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Cheney, Kinzinger, And “Sham” J6 Committee Under Fire After Friday Footage Dump; GOP Senator Calls For Investigation

By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | November 19, 2023

Ever since Friday’s release of more than 40,000 hours of Jan. 6 Capitol Police security video, dozens of clips debunking the Jan. 6 committee’s ‘violent insurrection’ narrative have been floating around X.

In response to the exculpatory footage that the Jan. 6 committee never showed the American public, Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) has raised significant questions about the handling of security footage.

Lee’s statements directly challenge the integrity of the now-disbanded committee, particularly addressing the roles of its former Republican members, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. He also accuses the committee – particularly those two, of selectively sharing information.

After Cheney attempted to hit back with her ‘best hits’ Jan. 6 footage, Lee replied: “Liz, we’ve seen footage like that a million times. You made sure we saw that—and nothing else.”

Lee also called for an investigation into the committee itself, labeling it a “sham” and questioning the use of taxpayer dollars in its operations. He insinuates that crucial information about the committee’s work could have been “deliberately lost or destroyed,” casting doubts on the committee’s transparency and objectivity.

The argument continued throughout the day, with Lee linking to a NY Post article with the headline “FBI lost count of how many paid informants were at Capitol on Jan. 6, and later performed audit to figure out exact number.”

Kinzinger swings and misses all day

In response to the backlash, Kinzinger made a stupid joke comparing Jan. 6 protesters to US army helicopters providing fire for South Vietnamese ground troops attacking the Vietcong in 1965.

Twice.

He also retweeted about a dozen similarly stupid jokes (check out his timeline).

The House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack was disbanded in January 2023, after releasing its final report in December 2022. The committee, comprising seven Democrats and two Republicans, faced criticism for its composition and the perceived partisanship in its approach.

Kinzinger did not seek reelection, and Cheney lost her primary, marking a significant shift in the Republican landscape. The release of the security tapes by Johnson is seen as a step towards transparency, allowing the public to form their own opinions about the events of January 6, away from the committee’s narrative.

November 19, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | , , | Leave a comment

Why were German politicians so eager to vaccinate children, and why are they lying about it now?

eugyppius: a plague chronicle | November 18, 2023

Here is a riddle:

Why were German politicians so eager, in summer 2021, to vaccinate children? Why did they place public pressure on vaccine regulators to recommend child vaccination?

Even a few months ago, I would’ve said this was no great mystery. Before August 2021, everybody still operated on the insane assumption that the vaccines would eradicate Covid. They believed (or professed to believe) that a vaccination rate in excess of some magic number would end the pandemic, and that magic number was presumed to be unachievable if children were spared the jabs. I’d still say that was the case, but a recent news story has caused me to consider this question more deeply. Where did the specific pressure come from? What drove, for example, random regional ministers of education to mount their own appeals to vaccinate schoolchildren? What did these dumb people ever know about viruses or reproduction numbers or population immunity? What was going on?

There has been a lot of talk in the German press about the need for an appraisal of pandemic policies. This talk has flowed in directly inverse proportion to anybody’s willingness to actually appraise anything. Almost the only exception is the state parliament of Brandenburg, where Alternative für Deutschland are strong enough to have forced the convening of a Corona Investigatory Committee. The revelations so far have been extremely eye-opening, despite the limitation of the inquiry to Brandenburg and substantial obstruction from the political establishment.

The Committee publishes no protocols, many of their sessions are closed to the public, and with a few exceptions the media studiously avoids reporting on their work. Nevertheless, every time its members meet, something new and very bizarre comes to light. During their third session, in October, the Committee summoned Britta Ernst, Minister of Education in Brandenburg from 2017 to 2023, and also since 1998 the wife of Chancellor Olaf Scholz. At one point in the proceedings, Saskia Ludwig asked Ernst a very important question, namely the one that stands at the head of this post:

Why did Ernst advocate the vaccination of children in 2021?

The Nordkurier reports on the exchange that ensued:

Ernst had always campaigned in favour of vaccination and said in November 2021 that a “high vaccination rate” was “crucial for child welfare.” Ludwig asked … whether Ernst would repeat this statement given the current level of knowledge about the risk of side effects when vaccinating children against Covid.

Ernst … replied that the recommendation of STIKO [the Standing Committee on Vaccination] had been decisive for her.

STIKO “set the standard” and she had “no doubts about the work of STIKO,” which is why she had “naturally adopted their findings, which they make on a scientific basis.” Regarding her statement from November 2021, she said: “I suspect that this quote regarding the vaccination rate referred primarily to adults.” Ernst continued: “In addition, STIKO also recommended the vaccination of children and adolescents, and we followed this recommendation.”

In other words, Ernst was just Following the Science. She was just doing what the expert regulators of STIKO told her to do.

Except, that’s not true at all. Ernst was calling for the vaccination of teenagers as early as July 2021, well before that body had made any such recommendation. She was circulating flyers among Brandenburg schoolchildren that assured them they might even be able to get vaccinated without their parents’ permission. And what is more, she was even demanding that STIKO expand their recommendation to include everyone over 12 years of age.

From an rbb return-to-school article published on 29 July 2021:

The new school year begins in Brandenburg in just over a week. Primary school pupils will then be required to wear masks and there will continue to be plenty of ventilation. The Minister of Education believes that schools are in a good position – but there is still a need for action when it comes to vaccination.

Brandenburg’s Education Minister Britta Ernst (SPD) is calling for children and young people to be vaccinated from the age of 12 …

Until now, the Standing Committee on Vaccination (STIKO) has advised that 12 to 16-year-olds should only be vaccinated if they have certain preexisting conditions. The European Medicines Agency (EMA) has already approved the vaccines from Moderna and Biontech/Pfizer for this age group.

Ernst called on STIKO to issue a clear recommendation in favour of these vaccinations. The committee has already established that the incidence of infection among children is not dangerous and that illnesses among children are not severe. “This gives us further support in favour of opening schools,” Ernst said. A clear recommendation from STIKO, however, would be “helpful in any case, because many parents are naturally unsure how they should act.”

It wasn’t just Ernst. The day before, the Minister President of Brandenburg, Dietmar Woidke, had also renewed his demands that STIKO approve the vaccines for healthy adolescents:

On rbb television, Brandenburg’s Minister President Dietmar Woidke (SPD) once again called for the vaccination of children aged twelve and over to be considered. “STIKO already recommends vaccination for children with pre-existing conditions,” Woidke said. He would welcome it if … STIKO were to make a recommendation for the vaccination of adolescents in view of the spread of the Delta variant. According to Woidke, Delta has increased the risks for children and adolescents. STIKO must now weigh “the risk posed by Covid and the risk that vaccines may pose to younger age groups.”

Confronted with these contradictions at the Committee last month, Ernst became oddly evasive. She said vaguely that “many parents were waiting for a recommendation from STIKO” and that she “seem[ed] to remember that children in other countries were already vaccinated.” She did not refer to Woidke or describe any broader discussions within the Brandenburg government, although demands for child vaccination were clearly bigger than her. Nor did she refer to pressure from teachers’ organisations or any specific epidemiological goals.

The excuse about parental pressure is very strange and unsatisfying, when you think about it. First, the vaccines had already been approved by the EMA for the 12-and-up group. Parents who really wanted to jab their kids just had to find a willing doctor. Second, and more importantly, it is not the job of state education ministers to pass the concerns of local jab-crazed parents on to national medical regulatory bodies in the media. Why can’t Ernst clearly describe her motives? Where did the demand to vaccinate children come from?

At another revealing moment, Ludwig asked Ernst about a pro-vaccine flyer circulated among Brandenburg schoolchildren. This flyer assured kids that “There are hardly any long-term side effects; the vaccine is broken down quickly by the body.” It also enthused that “In some cases, you can even be vaccinated without your parents’ consent.” Here, too, Ernst had no good answers. She would say only that the flyer merely described “the legal situation” and “that underage girls are given contraceptives by doctors without parental consent.”

I looked into this flyer, which is a creepy exercise in marketing vaccines to children. The version that was circulated in Thüringen is still online:

Ernst couldn’t say much about its contents because it came from on high. The flyer was funded by the Thüringen Health and Education ministries, and masterminded by odious health communicator, Erfurt professor and villain-of-the-blog Cornelia Betsch. In later months, Betsch would go on to advise the government on how to nudge German vaccine uptake higher. We are dealing with the upper reaches of the German vaccinator-industrial complex here, in other words. The flyer was designed according to interviews its authors conducted with teenagers at the Henfling Gymnasium in Meiningen, for the purposes of figuring out out how best to manipulate kids into getting excited about vaccines.

There are two things about this document that make it extremely obnoxious. The first is that it is full of highly manipulative propaganda. It tells children that “The virus spreads primarily among the unvaccinated,” that “if you are not vaccinated, you have a greater risk of becoming infected,” that “the virus is becoming more contagious,” that “it is very rare to be infected despite vaccination and it is rare to infect others” and that “if you are vaccinated, you also protect others who can’t be vaccinated.” It contains a specific section explaining that the vaccines won’t impact fertility, and so I expect it was targeted specifically at girls, for whom the get-vaccinated-to-protect-your-family subtext would be especially effective.

The second obnoxious point is that this flyer, advising teenagers to seek the jabs even in the absence of parental permission and providing them with the contact information of local vaccination centres, was published on 14 July 2021. That is, it came out in advance of any official STIKO recommendation that this age group should be jabbed at all, and just two weeks before leading Brandenburg politicians like Ernst and Woidke began calling for STIKO to expand their recommendations to include teenagers.

There was, then, an unauthorised child vaccination campaign underway in summer 2021, which consisted of vaccine propaganda circulated to school children on the one hand, public pressure on vaccine regulators on the other hand, and who knows what else on however many other hands. It was timed around the summer holidays, for the clear purpose of scaring children into seeking the jabs before they returned to school. For some reason, Ernst will not tell the Brandenburg parliament why she participated in this campaign, and she will not say who its orchestrators were.

November 18, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

FYI Archbishop Justin Welby, Jesus Would Not Approve

On the profound betrayal of Humanity by the leader of the Anglican Church

A Better Way to Health with Dr Tess Lawrie | November 18, 2023

One of the most troubling occurrences during Covid-19 was the collusion of formal religion with the supranational military-industrial-banking complex to induce our compliance with unlawful, unscientific and downright harmful Covid-19 policies.

Not only was religion used as a tool to manipulate people to comply with political decrees, it was also used to propagate fear.

The speed at which church doors were shut whilst big business continued its trading was anathema to most people. When places of worship did open, people had the fear of (science) God put into them by the corporate media, politicians and their trusted religious leaders alike. Sanitising rituals were demanded upon entry, social distancing within churches was enforced with tape and stickers, and various religious practices were modified or curtailed.

One of several images shared on social media of priests using toy guns to interact with people such as, in this instance, to conduct baptism rituals

Even singing in church was deemed dangerous. As such, it had to be done through face masks or was prohibited entirely. People not complying with these religio-political directives were often vilified, prevented from attending services and risked being cast out of their congregation. Fear of the latter kept many reluctantly acquiescent. Even my elderly parents regularly remarked how ridiculous, uncomfortable and de-humanising it was; how it was hard to breathe, let alone sing, through the mask – and how going to church just wasn’t the same.

Why was joy, love, compassion and trust so readily sent packing when Covid came along?

Why was the joy and community of regular Christian services systematically undermined? Why did religious leaders urge us to transfer our trust in ourselves and our spiritual relationships to conflicted scientists and politicians? Why were we encouraged to fear, instead of love and feel compassion for one another? And why was our faith abruptly deemed insufficient by religious leaders who fell quickly in step with directives from the New World Order planners?

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, may well know the answer to these questions. Welby has been the leader of the worldwide body of Anglican Christian churches since 2013. On the Anglican Communion website it states that, in the UK, ‘He is regarded as the nation’s senior Christian and spiritual voice,’ and is the ecclesiastical lead over 13,000 parishes. In addition, church leaders and millions of Christians across 165 countries are likely to be guided by his leadership.

Given his reach and responsibility, Archbishop Welby in my opinion may be responsible for the most profound betrayal of Humanity in two thousand years.

Mail Online article from 22 December 2021

When, in December 2021, the UK’s Daily Mail ran an article quoting Welby as suggesting that Jesus would get the [Covid-19] vaccine, I could barely believe it. At the time, there were well over two million reports of associated adverse Covid-19 vaccine reactions, including thousands of deaths, reported to the World Health Organisation’s Vigiaccess database; on the UK’s Yellow Card scheme, there were about 400,000 individual reports with around 2,000 fatalities.

The World Council for Health (WCH), which had been established in September 2021 to provide trustworthy guidance in the face of the harmful official Covid policies, had already commenced it’s ‘Cease and Desist Campaign’ to urgently raise awareness of these very concerning vaccine safety data and to advise vaccinators and others to stop vaccinating and promoting these novel injections. WCH had also published the Covid-19 vaccine spike protein detoxification guide.

The video accompanying the Daily Mail article on the 22nd December 2021 chilled me to the bone.

Urging people to get Covid-19 vaccinated, Welby emphasises in the Daily Mail video:

“It’s not about me and my rights. Now, obviously there are some people who for health reasons can’t go vaccinating – [that’s a] different question. But it’s not about me and my rights to choose, it’s about how I love my neighbour. To love one another as Jesus said: Get vaccinated. Get boosted.”

This announcement by the Archbishop, a figure of worldwide Christian authority, leveraging Jesus’ goodwill and our love for him against us to convince us to take Covid-19 injections should be a matter of great concern for all.

The Jesus I know would never have said that we should take as many vaccines as the military-industrial-banking complex tells us to.

He would never have promoted unsafe medical interventions that harm men, women, and children whilst lining the pockets of the rich; neither would he advocate for the derogation of individual sovereignty to state or supranational entities.

This is the antithesis of what Jesus stood for. Jesus healed with his hands and our faith. He stood for truth, justice, freedom and peace. Jesus was fighting the same corrupt system that exploits us today and targets our children from the shadows.

I’m not going to start unpicking all that I feel is so very evil about what Welby said. The way Welby used Jesus’ words to promote the agenda of the military-industrial-banking complex, which seemingly will stop at nothing to materialise its 2030 Great Reset agenda, is disgusting and disgraceful in my opinion. However, it is not up to me to forgive or to judge the Archbishop. Ultimately, Welby will have his Judgement Day, as will we all, and I’m very glad not to be in his shoes.

A Better World is on the Way

The Roman Empire that crucified Jesus is finally crumbling as its latter-day representatives reveal themselves to be, indeed, wearing the Emperors’ clothes. Thankfully, two thousand years later, all that has been hidden from us is being revealed. Evil will no longer be facilitated or tolerated in the world we are creating afresh together. It will no longer lurk in the shadows when we are done shining our lights on it.

A Better World for us, our children, and all creatures on this beautiful planet is being born. All that is required is that, in remembering who we are as human beings – courageous, firm and loving, following Jesus’ very human example – we take care of one another, draw on our collective power, breathe and push.

November 18, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

Israeli Deceit & the Ongoing Battle of Shifa Hospital

By Gareth Porter | Ron Paul Institute | November 17, 2023

The Israeli military has attacked and is occupying parts of al-Shifa hospital in an ongoing operation in northern Gaza. It is the biggest and most modern hospital in Gaza, which has  ceased to function normally because of a lack of power, while tens of thousands of displaced Gazans take shelter in it.

An attack on a hospital is normally considered a clear violation of the rules of war. The Israeli Defense Forces is justifying it by claiming that Shifa has long served as civilian medical  cover for the command center of the entire Hamas war operations and weapons storage.

That IDF claim has been cited constantly in Israeli propaganda as an argument that Shifa — and other hospitals in Gaza — should not be accorded the normal legal hospital immunity from attack.

Israeli forces closed in on Shifa while demanding for the last few days that the staff and patients remaining in the hospital be evacuated immediately. CNN reported Monday night that “the Biden administration has now signaled that it supports the Israeli position, as National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan declared on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday: ‘You can see even from open-source reporting that Hamas does use hospitals, along with a lot of other civilian facilities, for command-and-control, for storing weapons, for housing its fighters.’”

Those Sullivan remarks were an obvious green light for the IDF to press on for complete evacuation of the hospital.

The problem with that “open source reporting” is that it is never anything more than unsupported claims based on mere supposition. In fact, when the history of supposedly damning revelations about Shifa hospital providing cover for Hamas military activities are examined more carefully it becomes clear that it has been no more than a thinly veiled excuse for the IDF to attack and close down Gaza’s most important provider of medical care for the population of Gaza.

A History of Deception

The Israeli claim that Shifa hospital was providing such a cover for an Hamas military presence there is in fact the longest running theme in Israeli war propaganda on Gaza, dating back nearly 15 years to the first days of the Gaza war of January 2009.

That was when Yuval Diskin, the head of Israel’s domestic intelligence service Shin Bet, told Amos Harel of Haaretz newspaper that “many” senior Hamas officials were “believed” to be hiding in the “basements” of Shifa hospital, and that the Israelis knew all about those underground levels of the hospital, because they had originally been been built by the Egyptians before 1967 and extensively refurbished by the Israelis themselves in the mid-1980s.

Diskin also explained to Harel that Hamas was confident that it wouldn’t be attacked, because of the patients on the upper floors.

Apart from the fact that Israel’s intelligence service had admitted that it only suspected Hamas’ military presence under the hospital rather than having actual knowledge, Harel was, however, honest enough to report that his Palestinian contacts were telling him senior Hamas leaders never stayed in the same location but constantly moved from one location to another — a revelation that obviously made far more sense than the claim that those same senior Hamas officials were hanging out in a basement that was obviously well known to the Israelis.

Harel’s report also included a revelation — apparently from a Palestinian source — that raised problems for the nascent official Israeli propaganda line: “Some of the bunkers they are using,” Harel wrote, “were linked by tunnels Hamas built in recent years.”

The existence of numerous bunkers that could be used for command were thus independent of Shifa hospital, which the Israelis would always be able to invade. That reality clearly implied that it would make no sense for Hamas to depend on Shifa hospital for that purpose.

IDF Tale Resurfaces in Washington Post

Nevertheless, during the next Israeli-Palestinian war in July 2014, the  IDF tale of the Hamas leaders’ secret hideaway in the basement of Shifa hospital re-emerged as if it were an unassailable fact that justified IDF threats to attack the hospital.

In a story published July 15, The Washington Post reported as unassailable fact that Shifa “has become the de facto headquarters for Hamas leaders, who can be seen in the hallways and offices.”

Post reporter William Booth clearly did not see Hamas leaders in Al Shifa himself. Had he done so, he would have described the scene and identified one or two Hamas figures who had been pointed out to him at the hospital. So he was apparently passing on the self-interested claim of his Israeli interlocutors without informing Post readers that the information in question was far less reliable than it was made to appear.

The IDF became fixated on closing up another Gaza hospital in July 2014  Just two days after that initial appearance of the Shifa-Hamas theme in the 2014 war, Israeli airstrikes bombed Al Wafa Rehabilitation and Geriatric Hospital in Gaza City and forced its closure.

The IDF specialists created a video distributed three weeks later aimed at defending the destruction of Wafa hospital as a necessary response to Hamas using the hospital for military operations. But they had resorted to multiple levels of trickery to make their political point, as this writer discovered in investigating the video.

The IDF propagandists had spliced together videos from five years earlier and from different times of day so as to suggest that firing from an unused building more than 100 yards away from the hospital was a recent Hamas rocket attack on IDF forces. Then they spliced in an audio clip from an entirely different incident in which the IDF returned fire to try to show that the IDF bombing of Wafa hospital was justified.

At the end of July 2014, the Post reaffirmed its support for Israel’s primary propaganda theme in that six-week war. Terrence McCoy reported from Washington that Shifa Hospital had “become a de facto headquarters” of Hamas. That reporting reflected in turn the general readiness of much of the national press in Washington to accept the word of the Israelis as all they needed to know on that pivotal issue.

Eight years later, the same Israeli propaganda line immediately resurfaced after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, as the Israelis mounted a new propaganda offensive. On Oct. 27, IDF Spokesman Adm. Daniel Hagari, briefed the International press on the main lines of Israel’s position regarding Shifa hospital and Hamas operations: He repeated the line that a bunker underneath Shifa is Hamas’ main base of operation, and that Hamas operates “several tunnels inside and under” the hospital.

Maximum Suffering 

But Hamas’ tunnels outside Shifa could obviously be used for the same function of command of military operations without having to bother with Shifa hospital.

So the drumbeat of Israeli concern about the alleged Hamas command bunker underneath Shifa appears to have been a phony issue from the start, aimed merely at bringing pressure to bear on the medical system, namely to close down Shifa as the largest, most modern and most effective hospital in Gaza to create the maximum amount of suffering to the people of Gaza.

As of Tuesday, Shifa Hospital had ceased to function, as it had no electricity, having run out of fuel. The Israelis gallantly offered the hospital 300 liters of fuel — enough to function for about six minutes according to the hospital’s calculation.

They thus failed to take any emergency action to save 36 babies facing possible death from the non-functioning incubators after three had already died.

The scene at Shifa hospital early on Wednesday was eerie, as Israel tanks rumbled into the hospital grounds and Israeli troops entered the darkened main hospital building.

IDF spokesman Hagari would say only that Israeli forces were carrying out an operation “based on intelligence information and an operational necessity” and that it was in a “specified area in Shifa hospital”.

Later Wednesday the IDF’s Peter Lerner told CNN that the operation at al-Shifa hospital was “ongoing” and would say only that it had not found any sign of hostages in the hospital.

The Gazans who have been staying in Shifa have been afraid to take the approved routes away from the hospital because of relentless Israeli attacks on civilians trying to do so. The IDF will no doubt continue to use force against the hundreds of thousands huddled there to make them leave.

And now that Israel has control over many thousands of military age males in the hospital, it is doubtful that they will be allowed to go free, since they are considered as potential Hamas fighters.

The time has come for a reckoning on the long-running IDF propaganda ploy of claiming that Shifa has been used to hide Hamas’s command center.

Unless the IDF can show journalists convincing evidence of that long-claimed Hamas command presence under the hospital, they should stand for the truth and denounce that massive Israeli deception about Gaza.

November 17, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , | Leave a comment

Biden admin justifies Israel’s assault on Gaza hospitals with recycled Israeli ‘intelligence’

BY WYATT REED · THE GRAYZONE · NOVEMBER 15, 2023

As Israel assaults Gaza’s Shifa Hospital, the Biden administration claims that “Hamas does use hospitals” as military bases. Once again, Washington appears to be relying on dubious Israeli propaganda rather than independent analysis.

With Israeli troops storming Gaza’s Al-Shifa and Al-Rantisi hospitals, the United States and Israel are doubling down on discredited claims that Hamas has been maintaining “command centers” out of the basements of hospitals in Gaza, even after so-called evidence produced by Tel Aviv was thoroughly debunked.

“I can confirm for you that we have information that Hamas, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, used some hospitals in the Gaza Strip, including Al-Shifa, and tunnels underneath them, to conceal and to support their military operations and to hold hostages,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters Tuesday.

Kirby’s claim echoed the assertion by National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, who maintained that “open-source reporting” shows “Hamas does use hospitals, along with a lot of other civilian facilities, for command-and-control, for storing weapons, for housing its fighters.”

On November 14, Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh told reporters that US intelligence had no “boots on the ground,” nor any intelligence assets capable of independently gathering intelligence from or about Shifa. When asked if the declassified intel briefing spun out by Kirby and Sullivan arrived through Washington’s “Israeli counterparts,” she refused to answer. But she strongly suggested the intelligence dump was politically motivated.

“This is newly-downgraded information that we felt was important to get out today, because there have been a lot of questions about the hospital and how Hamas operates, and so it was important to get out there,” Singh insisted.

Hamas denies using hospitals for military purposes, and both local healthcare workers and international humanitarian organizations back that up. “I’m sick and tired of these [Israeli] claims that there are Hamas command centers [in hospitals],” Norwegian physician Dr. Mads Gilbert told Al-Jazeera on November 12. Having performed life-saving procedures for several weeks inside Shifa during Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza, Gilbert noted, “As I’ve said 100 times… we’ve never seen high-ranking Hamas people in Al-Shifa,” adding “we’ve been able to roam freely.”

But that did little to prevent Israeli troops from waging an all-out assault on the facilities. As Israeli forces surrounded Shifa hospital on Tuesday with the full-throated support of the Biden administration, arresting journalists outside the facility and violently clearing displaced people from its grounds, doctors inside were forced to move babies in intensive care from one wing of the hospital to another to save their lives. A lack of fuel had already forced many of those infants off vital oxygen supply units.

Meanwhile, Israeli forces have been unable to find any presence of hostages inside or around the hospital. As Israeli Army Radio reported on November 15, “There is no indication of the presence of abductees inside the hospital.”

Systematic Israeli misinformation campaign dismissed by US as “fog of war”

Israeli and American officials have yet to produced any proof that Hamas operates a “command center” under Al-Shifa. Video published by the Israeli military purporting to prove Hamas kept hostages in the basement of Al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital, Gaza’s last remaining medical center with a pediatric cancer ward, was less than convincing.

In that video performance, top Israeli army spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari claims that what appears to be a bomb shelter for young children is actually a Hamas torture chamber, citing objects as unlikely as a baby bottle and a woman’s clothes. In one particularly memorable and widely panned moment, Hagari insisted the days of the week written in Arabic on a calendar were actually the names of the “terrorists” meant to guard captive Israelis ostensibly being held there.

The Israeli military has since attempted to downplay the deception as a “mistake in translation.”

It was hardly the first round in Tel Aviv’s fake news campaign. In the weeks since Palestinian resistance groups launched their shock assault on October 7, native Arabic speakers have taken to social media to mock the audio recordings Israel regularly publishes which purport to show Hamas members gleefully discussing carrying out war crimes.

In November alone, official Israeli social media accounts have been forced to walk about at least a half-dozen false assertions. A video showing a crying woman describing how she retrieved her son’s decomposing body from the streets of Gaza was transformed by Israel’s embassy to the US, which used fake captions to falsely claim she was blaming Hamas for the siege. When questioned, the embassy subsequently deleted the post.

The same week, Israel’s main government account on Twitter had to delete its false claim that “AP, CNN, NY Times, and Reuters had journalists embedded with Hamas terrorists on October 7th massacre” – a lie which the New York Times condemned as “reckless” and said put its journalists on the ground in Israel and Gaza “at risk.”

Days later, Israel’s official Arabic-language Twitter account deleted footage of a woman dressed in nursing scrubs who claimed to work as a nurse in Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital denounced Hamas for supposedly stealing fuel and medicine. Other doctors and nurses at the medical center reportedly told journalist Younis Tirawi: “We don’t know this woman; she has never worked here before & we’ve never seen her at the hospital.”

Social media users claimed the woman was Israeli actress Hannah Abutbul, who moonlights as a social media manager of an Israeli company named Aish International that works alongside the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Abutbul denies appearing in the video.

On November 10, Israel’s Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) claimed Hamas was “INSIDE the Indonesian hospital last night,” citing a video which appeared to show a firearm being displayed. An observer who pointed out that the object was actually a billy club had their reply ‘hidden’ by the official Israeli account.

Throughout the blood-spattered onslaught on the Gaza Strip, US officials have consistently taken Israeli claims at face value, even parroting Tel Aviv’s excuses when prompted. Following Biden’s now-retracted claim to have seen “confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children,” US officials continue to exhibit a remarkable willingness to side with the Israeli government and echo its talking points.

During a November 14 press briefing, a reporter asked State Department spokesman Matthew Miller about the Israeli government’s habitual spreading of “misinformation.” Miller responded by brushing off Israel’s parade of fabrications as an inevitable feature of the “fog of war.”

“In the fog of war, from thousands of miles away at the podium,” the spokesman insisted, “I have no way to independently adjudicate the various claims that are being made.”

November 16, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Hamas rebuts Israeli claim about finding weapons at Al-Shifa Hospital

Palestine Information Center – November 16, 2023

GAZA – The Hamas Movement has belied the Israeli occupation army’s claim that it found weapons and military equipment in the Shifa Medical Complex, describing it as “part of its lies and cheap propaganda that aim to justify its crimes against the health sector in Gaza.”

“These claims are part of the silly propaganda that was spread by the occupation after it stormed the Rantisi Children’s Hospital. They put weapons in the place and then make up a weak story that no longer deceives anyone,” Hamas said in a statement on Wednesday.

“We have repeated more than once and for two weeks our call on the UN and international organizations to form an international committee to visit the hospitals and check on their conditions to expose the occupation’s lies and false claims because we are aware of the size of its fabrications and deception that aim to cover up its crimes against children, women and defenseless civilians,” the Movement added.

November 16, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Pentagon fails annual audit

RT | November 16, 2023

The US Defense Department has flunked its sixth annual independent audit, having failed to even provide auditors with enough financial data to complete their evaluation, a report released on Wednesday revealed.

The overall results of the audit – the sixth that the Pentagon has failed since it was required to begin auditing itself in 2018 – were a “disclaimer of opinion,” the worst of three possible grades and the same rating the department received last year. The result took into account 29 component audits, of which 18 were also flunked with disclaimers of opinion. Just seven components received “unqualified opinions,” the most desirable rating, while another one received a “qualified opinion.”

Pentagon Chief Financial Officer Michael McCord attempted to frame the audit results positively, stating in a press release accompanying the report that his department was “making progress toward the goal of a clean audit.”

McCord acknowledged in a call with reporters on Wednesday that the Pentagon had not expected to pass the audit, but insisted it was moving toward resolving its balance of funds with the Treasury Department. He also touted the use of automated programs for rote tasks, stating that “bots” had saved 600,000 hours of work between the Navy and Air Force alone, and claimed the Pentagon had done a detailed inventory of its stockpiles in the course of supplying billions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine.

However, the Pentagon remains the only cabinet-level department never to have received a clean financial bill of health. With $3.8 trillion in assets, $4 trillion in liabilities, and little meaningful oversight, the potential for waste and fraud is immense, according to the Government Accountability Office, which has included the department’s business systems modernization and financial management initiatives on its “High Risk List” – a list of federal programs most susceptible to fraud, abuse, mismanagement, and waste – for nearly 30 years.

The Pentagon consumes more than half of the US discretionary budget, with most in Washington wary of cutting military spending lest they run afoul of the defense industry, a source of hefty donations to both sides of the political aisle, according to OpenSecrets.org, which tracks political contributions. Defense Department staff have admitted to “misplacing” trillions of dollars in transactions in accounting discrepancies that have never been resolved.

Efforts to rein in profligate defense spending in Congress have repeatedly failed. The Audit the Pentagon Act, which would penalize any department of the military that fails its annual audit by forcing it to forfeit 1% of its budget, was introduced again in the Senate last year after the Defense Department was unable to account for more than half of its assets. However, it never made it to the floor for a vote.

November 16, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Militarism | | Leave a comment

US-based NGO confirms running Russian opposition troll farm

RT | November 16, 2023

The Free Russia Foundation (FRF), a Washington-based NGO, has confirmed running a network of paid online commenters focused on influencing Russian current affairs and the Ukrainian crisis.

The pro-opposition troll farm was exposed in an explosive report published on Wednesday by SVTV, an online outlet created by Russian libertarian activist Mikhail Svetov. The report claimed, citing a trove of documents received from ex-employees of the network, that the FRF-payrolled troll farm has collaborated with FBK (Anti-Corruption Foundation), founded by jailed Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny, and has also routinely targeted critics of FBK and the government alike.

The FRF confirmed on Thursday that the troll network actually exists. The NGO claimed the investigation by SVTV was “inaccurate on a large number of points” and strongly denied any links to Navalny’s FBK. The foundation also insisted the network has been never used to discredit “any opposition politicians, journalists, projects or groups.”

“We regret that certain so-called independent outlets allow themselves (by mistake or intentionally) to spread lies and put a large number of people at possible security risks,” the foundation said in a statement.

Earlier, FBK Director Ivan Zhdanov denied the anti-corruption foundation was associated with the troll network, vowing to prove this in court, if needed.

According to the SVTV report, the troll network has been outsourced by FRF to Reforum, a Lithuania-based non-profit, which hired contractors to perform “social media management consultations.” In reality, the “consultations” involved posting remarks under select online posts, using pre-approved talking points. The commenters, receiving €10 ($10) per hour on average, have been using fake profiles with photos of persons who had abandoned or lost their accounts, the report also claimed.

Online commenters apparently work from multiple offices in Vilnius, Lithuania and Tbilisi, Georgia. They have also reportedly taken to calling themselves “elves” who fight the “Russian trolls” and “orcs.”

The FRF described its troll network as a “strategic communications center,” created solely to “convey the truth about the Kremlin’s crimes and the consequences of the bloody war waged against Ukraine to their compatriots in Russia.” The network brings together “tens and hundreds of Russian activists, media and SMM professionals, working around the clock,” as well as “analysts” to study ways of waging “information war,” the NGO stated.

November 16, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

Bunker Debunker: Did Israel Build Subterranean Fortress Under Gaza’s Biggest Hospital?

By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 15.11.2023

Situated in Gaza City, the Dar Al-Shifa Hospital is the largest medical complex in the Gaza Strip, and has a 700-bed capacity. The IDF has targeted the complex repeatedly over the past week-and-a-half, alleging Hamas’ use of facilities located underneath as a fortified command center. Is there any truth to this story? Sputnik did some digging.

The Israel Defense Forces provided a worrisome explanation for its targeting of hospitals and ambulances in the Gaza Strip on Monday, publishing (and then deleting) an eyebrow-raising X post saying that “for Hamas, ambulances are used to transport its operatives and weapons to disguise them as civilians,” while “hospitals are in fact terrorist infrastructure.”

“This is against international law and turns them into legitimate military targets,” the IDF said.

In the days and weeks before and since, the al-Shifa hospital complex has come under repeated attack. On November 4, an air strike hit an ambulance near the hospital’s entrance, killing 15 people and injuring 60 others. The hospital was targeted a second time on November 6. Finally, on Wednesday, the IDF launched a ground raid inside the facility.

Before mounting its “precise and targeted operation,” the IDF alleged that Hamas had established a secret headquarters burrowed deep underneath the medical complex. In a statement, the military said it had “publicly warned time and again that Hamas’ continued military use of the Shifa Hospital jeopardizes its protected status under international law,” and lamented that the “relevant authorities in Gaza” ignored an IDF ultimatum to “cease” “all military activities within the hospital.”

Several weeks earlier, the IDF released a computer-animated video of a massive alleged underground tunnel and bunker complex it said was situated underneath the hospital complex, including conference rooms, arms and fuel caches and even a makeshift weapons factory. Israeli intelligence followed up by providing interrogation footage of a captured Hamas fighter admitting there was indeed a large underground hardened facility underneath al-Shifa used by the militant group. US intelligence, Pentagon and White House officials chimed in in support of Washington’s Israeli ally, alleging that Hamas has indeed been using tunnels underneath Al-Shifa for “command and control areas as well as weapons storage,” and that “newly declassified intelligence” indicates that the hospital is being used “to support their military operations.”

Hamas has dismissed the allegations, accusing the IDF of using the claims to justify its indiscriminate bombing of the Gaza Strip.

Who Built the Facilities Underneath al-Shifa?

Starting out as an army barracks during the British Mandate for Palestine era, al-Shifa was turned into a hospital in 1946 during the closing years of Britain’s occupation, and expanded into an entire complex of medical facilities during Egypt’s administration of Gaza between 1953 and 1967. Seizing the Strip during the Six-Day War of June 1967, Israel preserved and then expanded the hospital complex, and in the 1980s, with US financial backing, gave it a major overhaul, with Israeli architects Gershon Zippor, Teddy and Ben Kaplan and others tasked with creating its modern-day design, outlining a “Master Plan for the Year 2000” of modern, six-floor buildings spread across a 12.5-acre complex and equipped with what were at the time the latest medical innovations.

Along with the medical facilities, the project reportedly saw the construction of “a secure underground operating room and tunnel network” underneath the Hospital’s Building Number 2 in 1983, with a large “underground concrete floor” constructed underneath the facility during the same period. Other reports indicated that the hardened underground facilities were used to house the hospital’s laundry and “various administrative” offices.

Zippor, notably, had previous experience with underground military facilities, and between 1972 and 1976 engaged in the conversion of bunkers and trenches used during the Six-Day War into the Ammunition Hill Memorial Site and Museum in Jerusalem.

Hamas reportedly knew about the hospital complex’s hidden underground fortified areas, with a 2014 report in Ynet revealing that Zippor’s son, Barak, had mentioned that in the late 1980s, an Israeli contractor “hired Hamas as a security company” for the hospital.

As for the potential use of the underground facilities by Hamas after Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, a 2009 report in Haaretz citing Palestinian sources indicated that the militant group’s leaders never hide in one place, but spread out and constantly change locations using an elaborate network of tunnels.

None of the Israeli reporting on the hospital complex’s construction shows photos of its reported fortified basement areas, and reporters covering Israeli attacks on or near the hospital during Israel’s wars with Hamas in 2008-2009, 2012, 2014 and 2023 have yet to present any direct proof of Hamas’ use of the underground facilities built by the Israelis.

“When it comes to the issue of the bunker or the tunnels underneath the Shifa Hospital, I think one of the reasons that Israel is…asserting this is because every time it has tried to make an assertion regarding Hamas’ operations, those assertions have consistently been debunked,” Sami Hamdi, political analyst and head of International Interest, a UK-based global risk and intelligence company, told Sputnik.

The IDF will undoubtedly hope to find evidence of Hamas using underground facilities and tunnels built in the 1980s as evidence to support its narrative about the Palestinian militant group’s use of civilian infrastructure and noncombatants as human shields, but it remains to be see whether Tel Aviv can actually sway public opinion in this manner, the political analyst believes.

“The point being, I think that when it comes to the Israelis pushing this narrative, it has less to do with the idea that Israel actually believes [it] and more about a desperate attempt to try to win back public opinion that it has emphatically lost as a result of the bombardment of social media videos showing the realities of the atrocities that are being committed in Gaza,” Hamdi said.

Mehmet Rakipoglu, a researcher at Dimensions for Strategic Studies, a London-based think tank, points to the irony of the IDF accusing Hamas of using bunkers and tunnels underneath Gaza’s civilian infrastructure when Israel itself appears to have built the “secret shelter” under the Shifa hospital in the first place.

“It is obvious that Hamas did not use the hospital as a shield. Even though Israel tries to manipulate public opinion with amateur videos, the truth is clear,” Rakipoglu told Sputnik.

So far, “the places that Israel claims to be used by the ‘Hamas terrorist cells’ and as tunnels are spare water tanks,” the observer said, referring to social media posts mocking the IDF’s reported ‘proof’ of alleged militant tunnel networks in civilian areas which turn out to be mere water containers, heaters and septic tanks.

November 15, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Israel kills elderly Palestinian after using him in propaganda about ‘safe corridor’

Israeli army soldier talking to Bashir Hajji, a 79-year-old resident of Gaza City [@MariamBarghouti/X]
MEMO | November 15, 2023

The Israeli army killed an elderly Palestinian after using him in a propaganda campaign promoting its “safe corridor” in Gaza, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has revealed. The organisation expressed its “outrage” on its website about Israel’s use of the man in an attempt to cover up its horrific crimes against displaced Palestinians fleeing Israeli violence in the northern Gaza Strip.

“The Israeli army released a photo of one of its soldiers talking to Bashir Hajji, a 79-year-old resident of Gaza City’s Zaytoun neighbourhood, as he travelled on Salah Al-Din Road, the main route to the southern Gaza Valley,” explained the organisation. “The soldier appears to be helping and protecting displaced Palestinian civilians.”

However, the elderly man’s granddaughter, Hala Hajji, told the Euro-Med Monitor team that her grandfather was “brutally executed while crossing the ‘safe corridor’ when members of the Israeli army deliberately shot him in the head and back.” She also confirmed that he is in the photo that was put out by Israel, “exposing the army’s dangerous practice of flagrantly fabricating stories.”

Euro-Med Monitor pointed out that it has documented dozens of cases of the Israeli army executing displaced Palestinians and, in some cases, bombing them. Those displaced were attempting to flee to the south of Wadi Gaza at the Israeli army’s request.

The organisation renewed its calls for the “UN and the International Criminal Court to open an urgent independent investigation into the crimes to which displaced Palestinians have been and are still being subjected to hold those who ordered such crimes accountable; and to achieve justice for the victims.”

Euro-Med Monitor is a non-profit human rights organisation. Seventy per cent of its staff and volunteers are victims of human rights violations. According to its website, it “advocates for the human rights of all persons across Europe and the MENA region, particularly those who live under occupation, in the throes of war or political unrest and/or have been displaced due to persecution or armed conflict.”

November 15, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , | Leave a comment

CDC Runs Two VAERS Systems — The Public Can Access Only One of Them

By John-Michael Dumais | The Defender | November 14, 2023

When Dr. Robert Sullivan collapsed on his treadmill three weeks after his second COVID-19 vaccine in early 2021, he fell into a “nightmare” ordeal that he said exposed glaring deficiencies in the nation’s vaccine safety monitoring system.

Diagnosed with sudden onset pulmonary hypertension, the healthy and fit 49-year-old anesthesiologist from Maryland attempted to file a report through the government-run Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).

But like others interviewed in a recent investigation by The BMJ, Sullivan hit barrier after barrier when trying to submit and update his report.

Almost three years later, still grappling with debilitating symptoms, Sullivan’s experience highlights the systemic problems with the U.S. adverse events monitoring system run jointly by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

From doctors unable to file reports to disappearing data, limits on transparency and lack of resources to follow up on concerning vaccine reactions, experts warn VAERS is failing to detect critical safety signals.

According to one of those experts — VAERS researcher Albert Benavides, whose experience includes HMO claims auditing, data analytics and revenue cycle management — VAERS’ failure isn’t accidental.

“It is not broken,” Benavides wrote in his Substack coverage of The BMJ investigation. “VAERS runs cover for the big pharma cabal.”

‘They even delete legitimate reports’

Like others interviewed by The BMJ, Sullivan experienced limited follow-up after submitting his VAERS report. He received only a temporary report number months after his initial submission.

A physician named “Helen” (pseudonym) told The BMJ that fewer than 20% of concerning reports get follow-up, including many deaths she reported.

In consultation with Benavides, an audit by React19 found that 1 in 3 COVID-19 vaccine adverse events reports in VAERS were either not posted publicly or were deleted. React19 is a nonprofit that collects stories of people injured by the mRNA vaccines.

According to The BMJ, of those queried by React19, “22% had never been given a permanent VAERS ID number and 12% had disappeared from the system entirely.”

Benavides, who publishes the VAERSAware dashboards documenting many of the problems with VAERS, said there is even deeper dysfunction in the VAERS system — from inventing symptoms to deleting reports.

“VAERS does not publish all legitimate reports received,” Benavides told The Defender. “They throttle publication of reports. They even delete legitimate reports.”

For a system dependent on voluntary engagement, these restrictive policies keep critical data hidden, according to Benavides.

In 2007, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) contracted with Harvard Pilgrim Health Care (HPHC) to review the VAERS system. In 2010, HPHC filed its r report, which determined that 1 in 39 people experienced vaccine injuries and that only around 1% of vaccine-related injuries or deaths are ever reported to VAERS.

The CDC, which operates under HHS, scuttled the study, refused to take calls from the researchers and declined to upgrade the VAERS system when a new, much more effective system was developed.

‘Blind spots are self-created’

VAERS “collects reports of symptoms, diagnoses, hospital admissions, and deaths after vaccination for the purpose of capturing post-market safety signals,” according to The BMJ.

But the limited transparency of VAERS data presents barriers to proper analysis, according to The BMJ’s investigation and researchers like Benavides.

The public — including doctors and other report submitters — can access only incomplete initial reports, not updates with vital details.

This means outcomes like death are often excluded if the initial report was for an injury and a subsequent death report was filed.

“I made the false assumption that my conversation [with VAERS] would result in an adjustment to the publicly reported case,” Patrick Whelan, M.D., Ph.D., told The BMJ.

Whelan, a rheumatologist and researcher at the University of California Los Angeles, in 2022 filed a report of a cardiac arrest in a 7-year-old male patient after COVID-19 vaccination.

“I assumed that, since it was a catastrophic event, the safety committee would want to hear about it right away,” Whelan said. But nobody called him or requested an update after his submission.

“There was no mechanism for [updating] it,” Whelan told The BMJ. “The only option I had was to make a new VAERS report.” Without updates, the VAERS data showed that the boy was still hospitalized.

Whelan is one the authors of a recent critique of the Cochrane Review that concluded the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines were not dangerous.

The problem with VAERS is not limited to a lack of adequate follow-up but to the incomplete and often inaccurate information found there.

“VAERS in effect allows typos, truncated lot #’s, UNK [unknown] ages, UNK vax dates, UNK death dates, etc. to pass through into publication,” Benavides said.

Benavides said specific data — including ethnicity, hospital names, attending physicians, submitter’s relationship to the patient, patient and submitter addresses, telephone numbers and emails — collected by VAERS are not published,

“Any blind spots are self-created, in my opinion,” he said.

Agencies maintain two separate VAERS databases — public gets to see only one

“There’s two parts to VAERS, the front end and back end,” stated Narayan Nair, division director for the FDA’s Division of Pharmacovigilance at a December 2022 meeting with advocates, according to The BMJ. “Anything from medical records by law can’t be posted on the public-facing system,” he said.

The BMJ investigation discovered that the FDA and CDC maintain two separate VAERS databases, one available to the public that contains only initial reports, and a private back-end system containing all of the updates and corrections.

“Anything derived from medical records by law” cannot be posted on the public-facing system, Nair told the advocates, according to The BMJ.

In an apparent contradiction to this claim, The BMJ noted the FDA’s Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS), which collects post-marketing information on drug reactions, posts its updates publicly.

Sullivan, who met Nair years before COVID-19 and considers him a friend, told The Defender that if this “very bright, kind and caring person” could not fix VAERS, “I don’t think it’s fixable.”

CDC says it reviewed 20,000 reports of deaths — none were related to COVID shots

Withholding outcome data like deaths obscures critical safety signals, experts contend.

James Gill, a medical examiner, reported the death of a 15-year-old patient after vaccination, but the case was dismissed by the CDC despite autopsy evidence, according to the BMJ investigation.

Physician “Helen” told The BMJ that after filing reports on her medical patients, including six who had died, she received only a single request for medical records on the death and two for hospital-admitted patients.

The standard operating procedure for COVID-19 vaccine reports in VAERS, according to The BMJ, is for reports to be processed quickly and for “serious reports” to receive special review by CDC staff.

However, while some other countries have acknowledged the probable connection between the mRNA vaccines and death, the CDC, while claiming to have reviewed nearly 20,000 death reports, has yet to acknowledge a single death linked to the COVID-19 vaccines, The BMJ said.

Benavides provided The Defender examples of VAERS “deleting legitimate reports,” not just duplicates or false claims.

“VAERS even deleted dead Pfizer Trial patients,” he said, claiming that this report, for example, was not a “duplicate” and did not appear to be fake.

Benavides said:

“There are currently about 50 deaths that are not counted as deaths because the correct box is not checked off.

“There are thousands of reports and about 100 deaths in ‘UNKNOWN VAX TYPE’ in VAERS. Read the narrative to see these are clearly C19 jab-related deaths.

“There are over a thousand cardiac arrests where they are not marked as dead, and I question if they actually survived because there is no mention of ROSC [return of spontaneous circulation].”

“Why couldn’t VAERS populate the ages of these dead kids before publication?” Benavides said, pointing to this report on his website.

Physicians report only FDA-recognized adverse events

Ralph Edwards, former director of the Uppsala Monitoring Centre and until recently editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Risk & Safety in Medicine, told The BMJ the regulators may be relying too heavily on past epidemiological data, especially for new types of adverse events. “If something hasn’t been heard of before, it tends to be ignored,” he said.

Without guidance to report potential risks, doctors also face barriers. “Physicians are only willing to talk about FDA-recognized vaccine adverse events,” stated physician “Helen” in a 2021 meeting between the FDA and physicians and advocates, according to The BMJ.

Svetlana Blitshteyn, a neurologist and researcher at the University at Buffalo, New York, told The BMJ if physicians are not educated to look for a specific condition, they’re unlikely to test for it or know how to treat it.

Sullivan told The Defender he believes his experience of developing pulmonary hypertension after taking the mRNA vaccine is one such safety signal the CDC and FDA are overlooking — a condition he believes many athletes have unknowingly developed.

Sullivan co-authored a paper of his and one other similar case of post-vaccine pulmonary hypertension. According to the paper:

“Pulmonary hypertension is a serious disease characterized by damage to lung vasculature and restricted blood flow through narrowed arteries from the right to left heart. The onset of symptoms is typically insidious, progressive and incurable, leading to right heart failure and premature death.”

“Athletes are canaries in the coal mine,” Sullivan told The Defender, speaking of the unusual numbers of athlete deaths since the rollout of the vaccine. Sullivan thinks that those with superior physical conditioning, like him, stand a better chance of survival with early detection.

However, he said, “Athletes will get echocardiography, and it will be essentially normal. The only way to tell for sure is to do a right-heart catheterization” that can identify the anomaly.

Sullivan believes the lives of many athletes could still be saved if the reporting system recognized and investigated the signal — and said he would be happy to join a project dedicated to this goal.

He also told The Defender he believes many of the sudden deaths reported in the 25- to 44-year-old age group are a result of this hidden condition.

‘The buck stops with the CDC for reforms’

Critics point to choices by the CDC as compounding VAERS’ passive design and understaffing issues.

Despite over 1.7 million reports since the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, staffing was not boosted accordingly, according to statements the CDC made to The BMJ.

A Freedom of Information Act request by The BMJ revealed Pfizer has nearly 1,000 more full-time employees working on vaccine surveillance than the CDC. Records showed in 2021, Pfizer on-boarded 600 additional full-time employees to handle the volume of adverse reports and planned to hire 200 more.

Physician “Helen” in The BMJ article called for an end to the “negative feedback loop” whereby the FDA fails to list adverse reactions because passive surveillance systems like the FDA’s don’t display them, while at the same time, because of that lack of disclosure, “physicians are blinded to the adverse reactions in their patients, and thus aren’t reporting them.”

“The buck stops with the CDC for reforms needed to open up data,” Benavides told The Defender, adding several suggestions that could immediately improve VAERS:

“Revert back to pre-January 2011 when VAERS did append initial reports with follow-up data, including death. Take off the arbitrary 30-minute time limit to file a report before getting kicked off. Make the process easier to submit follow-up data.”

When asked why the incompetence of VAERS had been allowed to continue for so long, Sullivan told The Defender, “Because of the lack of product liability” for the vaccines “and the surge to defend economic interests.”

Sullivan said he’d like to see the following changes to the system:

  • Pharmaceutical advertising banned.
  • Pharmaceutical company revenues devoted to advertising instead be spent on R&D.
  • The tax money collected on pharma profits be directly sent to victim injury funds.

Yale cardiologist takes on study of COVID vaccine injuries

Benavides said he spoke with Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) Monday and is also in discussion with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic to address the concerns with VAERS, including the under-publishing of reports.

“That’s a long overdue prospect and it would be incredible to actually get some analysis by that committee,” he said.

Another bright spot comes from news reported in The BMJ’s investigation that Dr. Harlan Krumholz, a cardiologist and researcher at Yale University, has been recruiting members of React19 to study their vaccine injuries.

“We are working hard to understand the experience, clinical course, and potential mechanisms of the ailments reported by those who have had severe symptoms arise soon after the vaccination,” Krumholz told The BMJ.

Sullivan told The Defender that medical science is “just beginning to catalog the damage to the heart” from the vaccines but that “in order to treat something, you have to diagnose it” — and that, because of the shortcomings with VAERS, “we have yet to scratch the surface of that.”

Sullivan, now almost three years into his ordeal, is outliving his initial prognosis.

“I have a grim diagnosis hanging over me, but I’m optimistic because I’m still here,” he said. “I had something bad happen to me, but I’ve met so many amazing, wonderful people along the way who are just interested in truth.”

“I’m going to live the best and most productive life I can with the time I have left,” Sullivan said, helping others who “have this cloud hanging over their future.”

John-Michael Dumais is a news editor for The Defender. He has been a writer and community organizer on a variety of issues, including the death penalty, war, health freedom and all things related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

November 14, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

EU retail giant explains ‘mislabelling’ Israeli products

RT | November 14, 2023

Lidl supermarkets have come under fire in France for allegedly trying to disguise the origin of products from Israel, local media reported over the weekend.

According to the reports, French netizens have spotted Lidl labeling Israeli avocados and pomegranates as being of African or even Spanish origin. A number of users posted photos featuring the products and their labels, both the original and those added by the store, on X (former Twitter) as proof of the misrepresentation, calling the situation “a scandal at Lidl.”

“The item is supposed to come from Morocco according to its label, but after examining it, it turns out that the real origin is Israel,” wrote one user.

“Same thing [happened to me] this morning at the Lidl in Vallauris – avocados from Morocco on the store label, and on the avocado, an Israeli label… I think there are plenty of stores doing this to sell their stocks,” another X user recounted. Similar discrepancies have also reportedly been sighted in Auchan and Carrefour stores.

Commenting on the reports, Schwarz Group, which owns Lidl stores, said that the supposedly intentional mislabeling was nothing more than “a display error, due to the fact that we regularly have avocados and pomegranates from different sources on the shelves.”

While some alleged instances of mislabeling predated the Israel-Hamas conflict, their number reportedly surged when the hostilities began in early October and calls from pro-Palestinian activists to boycott Israel-linked goods became more frequent. Some users believe that these calls prompted the stores to intentionally misrepresent products of Israeli origin so that customers would continue to buy them.

“In view of the recent events in the Middle East, we are dismayed by what is hap-pening [in our stores] and are observing the situation with great concern. Schwarz Group companies reject all forms of violence. Our thoughts are with the victims of the conflict,” the company’s press service told the news outlet.

According to the news outlet Actu Strasbourg, France’s Directorate General for Competition Policy, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) has been aware of the complaints and is currently investigating the situation.

“These incidents were the subject of a small number of reports to our services, spread over several months. These, like any consumer report, are taken into account by DGCCRF investigators,” the organization told the news outlet.

November 14, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Economics | , , , | Leave a comment

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