The US has already committed over $110 billion in military and economic support to Ukraine, with President Joe Biden recently asking Congress for $24 billion in additional cash. Washington’s allies have sent tens of billions of dollars more in aid, with Ukraine quickly becoming the most expensive NATO-instigated security crisis since Afghanistan.
The costs of the geopolitical, military, and economic quagmire which the Biden administration unleashed in Ukraine will continue to steadily rise even if peace were to break out tomorrow, and American taxpayers are expected to largely foot the bill.
That’s the conclusion of an independent economic analysis put out this week by a senior fellow from the Center for Security Policy and the Yorktown Institute, a pair of Washington, DC and Maryland-based think tanks.
The analysis takes into account the World Bank’s March 2023 estimate that Ukraine will require some $411 billion in reconstruction support over the coming decade, plus whatever additional expenses may have arisen between then and now, with the analysis giving an overall ballpark figure of $600 billion+ in total expenses.
The analysis compared these ballooning costs to the $60 billion the US spent on Iraqi reconstruction after the 2003 invasion, plus the $90 billion spent in Afghanistan for reconstruction purposes during the 20-year US-led war and occupation of that country, which culminated in the collapse of the Afghan government and its NATO-trained military almost immediately after Washington withdrew its support in 2021.
“There is no doubt that most of the US assistance to Afghanistan was probably stolen or went over to the Taliban…In the case of Iraq, most of the aid was wasted thanks to bad management, corruption and poor planning,” the report noted. “The US and its allies will need to cough up $60 billion annually to support Ukraine, and expect that a lot of it will be stolen. It will have to keep the funding up for 10 years,” the analysis added.
Citing waning support for continuing the proxy war against Russia from key allies including Germany and Britain, the report expects the US to have to cough up most of the cash. Accordingly, the analysis doesn’t rule out that the Biden administration may be deliberately seeking to prolong the military crisis as long as possible to put off committing reconstruction aid, particularly as a growing majority of Americans, including several major presidential candidates, no longer want to continue endlessly funding the conflict, or the Volodymyr Zelensky government.
Ultimately, the analysis expects Ukraine to become “the most costly” reconstruction operation ever conducted by the US, pointing out that by comparison, the US Marshall Plan reconstruction campaign in Europe after World War II cost “just” $13.3 billion (or $173 billion in today’s dollars, accounting for inflation).
Questions have swirled for months surrounding Ukraine’s post-conflict economic future, with the nation’s gross external debt continuing to mount, and some observers fearing the country will be “crippled” by the debt it owes to the International Monetary Fund and other institutions over the long term. The tremendous interest US hedge fund giants like BlackRock have shown in Ukraine’s fertile black earth soil, as well as the country’s untapped rare earth mineral deposits, has also sparked concerns that Kiev might come out of the present crisis as a full-on economic neo-colony of the United States and its allies.
A recent journalistic report revealed that the Ukrainian president bought a luxury villa in Egypt in the region of El Gouna, also known as the “city of millionaires”. More than that, evidence indicates that Zelensky used Western money for the purchase, spending in personal luxury a significant part of the amounts he receives from NATO countries.
The data were published by Egyptian investigative journalist Mohammed-Al-Alawi. After in-depth research involving sources familiar with the topic, Mohammed discovered that the Zelensky family acquired a luxury property in Egypt valued at around five million dollars. The place is located in the coastal zone of Egypt, next to the Red Sea, an area famous for having many opulent properties. Not by chance, El Gouna is home to many millionaires interested in having a comfortable place to stay during their non-working time. For example, it is said that next to Zelensky’s villa there is an “estate that belongs to the world-famous Hollywood actress and public figure Angelina Jolie”.
The Egyptian journalist published the documents that prove the purchase of the villa, its price and the contracting parties. Zelensky bought the property through his mother-in-law, Olga Kiyashko, who signed a contract with the Egyptian sellers on May 16, 2023. Analysts who have commented on the case say that the source of the money appears to be none other than the Western financial aid packages that arrive in Kiev, considering the high price of the villa.
Egyptian political scientist Abdulrahman Alabbassy commented on the situation, saying it is “surprising” that Zelensky and his relatives spend fortunes on personal luxuries instead of using Ukraine’s riches for military and humanitarian purposes, considering the time of war. Alabbassy blames Ukrainian corruption for this kind of attitude and reminds how Kiev’s political system is controlled by egocentric officials who prioritize personal gain over care for their own people.
“I am surprised that relatives of top Ukrainian officials began to buy luxury real estate after the start of Ukraine war. I don’t remember anything like this before (…) It is surprising that Ukraine is waging a bloody war with Russia, and relatives of Ukrainian officials are buying up real estate in Egypt instead of donating their riches to the needs of the country. A suspicion is creeping in that Ukrainian bureaucrats, with the help of their relatives, are stealing financial aid to Ukraine from the West. I am quite certain that Zelenskyy’s mother-in–law’s purchase of a villa in El Gouna is the result of corruption and the theft of humanitarian aid to Ukraine. I sincerely sympathize with the Ukrainian people” he said.
In fact, this news just corroborates what has been denounced for a long time about Zelensky’s hypocrisy and his relentless pursuit of luxury and personal benefits. Previously, a case that went viral on the internet and generated popular outrage was the report that the Ukrainian politician had rented his 4 million euros luxury mansion in Italy to a couple of Russian millionaires – while publicly defending the banning of Russians from Europe because of the war. To date, the case has not been fully clarified, having media publications both confirming and denying the news. However, it does not seem to be something surprising for Zelensky, especially considering what happened recently in Egypt.
It is also necessary to remember other selfish attitudes of the Ukrainian president throughout the conflict. For example, in July last year, Zelensky and his wife Olena posed for Vogue magazine at the height of hostilities, showing absolute disrespect for Ukrainian citizens victimized by the conflict. The photos were made in staged scenarios that simulated a battlefield, in a clear attempt to “romanticize” the war to gain the attention of Western readers. At the time, there was a strong criticism and a negative impact on Zelensky’s popularity.
About corruption, it is also possible to say that these attitudes are really expected. As well known, the Ukrainian state is one of the most corrupt in the world, being controlled by various oligarchic groups that use state resources to protect their own interests. This did not change with the arrival of Western military and financial aid. When NATO’s assistance packages arrive in Kiev, they end up in the hands of corrupt politicians who use part of these funds for personal gain. The Zelensky family case is an example of this, but it is expected that many other similar situations will be revealed in the near future.
Western public opinion needs to understand that corruption in Ukraine, widely recognized by mainstream media before the special military operation, will not change just because the country is at war. Corrupts will remain corrupt, in war or peace. In this sense, the more money comes to Kiev with the excuse of “assistance”, the more Zelensky and other politicians and oligarchs will spend these resources on personal luxury.
Lucas Leiroz, journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant.
The previous Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Rochelle Walensky, submitted a letter of resignation to the Biden administration on May 5. On June 16, the Biden White House announced its “Intent to Appoint Dr. Mandy Cohen as Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.” Walensky’s term officially ended on June 30. At this moment of writing, the date is August 20. Mandy Cohen has been the official Director of the CDC for seven weeks.
Out With the Old Boss
Walensky’s term from January 2021 to the end of June 2023 was a period of devastating ineptitude combined with profiteering and reckless power projection by herself and the agency she led. This was the period of the vaccine roll-out, and Walensky pushed vaccines as the only treatment for an over-hyped threat of a SARS-CoV-2 virus. AP said Walensky “was brought in to raise morale at the CDC, to rebuild public trust in the agency and to improve its sometimes-bumbling response to the pandemic.”
Instead Walensky claimed vaccination was necessary for everyone to prevent the spread, then later after the virus panic was diminished, the CDC declared that the vaccines never had the ability to prevent spread, only reduce symptoms. Walensky declared that it was “urgent” for pregnant “persons” (she would not say “mothers” or “women”) to get the vaccine to protect their babies and themselves. A careful reading of the CDC study Walensky referenced as a source for her recommendation stated no such thing, but declared that some safety concerns had arisen for pregnant “people” including over 20% pre-birth death of the fetus. Especially in the first and second trimester, insufficient data was available to make any recommendation. More data was needed. Walensky urged pregnant “persons” to get vaccinated anyway, making the nation’s pregnant mothers test subjects in the vaccine trial.
It was Walensky who spouted the slogan “a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” to describe her claim that hospital beds were filled overwhelmingly with unvaccinated people, and that the great percentage of deaths were among the unvaccinated. See the official Press Briefing by White House COVID-19 Response Team and Public Health Officials, timestamp 37:00. “There is a clear message that is coming through: This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated.”
In a move of chutzpah, Walensky announced in August 2022 that she would “shake up” the CDC with extensive changes referred to as a “reset,” because the $12 billion agency “needs to become more nimble.” Walensky said it was her “responsibility to lead this agency to a better place.”
‘It’s not lost on me that we fell short in many ways’ responding to the coronavirus, Walensky said. ‘We had some pretty public mistakes…’
Some had hope at the time Walensky would acknowledge the CDC’s large over-reach and over-reaction to an over-hyped pandemic, doing more public health harm than good with its extreme lockdown measures — but that was false hope. Instead Walensky implemented “Increasing use of preprint scientific reports to get out actionable data, instead of waiting for research to go through peer review and publication by the CDC journal Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.” Walensky said she would “get rid of some of the reporting layers that exist, and I’d like to work to break down some of the silos.” Both of these measures sound like lowering the scientific standards upon which the CDC reacts, not raising them. “Altering the agency’s organization chart to undo some changes made during the Trump administration,” and establishing a new “health equity” department hardly sound like improvements either.
One critic of Walensky’s “reset,” James Lyons-Weiler, Ph.D., “research scientist and author, said the changes are just an escalation of the deeper problem of governmental agencies colluding with pharmaceutical companies to lower scientific testing standards.”
Robert F Kennedy Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense called Walensky’s time as Director of the CDC a “contentious reign” in its “CDC Director Walensky Resigns, Ending Contentious Reign Over COVID Vaccine Policies.” This provides an accurate summary of the damage Walensky’s covid policies inflicted on American school children, businesses, families and lives.
Under Walensky, the CDC also gave false information on vaccine safety monitoring, added the COVID-19 vaccines to the childhood vaccine schedule despite known harms, withheld data on boosters from the agency’s own advisers and told pregnant women the vaccine was safe — just days after Pfizer reportedly finalized a report demonstrating it wasn’t, among other things that have outraged critics.
In her letter of resignation, Walensky said “I have never been prouder of anything I have done in my professional career.”
“Dr. Walensky has saved lives with her steadfast and unwavering focus on the health of every American. As Director of the CDC, she led a complex organization on the frontlines (sic) of a once-in-a-generation pandemic with honesty and integrity. She marshalled (sic) our finest scientists and public health experts to turn the tide on the urgent crises we’ve faced.
“Dr. Walensky leaves CDC a stronger institution, better positioned to confront health threats and protect Americans. We have all benefited from her service and dedication to public health, and I wish her the best in her next chapter.”
Walensky’s next chapter should be spent in prison for betraying the trust of the American people. She gave no clear reason for her resignation, except to note the “waning of the covid-19 pandemic” and “the nation is at a moment of transition as emergency declarations come to an end.” On the same day of Walensky’s announced resignation, May 5, the WHO officially ended the covid “global emergency.” The U.S. ended its covid “public health emergency” on May 11.
Two days after the director transfer, on July 2, Walensky had the further chutzpah to give an interview with the Wall Street Journal, “Departing CDC Director Rochelle Walensky Warns of Politicized Science,” in which “she says public needs to be wary of misinformation.” Once again Children’s Health Defense details why this is another act of astounding hypocrisy showing how Walensky’s CDC itself highly politicized the “science” and spread dangerous misinformation.
Rochelle Walensky is Jewish, as chronicled in an essay on substack Taboo Truth. It examines previous Jewish CDC Directors Jeffrey Koplan, Tom Frieden and Anne Schuchat and their various scandals, and other Jews within the agency’s historic infrastructure, including massive funding lobbied by Jewish Home Depot owner Bernard Marcus which expanded the CDC to the bureaucratic leviathan it is today.
Secretary of North Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services
transformation of North Carolina’s Medicaid program and Medicaid expansion.
Chief Operating Officer and Chief of Staff of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
Acting-Director of the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight
Affordable Care Act policy development and implementation
medical degree from Yale School of Medicine and a Master’s (sic) in Public Health from the Harvard School of Public Health
Walensky was also a graduate of Harvard School of Public Health. Just as Walensky, Jewish Mandy Cohen is married to a Jewish man, Samuel Cohen, a health care regulatory attorney. He is:
“Managing Director of Health Policy at Curi Advisory, which is a full-service advisory firm that serves physicians and medical practices. Equal parts fierce physician advocates, smart business leaders, and thoughtful partners, Curi’s advisory, capital, and insurance offerings deliver valued advice…”
Mandy’s maiden name is Krauthamer, spelled differently and not likely a relation except by tribe to the Jewish Neo-Con war-monger journalist Charles Krauthammer. Mandy’s Jewish mother Susan was a nurse practitioner in an emergency room on Long Island, who inspired Mandy onto a public health path. Her Jewish father was a high school guidance counselor.
An extensive and detailed profile of Mandy Cohen emerged in the first year of the covid pandemic when she was Secretary of the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services (NCDHHS). Titled “She’s the face of NC’s fight against COVID-19. Meet Dr. Mandy Cohen, Tar Heel of the Year,” it announces “Cohen is The News & Observer’s 2020 Tar Heel of the Year, an honor that recognizes a North Carolina resident who has made lasting and significant contributions in the state and beyond.” This humanizing puff piece states, “Cohen has become the figurative and literal face of North Carolina’s ongoing fight against COVID-19.”
“It is a fight in which she’s relied most upon data and science and something less easily quantified: the sense of empathy and compassion that some closest to her say make her a perfect fit for her position. It is a fight that’s challenged her to balance competing interests — one that at times has brought fierce criticism from skeptics who dismiss science or downplay the virus — while maintaining the goal of preserving the health and lives of North Carolinians.”
According to North Carolina Dept. of Health and Human Services, using my own simple calculation, over the past year the case fatality rate from Covid-19 amounts to .4%. This means 3,903 people in North Carolina died with covid over the past year (not necessarily from covid, and according to flawed PCR test diagnostics acknowledged by the CDC itself). Open VAERS shows that 179 people in North Carolina have been reported slain by the vaccine since its roll-out in early 2021 until June 16 of this year (the same date the White House announced intention to appoint Cohen CDC director).
Recall that the Vaccine Adverse Reporting System (VAERS) was shown by the CDC’s own funded study in 2010 to report less than 1% of actual adverse vaccine events. The number of people slain in North Carolina by the vaccine could be more honestly at least 18,000. To compare these numbers—covid-killed vs. vaccine-killed—we should divide 18,000 by 2.5, since the covid-killed number is only for one year (the mildest year), and the vaccine-killed for 2.5 years. Answer: at least 7,200 vaccine-killed per year compared to under 4,000 per year covid-killed. The cure may have been at least almost twice as lethal as the disease.
As the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were scheduled to arrive in North Carolina, Cohen addressed her staff. “So that tells me a couple things… One, no one else is talking about vaccines and sort of setting the stage and being transparent. So, A-plus, team. … We’re setting expectations. We’re sharing what we know. We’re being concrete. We’re talking about all our plans, so I’m really pleased.”
Yes, A-plus, team. Mandy is really pleased you were talking about vaccines and being transparent. Unfortunately for the thousands slaughtered by the vaccines in North Carolina and their families, you were not transparent about the carnage the vaccines could cause in the state. Cohen’s “sense of empathy and compassion” made her a perfect fit for that job.
Cohen’s Jewish identity is featured:
“She spent most of the next hour listening to her staff members detail their work. By the time the meeting was ending, Cohen had changed her virtual background to that of a picture of her family for some Throwback Thursday show-and-tell. The picture was from her oldest daughter’s baby-naming ceremony, a Jewish ritual, and the family was standing in front of a menorah.
“‘Throwback Thursday and Hanukkah,’ Cohen said with some excitement, introducing her family.
“Like her family, her faith has played an important role in helping her navigate the pandemic. She wears a necklace with the chai (pronounced like “high”) symbol around her neck. The symbol represents the Hebrew word for life and health.
“When Cohen and her husband moved to North Carolina, they did not know anyone. The synagogue they chose became a second home. “And I also joke with the rabbi that I think Jews were public health people before they knew what public health was,” Cohen said, referencing Jewish dietary restrictions, and how even before the pandemic there was “a lot of washing your hands in Jewish ritual practices.
“Back on the work call, Cohen wished a Happy Hanukkah to those celebrating. It was the first night of the festival, and she needed to hurry home.”
If Cohen’s “faith” is even remotely Talmudic-influenced, the chai symbol represents the Hebrew word for life and health to Jews, and death and sickness for Goyim. Washing hands in Jewish rituals may sometimes be a necessity to cleanse away the blood from the male genital mutilation ceremony of circumcision, cruel animal sacrifices, and Jewish Ritual Murder that includes drinking the blood of raped, tortured and slaughtered children. Cohen of course does not allude specifically to these Talmudic blood rituals, but the hand-washing associated with them could hardly have made such extreme Talmudic fundamentalist Jews “public health people.”
Cohen cannot be accused of these Judaic horrors, but just as with Walensky, nor can she be trusted with a “sense of empathy and compassion” while wearing a Hebrew symbol of life and health. Chai means “to live and walk in the Jewish cultural lifestyle,” and also “the lowest (closest to the physical plane) emanation of God.” She may be worshiping a Hebrew god who seems more like a demon, demanding blood, insanely jealous, viciously punitive to a genocidal extent, and intolerably racist.
The ever-alert Children’s Health Defense, in commenting on Cohen’s appointment to CDC director, did not take its criticism so far, but it is indicative that CHD called Cohen “fanatic.” In “‘Fanatic?’: Biden’s New CDC Director Was Strong Proponent of Pandemic Mandates, Masks and Lockdowns,” author Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. quotes critics who have emerged throughout the covid years 2020-21 as voices of medical scientific reason.
“Cohen appears to be fully entrenched in the ‘bio-pharmaceutical complex.’ She was on the wrong side of every pandemic public health intervention, failed to recognize early therapeutics and natural immunity, and to date has not acknowledged the safety disaster unfolding with the COVID-19 mass, indiscriminate, vaccination program.”
-Dr. Peter McCullough, author The Courage to Face COVID-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex
“(Cohen is) a public health COVID authoritarian and the worst possible person to become the next CDC head.”
-Alex Berenson, commentator and former New York Times journalist
“Apparently diversity mandates haven’t hit the CDC yet. Cohen is a lot like Walensky, a nice Jewish* doctor** from the Northeastern suburbs with all the right degrees.
“(*I can say it, I’m Jewish)
“(**The actual expression is “nice Jewish girl” but I don’t want to get in trouble)”
“Going through [Cohen’s] timeline is a strange blast from the past of heartbreaking fear-mongering, pseudo-science, and propaganda. She passed with flying colors all three tests of compliance: closures, masking, and vaccine mandates.”
– Jeffrey A. Tucker, founder and president of the Brownstone Institute
In his essay, “New CDC Director Is Another Lockdowner,” Tucker starts by telling us that in order to have power and influence in the Soviet Union, one needed to be a member of the Communist party.
“We are headed this way in the US today. The party in question is the lockdown party. … That’s my best read on why Mandy Cohen is being pulled away from her perch in North Carolina, where she led a catastrophic pandemic response, to be the replacement for Rochelle Walensky as head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She is a faithful member of the lockdown party and thus demonstrates her willingness to do it again should the occasion arise.”
My best read is that both Walensky and Cohen are members of the Jewish party, with lockdowns as their strategy to advance Jewish profit and control objectives. Their willingness to do it again is rooted in their faithfulness to Jews and Judaic indoctrination. The occasion will arise because they will engineer one again. For a wider analysis of the Jewish role in covid, see the TOO book review “New Covid Book Tackles Taboo Truths.”
CHD/Nevradakis: “Cohen was ‘the top choice of Jeffrey D. Zients,’ the Biden administration’s former COVID-19 response coordinator.”
Zients is of course Jewish as well, suggesting the well-known phenomenon of Jewish tribal nepotism in appointing Cohen. Zients went from COVID-19 response coordinator, “charged with rolling out a massive vaccine program nationwide in early 2021,” to the current White House Chief of Staff, “like the chief operating officer for the government.”
“Jewish Ron Klain has been Joe Biden’s political alter ego for many of the last 40 years, regardless of his position or Biden’s interaction with Jews and Israel,” Democratic Party strategist Steve Rabinowitz said, adding: “Along the way, Klain has proven himself as friendly to our community and to Israel as we are with his old/new boss.”
Closely similar to Zients, and generally similar to Walensky and Cohen, Klain formerly took charge of a “pandemic response” to another disease scare in 2014, as Obama’s “Ebola Czar,” according to the Jewish Forward. Given the general Jewish hatred of the Russian Czars, I struggle to understand why these Jews apply this term to themselves when they lead “pandemic response” efforts. Perhaps to further defame the long-dead Czars, but doesn’t this also defame themselves?
CHD/Nevradakis quotes:
“Dr. Mandy Cohen during her tenure as North Carolina’s HHS secretary pushed through the most draconian COVID-19 measures imaginable.
“With her at the helm of the CDC, I expect we will just get more lying and hiding regarding the agency’s abysmal response to the pandemic and horrific track record in general.”
-Brian Hooker, Ph.D., P.E., senior director of science and research for Children’s Health Defense
Cohen was particularly harsh on children in North Carolina, imposing mask mandates in school regardless of vaccination status, extending school closures longer than most other states, and threatening to sue a county school board if it did not “rescind a new policy that eliminates COVID-19 quarantine measures for most students and staff.” All this after it was known that children were at almost zero risk from covid. In “studies of children (that) are the most comprehensive yet anywhere in the world,” 2 in a million children died of covid, and most of those had “co-morbidities.”
Combine Walensky’s damage to unborn babies in the womb with Cohen’s damage to school-age children, and these two Jewish lockdown/vaccine “fanatics” covered the entire childhood age range with trauma and death, for no valid reason.
Adolescent suicides spiked during the pandemic. In North Carolina under Cohen’s lockdown reign, “youth” suicides spiked, attempts up 46% among 10-14 year old girls in 2021. Cohen continued to impose among the harshest school lockdown measures in the nation, motivated no doubt by her Jewish “sense of empathy and compassion.”
When they heard rumors that the Biden Administration—itself overwhelmingly Jewish—was planning to propose Cohen as CDC director, a group of 28 Congresspeople (24 men including a Senator and a Representative from North Carolina, and 4 women including Marjorie Taylor Greene) issued a joint letter to the President dated June 13 2023. They state:
“Dr. Cohen is unfit for the position. Throughout her career, Dr. Cohen has politicized science, disregarded civil liberties, and spread misinformation about the efficacy and necessity of COVID vaccinations … and the necessity of masks.
“… Dr. Cohen was a proponent of unnecessary, unscientific COVID restrictions on school children… After a North Carolina school district followed the science by declining to institute unscientific mask mandates and voted with an overwhelming majority to end “contact tracing” and curtail other unproven and largely hysterical quarantine policies, Dr. Cohen threatened to bring legal action against the district. Dr. Cohen’s willingness to threaten the school district put politics over the well-being of children and is just another example of the litany of public health abuses the American people endured at the hands of bureaucrats throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The letter continues:
“Dr. Cohen has an extensive history of publicly… supporting radical, left-wing policies … (She) endorsed an unconstitutional ban on semi-automatic rifles and lobbied to classify climate change as a ‘public health crisis.’”
“Given her strong affiliation with… the COVID-19 lockdowns, it will be difficult for the American people to trust Dr. Cohen to run the CDC as a nonpartisan actor who makes objective decisions rooted in scientific data, and not in political expediency.”
Or Jewish Talmudic “science tikkun” as espoused by militant Jewish vaccine promoter Peter Hotez. In 2020 as secretary of NCDHHS, Cohen said in an interview with Religious News Service: “There’s so much of what I do in the health and human services space that’s so aligned with Jewish values of healing the world.” Healing the world is dangerously close to the Judaic concept of tikkun olam: fixing the world. The article further states: “It (wearing the Hebrew Chai necklace) is a testament to her faith — she is Jewish — and, in this strange pandemic moment, to her religious values.”
And: “As the Jewish High Holidays approach, Cohen said she looks forward to the time of reflection and introspection — the themes of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur — especially as they relate to her public work.” This ten day period between Judaic holy days includes a day of judgment where the fate of the wicked is decided. It is a time of reflection and repentance. As the wicked witch of North Carolina health and death, Cohen had much upon which to reflect and repent.
Dale Folwell is running for North Carolina governor. He tweeted:
“… the actions of Dr. Mandy Cohen during Covid resulted in more disease, death, poverty and illiteracy. As NC Governor, I would be hard pressed to ever follow her lead at CDC if chosen by the POTUS.”
The tweet was on June 2, two days after Cohen officially became Director of the CDC.
Private Sector, Monied Interests
In the short time between her resignation from NCDHHS in November 2021 and her appointment to CDC Director on July 1, 2023, Cohen was the Executive Vice President of Aledade, “the nation’s largest network of independent primary care practices.” She was also the Chief Executive Officer of Aledade Care Solutions, “the company’s new health services unit.” Aledade’s Executive Team’s webpage still lists Cohen as EVP and CEO of the Care Solutions new unit.
“An employee is prohibited from participating personally and substantially in a matter in which he, his spouse, minor child, or a general partner, or an organization of which he is an officer, director, trustee, partner or employee has a financial interest.”
Or she, in Cohen’s case. We must watch her closely for conflicts of interest, since her Jewish predecessor Walensky was identified in just such a conflict in 2021 soon before and after her appointment to CDC director. In “CDC Director Walensky’s Husband Received $5 Million in HHS Grants – and That’s Just the Start of It,” we see the insider connections, including Fauci, and another NIAID official who was on the oversight committee that approved the grant, both of whom worked with Rochelle in her time at CDC before she became director. They funneled a large research grant to Rochelle’s husband Loren’s private biotech firm Lytica Therapeutics. He is shown on the Team webpage as “Scientific Cofounder” and his bio states he is “Professor Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, and Director of the Harvard/MIT MD-PhD Program.”
Also on the team is a Daniel Cohen, PhD, Associate Principal Scientist, Protein Chemistry. Mandy’s Wikipedia entry shows in its Early Life section, she “has two younger siblings.” The “Tar Heel of the Year” article says, “Her brother’s family just had a baby in May…” Certainly we see many Cohens throughout the Jewish power structure, and cannot verify that Daniel has any direct relation to Mandy except by tribe.
Such speculation is unnecessary. Cohen’s depravity emerged within a week of taking office when numerous news reports quoted the CDC stating: “transgender and nonbinary-gendered individuals may give birth and breastfeed or feed at the chest (chestfeed).” This ignited outrage from the nation’s mothers, Republican party candidates, Fox News and many others.
Not surprisingly, links to the CDC statement in these reports go nowhere or in circles now, but one prominent mention found on the CDC official website says under “Priority Breastfeeding Strategy: Continuity of Care” – “Review (of) Continuity of Care in Breastfeeding Support; a Blueprint for Communities” document: “Create community environments that proactively promote, protect, and support chest/breastfeeding.”
It is under “Health Equity Considerations” where we find the horrifying statement under “Pronoun Use – Remember That:” There is more. “An individual does not need to have given birth to breastfeed or chestfeed. Some families may have other preferred terminology for how they feed their babies, such as nursing, chestfeeding, or bodyfeeding.”
In an established pattern of recklessness endangering the nation’s children and mothers, Cohen failed to warn of the dangers to babies from synthetic hormone-induced “chest milk.” The synthetic hormone no longer recommended for increasing natural female lactation but recommended (not by name) for transsexual “chest feeding” Domperidone is a known risk to babies.
Cohen’s tribal colleagues the Jewish Pritzker family rules the transsexual transition industry with billions of dollars in grants, investments, donations and profits to impose the unholy inhuman agenda. Family oligarch Tom Pritzker was only one of two names listed in Jewish Epstein’s notorious black book with a special hand-written note: “Numero Uno.”
Caution: Another Jew Leads CDC
We have seen excessive evidence that the new CDC director Mandy Cohen will inflict whatever catastrophic lockdown measures and vaccine mandates the next contrived disease panic offers to further Jewish objectives, just as previous CDC director Rochelle Walensky.
May we all take caution. Not viruses, but certain Jews acting in coordination have infected the governmental power structure with the capability of inducing sickness and death by unelected, arbitrary and capricious decree. The cure is truly worse than the disease. The new CDC director Mandy Cohen, driven by her Judaic faith, now leads the most powerful Federal agency imposing public health/death measures.
May we turn to a more natural, holistic health model to survive her impending reign of terror at CDC.
The ABIM’s history proves their present actions are political/financial and not scientific. They are making examples of us “dissenters” to scare the rest of the country’s docs to keep quiet.
The unholy alliance of industrycaptured high-impact medical journals, federal public health agencies, professional societies (ABIM, AMA, APHa etc), and most importantly, the state medical licensing boards directed by the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) are still going hard after us “dissenting” doctors. You know, those of us that very publicly called out the unscientific policies implemented by corrupted policymakers in a directed pursuit of profits and power. Their actions trying to silence us (and to scare other doctors from speaking out) are escalating.
Recently, what I call the “misinformation committee” of the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) voted to strip Professor Paul Marik and myself of our Board certifications. To best understand why they would do this, I think it is important to review what the ABIM is, how it operates, and then detail their absurd attempt to paint us as misinformationists by using disinformation.
Let’s trace my current relationship with the ABIM to today:
At the end of my training, I became Board Certified by the ABIM in three specialties (Internal Medicine, Pulmonary Diseases, and Critical Care Medicine).
What is the ABIM? Well, from this devastating article by Kurt Eichenwald, an accomplished corporate investigative journalist who did a devastating takedown of the ABIM and its officers in a Newsweek piece in 2015:
The ABIM is a purported nonprofit that certifies new physicians as meeting standards of practice. Beginning in the early 1990s, the ABIM ordered certified doctors to be recertified, again and again. Without the ABIM seal of approval, lots of internists and subspecialists can’t get jobs and can’t admit patients to hospitals. So by taking advantage of that monopolistic power, the ABIM has forced hundreds of thousands of physicians to follow recertification processes that doctors complain cost them tons of money (paid to the ABIM), require tons of time (taken from families and medical practices) and accomplish nothing.
In many doctor’s opinion, this cash grab of the ABIM by selling “certifications” is a corrupt farce. There is no evidence that certifying doctors in this highly costly way does anything to improve the quality of care delivered. The ABIM has not only refused to produce data showing the program improves patient care but also hasn’t conducted any studies on that matter. In fact, the ABIM and its related organizations are:
harming American medicine and diminishing the quality of scientific research, pushing physicians to close practices rather than wasting time on expensive and frustrating busywork, and forcing specialists to play a game of medical trivial pursuit. (Even Baron has admitted that he was tested for recertification on topics he never used in his practice.)
But it sure does generate cash for ABIM executives. Note that Board Certification used to simply be a sort of “honor” denoting that the member passed a more rigorous examination in their specialty. That “honor” comes at a price though:
Since I am (was?) Board certified in 3 specialties, lets do some math as this is what it costs me to re-certify every ten years:
$1,430 for Internal Medicine
$2,325 for Pulmonary Diseases
$2,325 for Critical Care Medicine
But wait, we are not done yet. These bastards were not making enough money with once-every-ten-year recertification exam fees, so they invented a new program of annual busywork education requirements which they called Maintenance of Certification (MOC) which costs you $220 every year for every certification (plus late fees if you forget). To wit, I went into my patient portal and discovered. I owe them $480 for each of my certifications!
And get this – that money essentially goes to ABIM executive salaries and pensions and other dubious private investments as described by Eichenwald where he details the insane lengths the ABIM goes to “hide” the compensation and pension data on its executives. What is worse is that ABIM certification has now been made a requirement of employment as a faculty member of academic medical centers and hospitals and is also a requirement to be on many insurance company panels (these actions further strengthen the control of doctor behavior).
Doctors have started publicly slamming the group in industry publications. “ABIM is imposing on us an onerous and ill-conceived tool, one that most physicians agree is irrelevant,” Dr. Karmela Chan wrote in Internal Medicine News. “I am glad this conversation is happening, because, frankly, the process was enough to make me want to quit being a doctor.” Further, in a recent poll of 2,211 physicians conducted on a doctors-only website called Sermo, 97 percent of the respondents criticized recertification.
Richard J. Baron, the ABIM CEO that sent letters threatening decertification to me and Paul, makes close to a million dollars a year, however that data is almost impossible to find due to the ABIM’s multiple attempts to obscure it as well as its spokespeople avoiding answering any inquiries on the topic. Here is a summary of Eichenwalds findings on the ABIM:
In 2015, they were 5 months late in filing their publicly available financial report with the IRS (that several journalists were very interested in).
The report is full of obfuscations and anomalies of reporting of not only the actual money earned by the executives, and particularly Baron, but his financial conflicts of interest are even better hidden.
A big percentage of the ABIM’s millions was in the form of cash to one former employee.
The ABIM in 2013 had 57 million against liabilities of 105 million – while Baron was going around saying that its assets are three times its liabilities (this was a 100% lie. When I get to the ABIM’s response to our defense letter, remember that what liars do is.. lie).
It lost $4.8 million on $55.5 million in revenues, no small feat and almost entirely due to a bloated payroll.
It also claims it spends no money on lobbying while it spent between 100K to 160K annually to lobby Congress on Medicare and Medicaid (another lie).
The data on top officers compensation is so obscured and fragmented, Eichenwald reported that he had found it much easier to discover executive compensation at Enron, Worldcom and Adelphia – all famous for lying on tax filings. Again no small feat (to be one of the top corporate liars in the U.S).
Officers “double dip” – former CEO Christine Cassel got $741K from ABIM and $247K from the ABIM “Foundation” (slush fund for ABIM officials) and also got $219K in “other compensation” – totaling $1.2 million for one year. (Nice gig if you can get it).
But wait, we are not done. Cassel also got $504K in “deferred compensation” for a total of $1.71 million more that year (six times the median compensation for similar sized non-profits). Six times.
Then there is this doozy of an article which came out this week in The Defender by Children’s Health Defense, detailing the ABIM CEO Richard Baron’s conflicts of interest:
Some of the most disturbing reveals:
“The head of a national medical organization who publicly called for doctors to lose their licenses unless they supported government narratives on COVID-19 treatments and vaccines concealed his relationship with a public relations firm whose client list also included Pfizer, Moderna and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Dr. Richard Baron, president and CEO of the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) is a client of Weber Shandwick, investigative journalist Paul D. Thacker reported on Wednesday.
Note that I went after Weber Shandwick in my book, “The War on Ivermectin” where I argue (without proof, although I believe that is coming because I know of a subpoena coming their way) that they created and launched the “Horse Dewormer PR campaign,” highlights of which was the famous FDA tweet and absurd Rolling Stone article:
In late 2021, Baron publicly pushed for doctors who spread “misinformation” about COVID-19 and the vaccines to lose their license and certification.
According to Thacker, “Weber Shandwick’s panel featuring Dr. Baron has been widely promoted by the PR firm’s employees,” including Sarah Mahoney, executive vice president, Healthcare Communications, Strategy & Planning for Weber Shandwick, who in a LinkedIn post, wrote she “can’t think of a more important topic right now.”
Although to the unawake the following may seem normal public health practice, but to those of us fighting agency capture by Big Pharma, it is absurd:
The CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD) in September 2020 awarded Weber a $50 million contract “to promote the vaccination of children, pregnant women and those at risk for flu and increase the general acceptance and use of vaccines,” according to the PR firm’s website.
Thacker said he believes much of what is labeled “misinformation” in medicine and academic research “is really just corporate PR,” and that “Congress needs to take a harder look at funding for ‘misinformation research.’“
Speaking of taking a harder look at where the funding is coming from for “misinformation research” and the ABIM, it turns out that.. we can’t. Why? Check out this tweet showing a clause inserted into the ABIM’s by-laws in 1998:
But wait, it gets better, like way better. Also in their by-laws:
Information that is disclosed will be kept confidential except to the:
President and Chair of the Board;
The chairs of the relevant Subspecialty Boards, Test-Writing Committees, and other Committees of the Board, members who serve on the relevant Boards and Committees, and staff working with the respective committees;
The Conflict of Interest Committee members and Conflict of Interest Committee staff,
except as required for the purposes of continuing medical education.
So, basically, they can take money from any corporate entity and do not have to disclose it to anyone. Again, nice gig if you can get it.
Back to the ABIM’s history: One of Eichenwalds more disturbing observations about the behavior of the ABIM:
I can attest to the ABIM’s pomposity. Starting with my first story about the ABIM, the organization usually has refused to acknowledge I even asked a question. The only other group to do that in my 30-year journalism career was a company that processed payments for child pornography websites. Plus, when I reported on the uprising by doctors, the ABIM ignored the facts and instead investigated me.
Now lets fast forward to Covid. On July 29, 2021, the FSMB (this entity controls the state medical licensing boards, not the ABIM – at least on paper) issueda policy statement that “Physicians who generate and spread COVID-19 vaccine misinformation or disinformation are risking disciplinary action by state medical boards, including the suspension or revocation of their medical license.”
What is interesting is how fast and how rigidly the ABIM followed the FSMB’s lead and enacted their own misinformation policy despite the fact that, as my colleague Meryl Nass has pointed out:
“suddenly claiming that using licensed drugs for COVID, criticizing federal policies for COVID or criticizing the value of COVID vaccines is unprofessional” gives the specialty board the right to revoke a certification—well, that was never part of its contract with me.So pulling my certification for issues that were never specified in the original contract is breach of contract.
I think it would only be a breach if contracts, like our Constitution and the practice of medical ethics, were still “a thing.”
The ABIM apparently liked the FSMB’s “misinformation policy” idea to attack dissenting doctors so much (or were told to like it) that 2 months later, they,along with their colleagues at the American Board of Pediatrics and the American Board of Family Medicine, issued a statement supporting the FSMB’s position, saying, “We all look to board certified physicians to provide outstanding care and guidance; providing misinformation about a lethal disease is unethical, unprofessional and dangerous.” (note that they seem particularly focused on Covid misinformation and not any other disease model or therapeutics. Do you think it could be because Covid vaccines and therapeutics opened immensely profitable markets to Pharma overnight?).
Again from Meryl Nass (please subscribe to her Substack):
Furthermore, the processes the ABIM is using, as described by CEO Richard Baron, MD in his podcast with the New England Journal of Medicine are procedurally unfair. Dr. Baron earns $1 million/year to threaten doctors for a crime that does not exist. Baron, notably, refused to specify where the line was between misinformation and genuine disagreement in that podcast, though he seems to have no difficulty at all drawing the line when it comes to licensees who speak publicly about how to manage COVID. In a truly Orwellian effort, the ABIM and the ABIM Foundation have dedicated the year to ‘building trust’ in medicine.”
In what I suspect was the ABIM’s first enforcement of their shiny new policy, they go after Peter McCullough, Paul Marik, and myself on the same day (May 26, 2022) with a letter quoting numerous public statements we made, implying that we needed to defend the substance of such statements with supporting data or risk losing our certifications.
“Game on” I thought, looking forward to the exercise of “debating” scientific data with the ABIM. However, our FLCCC lawyer, Alan Dumoff pointed out that the ABIM’s policy and procedures state that the process of accusing a member of misinformation requires that they first provide evidence to us that what we said was inaccurate. So, we wrote back, pointing out to the ABIM their brazen “error” (yeah right) in not complying with their own policy and procedures.
“Nonsense” they wrote back (in short). Their logic was truly shocking – they say that the fact they provided the substance and references to my public statements means they did their duty (rather than their providing references that would refute my statements which is what their policy states they need to do).
You can read their brazen, illegitimate, dismissive response here:
This letter above demonstrates the unchecked power they have – they alone determine whether they are following their own policy which they so clearly were not. What did I say about liars before?
Anyway, rebut them we did. We wrote a 76 page treatise with 175 references, 11 exhibits, and 22,000 words, marshaling and weaving numerous data sources to support all our public statements that they had a problem with. May it enter the historical record here (I think you Covid vaccine and ivermectin data geeks will find the letter impressive).
We sent that letter over 6 months ago… and finally got an answer a few weeks ago. To understand the misinformation committee’s response, note this statement from an editorial written by Baron where he tries to give examples of misinformation:
A whole range of statements with which many — or even most —physicians might disagree would therefore not trigger our disciplinary process. On the other hand, when someone certified by the ABIM says something like “the origin of all coronary heart disease is a clearly reversible arterial scurvy” or “children can’t spread Covid” or “vaccines don’t prevent Covid deaths or hospitalizations,” we are not dealing with valid professional disagreement; we are dealing with wrong answers.
That last sentence is critical as Baron literally is saying that the ABIM gets to determine what is a valid professional disagreement versus a “wrong answer.” Good to know, especially in regards to the fact that the narrative that “vaccines prevent Covid deaths or hospitalizations” was strongly refuted in our initial response letter.
This issue about drawing a line between misinformation and genuine disagreement is a critical one. From our letter of appeal written by our lawyer Alan Dumoff:
Threshold Issue: What Standard Distinguishes Legitimate Differences of Professional Opinion and Misinformation
We disagree with the Committee’ s interpretation of the data, which we address below, but the initial question is by what standard the American Board of Internal Medicine (“ABIM” or “Board”) evaluates evidence to determine that disagreement with consensus generally, and regarding controversial matters around COVID-19 policy specifically, rise to the level of actionable misinformation. The Board’s policy recognizes the right to legitimate debate, which requires it not merely show evidence supporting a consensus view but that it demonstrate that these professional disagreements are not legitimate but outright misinformation.
If not grounded in an articulated standard, at the very least, the Board must demonstrate that the views at issue are false by citing the fallacies in the actual substance of the evidence provided, not simply by critiquing a few isolated studies divorced from the totality of evidence. Resting solely upon citations to mainstream publications while substantially avoiding the evidence in our Submission, and our detailed critiques of these publications does not provide a basis for the Board to take action against my clients.
A diplomate’s medical positions must be plainly erroneous to merit sanction. Departure from consensus is hardly unusual and by itself insufficient. While the Sanctions Notice gives the appearance of having done so, the Committee did not directly engage the numerous imperfections in the mainstream approach Drs. Kory and Marik’s have pointed to in substantial detail. The Committee has not engaged the evidence submitted and demonstrated it is illegitimate, only that it departs from the consensus, that is insufficient to support a sanction.
The point is that the ABIM appears absurdly obsessed with getting doctors to spout only consensus opinions. This is literally unprecedented in science. From Michael Chrichton the author:
I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had. Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.
I love that last line so much it bears repeating, “If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.”
Now, let’s look at their response to our 76 page letter teeming with supportive data for our statements. Can read their letter in its entirety here but I thought I would just pull the most illustrative sections:
… the CCC (i.e. misinformation committee) concluded that your statements about the purported dangers of, or lack of justification for, COVID-19 vaccines are false and inaccurate because they, too, are not supported by factual, scientifically grounded, and consensus driven scientific evidence. In fact, the overwhelming body of factual, scientifically grounded, and consensus-driven evidence – at and since the time you made those statements – shows that the COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective for children and for adults
I have heard of the term “evidence-based medicine (EBM)” which is what I practice, but not “consensus driven science” (completely new invention – pernicious indeed. I Actually adhere to the original definition and conceptual framework envisioned by the founders of evidence based medicine which was incredibly well detailed in a by my friend “A Midwestern Doctor” in his brilliant recent post “What Happens To Doctors Who Innovate”.
Anyway, they then listed a few published, peer-reviewed papers supporting their point, blissfully un-acknowledging of the fact that the high-impact journals have been systematically censoring pretty much all negative analyses of the vaccine campaign’s impacts while publishing nothing but positive reports with cherry-picked and/or fraudulent data – so there is no way for the truth about vaccines to win in scientific debates my friends.
The high-impact journal censoring of adverse vaccine data is identical to their censoring of dozens of positive trials of ivermectin, something I extensively detail in the chapter called “The Journal Rejections of Positive Ivermectin Studies” in my book.
It gets even better – they next argue against my claims of lack of safety of the vaccines by, get this, referencing proclamations by the WHO and CDC. They ignore all the immense data to the contrary that I submitted while of course being willfully oblivious to the fact that the CDC and WHO are fully Pharma captured agencies:
Moreover, the vaccine safety data overwhelmingly (overwhelmingly?) contradicts your statements about vaccine risks. See, e.g., Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Safety of COVID-19 Vaccines,” https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/safety-of-vaccines.html (updated March 7, 2023) (reporting that “Adverse Events (Serious Safety Problems) Are Rare,” and that “[t]he benefits of COVID-19 vaccination outweigh the known and potential risks”); World Health Organization, “Safety of COVID-19 Vaccines,” https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/safety-of-covid-19-vaccines (March 31, 2021) (stating that “[b]illions of people have been safely vaccinated against COVID-19,” that “mRNA vaccines [for COVID-19] have been rigorously assessed for safety, and clinical trials have shown that they provide a long-lasting immune response”).
The paragraph above should enter the historical record… somewhere. That will NOT age well. The only thing more absurd to contemplate is whether they know they are lying in their letter or if they are simply referencing propaganda that they themselves swallowed whole? In a way, the former might be more acceptable to me at this point.
Their opinion on how I got ivermectin wrong was similarly brazen – they ignored all the meta-analyses (historically considered the strongest form of data, a fact they seem to have willfully avoided) in favor of listing a handful of trials where ivermectin was supposedly found ineffective, relying mostly on citing “the Big 6” (what I named the chapter describing the fraud behind the 6 largest, Pharma-conflicted and most publicized trials on ivermectin). This was 100% unsurprising.
Check it out:
First, the CCC concluded that your statements about the safety and efficacy of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as treatments for COVID-19 are false and inaccurate because they are not supported by factual, scientifically grounded, and consensus driven scientific evidence (there it is again).
Susanna Naggie, M.D., M.H.S., et al., “Effect of Ivermectin vs Placebo on Time to Sustained Recovery in Outpatients With Mild to Moderate COVID-19,” 328 JAMA 1721 (2022), https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2115869 (finding in a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled study with 1,800 participants that “[a]mong outpatients with mild to moderate COVID-19, treatment with ivermectin, compared with placebo, did not significantly improve time to recovery,” and that “[t]hese findings do not support the use of ivermectin in patients with mild to moderate COVID-19”);
I laughed out loud when they led their argument with the Naggie trial funded by the NIH as it contained the most brazen fraud of the Big 6 Pharma Ivermectin trials. All you need to know about the trial is that they moved the primary comparison endpoint of the trial.. in the middle of the trial. They moved the main comparison from symptoms at Day 14 to Day 28. Note that changing endpoints in the middle of a trial is a supposed never event. Except the same trick was pulled in the Remdesivir trial.
Anyway, in a presentation by Naggie, in this secondary endpoint, you can see that ivermectin was superior at Day 14 to a high degree of Bayesian “statistical significance” but the “statistical significance” was not reached at Day 28 (I use quotes around statistical significance because it is an erroneous concept when doing Bayesian statistics but that is what they did anyway when they pre-specified a threshold of above 0.95 as “significant”). Can anyone tell me why they moved the endpoint to Day 28 in the middle of the trial:
With this brazen maneuver (and many others) it allowed Naggie et al to publish this conclusion: “these findings do not support the use of ivermectin in patients with mild to moderate COVID-19.” Not-so-fun fact: Naggie also sat on the NIH covid treatment guidelines committee where she voted to not recommend ivermectin right before she and her University received tens of millions.. to study ivermectin in Covid. You want more? She also owns stock in a competitor to ivermectin (monoclonal antibodies for Omicron) and has received money from numerous other Big Pharma companies including Gilead. Lets get back to the letter…
Rather, the CCC seeks to accomplish precisely what you assert ABIM should be doing: seeking to “further the professional integrity of medicine by encouraging evidence-based debate” (emphasis added).
Indeed, as set forth in ABIM’s False or Inaccurate Medical Information policy, physicians have an ethical and professional responsibility to provide factual, scientifically grounded, and consensus driven scientific evidence (there it is again). As discussed above, by touting the effectiveness of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as COVID-19 treatments and casting doubt on the efficacy and safety of COVID-19 vaccines with such seemingly authoritative statements, you have made statements that are inimical to ABIM’s ethics and professionalism standards for board certification.
In light of all the evidence and circumstances, the CCC determined to recommend that your board certification be revoked.
There is only one silver lining here. One – the impending loss of my certifications does not affect me materially because I have a private fee-based practice due to my need for complete autonomy and lack of restrictions in empirically treating the vaccine injured with various repurposed and alternative therapeutics. I thus cannot and will not accept insurance, and secondly, my academic career is over – no longer will I ever enter back into the system of medicine.
About the only opportunity this whole attack has created is one where I get to defend myself on appeal in a debate with three academic white coats of their choosing. Bring. It. On.
Although the outcome of the debate is assuredly pre-determined, I know it will satisfy a deep yearning many of us dissidents have had for going on 3 years now – to debate someone, anyone, anywhere. Crush them with data. Make ‘em look silly although I will be the only one who knows it happened. It will let me vent my disgust at how they have widely disseminated corrupted scientific evidence and policies while simultaneously ignoring the clinical observations and expertise of frontline doctors who have treated thousands of actual Covid patients.
I will then toss in a little lecture about how RCT’s have long ceased to be a credible means of proving anything in science given that in modern medicine only “Big RCT’s” count and that all “Big RCT’s” require such massive funding that the bias of the funders outweighs any objectivity such trials can profess to attain. I will also remind them that throughout modern medical history, the findings of RCT’s and retrospective observational trials are identical, yet academia has been taught to systematically ignore observational trials. Reason: only massively funded entities can conduct a “Big RCT” while any committed clinician willing to give up nights and weekends can conduct an observational trial. Pharma cannot allow research to be conducted that they have no control over – so they took over the journals and medical school curriculums which now literally teach that observational controlled trials can only be considered “hypothesis generating” and thus their results should not be acted on. Nonsense.
I will also remind them that they are violating international law and human, civil, and political rights as argued by Meryl Nass in another of her excellent posts regarding her own persecution by her state licensing Board:
International law is on our side. A total of 172 countries are parties to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights:
According to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19,
“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
“Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.”
And the Nebraska Attorney General protected doctors and pharmacists in Nebraska from their Boards, explicitly allowing them to prescribe HCQ and IVM. His opinion is a tour de force, which goes into detail about why the CDC, FDA and NIH guidelines are contradictory, unscientific and should not be followed. It should be cited in every case.
I also plan on reminding them that the FDA got its ass handed to them in court last week during a hearing of Paul Marik, Mary Tally Bowden and Robert Apter’s suit against the FDA. From an Epoch Timesarticle on the hearing:
“FDA explicitly recognizes that doctors do have the authority to prescribe ivermectin to treat COVID,” Ashley Cheung Honold, a Department of Justice lawyer representing the FDA, said during oral arguments on Aug. 8 in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit.
The statements “don’t prohibit doctors from prescribing ivermectin to treat COVID or for any other purpose” Ms. Honold said.
“FDA is clearly acknowledging that doctors have the authority to prescribe human ivermectin to treat COVID. So they are not interfering with the authority of doctors to prescribe drugs or to practice medicine,” she said.
So, if the FDA recognizes we have the authority to prescribe ivermectin, then assuredly we are allowed to have the opinion that it is a valid therapy. However, the ABIM will not allow an ABIM certified physician to publicly express this opinion or recommend this practice. Maybe the ABIM should have a little chat with the FDA?
The nonsense doesn’t end with the ABIM, as they are only one prong of this campaign. How is this for some comic relief, published last week in one of the top journals in the world where they found that almost all the Covid misinformation in the U.S on social media can be traced to 52 doctors.
I was honored to discover that yours truly made the list! In their quoted examples of misinformation in Table 4, I have taken the liberty of owning up to the posts attributed to me, all of which I stand by to this day:
I think I will finish with this excerpt from a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed touching on the Missouri vs. Biden case where the administration is being sued for its systematic censoring of U.S citizens on social media by every intelligence and health agency in our Federal government :
This is where the decision of U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty sheds light. His detailed recounting shows a Washington energetic in protecting Americans from Covid opinions, expertise and claims that conflicted with its own, at a time when it served politicians to show they were trying to save Americans from encountering a virus that couldn’t be avoided. When government has a message to deliver, especially when the political stakes are high, it won’t be content just to push its own message, it will try to silence others. Fighting back will always be necessary. The only surprise in our age is how thoroughly the “liberal” position has become the pro-censorship position (that last line is a doozy).
The assembling of a compelling and fair response to an infectious viral outbreak is an immense challenge. Ideally, unbiased experts without conflicts of interest develop a survey of potentially effective remedies. The team includes seasoned pathologists, broad-thinking social psychologists, experienced epidemiologists, holistic dieticians, and veteran practitioners of complementary and indigenous medicine.
Imagine a broadly trusted, well-meaning group gathering knowledge, and through consensus, generating recommendations and medical guidelines designed to have the greatest impact towards minimizing suffering. In making the best efforts to evaluate solutions and means of relief, they never lose sight of weighing risks versus benefits.
This did not happen. During the recent pandemic, all of those who considered or attempted to approach the crisis without the blessings of authorities were summarily belittled, repressed, and disgraced.
Many voices of reason were confounded by the enigmatic organization, the Center For Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). Their duplicitous activities were neither creative nor supportive, and simply aimed at destroying those who refused to agree with dogmatic mandates and protocols generated by the pharmaceutical industry.
At the peak of CCDH’s influence, they released a malicious piece of propaganda, called TheDisinformation Dozen. The document was a frontal, full-scale attack on those who questioned the viability and motives of the mainstream response to the pandemic. This manifesto was conceived as a distractive and deceptive instrument — disseminated among the willing world press corps. Not only was the news media compromised by their funders, but they were also hungry for a scapegoat and eager to enthusiastically repeat easily drawn, though suspect conclusions.
The CCDH’s overt purpose was to stop any alternative thinking about how to respond to a viral outbreak. Their offense against those who failed to accept vaccines as a panacea presents a telling window into the boldness of authoritarian bullying over the last three years.
The Missouri v. Biden lawsuit alleges that the White House pressured social media to close accounts of pandemic policy dissenters. During discovery, Eric Waldo, the Senior Advisor to the Surgeon General admitted CCDH briefed their office before they pressured Facebook for more censorship.
Most recently CCDH has come under increased scrutiny with a lawsuit by Twitter claiming they are masquerading as a legitimate research firm and that they illegally obtained data to use it in a scare campaign to deter advertisers from the platform.
Concurrently, the publications and damage done by Imran Ahmed, the chief executive officer of CCDH, and his collaborators, are being examined by the House Judiciary Committee. The ongoing investigation into government censorship of alternative viewpoints during the pandemic has determined that CCDH’s activities are of interest. Ahmed was notified that he must supply all documents related to CCDH and its relationship with the federal government and social media companies.
CCDH purports to be a non-profit organization without political affiliation or funding, protecting the public from dangerous misinformation. As they face increasing scrutiny and pressure, a thorough examination of their origins and tactics reveals the mechanics of an organization whose mission is to censor enemies of the state and the pharmaceutical industry.
On The Attack
As the COVID crisis escalated, Ahmed assembled a primary list of competitors to Big Pharma; disparaging those who simply questioned a single prescribed solution. Without presenting evidence, The Disinformation Dozen claimed twelve individuals held the primary responsibility for vaccine hesitancy and thousands of deaths. While leaping to these conclusions, Ahmed also surmised that the motivation of anyone who expressed opinions that did not conform with industry and government — was financial. The report insists that sources of alternative information must be de-funded and de-platformed.
Incredibly, there are no details in all of these publications that informs or assures the public about vaccine safety and effectiveness. What the CCDH reports all have in common is the assumption that vaccines are Big Pharma’s gift to mankind and that all other responses to infectious disease are heresy and worthy of scorn and condemnation. These assaults on dissenters are filled with strongly worded guidance, both for individuals and governments, urging people to resist and disregard those who dare counter the pharmaceutical narrative. Strikingly, the reports show complete indifference to free speech, lateral thinking, and medical autonomy.
CCDH leadership’s lack of qualifications in public health and epidemiology is indicative that their intentions and strategy are other than altruistic. Despite his organization’s goal to identify and counter digitalhate, Imran Ahmed’s résumé reveals no recognition of medical or humanitarian ethics.
Not surprisingly, Ahmed has a history of blindly supporting Big Pharma’s dictates concerning the viability and safety of vaccines. For years, he and his associates have specialized in attacking anyone who doesn’t follow the narrow guidelines of pharmaceutical industry preferences.
Ahmed is not medically qualified and shows no understanding of healthcare. However, he has been a political operative and has worked behind the scenes for power brokers at the highest level.
Profiles In Deception
Of particular interest is a telling British political scandal dubbed, Brickgate. Ahmed had been working for MP Hilary Benn, another pharma cheerleader. During the brief challenge in 2016 to the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbin, he became the communications director for Angela Eagle, an MP who was one of two possible replacements for Corbin. Ahmed was the point man on an allegation that a brick was thrown through a window in Eagle’s office, with the implication that she was being threatened by her political opponents. The UK press promoted the story, reporting on Ahmed’s accusations and outrage.
The facts proved otherwise. The window turned out to be in a shared stairwell and broken from the inside. A brick was never found, and a police inquiry determined it was very unlikely a hostile act. Whereas Ahmed undoubtedly knew these details, he attempted to portray a different story to gain political points for his boss.
This seemingly minor tale illustrates that the noble role Ahmed presents currently was preceded by his willingness to do whatever it takes to serve his masters. It also confirms that his work has been other than in the service of revealing truth.
Ahmed’s shadowy background and relationships with politicians, including his co-founder of CCDH, Morgan McSweeney, certainly do not qualify him to judge anyone’s ethical standards.
Within a few years of Brickgate, Ahmed followed his political godfather, McSweeney, in further machinations toward engineering the agenda of Labour Party leadership. Ahmed took the helm of CCDH, and McSweeney remains integral to the senior staff of MP Keir Starmer. He is a serving member of the vaccine-friendly Trilateral Commission, the current head of the Labour Party, and a likely future UK Prime Minister. Starmer was an early proponent of the COVID vaccine and has a close relationship with Lexington Communications, a lobbying firm that represents Pfizer. With the strong support of Starmer, the United Kingdom was the first country to release the Pfizer COVID vaccine. Even as it was rolled out, he pressed for government repression in a joint effort with CCDH, harassing those who dared to question vaccine safety and effectiveness.
Most of Ahmed’s cohorts all have common interests that have little to do with well-being.
Board Member and MP Damian Collins is another pro-Pharma devotee. Pfizer’s main UK plant was in Kent — Collin’s home district — and he was a strong proponent of the early release of their COVID vaccine. He is also directly associated with the military intelligence group, Integrity Initiative, and a member of the Henry Jackson Society, a secretive association that has connections with the CIA.
The fabric of CCDH’s personnel is embroidered with intelligence community assets. There is no better example of this than Ahmed’s communications director, Lindsay Moran, a self-declared former CIA operative, with experience in consulting for mainstream media. Her previous employment does not make her a criminal, though it does bring further into question the intent and operations of CCDH.
Considering Imran Ahmed’s credentials, known associates, and the profile of other CCDH figures, it can be asserted that there is more to the organization than its stated purpose. At a minimum, this background brings into serious doubt Ahmed’s ability to inform and advise the public in an unbiased manner.
Without awareness or mention of his political affiliations, Ahmed has been relied on for stories and quoted by many news outlets, who present CCDH as a pristine source of factual information.
In one glowing personal profile, his work is described in an article from 2021 on the Global Citizen website. Avoiding questions about his past work, Ahmed’s views are swallowed whole by the authors and repeated gleefully, including the outrageous claim that almost all COVID deaths are among the unvaccinated. The most telling information in the entire piece is at the end: This series was made possible with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
It is important to evaluate this hagiographic portrait and consider that it is presented by Global Citizen, an international non-profit that does not hide ecstatic support of vaccination. According to its website, the organization’s central pursuit is raising and directing funds toward global poverty and health. Global Citizen sponsored a spectacular fundraising concert in 2021 called VAX Live — where among the luminaries who appeared among performers was President Biden, who described the crisis as a pandemic of the unvaccinated; perhaps the best advertising the pharmaceutical industry ever had. The concert successfully promoted and procured COVID-19 vaccines with funds raised by the event.
The Money Trail
Global Citizen has intimate relationships with the Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the World Health Organization. These partners share a common interest in vaccine advancement and have gained undue influence over governments and the press. As political leadership floundered in the face of the building healthcare scare, these unelected power brokers stepped in to persuade the world that vaccination was the only remedy to consider.
CCDH insists that it does not take money from partisan organizations or receive government funds, however, this is difficult to confirm when they refuse to reveal all details of its funding. The world of non-profits has numerous routes for financing to be directed in ways to avoid scrutiny.
Some of the not-for-profit organizations that are partners with CCDH claim to have high-minded goals, yet support an organization that betrays indifference to freedom of expression. The Institute For Strategic Dialogue facilitates and defends CCDH in contrast to its stated mission:
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) is an independent, non-profit organisation dedicated to safeguarding human rights and reversing the rising tide of polarisation, extremism and disinformation worldwide.
ISD structure and membership betray a different agenda. Attacking those with dissenting opinions who question mainstream corporate concerns is a cause of the polarized environment that they claim to safeguard.
Evidence points to well-endowed philanthropic organizations with ties to the pharmaceutical industry propping up CCDH and their hostile scheming. Support also includes money funneled through the shady world of PR agencies that are paid millions by Big Pharma to promote their interests. The Paris-based, Publicis Groupe, has directed such resources, admitting to relationships with fact-checkers that support their client’s positions. CCDH and a similar entity, Newsguard, both depend on minimal scrutiny of the structure and motivation for their financing. The perception of these non-profits would change dramatically if the public realized how their presentations are influenced by money.
Although financing has yet to be tracked, there are signals that point to a possible Bill Gates — CCDH relationship. Ahmed instinctively and repeatedly protects Gates and consistently attacks those who question his motivation for supporting vaccination.
In the Anti-Vaxx Playbook, Ahmed claims Gates is attacked symbolically within a word slaw that sidesteps the powerful influence of the Gates Foundation:
Anti-vaccine campaigners have collaborated with alternative health entrepreneurs and conspiracists to ensure that global health philanthropist Bill Gates has become a symbolic figure that represents all of their attacks on the trustworthiness of vaccine advocates.
These attacks are not aimed at influencing the ongoing debate over a Covid vaccine, in which the role of Bill Gates takes a back seat to more practical issues. The real utility of this campaign of vilification is to create a symbol and associated memes that aid the communication of interrelated beliefs about Covid, vaccines and conspiracies.
Bill Gates has come to represent a complex of anti-vaxxer talking points and conspiracy theories. Virtually every element of the on line anti-vaxx movement has found ways of featuring him in their narratives, in a variety of contexts and tones.
This description is a conspicuous attempt to deflect well-deserved attention from Bill Gates, claiming so-called anti-vaxxers are simply mentioning his name as a talking point.
Contrary to where Ahmed would direct us, an examination of Gates is central to understanding how philanthropy, corporate influence, and profiteering form government policies. Attempts at blurring the role of Gates and his foundation as they support vaccines and COVID response policies reveal CCDH’s loyalty to protecting the milieu of its political and financial benefactors.
The philanthropic and corporate worlds’ support and reliance on CCDH is at the nucleus of this deceptive contrivance, enhancing the facade that protects CCDH from scrutiny.
There are a wide variety of theories about why this shaping of public perception is so important. One consequence is obvious; the fraud increases the amount of profits for the pharmaceutical industry and the billionaires who support vaccine sales. Financing organizations like CCDH is a necessity in the general plan to minimize public doubt about an immensely lucrative product.
CCDH is paid to manipulate sentiment without substantiation. It remains stunningly apparent that no supporting details, scientific reports, or verifiable sources of facts appear in any CCDH reports. They merely use the premise that vaccination is the only trustworthy solution for infectious diseases — to vilify their targets.
Defending The Indefensible
The repercussions of the antics of the pharmaceutical-philanthropic consortium are exhibited in this sordid tale. Yet the damning revelations about Imran Ahmed and CCDH are unreported as yet by a press corps that trusts and mimics a political hack.
There remains a wholesale and uncritical acceptance of CCDH while its ability to present an objective assessment of any medical or healthcare opinion is demonstrably biased. Their mission has no basis in exposing the truth, yet nodding promoters still acquiesce to their alleged veracity.
The growing evidence of connections between individuals and entities that promote vaccines and so-called fact-checkers underlines the degradation of news gathering and reporting. The willingness of the news media to accept and disseminate CCDH disinformation without scrutiny reveals these dynamics and the dangerous trend toward authoritarian censorship.
As CCDH faces legal consequences for its negligence and a congressional inquiry into its relationship with the government, the organization continues to manipulate the truth with deceptive lies. They must rely on the press and the public to remain blind to their duplicity.
As a response to the Twitter (X) lawsuit, in an open letter signed by its supporters, CCDH dares to invoke a threat to their rights to free speech;
We view these efforts as a threat to the right to the freedom of expression, resulting in a dangerous chilling effect on civil society, experts, and advocates – and ultimately the public, which deserves to know how X and similar platforms are spreading hate and disinformation.
The appeal ends with desperate phraseology that reflects the height of hypocrisy:
The misuse of the legal system and other forms of intimidation against researchers, experts, and advocates who seek to hold social media companies accountable is an attack of the right to freedom of expression and access to information and must cease. The bullying of those seeking to speak truth to power cannot be tolerated.
Indeed.
In attempting to defend themselves, these words further betray CCDH’s hypocrisy. And the list of those signing on to this rebuttal only indicates how deeply compromised the corporate world has become in pretending to have noble exploits.
It is most important to view the activities of CCDH from the broadest historical perspective.
Their censorship efforts are at the epicenter of an open collaboration between corrupt industrialists and compromised politicians; repressive methodology with hostile tactics display the apparatus and consequences of merging the corporate world with the government.
New memos indicate that then-Vice President Joe Biden did not act in concert with the US government when he threatened to withhold $1 billion in Ukraine aid unless the Poroshenko government fired the prosecutor general who targeted Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian employer at that time.
Joe Biden and Democrats have repeatedly stressed that his insistence on firing Ukrainian then-Prosecutor General Viktor Shokhin back in December 2015 was consistent with the US policy of stamping out corruption in Ukraine.
At the time, then-Vice President Joe Biden even went so far as to threaten then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko that Washington would deprive Ukraine of a much-needed $1 billion loan guarantee in case the latter did not fire Shokhin. The conversation reportedly occurred in December 2015. Biden openly bragged about the incident to the Council on Foreign Relations gathering in January 2018:
“I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion.’ I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”
However, memos by Treasury and Justice Department officials obtained by Just the News, an independent US media outlet founded by award-winning investigative journalist John Solomon, indicate that the US government held Shokhin in high regard at the time and concluded that Ukraine had made progress in fighting endemic corruption, thus deserving the loan guarantee.
“Ukraine has made sufficient progress on its reform agenda to justify a third guarantee,” read an October 1, 2015, memo by the Interagency Policy Committee (IPC), a Barack Obama task force.
Moreover, Senior State Department officials sent Shokhin a personal note saying they were “impressed” with his office’s work and invited him and his staff to Washington for a January 2016 strategy session prior to his sacking.
Remarkably, an audio tape from March 2016 which appeared to record Biden and Poroshenko’s conversation showed that the Ukrainian president pointed out that there was no evidence that Shokhin and his office were anyhow mired in corruption:
“Despite the fact that we didn’t have any corruption charges, we don’t have any information about him doing something wrong, I especially asked him … No, it was the day before yesterday. I especially asked him to resign,” Poroshenko allegedly told Biden in a tape released in 2020 by then-parliamentarian Andrii Derkach.”
Per Solomon, Biden’s political maneuver stemmed from the fact that the latter had been aggressively investigating Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas firm that hired Joe’s son Hunter in 2014 and paid him a hefty salary of $83,333 a month despite Hunter having no expertise or experience in the energy sphere.
What’s more, Hunter’s business associate Devon Archer, who was also employed by Burisma at the time, testified to the House Oversight Committee on July 31 that Shokhin’s investigation was rattling the Ukrainian gas firm and that the Burisma leadership was putting pressure on Hunter to deal with it.
Joe Biden’s role in firing Shokhin created much controversy in 2019, when House Democrats pushed ahead with the impeachment of then-President Donald Trump who asked Poroshenko’s successor, Volodymyr Zelensky, to look into the Bidens’ conduct in a phone conversation.
Democratic lawmakers and officials testified during Trump’s first impeachment that Joe’s actions in withholding the $1 billion in aid had nothing to do with Hunter and were thoroughly consistent with the US government’s Ukraine policy. Per Solomon, this narrative appears to be false.
The US investigative journalist specifically quoted lawyers who worked on Trump’s impeachment defense. They said that they didn’t have access to the memos unearthed by Just the News, showing that the Obama government was satisfied with Shokhin’s work. As per Trump’s former legal team, the documents in question would have made a significant difference to the Trump impeachment case.
The Democratic Party’s apparent attempts to shield Biden, who announced his presidential bid on April 25, 2019, seemingly fit into a broader set of actions by US officials, Biden campaign aides, intelligence operatives, Big Tech and Big Media to suppress any narrative which could cast a shadow on the Bidens’ conduct.
In October 2020, a concerted action by the former top brass of US intelligence agencies, Silicon Valley giants and the US mainstream press smeared a legitimate story by the New York Post stemming from files of a so-called “laptop from hell”, belonging to Hunter Biden, as “Russian disinformation”. It turned out later that the damning materials on the infamous laptop were genuine.
Those who doubt that “fact-checking” is an industry created around the push for internet censorship that’s been going on these last years might be persuaded otherwise by information that emerged from a lawsuit.
The lawsuit was filed by Australia-based reporter and commentator Avi Yemini, and it reveals the amount of money changing hands between Facebook (Meta) and its notorious “fact-checkers” whose purpose is supposed to be weeding out “misinformation.” And who are supposed to be “independent.”
However, these efforts disturbingly often end up in plain censorship of “disfavored” opinion on political and social issues.
And even though Yemini eventually had to withdraw his lawsuit in order to avoid costs he was unwilling or unable to pay, the legal process while it was ongoing produced some interesting findings, including the true nature of some of the “fact-checkers’” purported financial independence from Big Tech.
According to a deal cited in the court documents, the figure went up to half a million dollars annually – and that’s involving just one “fact checking” operation, RMIT University’s FactLab, also based in Australia.
The agreement was kept confidential, but surfaced in Yemini’s defamation suit naming RMIT FactLab as the plaintiff. Yemini claimed that this group subjected one of his reports to a false “fact-check.”
But, whether that’s true or false, RMIT lab was given 800 Australian dollars per “check,” up to 40,000 per month – with the contract stipulating that RMIT would run up to 50 articles through its “fact-checking machine” each month.
The issue that this discovery sheds light on is the nature of these arrangements – namely, “independent fact-checkers” seem to be very much involved in commercial dealings with social media giants, which has the inherent potential to sway the results of their work in a desired direction.
At the same time, given the reach and influence of the huge platforms where content is “arranged” in a certain way thanks, among other things, to the work of these organizations, this means that public opinion could be unfairly influenced through biased information.
RMIT University, which is behind RMIT FactLab, maintains that the group is in fact independent and that the money comes from “philanthropic donations and independent research grants.”
The head of a national medical organization who publicly called for doctors to lose their licenses unless they supported government narratives on COVID-19 treatments and vaccines concealed his relationship with a public relations firm whose client list also included Pfizer, Moderna and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Dr. Richard Baron, president and CEO of the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) is a client of Weber Shandwick, investigative journalist Paul D. Thacker reported on Wednesday.
According to Thacker, “Weber Shandwick’s panel featuring Dr. Baron has been widely promoted by the PR firm’s employees,” including Sarah Mahoney, executive vice president, Healthcare Communications, Strategy & Planning for Weber Shandwick, who in a LinkedIn post, wrote she “can’t think of a more important topic right now.”
The CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD) in September 2020 awarded Weber a $50 million contract “to promote the vaccination of children, pregnant women and those at risk for flu and increase the general acceptance and use of vaccines,” according to the PR firm’s website.
Under the contract, Weber employees were embedded in the NCIRD to “communicate the risks and recommended actions for outbreaks and convey vaccine recommendations to healthcare providers,” according to Thacker.
Medicine has always been ‘in bed with Big Pharma’
Several doctors have faced disciplinary action by state medical boards for allegedly spreading “misinformation.” One of them is internist and biological warfare epidemiologist Dr. Meryl Nass, a member of Children Health Defense’s scientific advisory committee.
Nass on Thursday sued the Maine Board of Licensure, which suspended her license in January 2022.
The board’s suspension arose from its adoption of a position statement promulgated by the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) threatening physicians “who generate and spread COVID-19 vaccine misinformation” with suspension or revocation of their medical license.
Nass told The Defender that in order to get certified by organizations like ABIM, there are several requirements, primarily related to demonstrating competence in one’s field of specialization, including completing a residency, being certified by the residency director, and paying for and passing the board examinations.
Nass told The Defender that in order to get certified by organizations like ABIM, there are several requirements. She explained:
“You complete a medical residency in your field of specialization. Your residency director certifies your competence and moral character, and you must pay for and pass your board examination to demonstrate your command of your specialty.
“When you’ve paid them for board certification and successfully completed all the requirements, how can they change the rules 20 or 50 years later and say, ‘we’re going to decertify you now because we don’t like your viewpoint?’
“There was nothing in any documentation from the Board of Internal Medicine about misinformation, or any other standards that the board can impose apart from competency to practice when it issued certifications.”
Dr. Richard Eggleston, a retired ophthalmologist in Clarkston, Washington, also faces disciplinary action — by the Washington Medical Commission — arising from articles he published in a local newspaper in 2021, questioning the official narrative and medical advice related to COVID-19.
Doctors aren’t being targeted exclusively for spreading “misinformation” — some, like Dr. Mary Kelly Sutton, an integrative physician, were targeted for their less-than-100% support for COVID-19 vaccines.
Last month, the Massachusetts medical board revoked Sutton’s medical license, claiming she improperly exempted eight children from required school vaccinations. This came a year after California also revoked Sutton’s medical license.
Sutton told The Defender, “The voice of medicine today is determined by the marketing wisdom of Madison Avenue, not by what is sound information from scientific research.”
Sutton said the whole practice of medicine rests on sharing and providing information necessary for informed decisions and consent. When specialty boards issue vague accusations, they engage in “harassment,” and an “egregious overreach of power” and are obstructing the practice of medicine.
A California law aimed at punishing doctors for providing “misinformation” to their patients is now in “legal limbo” following conflicting rulings in state courts earlier this year, which could affect Sutton’s and other California doctors’ cases going through the courts.
This trail of evidence demonstrates medical boards are not simply acting on their own authority but in collusion with state governments, federal agencies and private companies.
“There’s no one who is a ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’ expert whose opinion does not align with the government and with the corporations,” Thacker told The Defender. “That’s what makes them an ‘expert.’”
“What’s always been true is that medicine has been in bed with Big Pharma,” he added. “It’s now becoming a lot more transparent. These relationships are much more transparent.”
‘A very political attempt to shut down people from having alternative viewpoints’
According to Thacker, Baron began his “crusade for the biopharmaceutical industry” in September 2021. In a post for ABIM’s blog, Baron said, “I want to state unequivocally that ABIM can and does take action, independent of state licensing boards, to remove certification from physicians for unprofessional and unethical behavior.”
For Thacker, Baron’s concern about “misinformation” was first triggered when physicians spoke out against COVID-19 vaccine safety, efficacy and side effects. “These are the same concerns held by Weber Shandwick, who Pfizer and Moderna are paying big buck[s] to promote their vaccines,” he said.
“Baron’s relationship with Weber Shandwick was not disclosed” by JAMA, Thacker said, “nor in an accompanying viewpoint Baron wrote for JAMA.”
After an inquiry by Thacker, JAMA’s editor-in-chief, Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, said, “We initiated our internal investigation earlier this week, in accordance with our standard processes for allegations of non-disclosure of conflicts.”
“It is notable that Baron has done his best to mislead the public and other physicians about what he is doing,” Nass said. “He claims the ABIM is trying to ‘protect the legitimacy of medical expertise’ rather than censoring viewpoints it does not like.”
Nass said Baron “conjures up examples of what the board might censure.” She pointed to a Feb. 23, 2023, New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) article Baron co-authored with attorney Carl J. Coleman, which stated:
“When a licensed physician insists that viruses don’t cause disease or that COVID-19 vaccines magnetize people or connect them to cell towers, professional bodies must be able to take action in support of fact and evidence based practice.”
“Yet this is a fabrication,” Nass said, adding:
“Instead, Dr. Baron, who earns about $1.2 million yearly from the ABIM and the ABIM Foundation, has decertified Drs. Peter McCullough, Paul Marik and Pierre Kory — all highly celebrated, published and esteemed doctors in their fields.
“None of them have uttered any mumbo-jumbo about cell towers, magnetism or a non-viral etiology for COVID-19. All have had their board certifications revoked for the viewpoints they expressed — viewpoints that are supported by a preponderance of the medical literature.”
In a January 2022 article for Health Affairs, Coleman wrote, “Licensing boards are state agencies subject to the First Amendment, and as such they are limited in their ability to penalize physicians based on the content of their speech.”
Yet, a 2022 NEJM article co-authored by Baron argued that while “Differences of opinion in medicine are necessary for progress … there are some opinions that have been so thoroughly repudiated by existing evidence as to be considered definitively wrong.”
‘All this money is sloshing around now for misinformation research’
According to Thacker, “PR firms are now moving into the ‘disinformation’ space after decades of deceit on behalf of multiple industries,” with Weber Shandwick having “expanded into the disinformation space in late 2021,” promoting tactics that help “brands combat misinformation and disinformation that may implicate them.”
Speaking to Thacker, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, director of bioethics at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, said, “The ABIM is clearly part of this ‘medical misinformation’ push, which is orchestrated by pharmaceutical companies and their PR allies” and which serves “the interests of Big Pharma.”
Remarking on the presence of a “medical misinformation” panel at SXSW, long known as a music, film and technology festival, Thacker told The Defender, “Anyone and everyone is getting involved in ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation.’”
“Baron has given a TED Talk, for instance. Why is TED Talks involved in this?” he asked.
For Thacker, the answer relates to financial interests. “All this money is sloshing around now for ‘misinformation’ research. Anyone can hop up and down saying ‘I’m an expert on misinformation and disinformation, get me a grant, get me on a panel,’” he said.
Weber embedded staffers within the CDC while representing Pfizer, Moderna
Thacker wrote that prior to discovering Baron’s ties to Weber Shandwick, he had confirmed the PR firm’s ties to COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers Pfizer and Moderna.
These ties did not prevent the CDC from awarding the $50 million contract to Weber Shandwick in September 2020 to push vaccines. The Daily Mail subsequently reported Thacker’s findings.
Medical Marketing and Media reported “Weber’s duties include providing 10 on-site health communications staffers, seven health comms specialists, two health research specialists and one social media specialist” to NCIRD, as well as “generating story ideas, distributing articles and conducting outreach to news, media and entertainment organizations.”
In October 2020, a blog post by Stacy Montejo, senior vice president at Weber Shandwick, disclosed that Pfizer is one of the firm’s clients. A month later, with Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine awaiting Emergency Use Authorization, the company hired Weber Shandwick to handle the vaccine’s publicity, according to PR Week.
Such relationships have continued to the present. In June, Moderna announced a new communications strategy “to further educate the world about Moderna’s mRNA technology and its promise to transform the future of human health.”
The effort is led by Laura Schoen, “who is sometimes titled president of global healthcare at Weber Shandwick, and other times chief healthcare officer at IPG DXTRA, Weber Shandwick’s parent company,” Thacker wrote.
Lucy Rieck, a Weber Shandwick employee, previously publicly tweeted support for a panel Moderna proposed for this year’s SXSW, titled “COVID, Monkeypox, Disease X, What’s Next?” That proposal does not appear to have been accepted for presentation.
Conflicts of interest between Weber Shandwick, the CDC and NCIRD, and Pfizer and Moderna do not appear to have been disclosed.
In October 2022, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) sent a letter to the CDC inquiring about its relationship with Weber Shandwick and requesting “information regarding the nature of Weber’s work for the NCIRD.” It’s unclear whether the CDC complied with the request.
Todd S. Richardson, one of the attorneys representing Eggleston, told The Defender “While it is certainly understandable that governmental agencies will hire PR firms to help them get their message out … it becomes of real concern to me when those agencies, or people working within the agencies, try to silence those who disagree.”
According to Thacker, the web of relationships between Weber Shandwick doesn’t just extend to Big Pharma companies, the CDC and its agencies, or to doctors such as Baron. Academics such as Brown University’s Claire Wardle, Ph.D., a key figure in the “misinformation research” space, have participated in some of the firm’s events.
Wardle, a professor of the practice of Health Services, Policy and Practice at Brown University who has no scientific or medical credentials, participated in an online meeting organized by Weber Shandwick in October 2020 to discuss “election misinformation.”
Subsequently, Wardle played a key advisory role in the Biden administration, federal agencies, social media platforms and Ivy League institutions as they sought to censor content that ran counter to the government’s COVID-19 narrative.
According to Thacker, she “helped organize many of today’s campus disinformation groups … with funding from Google” and later sent Twitter a report aimed at countering the “growing threat of disinformation to trust in COVID-19 vaccines.”
Thacker said the biopharmaceutical industry is “the smartest at putting out disinformation. What other industry has bought off the medical community and the science community?” he asked. “They bought off the researchers, the government, the academic journals.”
Thacker said he believes much of what is labeled “misinformation” in medicine and academic research “is really just corporate PR,” and that “Congress needs to take a harder look at funding for ‘misinformation research.’“
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.”
When he retired in December 2022, Dr. Anthony Fauci, then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) was the highest-paid federal employee and the recipient of the largest federal retirement package in history.
Fauci’s successor, Dr. Jeanne M. Marrazzo, will soon take over leadership of the agency — and its $6.3 billion budget.
Fauci praised Marrazzo, telling CNN, “She’s very well-liked. She’s a really good person. I think she’s going to do a really good job.”
But some of her critics, including medical and public health experts interviewed by The Defender, questioned Marrazzo’s suitability for leading NIAID, citing her limited experience as a medical practitioner and her role in supervising clinical trials of remdesivir, a controversial drug used to treat hospitalized COVID-19 patients.
Critics also called out her steadfast support for strict restrictions and countermeasures during the pandemic, and her receipt, since 1997, of more than $20 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and payments from Big Pharma — including from Gilead, the manufacturer of remdesivir.
Before being named director of the NIAID, Marrazzo was director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the UAB at Birmingham. She will replace Dr. Hugh Auchincloss, who has served as NIAID’s acting director following Fauci’s departure.
Commenting on the appointment, Brian Hooker, Ph.D., senior director of science and research for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), said:
“It looks like Dr. Marrazzo will give us more of the same, unfortunately. Her flip-flopping, penchant for Big Pharma, and support of draconian public health (control) measures mean that she’ll take a reactionary posture to any ‘pandemic threat’ and may be as gleeful as Fauci at the prospect of new pandemics.
“I have dim hopes that she may learn some lessons while the investigations into Fauci lying to Congress play out. However, these bureaucrats don’t really believe that the law applies to them.”
The NIAID is the second largest center at the NIH. According to CNN, it “supports research to advance the understanding, diagnosis and treatment of infectious, immunologic and allergic diseases,” as well as “research at universities and research organizations around the United States and across NIAID’s 21 laboratories.”
“Marrazzo fits the mold of every public health leader so far that has led the charge during the pandemic,” Dr. Kat Lindley, president of the Global Health Project and director of the Global COVID Summit, told The Defender.
Lindley added:
“My concern with Marrazzo is actually her Big Pharma ties, her lack of clinical experience with COVID-19 in particular, and her blatant ignorance on early treatment and support for unproven, scientifically debunked measures, in particular masking.
“Any scientist or physician should understand that masking has never proven to be effective and, in the case of children, even detrimental.”
Touted remdesivir as ‘silver bullet’ for treating COVID
During her tenure at UAB, the university served as one of the clinical trial sites for remdesivir, an antiviral originally developed by Gilead Sciences as a treatment for Hepatitis C and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).
According to the NIH, the trial was intended “to evaluate the safety and efficacy of the investigational antiviral remdesivir in hospitalized adults diagnosed with coronavirus disease 2019.” Marrazzo supervised the UAB trial site.
UAB has long served as a research site for remdesivir. A February 2021 UAB report states, “Gilead entered into collaboration with the UAB-led Antiviral Drug Development and Discovery Center … to study remdesivir against coronaviruses” in 2014.
“These earlier studies enabled remdesivir to more quickly be tested and approved for human use as a treatment for COVID-19 when the 2020 pandemic struck,” UAB stated.
The trial results, published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) in November 2020, found remdesivir shortened “the time to recovery in adults who were hospitalized with COVID-19 and had evidence of lower respiratory tract infection.”
Fauci later praised remdesivir as the “standard of care” for treating COVID-19.
However, according to investigative journalist Jordan Schachtel, studies “show that there are zero clinical benefits to injecting patients with remdesivir. Many studies show that remdesivir can severely injure vital organs such as the heart and kidneys.”
Yet, Marrazzo never disclosed a conflict of interest when publicly commenting on remdesivir, Schachtel said. She described it as a “silver bullet” in remarks shared with The Washington Post in July 2020, and in tweets praising the drug.
“Given the UAB-Gilead partnership, one would think that Dr. Marrazzo would refrain from commenting on issues through which she maintained a clear conflict of interest,” Schachtel wrote. “She did no such thing.”
According to the U.S. government’s Open Payments database, Marrazzo received seven payments from Gilead, totaling $2,474.93.
But as Marrazzo repeatedly praised remdesivir — and, according to Schachtel, has “never shown remorse” for this despite mounting evidence of the harm it has caused — she has repeatedly spoken out against hydroxychloroquine for treating COVID-19.
In June 2020, in reference to a study published in the NEJM claiming hydroxychloroquine is ineffective in protecting people from COVID-19, Marrazzo said these findings “should provide a very big nail in the coffin” for the use of this treatment.
The following month, Marrazzo called a video that went viral on social media describing hydroxychloroquine as a cure for COVID-19 “very irresponsible and despicable,” adding that she was “glad that video is hopefully not being shared very much.”
In October 2021, she said hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin hold “special appeal” to the unvaccinated.
Yet, in April 2020, prior to the conclusion of the remdesivir clinical trial, Marrazzo said, “We are using it [hydroxychloroquine] in our hospital … for a range of patients including when patients are beginning to deteriorate,” adding:
“And lots of media folks are asking what we think about hydroxychloroquine. And the reality is that we live and die by the evidence. And one issue is the argument about whether it’s even ethical to use these treatments when we don’t have the evidence.
“But I would get back to the compassionate use argument. When you have a patient who’s dying, you have to use what you can, what’s available.”
Cheerleader for COVID vaccines and Merck’s molnupiravir
Marrazzo has also praised COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics. In May 2020, she was “hopeful” about the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine clinical trial — despite its enrollment of only eight volunteers, saying “We don’t have the luxury of time here in this case.”
In January 2022, Marrazzo said “Vaccination makes the biggest difference” in fighting COVID-19, adding that “boosters, of course, are going to augment that protection.”
And in October 2021, Marrazzo praised molnupiravir, Merck’s antiviral pill for COVID-19, stating it had “extraordinary potential.” Results of a preprint study later showed the drug may fuel the development of new and potentially deadly variants of COVID-19.
Cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough told The Defender Marrazzo “has been willfully blind to the failure of COVID-19 vaccines” and “appears incapable of mastering the four pillars of pandemic response to lead America through the next pandemic: 1) contagion control, 2) early treatment, 3) late treatment and 4) vaccination.”
A ‘slap in the face’ to vaccine, hospital protocol victims
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Marrazzo made frequent television appearances in which, according to a UAB statement, she “helped inform the world … sharing critical information and perspectives.” UAB touted Marrazzo as a COVID-19 expert during this period.
According to AL.com, Marrazzo was on Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey’s COVID-19 task force, supporting “emergency public health measures that closed business and mandated mask wearing.”
In March 2020, Marrazzo supported “flattening the curve,” calling on the public “to make personal sacrifices for the greater good.” In similar statements made on May 8, 2020, Marrazzo warned of a “backslide” if measures like social distancing were loosened.
In a June 2020 YouTube video, “Why you should wear a mask,” Marrazzo said, “Masks have contributed to the control of this pandemic in other communities.” She called for masks for schoolchildren over age 6 and included mask-wearing in a list of “Three basic rules” along with hand washing and social distancing.
In an article she co-authored and in which she highlighted “the intersection of the COVID-19, HIV, and STI pandemics,” Marrazzo drew parallels between wearing masks and wearing condoms, writing:
“Condoms reduce transmission of HIV and bacterial STIs effectively, if used adequately and consistently, but lack of access to condoms or perhaps even personal preference limits their utility.
“As a correlate to barrier protection, masking has proven effective to reduce the expulsion of SARS-CoV-2 and other respiratory virus droplets.”
The paper also repeated claims regarding the “lack of benefit” of hydroxychloroquine, zinc and vitamins C and D in treating COVID-19. Conversely, referring to the COVID-19 vaccines, the authors stated, “There were few serious adverse events in either arm, and there were no deaths related to the vaccine.”
Blaming the unvaccinated
In May 2021, she criticized loosened Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommendations that the vaccinated do not need to wear masks, stating that because less than 50% were vaccinated in her community, she would still wear a mask indoors despite being fully vaccinated herself.
In July 2021 she warned of a “summer surge” that would be fueled by the unvaccinated.
In December 2021 Marrazzo again scolded the unvaccinated. “Your decision to get infected is unfortunately not just going to be affecting you,” she said. “It’s going to be serving a source of incredible infectiousness going forward.”
Dr. Scott Atlas, a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force during the Trump administration, told KUSI News San Diego that Marrazzo “was completely wrong about COVID … Pushing pseudoscience, pushing … her belief that vaccines stopped the spread of the infection, that children have high risk, and that masks were efficacious.”
“Marrazzo represents everything that was done wrong in the handling of COVID,” said Gail Seiler, Texas chairperson, Projects and Content, for the FormerFedsGroup Freedom Foundation and a survivor of the CDC’s COVID-19 hospital protocols, including administration of remdesivir.
Seiler told The Defender that Marrazzo advocated for no early treatment until the patient “worsened to the point of hospitalization,” and at that point to give remdesivir, “a drug that she profits from.”
Seiler added:
“Because of people like Marrazzo, patients in the hospital were given no hope of survival. Because of her ignoring the evidence, over a million people died who shouldn’t have.
“Her selection to the NIAID is a slap in the face to every family whose loved ones were killed by the protocols she profited from. And it exemplifies why the general public has lost trust in agencies such as the NIAID.”
Financial ties to Big Pharma
Marrazzo received a total of $20,405,337 in NIH grants for 67 studies between 1997 and 2023, according to NIH data. These grants ranged between $6,000 and $2.82 million and averaged over $304,000 per grant.
Open Payments data show Marrazzo has received $28,761,36 across 37 “general payments” and $152,208.42 across seven payments for “associated research funding,” including $18,636.59 in consulting fees, $4,500 in honorariums, and payments from companies such as Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, Gilead, Janssen and Abbott Laboratories.
Her employer, UAB, received at least two Gates Foundation grants pertaining to health-related research in recent years. This includes a June 2021 grant, “Modeling Impact of Service Delivery Redesign” totaling over $1.5 million, and a $124,921 grant in April 2020 for a project titled “COVID-19 CTA: HTS Core for screening compounds.”
UAB’s Division of Infectious Diseases boasts “an active research portfolio with approximately $39 million in external research funding.” Research specialties include “Pathogenesis of viral infections,” “Antiviral therapy,” “Travel medicine and international health” and “Host defenses and infectious diseases in immunocompromised patients.”
Big supporter of gain-of-function research
UAB also houses a BSL3 research laboratory, the Southeastern Biosafety Laboratory Alabama Birmingham (SEBLAB), funded in part by NIH. According to UAB, it is “one of a limited number of institutions,” adding that the university ranks “among the top 25 in funding from the National Institutes of Health.”
The university states that SEBLAB researchers are “able to bring their skills to bear on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, and other issues directly relevant to biodefense and emerging infectious disease,” with a focus on NIAID “priority pathogens” and discovery of “new treatments to prevent or combat” diseases caused by infectious agents.
These projects have also included “Testing drugs on SARS-CoV-2,” a process involving growing the virus in SEBLAB. According to UAB researcher Kevin Harrod, Ph.D.,“We grow the viruses, measure them and provide them to the BARDA [the U.S. government’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority] contractor.”
BSL3 and BSL4 laboratories across the U.S. and the world have been associated with controversial gain-of-function research, which some have said is responsible for the development and subsequent alleged leak from one such facility, the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, leading to prominent calls to end such research.
According to Independent Institute, “Marrazzo’s views on the origin of COVID-19 are hard to find,” as are her views on gain-of-function research.
Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., a professor of international law at the University of Illinois who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, told The Defender that Marrazzo’s selection signals that the NIH and NIAID have no intention of stopping gain-of-function research at BSL3 and BSL4 facilities.
Boyle said:
“They will have her in place to deal with the next pandemic that they know is coming out of their own BSL3 and BSL4 labs, just as Fauci dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic that came out of the Wuhan BSL4 and the University of North Carolina BSL3 and that Fauci and [former NIH Director] Francis Collins funded.
“Under her auspices NIAID will continue to research, develop, manufacture and stockpile every hideous type of Nazi biological warfare weapon known to humanity … There will be no end to it and to these death scientists like her … unless and until we stop them by criminal prosecutions.”
Boyle called Marrazzo a “Fauci clone, not an original and independent thinker,” adding, “The Bidenites and the globalists and Big Pharma behind them picked her to continue the Fauci/NIAID policies and programs across the board.”
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.”
I am not a big fan of Federal Government disaster relief. Too much of the time the money never gets to those who need it most, and too often Washington’s armies of disaster “experts” are more interested in pushing people around than helping them.
Nevertheless, it’s hard to look at recent footage of the devastation in Maui and then hear President Biden tell Congress that he needs another $24 billion for Ukraine. How can this Administration continue to justify tens of billions of dollars for this losing war that is not in our interest while the rest of the United States disintegrates?
Biden’s new $24 billion request comes on top of well over $120 billion already spent to fight the US proxy war on Russia in Ukraine. Heritage Foundation budget expert Richard Stern has done the math and determined that Biden’s spending on the Ukraine war thus far will cost each and every American household $900. How many Americans would rather have those $900 dollars back in their pocket rather than in the pockets of Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon, and Ukraine’s oligarchs?
Recent surveys have shown that a majority of Americans could not afford to cover a sudden $1,000 emergency. Will Americans connect the dots and realize that the reason they can’t find that $1,000 for an emergency is because the neocons have already sent it to Ukraine?
Ukraine has long been known as among the most corrupt countries on earth and not long ago investigative journalist Seymore Hersh wrote that Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelensky has embezzled at least $400 million in aid from the American people. Corruption scandals continue to break in Ukraine. Just last week Zelensky fired the heads of all local draft boards for corruption. Some press reports suggest that sales of luxury cars in Ukraine have broken all previous records. I wonder why.
No wonder the tide of US public opinion is turning against further involvement in the war. Recently CNN found that among all Americans, more than 55 percent are opposed to continued aid to Ukraine. Among Republicans the number opposing more aid to Ukraine rises to three-out-of-four. That is why we are finally starting to see more Republican Members raising concerns. I’d like to think they have seen the light that an aggressive and interventionist foreign policy is not in America’s interest, but most likely they are worried about losing elections. Whatever their motivation, this turning tide should be welcomed.
Yet the Biden Administration persists in backing Ukraine even as the US mainstream media is increasingly pointing out the obvious: Ukraine is not winning and cannot win, and continuing to pour money into a losing cause will just result in bankruptcy at home and more dead Ukrainians overseas.
Last week Newsweek published an article asking, “Does Ukraine Have Kompromat on Joe Biden?” In the article, Northeastern University Professor Max Abrahms wonders out loud whether Biden’s continued support for Ukraine might be related to compromising information held in Kiev about the many Biden family shady business ventures in Ukraine and the region. It is certainly worth considering.
Meanwhile, the residents of Maui that survived the recent horrific fire will take little comfort knowing that the Biden Administration is more interested in sending their money to Ukraine than in helping them recover.
Whistleblower Dr. Umberto Meduri – a world expert on corticosteroids who helped found the FLCCC – joins Dr. Paul Marik and Dr. Pierre Kory to talk about his fight against the forces trying to stop the use of another lifesaving, repurposed, affordable drug.
US Attorney General Merrick Garland, who works for President Joe Biden, desperately wants the world to know that the government’s investigation of his boss’ son is utterly apolitical. America’s top law-enforcement official is so desperate, in fact, that he has appointed a special counsel to handle the case.
That’s right. No mere employee of Garland’s US Department of Justice (DOJ) is going to be leading the criminal investigation of Hunter Biden. Garland on Friday assigned a special counsel to the case because he wanted to demonstrate to Americans the DOJ’s “commitment to both independence and accountability in particularly sensitive matters.”
Make no mistake: This is definitely one of those “particularly sensitive matters.” The president’s son has been accused of a litany of crimes – from failing to pay taxes to making an illegal gun purchase to transporting women across state lines for prostitution. It turns out he’s the sort of guy who was brazen enough to take pictures of himself smoking crack and driving his Porsche at 172 miles per hour, then to leave those images and countless other incriminating files on a laptop computer that he abandoned at a Delaware repair shop.
Most sensitive politically is the evidence suggesting that Hunter Biden ran an influence-peddling operation in which he allegedly solicited bribes in Ukraine and other countries by selling the family “brand.” The brand was then-Vice President Joe Biden and the political clout that he could wield for the family’s friends.
Those claims are the most serious because they connect the commander-in-chief to the alleged conspiracy. In fact, Hunter Biden allegedly patched in his father on conference calls with overseas business associates and once tried to coerce a Chinese businessman to resolve a payment dispute by claiming that Joe Biden was sitting next to him and would make the partner regret failing to comply.
President Biden has angrily denied having been with his son when the shakedown message was sent. He also has repeatedly denied having any knowledge of or involvement in his son’s business dealings. As evidence continues to mount to the contrary, it’s easy to see why Garland is concerned about public perceptions heading into the 2024 presidential election.
Republicans have accused the DOJ of giving the president’s son preferential treatment and of trying to protect the Biden family as Joe Biden seeks re-election. Two-thirds of US voters polled by Rasmussen Reports agreed, saying Hunter Biden got favorable treatment from federal prosecutors because his father is the president.
If all that doesn’t make the investigation politically sensitive enough, the cherry on top is that a DOJ special counsel has filed dozens of felony charges against Biden’s chief 2024 rival, former President Donald Trump, in two separate cases. Trump, the first ex-president in US history to be criminally indicted, has claimed that politically motivated prosecutors are trying to interfere in the election because Biden can’t defeat him in a rematch of their 2020 battle.
Garland’s solution was to appoint a special counsel in the Biden case. However, it turns out that the prosecutor assigned to the role is the same DOJ employee who has been running the Hunter Biden investigation since 2019. David Weiss, US attorney for the district of Delaware, was elevated to special counsel status at his own request. “Upon considering his request, as well as the extraordinary circumstances relating to this matter, I have concluded it is in the public interest to appoint him as special counsel,” Garland said.
The Pro-Biden press corps – meaning pretty much the entire US legacy media – nodded approvingly. For example, the New Republic was quick to claim that Biden’s attorney general had “annihilated several main Republican talking points.” The move “fully insulated the investigation from accusations of government interference,” the outlet added. NBC News said “distrustful” Republicans were still critical of the appointment.
As Garland pointed out, as special counsel Weiss will no longer be subject to “day-to-day supervision” by any Department of Justice (DOJ) official. And if the administration were to torpedo the investigation or block the filing of any charges, Garland would be required to inform Congress. The attorney general and Biden’s media backers also have noted that Weiss was appointed to his job by Trump and was allowed to continue leading the Hunter Biden investigation when the new president came into office.
But what really changed? Garland has repeatedly claimed that Weiss was given full authority all along to make prosecutorial decisions without any interference from higher-ups. If Garland is to be believed, Weiss merely has the same authority now, and his prosecutorial decisions will still have to conform with DOJ policies. He will have broad authority to file charges in any jurisdiction he chooses, but his boss insisted that he had that latitude before.
Weiss has backed up Garland’s claims that the investigation has been free of political interference. He denied allegations from IRS whistleblowers that the administration had declined to give him special-counsel status and that he had been prevented from filing indictments against the president’s son in Washington and Los Angeles, where some of the alleged crimes supposedly occurred.
Republican lawmakers were unimpressed by the fact Weiss was appointed as a US attorney by Trump, pointing instead to actions that suggested he was trying to protect the Bidens. The Delaware prosecutor’s investigation dragged on for four years, during which the DOJ declined to set the record straight when former US intelligence officials falsely claimed the laptop scandal was a Russian disinformation operation, deceiving voters just before the 2020 election. When Weiss finally did file an indictment in June, it was limited to tax and gun matters.
Weiss made a deal with defense lawyers that called for the felony gun charge to be dropped if Biden adhered to the terms of a diversion agreement. The president’s son also was enabled to avoid jail time on the two misdemeanor tax charges to which he agreed to plead guilty. It was a political happy ending that would allow Hunter Biden to move on, free of any felonies on his record, and end the distraction he was creating for his father’s re-election campaign.
Unfortunately for the Bidens, US District Court Judge Maryellen Noreika was taken aback by the deal, at least partly because it appeared that Weiss had given Hunter Biden immunity from prosecution for other possible crimes. The judge refused to accept the plea bargain late last month and sent the lawyers back to the drawing board to work out a revised agreement. Weiss said in a court filing on Friday that talks on a new plea deal were at an “impasse,” suggesting that the case was headed for trial.
It’s unlikely that such a trial would ever be allowed to happen, making a public spectacle of the allegations against Hunter Biden at a time when his father is asking voters for another four-year term in the White House. Even as Garland assures the public that the investigation will be guided “only by the facts and the law,” Weiss will have other concerns. Whether he carries the title of special counsel or US attorney for the district of Delaware, his job is to give the appearance of enforcing the law without causing any serious harm to the Bidens.
Peter Gøtzsche reviewed every randomised mammography screening trial ever conducted for the Cochrane Collaboration. Cochrane’s headline is that, assuming a 15% mortality reduction, one woman in 2000 avoids dying of breast cancer over ten years. Ten are overdiagnosed and treated. Two hundred experience false alarms.
But that headline assumes the reduction. When Gøtzsche looked only at the trials with adequate randomisation — the higher-quality ones — the reduction disappeared. No effect on breast cancer mortality. No effect on all-cause mortality.
This is the Cochrane finding, published in the establishment’s own database of systematic reviews.
No woman being asked to consent to a mammogram this week knows it.
That is why the new Unbekoming paperback exists. … continue
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