to those who hold the treasury purse strings. Nothing more. Here is a list of the demands for taxpayer money that appear throughout the report.
Supporting GP clinics, pharmacies, and aged care providers to improve, with $10 million a year, for five years. (p4)
Piloting Community Health Workers across six PHNs, with $750,000 a year, for five years. (p4)
States should develop tailored local initiatives with communities that face the biggest barriers to vaccination. Federal and state governments should contribute equally to $20 million a year, for five years. (p4)
Funding for Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation vaccination programs should be increased by $10 million a year. (p4)
A budget of $22 million for two years (for a new Australian Centre for Disease Control – Ed.) should be used to raise adult vaccine awareness and acceptance, and to re-set the adult vaccine narrative. (p29)
Across the PHNs and the states, our total proposed funding is $150 million over five years, for improving access to mainstream services and for tailored initiatives to reach persistently low-vaccination communities.
We therefore recommend a budget of $3 million per campaign-month for COVID and flu, for three months in each of two years, because the campaign has to reach a wider and potentially less-engaged audience than for childhood vaccines. (p54)
To raise awareness of shingles and pneumococcal vaccines, we recommend a budget of $2 million for two years’ worth of a two-month campaigns, equivalent to twice the spending per month on adolescent vaccines, to target a broader audience that is not easily reached through school-based vaccination programs. (p54)
Apart from the funding recommendations, the language is the thing that betrays the authors’ utilitarian view of humans, as if we are so many cattle to be herded through the crush with ever-increasing, and frankly unregulated, frequency. To wit:
The federal government should introduce vaccination ‘surges’, resetting community attitudes and making seasonal vaccination easier by:
Making vaccination intervals flexible for high-risk people, so more people are eligible for vaccination during surges.
What? Just tinker with the intervals so that it doesn’t matter when you get your next shot? They have dropped all pretence to there being some sort of valid reason for a given interval. The underlying motive could not be clearer – more shots for the sake of more shots, and more money, of course.
Only the most fleeting acknowledgement of the intrusions into our personal lives finds its way into this report. Lamenting the drop in vaccination rate, the authors write:
In December 2021, more than nine in 10 high-risk adults had been vaccinated for COVID in the previous six months. At that time, a range of vaccine mandates and restrictions were in place. By the end of February 2023, the share of high-risk people who were vaccinated in the last six months had crashed to below one in 10 (Figure 2.2).
To borrow from Saint Greta, “How dare they!” Blithely dismissing lockdowns and the devastation they inflicted on personal wellbeing, livelihood, and lives, and the outright coercion to give up bodily autonomy on pain of keeping your job, as “a range of vaccine mandates and restrictions” is insulting in the extreme. But they still hold out hope that we can be made to suffer like that again:
It is probably unrealistic to hope to repeat the high vaccination rates achieved during the worst of the pandemic. Those levels of vaccination were supported by vaccine mandates and unprecedented public health restrictions, and came in the context of surges of hospitalisations and deaths from COVID, and constant media coverage.
“Supported by vaccine mandates” is so disingenuous. It implies that mandates were a good thing. Mandates were a bad thing, and people have voted with their feet ever since they were lifted.
In their search for the mystifying reasons why people have shunned the wonder products that are so safe and effective, the authors propose a few reasons:
There are many reasons people don’t get vaccinated. Barriers can be trivial (forgetfulness), logistical (convenience), financial (not being paid for any time off work from side-effects), or even ideological (misinformation and conspiracy theories).
But they leave out a couple of big ones. How about prudence, for a start? Why accept a rushed experimental drug when there are no long term studies, by definition? For another, why trust a TGA which is funded 96% by industry?
This is a bureaucrat’s report lobbying for a bureaucratic gravy train. The patient is nowhere to be seen or heard in the entire 58 pages. New administrative organs are proposed. Experts will be required. New agreements between federal and state governments are demanded. Millions of taxpayer dollars will be needed.
The Agreement should also establish a Vaccine Implementation Committee, to coordinate effort, troubleshoot problems, and evaluate progress. This committee should be made up of experts, and representatives from federal and state governments and the Australian Centre for Disease Control (ACDC). (p24)
For bureaucrats, ‘targets’ are the stuff of dreams. Wet dreams in this case. They want to measure everything, and reward those who hit the targets. Conflict of interest, anyone? Get more vaccinations done in pharmacies? Sure – but who is better placed to advise a patient of risks and benefits?
Pharmacy vaccination should be continued, with red tape removed
The federal government has recently committed to four years of funding support for pharmacists who deliver free COVID and NIP vaccines to eligible people.
This makes it much easier to organise adult vaccines, increasing the number of locations where people can get vaccines by about 60 per cent. Increasing the pool of vaccinators also means people can more easily get vaccinated by someone who speaks their language, or who (sic) they already trust. By the end of 2022 nearly half of all COVID vaccinations were delivered in pharmacies. (p30)
The word ‘adverse’ appears only 4 times in the whole report. The most glaring example here:
Public insurance could cover other vaccination costs
Although vaccines on the National Immunisation Program are free up-front, people might worry about the cost of adverse reactions.
The government should evaluate whether Australia needs a vaccine injury compensation scheme, like 24 other countries already have. These schemes help cover costs if someone has a moderate or severe reaction to a vaccine. (p30)
No – the cost is not what people worry about. It’s the pain, disability, and death that people worry about.
I could go on about this report. But I think you get the drift.
Governments worldwide have disbursed substantial sums, amounting to tens of billions of dollars, to pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer for COVID-19 vaccines that will remain unused due to insufficient demand. In a recent development, the Romanian Senate has granted permission for prosecutors to scrutinize Florin Citu, who served as Romania’s prime minister in 2021, for allocating $1.1 billion towards the purchase of 53 million mRNA COVID-19 vaccine doses from Pfizer. Remarkably, these acquired vaccines were never used in Romania.
Florin Citu, is presently a senator within the ruling Liberal Party, a role that ordinarily grants him immunity from prosecution, however, on Thursday, anti-corruption prosecutors in Romania formally requested parliament and the president to authorise a criminal inquiry into the actions of the former Prime Minister and also of his former health ministers.
Florin Citu led a centrist coalition government after the December 2020 general election which was in power for less than a year amid the peak of the coronavirus pandemic with Vlad Voiculescu and Ioana Mihaila, were both members of the junior party USR, served as health ministers in his administration.
Abuse of Power
The investigation centers on suspected abuse of office related to the procurement of COVID-19 vaccines. The prosecutors aim to scrutinize Citu, Voiculescu, and Mihaila for allegedly acquiring an excessive number of Pfizer and Moderna vaccine doses between January and May 2021 without proper documentation or assessments justifying the scale of the purchase, but Florin Citu has emphasised that he exercised his duties as prime minister “in accordance with Romanian legislation.”
Under Romanian law, prosecutors need parliament’s and the president’s approval to investigate and detain sitting lawmakers and former cabinet ministers for graft offences allegedly committed while they were in office, according to Reuters, who add that “Lawmakers have a patchy record of approving such requests, but Citu has been a vocal critic of the current coalition government which includes his party, ahead of local, European, general and presidential elections in 2024.”
Unfortunately for Citu, but rightly so, the Senate voted 90-2 to lift that immunity to enable the investigation to move forward. Romanian news outlets reported all three may be charged with “abuse of power” (also translated as “abuse of office”), prosecutors have said.
The criminal investigation is the latest sign of how far, and how fast, mRNA Covid shots have fallen, particularly in Europe, according to Alex Berenson, who says, “In May 2021, European countries were so desperate to get mRNAs that they agreed to spend over $20 billion to buy 900 million Pfizer shots – on top of 600 million they had already purchased. (The May deal included an option to buy yet another 900 million shots, for 1.8 billion total – four shots for every person in the EU.).” Source
During that period, Europe had been trailing behind both the United States and the United Kingdom in COVID-19 vaccinations, there was significant pressure on European leaders to bridge the gap. It had been initially anticipated that AstraZeneca’s DNA vaccine was to contribute substantially to Europe’s vaccine supply, that was until the product was withdrawn following the safety concerns emerging about its vaccine and the link to blood clots.
As a consequence, the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna dominated the market in wealthy nations with Pfizer, in particular, accelerating its manufacturing at a faster pace than Moderna, resulting in a more abundant supply of vaccine doses over the months.
The European Union
The European Union happily agreed to pay 19.5 euros per jab – almost $24 based on exchange rates at the time. (The doses were to be split proportionally among EU members so they would not bid against each other for them.) (Source) “Good news for our long term fight to protect European citizens against the virus and its variants!” Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, crowed in a press release announcing the deal. “Production and delivery in the EU of up to 1.8 billion doses are guaranteed.”
In May 2021 a report from Brussels announced that the European Commission had signed a third contract with BioNTech-Pfizer for an additonal 1.8 billion doses. SOURCE
Western European countries passed the United States in the percentage of the adult population they vaccinated, and demand remained relatively high for the first booster dose in winter 2021/22. But after the mRNA jabs proved largely worthless against Omicron infections, demand collapsed in Europe, as it did in the United States. (Europe was always more skeptical than the United States of the value of Covid jabs for infants and children under 12.).
Germany was reported to have binned 83 million doses of coronavirus vaccines in July, at an approximate cost of €1.6 billion and a further 120 million more doses were sitting as unused stock, according to Politico, “even as it is set to receive more jabs at a time when vaccination has flatlined” […] and “according to data provided by the country’s health ministry, Germany scrapped 54 million COVID-19 vaccine doses by the end of 2022 and another 29 million in the first quarter of 2023.”
“However, the real tally is likely to be higher. The ministry didn’t provide waste figures for the second quarter of the year and also stressed that federal states and health care providers aren’t required to report vaccine waste. “Accordingly, a total volume of total disposed COVID-19 vaccine doses acquired by the Federal Republic of Germany cannot be quantified,” it said in an email to POLITICO.
Hundreds of millions of shots bought by the United States have also expired unused, though American health authorities have never provided even ballpark estimates, Alex Berenson writes, “But the oversupply problem is worst in poorer Eastern European countries, where demand for the jabs is lower – and the budget hit harder to tolerate. Last week, Pfizer sued the government of Poland to force it to pay about $1.5 billion for 60 million shots the Poles do not want. In Romania, which is even smaller and poorer and has strong anti-vaccine sentiment, the anger is even deeper.” — Source
The Romanian Sense of Smell
The Romanian vote now means that their National Anticorruption Directorate, or DNA, can officially open an investigation into Citu and the former health ministers, as the DNA requested last week in making a 27-volume-report to the Senate. The prosecutors claimed their initial investigation showed that Citu and the other ministers ordered the shots without considering the demand or need for them.
Health Minister Voiculescu, however, is denying his part, saying the purchase decisions were “exclusively made by the prime minister” and the former Prime Minister Citu too has denied any wrongdoing, and says “I fully trust the justice act and I am convinced the ongoing procedures will uncover the truth” and “he has always respected the law.”
The truth is they are all complicit and were happy enough to follow an agenda without question, lining the pockets of Big Pharma and their stakeholders. While the accused may have respected the law, they certainly did not respect the people of Romania who were the European Union’s second-least vaccinated state after Bulgaria.
Reuters, who still tout the World Health Organization data, which they say showed the “virus has killed 68,590 people to date in the country of 20 million” of course attributed this to “poor vaccine education,” nevertheless, they also say that they have been “plagued by distrust in state institutions” which is certainly more accurate. As one commenter on Unreported Truthsstated:
We can only hope the rest of the world has now acquired that “super sensitive” sense of smell.
Government agencies, private-sector firms, academia and nonprofits were collaborating to combat alleged “misinformation” and “disinformation” as far back as 2017, according to new documents released Tuesday.
The “CTIL Files” — which refer to the Cyber Threat Intelligence League, or CTI League, a key player in the so-called “Censorship-Industrial Complex” — are based on documents received from an unnamed but “highly credible” whistleblower, according to investigative journalists Michael Shellenberger, Alex Gutentag and Matt Taibbi, who released the files.
The new documents rival or exceed the “Twitter Files” and “Facebook Files” in “scale and importance,” according to the journalists, two of whom — Shellenberger and Taibbi — were instrumental in releasing many of the “Twitter Files” that first called attention to the “Censorship-Industrial Complex.”
A comprehensive picture of the birth of the ‘anti-disinformation’ sector
The documents, which the journalists detailed on Substack, center around the activities of the CTI League, which “officially began as the volunteer project of data scientists and defense and intelligence veterans but whose tactics over time appear to have been absorbed into multiple official projects, including those of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).”
According to the journalists, the CTI League documents “offer the missing link … to key questions not addressed in the Twitter Files and Facebook Files” and “offer a comprehensive picture of the birth of the ‘anti-disinformation’ sector.”
“The whistleblower’s documents describe everything from the genesis of modern digital censorship programs to the role of the military and intelligence agencies, partnerships with civil society organizations and commercial media, and the use of sock puppet accounts and other offensive techniques,” the journalists wrote.
Documents in the “CTIL Files” show members of the CTI League, DHS officials and key figures from social media companies “all working closely together in the censorship process.”
This “public-private model” laid the groundwork for “anti-misinformation” and “anti-disinformation” campaigns launched by the U.S. and U.K. governments in 2020 and 2021, the journalists wrote, including attempts to circumvent First Amendment protections against government censorship of speech in the U.S.
Such tactics included “masking censorship within cybersecurity institutions and counter-disinformation agendas; a heavy focus on stopping disfavored narratives, not just wrong facts; and pressuring social media platforms to take down information or take other actions to prevent content from going viral,” they added.
The CTI League went still further though, the journalists wrote, engaging “in offensive operations to influence public opinion, discussing ways to promote ‘counter-messaging,’ co-opt hashtags, dilute disfavored messaging, create sock puppet accounts, and infiltrate private invite-only groups.”
Former British intelligence analyst charged with creating counter-disinformation project
The journalists wrote that while previous releases of the “Twitter Files” and “Facebook Files” revealed “overwhelming evidence of government-sponsored censorship,” they had not revealed “where the idea for such mass censorship came from.”
The whistleblower alleged that a key figure in the CTI League, “a ‘former’ British intelligence analyst, was ‘in the room’ at the Obama White House in 2017 when she received the instructions to create a counter-disinformation project to stop a ‘repeat of 2016.’”
It was there that Terp met Pablo Breuer, a former U.S. Navy commander, who became a key figure in the CTI League. According to Wired, the two realized that misinformation “could be treated … as a cybersecurity problem.” This led to the development of CogSec, which soon housed the “MisinfoSec Working Group.”
“Terp’s plan, which she shared in presentations to information security and cybersecurity groups in 2019, was to create ‘Misinfosec communities’ that would include government,” the journalists wrote.
By spring 2020, it appears Terp achieved this plan, as the CTI League partnered with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which has been implicated in prior releases of the “Twitter Files” for its role in the “Censorship-Industrial Complex.”
Terp used AMITT to develop the DISARM framework, which the World Health Organization (WHO) applied in “countering anti-vaccination campaigns across Europe.”
The same framework “has been formally adopted by the European Union and the United States as part of a ‘common standard for exchanging structured threat information on Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference’” according to the journalists.
‘Can we get a troll on their bums?’
According to the journalists, MisinfoSec’s motivation for counter-misinformation was the “twin political earthquakes of 2016: Brexit and the election of Trump.”
“There’s something off kilter with our information landscape,” Terp and other CTI League members wrote, according to documents.
“The usual useful idiots and fifth columnists — now augmented by automated bots, cyborgs and human trolls — are busily engineering public opinion, stoking up outrage, sowing doubt and chipping away at trust in our institutions. And now it’s our brains that are being hacked,” they added.
In spring 2020, the CTI League set its sights on COVID-19-related narratives, targeting users who engaged in messaging that ran contrary to official policy.
“CTIL began tracking and reporting disfavored content on social media, such as anti-lockdown narratives like ‘all jobs are essential,’ ‘we won’t stay home,’ and ‘open America now,’” the journalists wrote.
“CTIL created a law enforcement channel for reporting content as part of these efforts. The organization also did research on individuals posting anti-lockdown hashtags … and kept a spreadsheet with details from their Twitter bios. The group also discussed requesting ‘takedowns’ and reporting website domains to registrars,” they added.
Regarding the “we won’t stay home” narrative, internal documents revealed by the whistleblower showed that CTI League members wrote, “Do we have enough to ask for the groups and/or accounts to be taken down or at a minimum reported and checked?” and “Can we get all troll on their bums if not?”
They also called posters circulating online promoting anti-lockdown posters “disinformation artifacts,” saying, “We should have seen this one coming” and asking “can we stop the spread, do we have enough evidence to stop superspreaders, and are there other things we can do (are there countermessagers we can ping etc).”
During CTI League brainstorming sessions to develop strategies for “counter-messaging for things like encouraging people to wear masks,” statements such as “Repetition is truth” were uttered by CTI League staff, the journalists noted.
The CTI League also sought to go “beyond simply urging Twitter to slap a warning label on Tweets, or to put individuals on blacklists.”
According to the journalists, “The AMITT framework calls for discrediting individuals as a necessary prerequisite of demanding censorship against them” and “trying to get banks to cut off financial services to individuals who organize rallies or events.”
As part of these efforts, even truthful information was targeted. In a 2019 podcast on “Disinformation, Cognitive Security, and Influence,” Terp admitted, “Most information is actually true … but set in the wrong context.”
“You’re not trying to get people to believe lies most of the time,” she said. “Most of the time, you’re trying to change their belief sets. And in fact, really deeper than that, you’re trying to change, to shift their internal narratives … the set of stories that are your baseline for your culture.”
Previous “Twitter Files” releases have revealed that true information was targeted for censorship by the U.S. government and social media platforms like Twitter if the information contradicted official policy regarding COVID-19 vaccines and restrictions.
‘Cognitive security’ a euphemism for censorship
In the same podcast, according to the journalists, Terp said, “Cognitive security is the thing you want to have. You want to protect that cognitive layer. It basically, it’s about pollution. Misinformation, disinformation is a form of pollution across the Internet.”
The journalists wrote, “A key component of Terp’s work through CTIL, MisinfoSec, and AMITT was to insert the concept of ‘cognitive security’ into the fields of cybersecurity and information security.”
Such “cognitive security” was seen as being threatened by the erosion of the mass media’s control on information and influence over public opinion.
Documents revealed by the whistleblower included a MisinfoSec report stating “For a long time, the ability to reach mass audiences belonged to the nation-state (e.g. in the USA via broadcast licensing through ABC, CBS and NBC).”
“Now, however, control of informational instruments has been allowed to devolve to large technology companies who have been blissfully complacent and complicit in facilitating access to the public for information operators at a fraction of what it would have cost them by other means,” the report said.
The same report also called for a form of “pre-bunking,” to “preemptively inoculate a vulnerable population against messaging,” suggesting that DHS-funded Information Sharing and Analysis Centers could be used to promote such pre-bunking.
‘If we get away with it, it’s legal’
Public-private partnerships were specifically sought out in an attempt to circumvent First Amendment free speech protections in the U.S., the documents revealed, even while Bloomberg, The Washington Post and Wired wrote glowing articles portraying the CTI League as a mere group of “volunteer” cybersecurity experts.
“Volunteer” and “Former” Government Agents Bloomberg, Washington Post and others published credulous stories in the spring of 2020 claiming that the CTI League was simply a group of volunteer cybersecurity experts. Its founders were: a “former” Israeli intelligence official, Ohad… pic.twitter.com/4jabvHJGIf
Yet, according to the journalists, “In just one month, from mid-March to mid-April [2020], the supposedly all-volunteer CTIL had grown to ‘1,400 vetted members in 76 countries’” and had “helped to take down 2,833 cybercriminal assets on the internet” including some which impersonated government organizations, the United Nations and WHO.
On the same 2019 podcast, according to the journalists, Breuer explained how the CTI League was getting around the First Amendment, by working to get “nontraditional partners into one room,” including “maybe somebody from one of the social media companies, maybe a few special forces operators, and some folks from Department of Homeland Security.”
Together, they would “talk in a non-attribution, open environment in an unclassified way so that we can collaborate better, more freely and really start to change the way that we address some of these issues,” Breuer said.
“Hogwarts School of Misinformation”
“SJ called us the ‘Hogwarts school for misinformation and disinformation,’” said the whistleblower. “They were superheroes in their own story. And to that effect you could still find comic books on the CISA site.”
Breuer even likened these tactics to those employed by the Chinese government, saying “If you talk to the average Chinese citizen, they absolutely believe that the Great Firewall of China is not there for censorship. They believe that it’s there because the Chinese Communist Party wants to protect the citizenry and they absolutely believe that’s a good thing.”
“If the US government tried to sell that narrative, we would absolutely lose our minds and say, ‘No, no, this is a violation of our First Amendment rights.’ So, the in-group and out-group messaging have to be often different,” he said.
The whistleblower told the journalists that CTI League leaders did not discuss their potential violation of the First Amendment.
“The ethos was that if we get away with it, it’s legal, and there were no First Amendment concerns because we have a ‘public-private partnership’ — that’s the word they used to disguise those concerns. ‘Private people can do things public servants can’t do, and public servants can provide the leadership and coordination,’” the whistleblower said.
According to the journalists, the authors of the MisinfoSec report also “advocated for police, military, and intelligence involvement in censorship, across Five Eyes nations, and even suggested that Interpol should be involved.”
The CTI League documents also suggest that the organization was involved in a form of domestic spying, with one document noting that while censorship activities abroad are “typically” performed by “the CIA and NSA and the Department of Defense,” such efforts “against Americans” necessitate the use of private partners because the government lacks the “legal authority” to do so.
According to the whistleblower, CTI League members also went to great lengths to conceal their activities, with a CTI League handbook recommending the use of burner phones, online pseudonyms and the generation of fake AI faces. One document advised, “Lock your s**t down … your spy disguise.”
One suggested list of questions to be posed to prospective CTI League members proposed asking whether those individuals had ever “worked with influence operations (e.g. disinformation, hate speech, other digital harms etc) previously” and whether those efforts included “active measures” and “psyops” (psychological operations).
Indeed, according to the documents, several CTI League members had worked for the military or intelligence agencies, while according to the whistleblower, “roughly 12-20 active people involved in CTIL worked at the FBI or CISA” — even, for a time, displaying their agency seals alongside their names on the CTI League’s internal Slack channel.
Terp, for instance, previously designed machine learning algorithms and unmanned vehicle systems for the U.K.’s Ministry of Defence.
According to the whistleblower, the CTI League sought “to become part of the federal government.”
Shellenberger, Taibbi to testify before Congress this week
According to the journalists, the FBI declined to comment, while CISA, Terp and other CTI League figures did not respond to requests for comment.
However, one CTI League member, Bonnie Smalley, did respond to the journalists’ request. She wrote, verbatim, “all i can comment on is that i joined cti league which is unaffiliated with any govt orgs because i wanted to combat the inject bleach nonsense online during covid. … i can assure you that we had nothing to do with the govt though.”
“CTIL appears to have generated publicity about itself in the Spring and Fall of 2020 for the same reason EIP did: to claim later that its work was all out in the open and that anybody who suggested it was secretive was engaging in a conspiracy theory,” the journalists wrote.
“But as internal messages have revealed, much of what EIP did was secret, as well as partisan, and demanding of censorship by social media platforms, contrary to its claims,” they said, adding that “EIP and VP, ostensibly, ended, but CTIL is apparently still active, based on the LinkedIn pages of its members.”
I look forward to providing testimony to Congress, this Thursday, about the Censorship Industrial Complex's clear and present threat to the United States of America and other liberal democratic Western democracies, and how we can shut it down.https://t.co/lRMWMWQ1OB
The journalists said the documents will be presented to Congressional investigators and made public, while protecting the identity of the whistleblower.
On Tuesday, Taibbi appeared in a live YouTube webcast presenting some of the key revelations from the first release of the “CTIL Files.”
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
Azerbaijan has filed complaints with the US, Germany and France over the illegal funding of a local media outlet, which has published investigations into government corruption. Three of its journalists were recently arrested on accusations of currency smuggling.
On Tuesday, the Azerbaijani foreign ministry issued a statement saying the ambassadors of the three Western countries had been summoned to a meeting. They were informed that the AbzasMedia portal was conducting unlawful financial operations with the participation of organizations registered in those states. They were also told that their embassies were involved in such activities.
Azerbaijani legislation prohibits the allocation of funds to unregistered projects. However, according to the foreign ministry, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), FreedomNow, New Democracy Foundation, and other organizations illegally transferred funds to the country, violating the rules of grant allocation and illegally facilitating the activities of the unregistered media portal AbzasMedia.
AbzasMedia said in a statement that, several days ago, three of its journalists were arrested on charges of “currency smuggling” and sentenced to four months in custody, linking the case to its corruption investigations. The outlet also reported that, according to police, €40,000 ($44,000) in cash was found in the office, and accused officers of “deliberately putting money in the office to justify arrests.”
Last month, the government of neighboring Georgia raised the alarm over the actions of the USAID-funded Center for Applied Nonviolent Strategies (CANVAS), saying it was planning to unleash a violent color revolution. The US Embassy in Tbilisi claimed the accusations against CANVAS were “false and fundamentally mischaracterize the goals of our assistance to Georgia.”
On its website, USAID states that it is “investing in democracy work to advance a free, peaceful, and prosperous world.”
USAID activities have been banned in Russia since 2012. According to the Russian Foreign Ministry, this decision was mostly due to the fact that the nature of the agency’s work in the country did not always comply with the stated goals, including their “attempts to influence the political process” through the distribution of grants.
Nasser Beydoun revealed on social media that he had been contacted by the Israeli lobby group AIPAC and offered $20 million to run against Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib in Michigan. Beydoun is the second candidate who has been offered funds to run against Tlaib, with Senate candidate Hill Harper speaking of a similar offer last week.
Taking to X, Beydoun wrote: “Even knowing where I stand on AIPAC’s influence on our elections and foreign policy, the pro-Israel lobby had the nerve to suggest that I would even consider taking a dime from them.”
Adding that he had been asked to “run against my friend Rashida Tlaib.”
I was offered $20 million to withdraw from the senatorial race and to run against my friend @rashidatlaib. Even knowing where I stand on AIPAC's influence on our elections and foreign policy, the pro-Israel lobby had the nerve to suggest that I would even consider taking a dime… pic.twitter.com/QTvFhbExj9
“The pro-Israel lobby will go to any length to remove anybody from the US Congress that has any opposition to their agenda and their total unequivocal support for Israel, good, bad, or indifferent.”
Tlaib, who represents Michigan’s 12th District in Congress, is the only Palestinian-American in the US House of Representatives. She is known for her criticism of Israel’s occupation and its invasion of Gaza.
Earlier this month, the House of Representatives voted to censure Tlaib for some statements that angered the Zionist lobby and the right-wing movement in the US, such as the use of the slogan “From the river to the sea.”
Politico first reported on 22 November that a Michigan businessman had offered Harper $20 million in campaign money if he stood against Tlaib in next year’s Democratic primary race, identifying Linden Nelson as the figure.
Soybeans generate approximately $80 million annually in mandatory producer assessments alone, funding a marketing apparatus that has transformed an industrial commodity into one of America’s most trusted “health foods.” The campaign succeeded. Soy milk lines supermarket shelves beside dairy. Soy protein fortifies everything from infant formula to energy bars. Vegetarians rely on tofu and tempeh as dietary staples. Doctors recommend soy to menopausal women. School lunch programs serve soy-based meat substitutes to children. An estimated 60 percent of processed foods contain soy derivatives. The premise underlying this proliferation—that Asians have thrived on soy for millennia and that modern science validates its health benefits—has been repeated so often it functions as established fact.
Kaayla T. Daniel’s The Whole Soy Story dismantles this premise through systematic examination of the scientific literature. The book documents that traditional Asian soy consumption averaged roughly one tablespoon daily, consumed as fermented condiments after processing methods that neutralized inherent toxins—a pattern bearing no resemblance to American consumption of industrially processed soy protein isolate, soy flour, and soy oil. Daniel catalogs the antinutrients that survive modern processing (protease inhibitors, phytates, lectins, saponins), the toxic compounds created by industrial methods (nitrosamines, lysinoalanine, hexane residues), and the heavy metals concentrated in soy products (manganese, aluminum, fluoride, cadmium). She traces the mechanisms by which soy isoflavones—plant estrogens present at pharmacologically significant levels—disrupt thyroid function, impair fertility, and interact with hormone-sensitive cancers. The evidence emerges from peer-reviewed journals, FDA documents, and industry sources themselves.
The stakes extend beyond individual dietary choices. Infants fed soy formula receive isoflavone doses equivalent to several birth control pills daily, with blood concentrations 13,000 to 22,000 times higher than their natural estrogen levels. Soy protein isolate—the ingredient in formula, protein bars, and thousands of products—has never received GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) status; its only pre-1960s use was as an industrial paper sealant. Two senior FDA scientists formally protested their own agency’s approval of soy health claims, citing evidence of thyroid damage and reproductive harm. The Honolulu Heart Program found that men consuming tofu twice weekly showed accelerated brain aging and increased dementia. These findings have not penetrated public awareness because the institutions responsible for consumer protection have been compromised by the industry they regulate. The Whole Soy Story presents the evidence that has been systematically excluded from mainstream health messaging, enabling readers to evaluate for themselves what the soy industry prefers they never learn. … continue
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