By Jonathan Turley | September 1, 2023
I recently wrote how the Washington Post issued a statement that declared that the newspaper was “standing by” columnist Philip Bump on his proven false claims on subjects ranging from Lafayette Park to Russian collusion. Bump’s prior claims have not only been conclusively shown to be false but other major media outlets have now rejected those claims. However, the Post claimed this week that they are in fact true in response to one of my earlier columns.
Now, Miranda Devine at the New York Post has written about a meltdown by Bump in a podcast interview with Noam Dworman, owner of New York’s own Comedy Cellar. Dworman had asked Bump to explain some of his claims and Bump offered one of the most vivid examples of the new media and it is chilling. After declaring that “I’m gonna lose my mind,” he stormed out of the interview after refusing to address the contradictions and dubious claims in his prior columns.
Dworman’s podcast interview stands as one of the most revealing and vivid examples of how the media has changed in the age of rage. Bump moves quickly from the conversational to crazed when simply asked about the basis for his claims in the Washington Post.
Dworman was asking about the mounting evidence and contradictions in the Biden corruption scandal. Some of us have said that there is evidence of obvious corruption and influence peddling, but more investigation is needed to establish any basis for impeachment or criminal charges involving President Biden. Bump, however, will have none of it. The Post writer (who demanded investigations of a wide array of Republicans on false stories with little evidence) is vehement that there is nothing to see here . . . and the public just has to take his word for it.
Dworman remains polite and pushes Bump to simply engage him in explaining some of the countervailing evidence. Bump responds “I just I’m gonna lose my mind. I’m gonna lose my mind.”
As the interview shuts down, Dworman asks “is there nothing we can talk about … half the country believes this stuff.”
Bump: “I know, because half the country doesn’t actually dig into the issues.”
Dworman: “Here’s your chance to disabuse people. They don’t read the Washington Post.”
Bump will have nothing of it as Dworman continues to try to get him to explain his controversial writings: “There’s just no point, because all you want to do is you want to have me here as the putative expert so that you can present me with things that have been debunked multiple times that I’ve written about.”
Dworman: “What’s been debunked?”
Bump: “These, these claims. I’ve written about this, this argument about his dad calling him. I’ve written about this. Did you read what I wrote?”
Dworman: “It’s not debunked. Neither of us were there.”
Bump: “Well, I debunked it in the standpoint that I’ve already addressed this and presented the counterarguments to it.”
Of course, Bump has been repeatedly shown to have pushed false claims and then refused to admit to his errors. Moreover, he has repeatedly been criticized for not honestly presenting the counterarguments.
Dworman makes another valiant effort: “I have two issues here. One is Joe Biden’s behavior and one is the issue of the press. The press actually bothers me more than Joe Biden.”
Bump, however, has all but left the building: “Because you don’t listen to the press. I’m sitting here and I’m telling you, you’re wrong about these things, and you don’t listen, and you continue to insist upon things that are, you know, parsing of language. And it’s just, it’s this is why I keep saying it’s silly.” He then says that he is leaving.
Dworman responded “Well, it’s a shame because this is a good conversation.”
Bump: “It’s not a good conversation, because you refuse to listen to what I’m saying to you. You asked me on to present evidence. I keep telling you.”
However, what he “keeps telling” Dworman and the public is to just accept his conclusions and not question his support and analysis.
Bump then walks out with a statement that captures perfectly the new media. He first attacks independent journalist Matt Taibbi and says that he has “an agenda.”
Dworman delivers a haymaker in response and states “You have no agenda.”
That is when Bump delivers his exit line that foreshadowed the Post statement on my column: “I do have an agenda … My agenda is to do my best to try and present accurate information to the public. And I have an institution behind me to hold me to account when I don’t do that, which I think is an important consideration.”
Indeed, the Post would then stand entirely behind Bump and claim that all of his false statements were true. Even when other media have acknowledged that these claims were false, the Post insists that they remain true. Thus, the Post is now saying that the following are true despite findings by inspector generals and special counsels to the contrary: (1) Bill Barr did order the clearing of Lafayette Park for the Trump photo op, (2) Barr also lied when he denied the use of tear gas by federal personnel in Lafayette Park, (3) there was never any spying on the Trump campaign by the FBI, (4) Hunter Biden’s laptop was seeded with Russian disinformation, and (5) the Clinton campaign was not behind false Russian collusion claims. It is all now deemed true by the Post. It appears that, if “Democracy dies in darkness,” journalism more often dies in the light of day.
After all, the problem is not that they are false but that people just “don’t listen to the press. I’m sitting here and I’m telling you, you’re wrong about these things, and you don’t listen.”
For example, they can’t be sued for providing false or dishonest information
By John Droz Jr. | Critically Thinking About Select Societal Issues | August 10, 2023
This is an extraordinarily important commentary!
The gist of a current court case that you’ve likely never heard of, is that three heroic doctors are suing the FDA about the loss of their jobs, about their careers being derailed, about the loss of their reputation — all because their professional, scientific opinion as to what was in the best interest of their patients, was different than the political agenda of the FDA. (Here is a bit of background.)
What is at stake here could not be more significant, and it applies across the board to EVERY federal agency. The question is: do federal agencies have the unsupervised right to replace Science with political science? Put another way: can they act dishonestly, incompetently, etc. with essentially no meaningful consequences?
Here is the doctors’ Complaint. Although it was filed a year ago, it is now being appealed this week — and some fascinating audio clips have emerged. There are three judges on a panel, asking the attorney representing the FDA some probing questions.
Five of these short audio clips (3-5 minutes each) are posted here. (The recording of the full proceeding is here.)
IMO some of the key takeaway revelations (so far) are:
1 – The FDA seems to claim that their published warnings are little more than offhand observations. For example, their slamming of Ivermectin was evidently just casual commentary (what the FDA calls “informational”).
Note the title here, on this FDA page which is STILL up! It says “Why You Should Not Use Ivermectin to Treat or Prevent COVID-19”.
Note 1: This is a deceptive headline because that article is mostly saying: a) citizens should not self-medicate, and b) using any veterinary medications can be dangerous. Both of these are legitimate concerns. So, if the FDA was honestly trying to benefit the public their heading should be: “Why You Should Not Self-Medicate Using Veterinary-Grade Ivermectin to Treat or Prevent COVID-19”. BIG DIFFERENCE!
Note 2: This FDA page has changed quite a bit over time. Here is the 2021 version.
Note 3: The current page makes outright false statements like: “Ivermectin has not been shown to be safe or effective for these indications.” I’m one of the few people who has taken the time to put together a spreadsheet of ALL the studies on ALL the major COVID early treatment therapies: see it here.
There have now been 99 Ivermectin scientific studies, and the overall early treatment effectiveness is 62%. IVM’s extensive safety record is extraordinary, with adverse effects (e.g., see here) in the ballpark of only one in a million usages!
Now, also on my spreadsheet, compare what the FDA has approved for early treatment of COVID-19 therapy: Paxlovid = 32% effective with these adverse safety issues, and Molnupiravir = 16% effective with these problematic safety issues!
Despite these LARGE benefits of Ivermectin in effectiveness and safety, the FDA continues to say that “Ivermectin has not been shown to be safe or effective” for early treatment of COVID-19. This is stunningly inaccurate.
Note 4: Even though the FDA now has access to 99 Ivermectin studies, their statement against Ivermectin is stronger now than when the page originally appeared in 2021! IMO this is what happens when a federal agency feels that there is no meaningful oversight, so effectively they can say anything they want.
2 – The FDA says that Courts have no business in reviewing anything they say or do!
Considering the above facts in #1, it’s obvious why this would be their self-serving position. Listen carefully to the second short audio clip, where the FDA’s attorney appears to say that the FDA’s communication to the public can be knowingly false, dishonest, etc. with no oversight or consequences — even when deaths result!
Regretfully, to date, the courts have played along with this game of charades. For example, the Chevron case is frequently cited by non-aggressive attorneys to say that courts will stay out of determining whether FDA processes, documents, and claims are legal, accurate, honest, warranted, etc.
However, that is an oversimplified opinion. Even the Chevron case states that the FDA’s actions must be “reasonable” — but that is rarely argued. BTW, the case we are discussing here would never have been filed if the doctors’ attorneys bought into the bogus idea that federal agencies have unlimited deference. Kudos to them that they did not accept that absurd argument!
Maybe I’m overly optimistic, but based on the judges’ questions and comments in these clips, it seems to me that this case might eventually upend Chevron. That would be EXTRAORDINARILY beneficial for US citizens, as it would apply to all national policies: from immigration to education, energy to climate change, etc.
3 – The FDA asserts that the only recourse that US citizens have about even egregious errors and deceptions by the FDA is through the “political process.” Astounding!
4 – The FDA indicated that the “political process” means that citizens need to elect a competent and attentive President, whose responsibility it is to see that the FDA acts responsibly — or else. The flip side is that when we do not have such a President, all federal agencies have a four-year time period to wreak whatever political havoc that suits them — again, across the board, and without real consequences to the guilty parties.
5 – The FDA’s attorney implied that there would be no compensation given for inaccurate or knowingly false FDA statements — including those that lead to Americans unnecessarily dying — other than an FDA person may lose their job.
6 – Based on these select audio clips, the fact that hundreds of thousands of Americans likely died needlessly due to the FDA’s COVID actions and inactions (see here), was not fully addressed. Hopefully, this will be brought up in this trial.
7 – In clip #3, the FDA attorney makes the startling claim that the FDA has the authority to give citizens medical advice! How is that possible when they know nothing of the medical history of any American citizen? Further, once they assert that right, how is a conflict resolved between what the FDA says and what a citizen’s medical provider says? That is one of the major issues in this important case.
8 – In clip #4, the FDA attorney acknowledges that doctors have lost their jobs, etc. due to their scientific conclusions on such matters as Ivermectin, and their science-based actions that they believed were in the best interest of their patients. However, the FDA attorney then stated that no losses, etc. were due to anything the FDA did. (!)
……….
Note that a lot of the bad behavior with the FDA (and CDC) would be reduced if the Medical Establishment refused to play politics and instead supported real Science for the public. Regretfully, that has not happened and the COVID-19 fiasco exposed this ugly underbelly. See my Report on the COVID failings of the Medical Establishment.
In another Report, I compared the FDA’s approval process for Remdesivir to Ivermectin. This appears to show stunning incompetence at the FDA.
I have made this point before, but it’s worth repeating. The war we are engaged in is that powerful Left-wing forces (exterior and from within) are trying to take America down. One of their primary strategies to do this is to replace Science with political science. That is what this case is about, as the FDA is specifically arguing that they have the right to scrap Science and substitute political science — with impunity!
Draw your own conclusions, but to me, this case is like a Molotov cocktail thrown into the Federal Government bureaucracy. Astoundingly, all three branches of our government are complicit with this nonsense.
Some obvious questions that need to be answered and fixed are: 1) How did Congress give pharmaceutical companies such broad protections against self-serving unscientific actions? 2) How did the Executive branch allow agencies like the FDA to be run by parties that they are supposed to regulate? 3) How did our Judicial system allow bad actor agencies to arrange to have no real legal oversight?
Considering that these failings are applicable to multiple federal agencies, is there any question why such things as COVID policies (and energy, and climate, and education, and immigration, and elections, etc., etc.) are a disaster?
Hopefully, this lawsuit will crack open the door to fixing this horrific mess…
……….
PS — What needs to be done now :
1) Competent attorneys should file friend of the court briefs to support this nationally important case. Overturning the Chevron precedent would have extraordinarily positive benefits for almost ALL US citizens.
2) Competent federal legislators should introduce a “Save America” bill (aka Agency Oversight Act). This legislation will rein in ALL federal agencies, by providing timely and meaningful oversight (plus real penalties) to them all.
By James Bovard | New York Post | August 29, 2023
In Washington, conning the American people is always considered a victimless crime. The latest DC shellshocker is the National Archives blocking release of 5,000+ emails Vice President Joe Biden wrote using a pseudonym to shroud Biden family graft.
In ancient Rome, the consul Scipio was accused of abusing his power. He stood in front of the Senate, pulled out the written records of his reign and tore them to pieces. Scipio’s reputation was so impeccable that the audience cheered him, regardless of his destruction of evidence.
Bizarrely, this is the same template the liberal media use to whitewash President Biden. Americans don’t need to know the facts of how Biden has used his power because his intentions are good.
But the only reason his intentions appear good is because we don’t have the facts.
Consider the latest wacky revelations on the nom de crook. In response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the National Archives admitted there are 5,400 emails Biden apparently sent under fake names including robinware456@gmail.com, JRBWare@gmail.com and Robert.L.Peters@pci.gov.
A few of those emails have trickled out from other sources, revealing messages tied to Hunter Biden’s Ukraine hustle. But the Archives is refusing to reveal thousands of other messages despite disclosure demands from the House Oversight Committee.
Biden declared in 2019 that there was “an absolute wall” between Biden family foreign schemes and his own role as vice president. Apparently, the “absolute wall” only applied to the specific name “Joe Biden.”
Did Biden take a class in law school on Incognito Influence Peddling or what?
This is the second Biden scandal recently exposed. In 2018, Biden bragged to a Council on Foreign Relations audience that he threatened to withhold a billion dollars in foreign aid to Ukraine unless that government immediately fired its chief prosecutor in December 2015.
Biden claimed the prosecutor was corrupt, yet State Department and other documents released last week reveal that the Ukrainian prosecutor had Washington’s trust. But that prosecutor was closing in on Burisma, threatening the million dollars a year in payoffs pocketed by Hunter Biden.
If those documents had surfaced during the first Trump impeachment case in late 2019, Donald Trump’s behavior would have appeared less conniving and Biden would have looked more conniving. (Both of them would still have looked like hell.)
Two years after Biden finagled that firing to purify the US ally, Ukraine was ranked the most corrupt nation in Europe except for Russia.
Biden owes his 2020 presidential election victory to pervasive, perpetual federal coverups. The Hunter Biden laptop coverup was only the tip of the bureaucratic iceberg.
How many other Biden scandals are scattered like unexploded cluster bombs throughout federal filing cabinets inside the Beltway?
How many other FBI memos exist on potential Biden bribes that we have not heard about?
How many Treasury Department Suspicious Activity Reports on massive wire transfers from squirrely foreign entities to Biden Inc. have not surfaced?
Are there other IRS investigations that were squelched without a trace?
Federal secrecy and coverups switched more votes in 2020 than Trump’s antics in Georgia and elsewhere ever could have flipped. Biden’s yammering about how his election was “the will of the people” looks more deranged with each new exposé of his pre-election abuses.
Federal Judge Amy Berman Jackson declared in 2019, “If people don’t have the facts, democracy doesn’t work.” Why bother having a national election if the result merely reveals how many voters were hornswoggled by secrets the feds kept from them?
Politics has rarely been an honest business, but the combination of pervasive secrecy and perpetual deceit makes a mockery of every high-school civics-class lesson.
Will the National Archives go to the barricades to defend the privacy interest of Joe Biden’s imaginary friends? Will dogged investigators, congressional committees and whistleblowers obliterate the tattered remnants of Team Biden’s credibility? Will the liberal media cease invoking the president’s good intentions to expunge his crimes?
Analysis of the data so far shows the trial was underpowered, poorly designed and incomplete
BY MARYANNE DEMASI, PHD | AUGUST 24, 2023
In January 2021, in the absence of any human data in pregnancy, the CDC stated on its website that mRNA vaccines were “unlikely to pose a specific risk for people who are pregnant.”
Former CDC director Rochelle Walensky backed it up with a full-throated endorsement of covid-19 vaccination in pregnancy.
“There is no bad time to get vaccinated,” said Walensky.
“Get vaccinated while you’re thinking about having a baby, while you’re pregnant with your baby or after you’ve delivered your baby,” she added.
Behind the scenes however, Pfizer was scrambling to conduct a clinical trial of its vaccine in pregnant women.
By February 2022, Pfizer revealed it still did “not yet have a complete data set.” Its statement read:
“The environment changed during 2021 and by September 2021, COVID-19 vaccines were recommended by applicable recommending bodies (e.g., ACIP in the U.S.) for pregnant women in all participating/planned countries, and as a result the enrollment rate declined significantly.”
This month, Pfizer finally posted some trial results on clinicaltrials.gov.
The data do not appear in a peer-reviewed journal or a pre-print, nor has it been submitted to the FDA for evaluation.
I spoke with experts who have analysed the data with a fine-tooth comb and made some alarming observations.
Pfizer originally planned to recruit 4000 healthy women aged 18 or older who were 24 to 34 weeks pregnant. Half would be randomised to the vaccine and the other half to a saline placebo.
The efficacy and safety of the vaccine would be determined by assessing covid-19 cases, antibody responses, and adverse events.
Peculiarly, Pfizer planned to vaccinate all the mothers in the placebo group, one month after giving birth to their babies.
Retsef Levi, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management said that vaccinating mothers in the placebo group during the assessment period would introduce a new variable into the experiment and “corrupt” the data.
“We now know that mRNA from the vaccine is detected in the breast milk, so those babies born from mothers who were all vaccinated after giving birth, are also potentially exposed to mRNA through breastfeeding,” explained Levi.
“This corrupts the comparison of the two groups of babies because you don’t have a true control group anymore,” he added.
Less than 10% of the originally planned 4000 study participants ended up in the trial.
“Only 348 women were recruited – 174 in each arm – meaning that the trial was never going to have the statistical power, particularly when analysing potential harms,” said Levi.
Notably, study protocols indicate that Pfizer was given the green light as early as May 2021 by drug regulators to scale back the trial and reduce the sample size.
“To me, the wording in the protocol suggests that the FDA or another regulator basically gave Pfizer permission to do less,” remarked Levi.
“It’s not surprising though. The vaccine had already been recommended for pregnant women and many have taken it, so there is no upside to completing a trial that may detect signals of potential harms. It can only create problems for them, right?” he added.
Given that pregnant women were being vaccinated with a product that had not undergone rigorous safety testing in pregnancy, the FDA was asked if and why it allowed Pfizer to scale back the trial.
The FDA replied, “As a general matter, FDA does not comment on interactions it may or may not be having with sponsors about their clinical trials.”
Angela Spelsberg, an epidemiologist and medical director at the Comprehensive Cancer Center Aachen in Germany agreed that the integrity of the study had been compromised.
“There are just not enough babies in this trial to detect rare or very rare adverse events. We learned from studies in animals that lipid nanoparticles in the vaccine can deposit in many organs including the ovaries, so we must be extremely cautious about the potential negative impacts of the vaccine on reproductive health,” said Spelsberg.
“The scientific community urgently needs access to the pregnancy study data on the patient level for transparency and independent scrutiny of vaccine safety and efficacy because regulatory oversight is failing,” she added.
The small sample size may have been the result of the strict selection process.
Pfizer recruited participants with an impeccable pregnancy history, and most were in their third trimester (27-34 weeks gestation), a stage when the baby’s major development has already occurred.
“It appears that they cherry picked the mothers to get the best results,” said Levi. “We have no idea what impact this vaccine has on the early stages of development of an embryo or foetus, because all the women had advanced pregnancies when they were recruited.”
Spelsberg agreed.
“The first trimester is particularly vulnerable to adverse reproductive health outcomes,” she said.
“Based on only weak observational evidence, regulators have reassured the public that the vaccines are safe throughout pregnancy. However, we don’t have reliable evidence on the vaccine’s impact on miscarriages, malformation, foetal deaths, and maternal health risks because they excluded pregnant women from pivotal trials,” added Spelsberg.
Levi also noticed that “only partial data” were published.
“It doesn’t include any important metrics such as covid infections or antibody levels and its says we must wait until July 2024 for those results. It’s disturbing to say the least,” said Levi.
Also missing from the dataset was a full account of birth outcomes. Of the 348 women in the trial, Pfizer only reported on the birth of 335 live babies.
Of the 13 pregnancies unaccounted for, Pfizer reported one foetal death (stillbirth) in the vaccine group and the outcome of the other 12 pregnancies remains unknown.
“This is unacceptable,” said Levi. “Failing to report the outcome of 12 pregnancies could mask a potentially concerning signal of the vaccine in pregnancy. What happened to the babies, did they all die? Were their mothers vaccinated or unvaccinated?”
Finally, there were quite a few babies that were lost to follow-up in the trial.
“Twenty-nine babies in the placebo arm didn’t get to the end of the 6-month surveillance period, versus 15 babies in the vaccine arm. That’s almost double. Again, this is concerning and requires a detailed and transparent explanation,” said Levi.
Overall, both Levi and Spelsberg say the delays and failure to disclose vital data are unacceptable.
“Pfizer took a year to publish the data. When they finally did, it is incomplete. And we are expected to wait until July 2024 for the next batch of results, while authorities continue to recommend the vaccine in pregnant women,” said Levi.
“We still don’t have solid scientific evidence whether this vaccine is safe for pregnant women and their babies,” said Spelsberg. “It’s a tragedy and a scandal that vaccine use has been recommended, even mandated to women before, during and after pregnancy.”
Questions were put to Pfizer, but the company did not respond by the deadline.
Moderna is also conducting a clinical trial of its mRNA vaccine in pregnancy, but no data are available.
RT | August 28, 2023
American multinational conglomerate 3M has agreed to pay more than $5.5 billion to settle hundreds of thousands of lawsuits, claiming that it supplied defective combat earplugs to the US military, people familiar with the deal told Bloomberg.
According to the agreement, the company will be paying the money out over a five-year period, the agency reported on Sunday. 3M’s board is yet to sign off on the settlement, it added.
When approached on the issue by Bloomberg, a representative of 3M said the company does not comment on rumors or speculation.
3M faces more than 300,000 lawsuits from US troops, consolidated in a multi-district litigation, claiming that the earplugs that the company’s subsidiary Aearo Technologies provided to the military between 2003 and 2015 were defective, and failed to protect their users from hearing loss and tinnitus.
Current and former servicemen alleged that the company knew its earplugs were faulty, but did not inform the military about the problem, while making no steps to fix the product.
The earplugs, designed to protect the hearing of troops during training and combat, were standard issue for US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
3M failed 10 out of 16 early trials over the plugs, and has been told to pay over $250 million in damages to more than a dozen plaintiffs.
Bloomberg noted that the reported settlement would allow the company to avoid a much larger liability, which it estimated at up to $9.5 billion.
“Sounds like 3M negotiated a pretty good deal for itself, given this litigation has been weighing on them for the better part of a decade,” University of Richmond law professor Carl Tobias told the agency.
3M had earlier sought bankruptcy for Aearo Technologies in an attempt to shield itself from the lawsuits over earplugs. However, this June, a judge ruled that the firm’s financial troubles were not harsh enough to initiate the procedure.
The same month, 3M announced that it had reached a $10.3 billion settlement with a host of US public water systems to resolve water pollution claims tied to so-called “forever chemicals” or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) used in the company’s products.
RT | August 26, 2023
The Biden administration sought to gain control over nearly every aspect of the inner workings of social media behemoth TikTok as part of negotiations allowing its continued operation in the US, according to a draft agreement obtained by Forbes last week.
The agreement, which runs to nearly 100 pages, would reportedly give the White House a level of control over the Chinese-owned platform even greater than that which it was found last year to be exercising over US-based competitors like Facebook and Twitter, allowing government officials to not only monitor and influence the conversation on the platform but also to interfere in the day-to-day operations of TikTok in the US.
Government agencies like the Department of Justice and Department of Defense would have full authority to examine TikTok’s servers, equipment, records, facilities, and other properties, according to the draft. They could also block changes to the app’s US terms of service, privacy policy, and moderation policies and veto the hiring of any individual involved in data security for the US.
The agreement would also force TikTok and its parent company ByteDance to submit to outside audits, assessments, code inspections, and cybersecurity checks by supposedly independent entities chosen by the US government. The company would be required to foot the bill for these intrusions.
The platform’s US staff could even have been required to exclude ByteDance’s executives from security-related decisions, instead deferring to an executive security committee whose actions would also be concealed from ByteDance. This committee’s primary responsibility would be maintaining US national security first and TikTok’s profitability second.
The draft seen by Forbes, dated last summer, is the product of months of exchanges between ByteDance and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which oversees foreign involvement in business deals that could potentially impact national security and has been investigating ByteDance for four years.
TikTok has repeatedly been threatened with a blanket ban or forced sale of its US assets to an American competitor as both President Joe Biden and his predecessor Donald Trump claimed the platform is used by Beijing for information warfare.
CFIUS renewed the call for a ban or sale in March after the DOJ launched an investigation into ByteDance employees using TikTok to spy on American journalists. A spokesperson for ByteDance confirmed the surveillance but attributed it to rogue employees who have since been fired.
TikTok has over 150 million American users spending 90 minutes or more on the platform. While the company pledged in 2021 to isolate US user data on servers owned by tech giant Oracle to assuage spying concerns, Biden prohibited its use by federal employees in December and dozens of state and city governments have followed suit.
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | August 26, 2023
A church in California punished during Covid lockdowns with a fine of $1.2 million is now suing over geofencing-based surveillance of its members.
The church, Calvary Chapel San Jose, along with Pastor Mike McClure, allege in the federal lawsuit filed this week that Santa Clara County engaged in warrantless and invasive surveillance, using the geofencing method and thus abusing location data harvested from the worshipers’ phones.
The filing is based on claims that both First Amendment related to free speech, and the Fourth Amendment, meant to protect against unlawful searches, were violated by the county as it resorted to spying via geofencing.
We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here.
Advocates for Faith & Freedom, a group that filed the lawsuit, specified that the county turned to SafeGraph data company in order to carry out this activity, and accuses the officials behind the scheme as engaging in tracking of residents not only without appropriate warrants and in an invasive manner, but also keeping this activity a secret from the public.
“This type of expansive geofencing operation is not only an invasion of privacy but represents a terrifying precedent if allowed to go unaddressed,” the complaint states. “As it stands, Defendants assert that, as long as they call it research, any level of government can target and spy on any individual or group at any time for any duration.”
It is further alleged that the operation lasted more than a year, “with seemingly no oversight, boundaries, or limitations.” The implication of this is that those targeted by this controversial, dragnet-style surveillance weren’t safe from it anywhere – be it the prayer room or the bathroom.
Those behind the lawsuit also reject the arguments that the defendants have apparently chosen to go with, namely, that the whole operation was done for the sake of “research,” and is therefore justified.
But, argues Advocates for Faith & Freedom, accepting such logic would mean that there would be no real limits to how government entities at any level could use geofencing to track either groups or individuals. This lack of boundaries means that the spying could go on against anyone and for any amount of time – and potentially be used against opponents.
“This is not just un-American; it is downright Orwellian,” stated Advocates for Faith & Freedom.
Santa Clara County, meanwhile, had nothing to add to its previous comments on the matter, well before the lawsuit was filed. Back in March, the county reacted to a report about tracking of worshipers written by journalist David Zweig.
BY DR CARL HENEGHAN AND DR TOM JEFFERSON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | AUGUST 25, 2023
This week saw the publication of a suite of systematic reviews by the Royal Society (RS) on the effect of non-pharmaceutical interventions in the pandemic.
Politico headlined with ‘Top review says Covid lockdowns and masks worked, period’. The Guardian led with ‘Lockdowns and face masks “unequivocally” cut the spread of Covid, report finds’, and the i newspaper stated: ‘Masks and social distancing did reduce Covid infections, new report shows, proving lockdown sceptics wrong.’
So there you have it, a slam dunk, sceptics, you were all wrong. You should have masked up and stayed in lockdown.
Even more so when you listen to the Chair of the report’s group, Mark Walport, who said: “There is sufficient evidence to conclude that early, stringent implementation of packages of complementary NPIs was unequivocally effective in limiting SARS-CoV-2 infections.”
Four systematic reviews informed the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions in the Covid pandemic. However, here is some of what these reviews report.
A systematic review on environmental control measures:
Many of these studies were assessed to have critical risk of bias in at least one domain, largely due to confounding factors that could have affected the measured outcomes. As a result, there is low confidence in the findings.
One study, an RCT, showed that daily testing of contacts could be a viable strategy to replace lengthy quarantine of contacts. Based on the scarcity of robust empirical evidence, we were not able to draw any firm quantitative conclusions about the quantitative impact of TTI interventions in different epidemic contexts.
Effectiveness of face masks for reducing transmission of SARS-CoV-2:
We analysed 35 studies in community settings (three RCTs and 32 observational) and 40 in healthcare settings (one RCT and 39 observational). Ninety-one percent of observational studies were at ‘critical’ risk of bias (ROB) in at least one domain, often failing to separate the effects of masks from concurrent interventions.
Effectiveness of international border control measures during the COVID-19 pandemic:
There is little evidence that most travel restrictions, including border closure and those implemented to stop the introduction of new variants of concern, were particularly effective.
The report makes the same errors that the UKHSA and Public Health England did. They ignored the critical biases and the confounders when drawing conclusions. Some of the comments misunderstand the evidence required for making healthcare decisions.
Chris Dye, Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Oxford, who led the review on masks for the Royal Society, said if they had only looked at randomised controlled trials, they would have come to the same conclusion as the Cochrane review. However, the researchers behind the paper released Thursday chose to analyse a larger body of studies and found strong evidence that masks work.
So, if we ignore high-quality evidence, we arrive at the conclusion we want – they fully understand the politics. Low-quality evidence means the estimated effect will differ substantially from the actual effect – we’ve known this for quite some time, and it is fundamental to the delivery of evidence-based interventions. An approach that uses low-quality evidence shouldn’t inform healthcare, and it doesn’t. That’s why we have NICE, which uses the best available evidence to develop recommendations that guide health, public health and social care decisions.
Did the reviewers, for instance, ask if there was a protocol for any of these studies – something we have previously pointed out. There were none, despite protocols being essential for robust research.
There is something we do agree with in the report, that the “future assessments should also consider the costs as well as the benefits of NPIs, in terms of their impacts on livelihoods, economies, education, social cohesion, physical and mental wellbeing, and potentially other aspects”. However this report looked at none of that. The single focus on one outcome, ignoring harms, further hinders informed decision-making.
The RS report wants us to believe that RCTs are impossible during a pandemic: “While RCTs should not be discounted, it is highly likely that most information in a future pandemic will continue to be observational.”
Yet the pandemic has re-emphasised the importance of high-quality randomised clinical trials and highlighted the need for preparation, coordination and collaboration.
The Royal Society review shows that some academics are losing their ability to think critically. Instead of retrofitting evidence to preconceived conclusions, it would be much better to report the uncertainties and set out those questions that need addressing. Refusal to acknowledge uncertainties does a disservice to society and undermines public trust in research.
Staying at home decreases your risk of all sorts of hazards – in the short term, you won’t get run over and you’ll reduce the risk of an infection or an accident. But what matters is the costs of what happens when you reemerge.
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Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
By Lisa Pease | Consortium News | September 16, 2013
More than a half century ago, just after midnight on Sept. 18, 1961, the plane carrying UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and 15 others went down in a plane crash over Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). All 16 died, but the facts of the crash were provocatively mysterious. … continue
Aletho News If Americans Knew No Tricks Zone
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