Jacinda Ardern awarded “Damehood” for handling of the pandemic, as excess deaths mount amid media crackdown
2023 deaths are 25% above normal – but are hidden from the public
BY IGOR CHUDOV | JUNE 5, 2023
New Zealand’s government awarded “damehood” – the second-highest honor in the country – to its former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
The award was given for “leading the country through the Covid pandemic.”
Who gave Jacinda this highest honor? Her new Prime Minister, Chris Hipkins. Mr. Hipkins was Jacinda’s Health Minister during the pandemic, so by giving her the highest honor for handling the pandemic, he also implicitly “honored” himself.
Jacinda did some very unusual things during the pandemic. Her government forbade New Zealand citizens from returning to their own country. She also supported a “two-tier society,” basically robbing unvaccinated New Zealanders of their constitutional rights and laughing about it:
How is New Zealand doing? Take a look at the Short-Term Mortality database. In 2023, New Zealanders are dying at excess rates of around 25% of normal.

https://mpidr.shinyapps.io/stmortality/
A successful pandemic policy would not result in roughly 25% excess mortality in the fourth year of the pandemic. The officials insist that Covid is not responsible for most of these deaths, leaving the actual cause an unspoken mystery.
Most New Zealanders are unaware that their chances of dying increased by a quarter because their country’s press is silent on excess deaths. The silence and lack of public awareness are not accidental: the government is intensifying its crackdown on social networks and the media.
This June, the NZ government revealed its initiative for “Safer Online Services and Media Platforms.”

The government is proposing to create “A new industry regulator” armed with powers to punish “media platforms”:
The new regulator would make sure social media platforms follow codes to keep people safe. Media services like TV and radio broadcasters would also need to follow new codes tailored to their industry. The regulator would have the power to check information from platforms to make sure they follow the codes and could issue penalties for serious failures of compliance. This would ensure everyone is playing by the same rules and that consumer safety is prioritised.
While the proposal gives lip service to “protecting children,” it quickly advances to “hate speech,” the right of the government to remove and block content, and more:
Continuing to remove and block access to the most harmful content – government interventions to censor content and criminalise associated behaviour would remain at the extreme high end of harm. The new framework would continue criminal sanctions for dealing with ‘objectionable’ (illegal) material, including powers to issue takedown notices for this type of content.
There would still be a place for a censorship role, with powers to determine whether the most harmful content should be classified as illegal to create, possess, or share.
Failure to comply with the requirements could lead to authors, creators, and publishers being suspended, removed, or prevented from accessing the platforms’ services. They may also be blacklisted if they show repeated harmful behaviour.
Regulated Platforms would need to implement approved codes of practice that meet legislated core safety objectives and minimum expectations
NZ plans to use Artificial Intelligence to do censorship:
safeguards and barriers to deter the upload and creation of risky content – for example, time-lags or verification requirements for specific types of content
methods to identify harmful content and prevent how it is shared and amplified. This would include ways to remove this content, such as:
• through human and Artificial Intelligence (AI) moderation practices
• downgrading content visibility
• removing recidivist individuals and entities – such as identifying bots and troll accounts that routinely post unsafe content • using authenticity markers.
Anyway, I am not a citizen of New Zealand, so I cannot tell that country how to govern itself.
What I can say, however, is that I am very sorry for the fine citizens of that remote land, who lost their constitutional protections, are dying at excessive rates, are largely unaware of the danger they are in, and have a government more interested in hiding the truth from the population and awarding highest honors to its members.

Does Jacinda deserve her “damehood”? Or does she deserve something else?
THE DURHAM REPORT, THE SPYGATE AND THE INEXTRICABLE TIE WITH THE ITALIAN DEEP STATE
By Cesare Sacchetti | The Eye Of The Needle | June 2, 2023
Fraud and treason. These are the first two words that come up to our mind when we read the Durham report.
In the report written by the special prosecutor appointed in 2019 by the then AG William Barr is narrated the plot to overthrow the Trump presidency.
When President Trump claims that this was the most subversive plot in the history of America, he’s certainly right.
An institution like the FBI, which was supposed to guard the regularity of the election, was the one who instead conspired to frame one of the candidates.
After the publication of the Durham report, the image of the FBI is definitely tainted.
And the most outrageous thing that shows how the FBI is a politicized institution is the fact that the latter acted on the orders of Hillary Clinton.
At page 98 of the report, we find the beginning of this conspiracy against Donald Trump.
Everything dates back to April 2016 when a legal firm that was working for the Clinton campaign was assigned a specific task.
Find, or better cook up, dirt to discredit Donald Trump. The legal firm hired Perkins Coie, a Washington based investigative agency.
Perkins Coie was tasked to find compromising information about Donald Trump in order to show that the Republican candidate was a sort of “Putin’s agent”.
This is the birth of the infamous Steele’s dossier named after his creator, Christopher Steele. Christopher Steele was a former agent of the British secret services, which apparently did not want to do anything with him.
Steel wrote a bogus dossier where he claims that Trump had intercourse in a Moscow hotel with Russian prostitutes whom were asked also to pee on the bed where Obama had supposedly slept years before.
This is the kind of outlandish garbage that was put into the dossier and this shows us, once again, the stunning proportions of this farce.
However, this “material” was the basis that allowed the FBI to launch the infamous Crossfire Hurricane probe.
Crossfire Hurricane is the beginning of the investigation where Trump was suspected of “Russian collusion”.
After the probe started, the FBI illegally wiretapped Carter Page, Trump’s former foreign consultant, and Paul Manafort, former director of Trump’s campaign.
And the Special Prosecutor is very clear in pointing out how their surveillance would have not been authorized without the Steele report.
The FBI and the intelligence community failed to do the proper due diligence of this information and the report, at page 96 of his report, points out this as well.
Durham writes that “neither U.S. law enforcement nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”
Evidence against Trump could not be founded because it was simply not there. And the institutions that were supposed to check Steele’s claims basically took his allegations at face value.
However, Crossfire Hurricane was launched also through the involvement of a foreign actor, which is Italy in this case.
In May 2016, George Papadopoulos, a former Trump consultant made some incautious revelations to Alexander Downer, an Australian diplomat close to the Clintons.
Papadopoulos said to Downer that he had received some compromising information about Hillary Clinton from Joseph Mifsud when he had met him in Italy two months before.
Joseph Mifsud is an enigmatic character. He is a Maltese professor at the Link Campus University in Rome, which is a university known to be quite close to the Anglosphere environment.
Actually, Papadopoulos took the bait of Mifsud who is close to the American Democratic party as well.
The Maltese professor has disappeared ever since. Some sources claim that the Italian secret service are hiding him because of his crucial role in the conspiracy against Trump.
However, we will come back later on the role played by the Italian deep state.
Now we must go back to Crossfire Hurricane.
Obama green lighted Spygate
Once the investigation against Trump was launched, President Obama was immediately informed about it.
In the summer of 2016 the word was spread in the intelligence community about the “Clinton Intelligence plan”.
Obama was briefed by then CIA director, Joseph Brennan, who said to the President how the Clinton campaign was working to frame Trump by falsely associating him with the Russian government.
Obama did not stop the plot nor he tried to halt the illegal FBI investigation. On the contrary, he gave a green light to it.
The conspiracy against Donald Trump had the blessing of Barack Obama who chose to help Hillary Clinton in her plan.
Some months later after this summit, in October, former Italian PM, Matteo Renzi, paid a visit to Obama in the White House.
In that period, Renzi was busy in supporting his failed Yes referendum campaign to reform the Italian constitution and he was also seeking endorsements from international relevant figures, like Obama.
Obama backed Renzi’s constitutional reform with a public statement that it clearly looked a meddling into Italy’s political affairs.
However, according to Papadopoulos, when Obama hosted Renzi at the White House asked him to play a part in the conspiracy against Donald Trump.
And here we have to meet new characters, who are the Occhioneros siblings, Giulio and Francesca Maria.
In that period, the Occhioneros were accused of illegal espionage against Italian institutional figures. The probe launched by the DA of Rome is called “EyePyramid” and it floods the pages of the Italian media.
The two were arrested and they later started denouncing a plot against them.
Giulio Occhionero is a nuclear engineer with advanced IT skills. He wrote to the then US Ambassador, Lewis Eisenberg, and to the US Congress.
Mr. Occhionero in his letters reveals the plot of the Italian authorities against him. According to him, his servers were hacked by the Italian postal police along with their respective IT division, the CNPAIC.
The goal of this operation was to plant some of Clinton’s email on the servers of his firm in the United States and then trying to associate these emails to Trump because of Occhionero’s relations with the Republican party.
So Occhionero in this story played the role of the classical patsy, chosen to frame someone else.
If his version is correct, the plot against Trump proceeded on two parallel ways: on the one hand, there was the American side of the FBI that was illegally spying on Trump campaign; on the other, there were the Italian authorities that were acting jointly with the US institutions to associate Trump with the Russian government.
In the first months of the conspiracy, we find tangible trace of this collaboration between the US and Italian authorities.
In April 2016, Kieran Ramsey, former legal attaché of the US embassy, wrote a letter to Nunzia Ciardi, director of the Italian postal police.

Ramsey’s letter to the Italian postal police
Ciardi is an interesting character because her name surfaced in the Italian mainstream media in 2021 when she was interviewed about the surveillance of the “no vax” activists.
It is still not clear to this day what was the extent of this surveillance and who authorized it considering the fact that the “no vax” activists were not committing any crime.
However, Ramsey wrote to Ciardi and he thanked her for the collaboration of her office in identifying the location of Occhionero’s emails.
It was April and Occhionero was still not investigated by the DA of Rome. Nevertheless, his name was in an official letter signed by the legal attaché of the American embassy and addressed to the Italian authorities.
The Italian engineer thinks that the kind of cybernetic attack that was enforced against his servers could not be operated without an ISP, Internet Service Provider, TIM, in this case.
And only a government could force to participate an ISP in this kind of hacking operation.
This also explains the visit paid by William Barr in Rome. Barr came to Italy to investigate Italy’s role in the Spygate case.
And here we can see once again the deep tie between the American and the Italian deep state. A “special relationship” that dates back to 1945 when after the loss of WW2, Italy has been living in a condition of limited sovereignity.
Italy has not been enjoying an autonomous foreign policy like the other countries who joined NATO. Italy’s foreign policy was mostly dictated by Washington and when Rome did not want to comply was threatened and harassed like what happened to former Italy’s PM, Aldo Moro, who was warned by Henry Kissinger to halt his policy.
Therefore, the Italian deep state finds itself in a condition of subordination to Washington. US governments used Italy as a strategic platform to keep up the old unipolar order of the past century.
This probably explains why Washington chose Italy to carry out its subversive plans against Trump. The Italian deep state is a sort of rogue agent, or just muscle for the US side to use in these kinds of “tricky” situations.
This also explains why Italy, once again, played a fundamental role in another subversive plot against Trump whose name is “Italygate”, which we exposed in this blog in December 2020.
After all, the Italian establishment can rule Italy only with the protection of the Washington guarantor and it must execute the orders of the latter.
When Trump stepped into the political arena, both sides saw a lethal treat. Trump had no interest in pursuing that relationship with the Italian establishment.
His mission was to free America from the rule of the Washington lobbies, which had been controlling Italy for decades.
Trump ended this axis. He severed the umbilical cord that tied the Italian deep state to the American one.
This is why the Durham report closed a cycle. A cycle where the walls were closed in on those who committed treason against the President of the United States.
Although the report does not explicitly mention Italy’s role, Trump has probably the proof about the involvement of everyone in this coup d’état. And this not only haunts the nights of the several people in Washington.
It haunts the nights of several people in Rome too.
Western weapons used in Ukrainian raid inside Russia – WaPo
Moscow earlier published photos of destroyed Western hardware on Russia’s territory as Washington struggled to explain them

RT | June 3, 2023
Military equipment and small arms provided by several NATO nations, including the US, ended up in the hands of militants who launched a cross-border raid into Russia’s Belgorod region in May, the Washington Post reported on Saturday, citing sources linked to US intelligence.
At least four tactical vehicles initially supplied to the Ukrainian military by the US and Poland were employed in the May raid, raising concerns about Kiev’s commitment to fulfilling the demands of its Western supporters, the sources told WaPo.
The US and its Western allies have consistently expressed opposition to the use of Western arms by Ukraine in attacks on Russian territory. They also urged Kiev to “carefully track the billions of dollars’ worth of weapons that have flowed into the country,” WaPo reported.
The attack in question occurred in late May, and in response, the Russian Defense Ministry announced that “over 70 Ukrainian terrorists, four armored combat vehicles, and five pickup trucks” had been destroyed in the clash in Belgorod. The remaining militants were subsequently forced back into Ukraine and targeted by Russian artillery. The incursion resulted in one civilian death and 12 injuries, according to Russian authorities.
The Russian military shared a series of photographs showing what appeared to be destroyed Western equipment abandoned by the militants. Some of the images depicted two M1151A1 Humvee armored cars stuck in bomb craters, while others displayed two M1224 MaxxPro armored vehicles. An AMZ Dzik-2 armored car, manufactured in Poland, was also visible in the images.
Kiev attempted to distance itself from the raid by claiming it was carried out by the “Freedom of Russia Legion” and the “Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK),” the neo-Nazi units responsible for a similar attack in the Bryansk Region in March. The Pentagon and the US State Department expressed doubts regarding the authenticity of the images.
The State Department also said that the US “does not encourage or enable attacks inside of Russia.” Washington also does not “support the use of US-made equipment … for attacks inside of Russia,” it added.
According to the Washington Post, videos published by the “Freedom of Russia Legion” and the RDK militants themselves showed fighters using the Czech-made CZ Bren and Belgium’s FN SCAR assault rifles. Both types of weapons were provided to Ukraine by the respective nations, the paper said, adding that “Bren and SCAR rifles are commonly distributed to Ukraine’s soldiers” and foreign fighters who travel to Ukraine to combat Russian forces.
A spokesperson from the Belgian Defense Ministry informed the Washington Post that they only provided weapons to “official authorities and the regular army” in Ukraine, placing responsibility on Kiev for their usage. Poland and the Czech Republic declined to comment on the findings presented by the Washington Post.
The use of Western military supplies in an attack on Russian territory raises the issue of Kiev’s accountability, Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington-based think-tank, told WaPo. The Ukrainians “are clearly complicit here,” Cancian, a retired US Marine Corps officer, added.
The UK’s “Chilling” Secret Unit That Monitored Lockdown Dissent
More revelations about the secretive Counter Disinformation Unit
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | June 3, 2023
A clandestine UK Government unit dubbed the Counter-Disinformation Unit (CDU) has been implicated in a troubling endeavor to curb and control online discussions about the controversial Covid-19 lockdown policies. The covert operation allegedly involved the collaboration of social media companies in a strategic bid to quell supposed domestic “threats.”
According to revelations from Freedom of Information requests and data protection requests from The Telegraph, posts critical of Covid-19 restrictions, including those questioning mass vaccination of children, were systematically removed.
Social media companies are now under scrutiny following allegations that their technologies were deployed to thwart the wide circulation or promotion of posts tagged as potentially problematic by the CDU or its Cabinet Office equivalent.
The files revealed the surreptitious monitoring of critics of the Government’s Covid plans. Artificial intelligence firms were reportedly enlisted by the government to search social media platforms, flagging any discussions opposing vaccine passports.
In a startling revelation, the BBC was implicated in clandestine government policy discussions regarding this alleged misinformation.
The CDU, hosted by the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS), operated a “trusted flagger” system with major social media companies. This mechanism expedited requests for content removal. The CDU, still operational, was formed in 2019, initially focusing on the European elections, later shifting its attention to the pandemic.
Critics, including MPs and freedom of speech campaigners, have labeled the revelations as “truly chilling” and a strategy tantamount to “censoring British citizens” — a tactic likened to those of the Chinese Communist Party.
“Any attempt by governments to shut down legitimate debate is hugely concerning, but to discover that DCMS actively sought to censor the views of those who were speaking up for children’s welfare is truly chilling,” said Miriam Cates, a Conservative MP to The Telegraph.
A government spokesman refuted the allegations, stating that the unit was designed to track narratives and trends using publicly available information to safeguard public health and national security. The spokesman insisted that the unit never monitored individuals and had a strict policy against referring journalists and MPs to social media platforms.
Like the Curious Bride in “Bluebeard”
By John Leake | Courageous Discourse | May 31, 2023
Recently I’ve been thinking about the old French folktale, Bluebeard. For readers who are unfamiliar with the story, Bluebeard is a nobleman who has been married six previous times to young women who have all mysteriously vanished. Wikipedia provides a succinct account of what happens when he marries a seventh time.
[A neighbor’s youngest daughter who decides to marry him] goes to live with him in his rich and luxurious palace in the countryside, away from her family.
Bluebeard announces that he must leave for the country and gives the palace keys to his wife. She is able to open any room with them, each of which contain some of his riches, except for an underground chamber that he strictly forbids her to enter lest she suffer his wrath. He then goes away, leaves the palace, and the keys in her hands. She invites her sister, Anne, and her friends and cousins over for a party. However, she is eventually overcome with the desire to see what the secret room holds, and she sneaks away from the party and ventures into it.
She immediately discovers that the room is flooded with blood and the murdered corpses of Bluebeard’s previous six wives hanging on hooks from the walls. Horrified, she drops the key in the blood and flees the room.
I’ve long been intrigued by Bluebeard as an archetypal expression of the horror we may experience when we become curious to know what is going on behind the closed doors of power. Bluebeard is a powerful nobleman who is apparently beyond the law. His young bride is an ordinary girl who becomes implacably curious to see all of the rooms of his castle, which seem to symbolize the rooms of his soul.
I spent this evening carefully reviewing declassified e-mails authored by the eminent Scripps Institute virologist, Kristian Andersen. The first one was dated January 31, 2020 and addressed to Anthony Fauci:

The most noteworthy sentences in the email are:
The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome [0.1%] so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially look engineered. … I should mention that after discussions earlier today, Eddie, Bob, Mike [Edward Holmes, Robert Garry, Michael Farzan] and myself all find the genome [of SARS-CoV-2] inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.
3.5 days later—shortly after a phone conference with Dr. Fauci and others—Dr. Andersen completely changed his tune. By then, the decision had been to submit a letter to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine regarding the origin of SARS-CoV-2.

Please note the final sentence:
If one of the main purposes of this document is to counter those fringe theories [about the virus being engineered] I think it’s very important that we do so strongly and in plain language (“consistent with” [natural evolution] is a favorite of mine when talking to scientists, but not when talking to the public—especially conspiracy theorists).
After these e-mails were released to the public in response to a FOIA request, Dr. Andersen claimed that he learned revelatory things about the novel virus in the 3.5 days following his initial e-mail to Fauci, and that these revelations caused his perfect volte-face. However, it seems to me that his explanation doesn’t really account for his strident, unequivocal assertions in his second e-mail.
Many of the recipients’ names in his February 4, 2020 have been redacted, but there [are] many apart from the two men who received his January 31 e-mail (Dr. Fauci and Jeremy Farrar). His first e-mail was a matter of strictly confidential counsel. His second pertains to an open letter—about to be sent to a large institution with many members—declaring that anyone who even suspects the novel virus to have emerged from a lab is a crackpot conspiracy theorist.
What on earth could inspire a virologist to adopt a posture of such Machiavellian duplicity about an infectious agent that—as he well knew—was about to inflict a catastrophe on all of mankind? He had to have known that such pronouncements—coming from a virologist of his eminence—would likely retard a thorough and impartial investigation of the virus’s origin.
Contemplating this question this evening, I thought Bluebeard’s young bride when she discovers the chamber of horrors in her husband’s castle. I suspect that Tess Lawrie felt the same way in her encounter with Dr. Andrew Hill, which she recounted in the short documentary film Dear Andy.
G7 leaders scaremonger over Iran’s nuclear programme, but WMDs aren’t their real concern
By Robert Inlakesh | RT | June 1, 2023
The G7’s concern over Iran’s nuclear programme parrots a decades-old WMD conspiracy theory, aimed at drumming up public support for anti-Iranian action that is really aimed at curtailing Tehran’s conventional weapons programme, regional alliances and the development of stronger ties with Moscow.
After the meeting between the Group of Seven (G7) leaders in May, a number of announcements were made on the trajectory of the alliance. Germany, France, the UK, the US, Japan, Canada, and the European Commission all agreed to take measures to reduce trade reliance on China. They also agreed to advance their commitment to Ukraine’s war budget, while pledging to combat Iran’s influence in the Middle East. The agenda platform, set out from the Japanese city of Hiroshima, seeks to further exacerbate the schisms between major world and regional actors in the emerging multipolar order.
Tehran has long been the target of Western ire and sanctions, and until recently was locked in a rivalry with its Persian Gulf neighbor Saudi Arabia. However, as the US and its allies focus their efforts on combating Russia and China, this has presented opportunities for the less powerful Iran to survive under sanctions.
On May 17, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Iranian counterpart Ebrahim Raisi signed a deal to finance the construction of an Iranian rail route that aims to supplement the international North-South Transport Corridor. It also emerged this month that 28 Russian energy companies plan to visit Iran, seeking to increase cooperation with and potentially help in advancing Iran’s oil and gas industry. These two developments add to the growing cooperation between the world’s two most sanctioned nations, both of which have proven themselves capable of finding alternatives to the West and circumventing the intended effects of its sanctions.
It is in this context that the conspiracy theories about Iran’s alleged pursuit of a nuclear weapon have emerged again in Western discourse. The G7’s draft communique on the issue expressed the nations’ concerns “about Iran’s unabated escalation of its nuclear programme,” while reiterating the “clear determination that Iran must never develop a nuclear weapon.” However, the assertions about Iran’s nuclear programme were also accompanied by the following sentence:
“We express our grave concern regarding Iran’s continued destabilising activities, including the transfer of missiles, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVS) and related technologies to state and non-state actors.”
Western officials have a long track record of wrongly predicting Iran’s development of an atomic bomb, offering false speculation about when Iran will have one whenever a separate major issue pops up. Now that Russia-Iran ties are developing, Tehran-Riyadh rapprochement has been brokered by Beijing, and the sanctions have failed to bring about regime change, it seems there is a build-up to another push to condemn the Iranian government on an issue which the Western world can unite over.
Earlier in May, UK foreign secretary James Cleverly told Fox News that “preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon remains an absolute priority in UK foreign policy,” going on to say that Britain continues to work “very, very closely” with Germany, France and the US to impose sanctions on Iran. And no talk of Iranian nuclear weapons would be complete without an Israeli official chiming in. Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant claimed that Tehran now has enough uranium for five nuclear weapons.
Since 1992, Israeli officials have been constantly making false claims and predictions on how long it will take for Iran to build a nuclear bomb, with former Israeli President Shimon Peres first warning the international community “that Iran would be armed with a nuclear bomb by 1999.” Back in January of 2021, former IDF chief Aviv Kochavi even made the claim that the nukes could be developed in “months, maybe even weeks.”
In reality, there is no proof that Iran has a secret nuclear weapons program, nor is there any evidence to suggest Tehran is seeking to develop the bomb, let alone use it. At this point, after the deadlines set by the countless predictions have passed, the current talk amounts to little more than a fact-free conspiracy theory. Thinking rationally about it, it would make no sense for Iran to use a nuclear weapon either, in the event that it actually is seeking one, especially not against Israel, as this could end up destroying the third-holiest site in the Islamic faith.
There are, however, a number of ways that Iran presents a clear and present threat to the West’s agenda in the Middle East. The first and most immediate threat comes through its defense industry. Iran now produces sophisticated drones and missiles that are capable of doing significant damage to NATO and Israeli forces in the Middle East, if need be. Additionally, Tehran has allies like Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine, Ansarallah (the Houthis) in Yemen, Kataeb Hezbollah in Iraq, and many others, who remain powerful in their own given arenas.
Lastly, it is clear that Iran is now on track for a brighter future economically. It has managed to end its hostility with Saudi Arabia, and this has meant that their competition inside a range of Middle East nations has eased. These strides toward regional stability have been coupled with developing relations between Tehran and Moscow. Iran also agreed on a potential $400 billion deal with China, announced back in 2021, which at the very least opened the door for further cooperation and investment.
At a time when the US and its European allies are focusing heavily on combating both China and Russia, it is a great frustration to witness Iran, their top Middle East foe, come together with their enemies. This is why the issue of nuclear weapons has come up again. Not that Western nations, armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons themselves, are in any position to tell others what to do – but it is clear that the question of an imminent Iranian WMD is not a serious one.
Robert Inlakesh is a political analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker currently based in London, UK. He has reported from and lived in the Palestinian territories and currently works with Quds News. Director of ‘Steal of the Century: Trump’s Palestine-Israel Catastrophe’.
Federal Government Funds $4.7 Million Grant — Led by Merck Consultant — to Increase HPV Vaccine Uptake…
… By Improving How Providers ‘Announce’ the Vaccine
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | June 1, 2023
This is the first in a two-part series examining federal funding for behavior modification approaches to increase uptake among teens of the human papillomavirus vaccine.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is funding a scientist who also is a paid consultant for Merck to conduct research on how to increase teen uptake of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, documents obtained by Children’s Health Defense (CHD) via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request revealed.
Merck manufactures Gardasil, the only HPV vaccine available in the U.S.
Documents show that the National Cancer Institute (NCI) at the HHS in 2021 awarded a $4.7 million, five-year grant to the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill.
The grant’s principal investigator, Noel Brewer, Ph.D., a psychologist and professor in the Department of Health Behavior at the UNC Gillings School of Public Health, consults for Merck and is also the recipient of commercial research grants from Merck, Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).
The HHS grant builds on Brewer’s previous industry and HHS-funded research investigating different “research-tested interventions” intended to reshape the behavior of physicians and patients by “improving” the ways providers “announce” the vaccine to potential recipients, in order to get more teens to take the HPV vaccine.
The grant is focused on further developing “Announcement Approach Training,” which involves having providers skip the step of discussing with families in “open-ended conversation” whether or not they want their child vaccinated for HPV and instead “presume” the family wants the vaccine and announce the child will receive it as if it were a routine part of the office visit.
Brewer and others’ previous research has shown this method reduces the time a provider needs to spend talking with their patients and increases vaccine uptake.
Other projects funded by the grant consist of conducting randomized controlled trials to see how best to get clinics and clinicians to implement this approach to increase HPV vaccine uptake, according to the FOIA documents obtained by CHD.
One trial investigates how clinics can rework their “standing orders” — the protocols for all practitioners — to standardize how clinicians talk to their patients, for example, using the announcement approach, or to otherwise change the nature of doctor-patient interactions.
Another trial investigates how financial incentives affect providers’ willingness to strongly recommend the shots. A third trial tests whether training by “trusted messengers” works to better alter provider behavior.
The overall project will compare the effectiveness and cost of the different methods and model them in rural areas, which typically have lower HPV rates.
U.S. government awarded more than 50 grants worth $40 million to increase HPV vaccine uptake
The $4.7 million grant to UNC was by far the largest awarded by the HHS to increase HPV vaccine uptake, however, it was not the only one.
CHD’s search of USAspending.gov identified more than 50 grants totaling more than $40 million awarded by the HHS to universities, healthcare systems and departments of public health to increase HPV vaccine uptake.
Two of the smaller grants came from the U.S. Department of Defense rather than HHS.
All of the grants — awarded since 2009, with most awarded since 2016 — fund projects either to test or to implement different methods to change people’s behaviors at the community, provider and patient level with the goal of getting more young people to take the shot.
Some of the more recent grants also focused on increasing HPV uptake by combating “misinformation” on social media.
This approach to vaccine uptake is part of a larger turn in American healthcare toward applying lessons from behavioral economics, like “nudging” to healthcare.
“Nudging” figured prominently during the COVID-19 pandemic and was heavily utilized by governments and public health officials throughout the world to implement restrictions and countermeasures.
Economist Richard H. Thaler and legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein defined the concept in their bestselling 2008 book — “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness” — as a method that “alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives.”
Thaler and Sunstein presented nudging as a technocratic solution for tricky policy issues involving a perceived need to encourage, in a “voluntary manner,” policies or measures that would otherwise be unpopular.
The strategy made its way into public health long before COVID-19, with Big Pharma, regulatory agencies and doctors applying this behavioral approach to the clinic, trying to “nudge” patients toward desired choices by changing the “choice architecture” they are operating in so that they would choose differently.
Providers directed to ‘presume’ families want the vaccine
Over the past several years, much research has been dedicated to studying how “nudge” strategies can be applied to vaccine uptake, particularly the COVID-19 vaccine.
A study posted in BMJ Global Health in 2021 called for further research into whether methods such as the “Announcement Approach” could effectively “nudge” people to take vaccines.
The documents related to the $4.7 million HHS grant obtained by CHD include detailed proposals for the randomized controlled trials in the “Improving Provider Announcement Communication Training” project, which investigates this approach.
The university webpage shows a total grant of $11.7 million, which appears to include administrative overhead costs.
The broader project is divided into four sub-projects, each led by a different faculty member with Brewer as the lead investigator.
Much of Brewer’s professional work is dedicated to increasing HPV vaccination uptake. He chairs the National HPV Roundtable, which brings together medical associations, nonprofits, health insurance providers and pharmaceutical companies, with funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to raise HPV vaccination rates.
He also advises the World Health Organization, the CDC and other organizations on “vaccine communication.”
Brewer is also a consultant who has served on different paid Merck HPV advisory boards since 2011 and has been a general consultant for the company since 2019.
According to his curriculum vitae, he has given numerous talks at Merck events on how to increase HPV vaccine uptake.
Merck awarded Brewer more than $500,000 in grant funding to study HPV vaccine uptake and he received more than $400,000 from Pfizer to study how trainings might improve physician perceptions and recommendations of the HPV vaccine. He has also received funding from GSK.
He is a member of HHS’s National Vaccine Advisory Committee working group on the HPV vaccine and his website says he was a paid advisor to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
The FOIA documents included support letters from Brewer’s colleagues celebrating how Brewer had “already changed the national landscape for increasing HPV vaccination.”
Brewer and his colleague Melissa Gilkey, Ph.D., associate professor of Health Behavior, developed “Announcement Approach” training specifically for the HPV vaccine and in this project are conducting randomized controlled trials to determine how best to put the approach into practice.
The research premise is that provider recommendations are key to increasing uptake of the HPV vaccine, but that providers either don’t recommend the vaccine — in part because they know parents have doubts about it — or don’t use the most effective method, “presumptive recommendation,” rebranded here as Announcement Approach, to make their recommendation.
A “presumptive recommendation” is made when the provider does not offer the option of not taking the vaccine to the family, thereby limiting the landscape of available choices.
This method directs the provider to act as if the family has already decided to vaccinate their child — to “presume” they want to be vaccinated — rather than opening space for dialogue or conversation around the vaccine.
Brewer et al.’s previous research that found training doctors to give announcements rather than have conversations with their patients, where they might raise more questions, led to higher rates of vaccine uptake.
Brewer’s team found clinics that used the presumptive or announcement approach had a 5.4% increase in uptake and physicians had to spend 40% less time discussing the vaccine with families.
The grant documents provide an example of the announcement approach:
“Announcements should indicate that HPV vaccination is part of routine care …
“We recommend that announcements 1) note the child’s age to establish what follows as part of routine care; 2) say the child is due for several vaccinations (noting the diseases prevented, not the vaccine names); and 3) say that the child will receive vaccines today.
“An example of a presumptive announcement is, ‘Now that Sophia is 12, she is due for 3 vaccines. Today, she’ll get vaccines to prevent meningitis, HPV cancers, and whooping cough.’”
For “hesitant parents” who don’t submit to the HPV vaccination with the initial approach, the provider should “connect and counsel.”
To do this the provider:
“1) connects with the parent by showing empathy and confirming the parent’s main question without reinforcing misinformation; and
“2) counsels the parent using a research-tested message and encourages them to vaccinate today.”
According to the grant proposal, “Messages in the counsel step increase parents’ intentions to vaccinate in our prior randomized experiments (e.g, ‘This vaccine is one of the most studied medications on the market. The HPV vaccine is safe, just like the other vaccines given at this age.’)”
If parents decline same-day vaccination, the team member makes a note in the patient’s chart and addresses HPV vaccination at the next visit.
In an observational study, the “announcement” or presumptive method was associated with an increase in parental vaccine acceptance but also with reduced satisfaction in the clinical experience.
The participatory or conversational format — where providers offer the full range of options to patients and dialogue with them about it —showed the opposite pattern.
HPV vaccine generates profits for Merck and HHS, which funds the grant
Brewer receives research funding from both Merck and HHS/NCI, both of which stand to gain financially from increased HPV vaccine uptake.
Merck — the only producer of HPV vaccines in the U.S. since GSK pulled Cervarix from the U.S. market in 2016 — generates billions annually from Gardasil sales. It reported sales of $4 billion in 2020, despite the challenges of the pandemic.
Sales jumped to $5.7 billion in 2021. And with expanded production and global uptake, Merck anticipates “very strong sequential and year-over-year growth for Gardasil.”
The National Cancer Institute at the NIH developed the technology for the HPV vaccine and licensed it to Merck, which formulated its Gardasil vaccine and ran the clinical trials. The FDA granted Fast Track approval for Gardasil after only a six-month review process and it was licensed to Merck in 2006.
From 2007 through 2019, the HPV vaccine was among the NIH’s top four most commercially successful inventions, an assessment based on the royalties a product produces for the NIH.
The National Cancer Institute, which is housed in the HHS, receives the royalties from the Gardasil vaccine and is the agency funding the UNC study.
The inventors, who work for the NIH, also individually receive up to $150,000 per year for their patentable inventions, depending on how much the NIH receives in royalties.
It is unclear how much NIH receives from the HPV vaccine. A 2020 Government Accountability Office report found that the NIH had generated $2 billion in profits from 34 licensed drugs — with three drugs generating more than $100 million — it created since 1991 and recommended that NIH ought to increase transparency around this process.
HPV vaccination, which requires multiple doses, was first recommended by the CDC for girls in 2006 and for boys in 2011. The CDC routinely recommends vaccination at ages 11-12 and says it can be started at age 9.
HPV infections may lead to the development of cervical cancer. However, most infections are benign and resolve on their own.
The UNC grant description states the HPV vaccine could prevent 32,100 cancers per year if it were administered at the target rate of 80% of the population.
But the efficacy of the vaccine is disputed.
Studying HPV vaccine efficacy for eliminating cervical cancer is challenging due to the long amount of time between infection and the development of cancer (mean time 23.5 years), lack of adequate informed consent, complexity between HPV infection and cervical cancer and the negative impact of girls’ sexual behavior, which may worsen the risks of cervical cancer.
In 2020, the CDC reported that about 75% of U.S. teens had gotten at least one dose in the two or three-dose HPV series, and about 59% had gotten the whole series — a rate that falls short of its goal of 80% coverage. That number dropped nearly 5% during the pandemic.
It also reported that uptake of the HPV vaccine is lower than that of other routinely recommended vaccines. A new study published May 23 in Pediatrics investigated why parents decide against the HPV vaccine for their children.
The study found that although uptake increased overall between 2010 and 2020, during that time, the number of parents citing “safety or side effects” as a reason for vaccine hesitancy increased by nearly 16% annually.
Since the Gardasil vaccine was introduced in 2006, numerous studies have linked it to debilitating autoimmune disorders, neurological side effects and other complications, prompting many families of injured children to file lawsuits alleging the company knew the vaccine could cause serious side effects, The Defender reported.
Until the COVID-19 vaccine became available, the FDA had received more adverse reaction reports related to Gardasil than any other vaccine in history.
The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program has paid out over $70 million to people making claims regarding Gardasil. Merck now faces more than 80 complaints in federal court alleging that the HPV vaccine caused debilitating autoimmune complications. A judge consolidated 31 of these cases into a single bellwether pool, against Merck’s protest.
But Merck continues to work with national agencies to increase gardasil uptake. Merck’s researchers in March published a study in Pediatrics suggesting evidence shows that moving routine HPV vaccination to ages 9 to 10 may improve vaccination coverage rates.
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
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.
Enthusiasm for the vaxx falls ever lower & millions of unwanted doses expire
The German press discover that maybe big pharma & their political enablers are not our friends after all
eugyppius: a plague chronicle | June 2, 2023
I know it’s not the repudiation we hoped for, but the widening displeasure over the deeply idiotic and imprudent contracts that the European Union negotiated with Pfizer and BioNTech for Covid-19 vaccine doses says a lot about where the vaccinators find themselves, politically and socially, at this late hour.
That erstwhile pillar of the vaccinator-industrial complex, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, has revealed a markedly reduced enthusiasm for the vaccines and their procurement in the past months. After attacking the lack of transparency surrounding the contract negotiations, they’ve found the energy to deplore all the worthless vaccine that our health ministers have purchased:
In Germany, by the end of March 2023, around 83 million Covid-19 vaccine doses expired and were thrown away by with the federal government alone. Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (SPD) has informed a private session of Bundestag budget committee of these developments …
These figures raise many questions. Did Germany, especially under Lauterbach’s predecessor Jens Spahn (CDU), but also during Lauterbach’s tenure during the fight against the pandemic, order too much vaccine? Could they have avoided these costs, which reach into the billions? Or did the state have no choice, because it was not foreseeable how many people would get vaccinated, and how many injections would be needed for effective protection in the longer run?
What devastating answers all of these questions have.
In any case, the EU and the Federal Republic of Germany have purchased far more vaccine than is needed now. As the Ministry of Health informed the Bundestag, Germany has donated 120 million vaccine doses to other countries. Even after these donated doses left the central warehouse, further doses nevertheless expired …
The Ministry explains that additional doses have expired ““at the various stages” of the supply chain. This refers to doses shipped to wholesalers, pharmacies and doctors’ offices. These parties are in turn responsible for “proper disposal,” the ministry explains. They did not provide figures on how many doses had expired and been destroyed by these wholesalers, pharmacies and medical practices. It is possible that these numbers have not been collected.
In other words: The 83 million figure represents a floor; nobody actually knows or is all that eager to tabulate how many doses have been thrown away.
When asked by the SZ, the Ministry of Health did not say how much the expired and destroyed doses at the federal level cost. Publicly available data nevertheless supports the assumption that the costs to the taxpayer … are in the billions.
And that may not be all.
Through the start of 2023, the federal government had ordered a total of 672 million doses for 13.1 billion Euros, generally via the EU. Each jab therefore costs just on average just under 20 Euros … According to the Ministry of Health, by the start of May, around 192 million doses had been injected in Germany, and some of the deliveries are still outstanding.
More than a year ago, the Berlin-based newspaper Tagesspiegel asked whether Lauterbach was threatened with “billions in damages”. At that time, it was already becoming apparent that vaccine could remain unused. In mid-2022, 3.9 million vaccine doses had expired. By the beginning of 2023, there were already 36.6 million vaccine doses. And now, only five months later, it is already 83 million. By the end of last year, approximately 54 million doses had expired and in the first quarter of 2023, approximately 29 million doses had been destroyed, the ministry informed the Bundestag.
Possibly even more vaccine will have to be destroyed. As of the beginning of May, the federal government still has stores amounting to around 120 million doses. Their future is “fraught with uncertainty” and depends, among other things, on the future course of the pandemic, the Ministry of Health informed the Bundestag. The Federal Government still intends to give “unneeded vaccine” to other countries.
Not a single country anywhere on earth can be found to take this stuff.
To avoid having to destroy more vaccine, the EU has now negotiated a partial cancellation of supply contracts with the pharmaceutical companies BioNTech and Pfizer. A “cancellation fee” is due for this, Lauterbach informed the Bundestag. According to reports, Lauterbach did not give a figure. The cancellation fees for unwanted vaccine is likely to reach costs in Germany alone of hundreds of millions of Euros.
While the details of the deal are officially secret, an outraged Polish health minister revealed several weeks that Pfizer and BioNTech have demanded that EU countries pay 50% of the cost for every previously ordered yet unneeded vaccine dose.
At the end of the article there lurks this foul paragraph:
With early access to safe and effective vaccines, many lives have been saved and millions of people have been protected from serious illness. The economic costs of the pandemic have also been reduced and the “impact on social life has been noticeably mitigated.” The vaccine surplus is a consequence of this strategy. This is how the Ministry of Health justified the bulk purchases in the Bundestag.
We’ve been over this many times at the plague chronicle, but as long as politicians and the press continue to indulge in these hollow excuses, I’ll keep repeating myself: It’s strange indeed that enthusiasm for these SaFE aNd EfFeCtIvE vaccines should have plummeted in precise inverse correlation to public experience with them. You’d almost think that the more the vaccinators were allowed to vaccinate, the more everybody decided the vaccines weren’t for them after all. This is hardly the response you’d expect to such miraculous, life-saving side effect-free products.
A great many journalists, bureaucrats, politicians and ordinary people were complicit in the excesses of the past several years, and as the policies of the pandemic continue to sour, they’ll do anything but talk about it. This more than anything is the reason for the deafening silence surrounding all of these matters. What critique there is will increasingly attach itself to isolated matters, such as school closures, and to specific initiatives in which few participated directly, such as the buying of vaccines. They’ll do everything they can to assign blame in those few areas, where they can’t be blamed themselves.
The Ursula von der Leyen Affair
Free West Media | June 2, 2023
After a criminal complaint in Belgium against the President of the European Commission, the so-called SMS-case, now takes a new turn. The judge responsible for the investigation will likely gain access to the secret messages exchanged between Ursula von der Leyen and Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer, at least if they haven’t been deleted.
The agreements on vaccines negotiated via SMS between EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and pharmaceutical giant Pfizer’s CEO Albert Bourla have caused much ink to flow, not least because many legally knowledgeable claim that the EU Commission, which is not elected, does not have the mandate to negotiate in these matters.
Due to this suspicion of negotiations “outside the framework” of the mega-contract for vaccine procurement signed, it would constitute a crime not to present these SMS messages, which are legally considered administrative documents and thus should be recorded. If they have been deleted, President Ursula von der Leyen, as the responsible head of a public authority, must answer in court. The case could reveal the existence of “a corruption pact,” according to French lawyer Diane Protat, but has received very little attention in mainstream media.
Several alternative media have written about the administrative contortions in the case when EU parliament members twice unsuccessfully invited Pfizer’s CEO to come and explain himself before the European Parliament. He accepted the first invitation, but canceled at the last minute and sent a subordinate, Janine Small, instead. When asked directly, she admitted that they had not tested whether the vaccine was effective against transmission but stubbornly refused to disclose any financial terms in the agreement.
Conflicts of interest? Corruption?
Since October 2022, an investigation has been ongoing within the European authorities. Then in December, the BonSens association initiated a procedure at the New York State Court to have the infamous text messages handed over, as they have serious suspicions against the President of the European Commission regarding conflicts of interest or even corruption.
The fact is that no official document precisely describes the official terms from the negotiations of the gigantic third contract for the purchase of Pfizer vaccines, covering 1.8 billion doses, for an amount of more than 70 billion euros.
Something else not reported to any significant extent by mainstream media is that the New York Times sued the European Commission, on the same grounds, to gain access to the text messages on January 25, 2023.
On April 5, 2023, lobbyist Frédéric Baldan filed a new complaint, this time as a criminal case in Belgium, to investigating judge Frenay in Liège. His complaint directly refers to the issue of the third contract for vaccine procurement and the fact that the negotiations were apparently conducted outside the usual framework to negotiate this type of contract, bypassing the steering committee responsible for evaluating the bids. Ursula von der Leyen, however, has no mandate giving her the right to intervene in this type of contract negotiation.
Belgian law has a peculiarity. A public authority operator who arbitrarily violates a constitutional law risks imprisonment (article 151 of the penal code). In this case, it is about the right to allow every citizen access to administrative documents, according to the principle of publicity.
The complaint is thus from a private individual and concerns civil liability for improper exercise of authority, exceeding powers, destruction of public records, illegal bias, and corruption. The complaint, therefore, aims to cover all eventualities.
This case is a real earthquake on the European political scene, which has already been hit by suspicions of corruption against the EU’s Health Commissioner Stella Kyriakidou and the QatarGate scandal.
Chaos
Even though the EU Commission did not want to let citizens, or even EU parliamentarians, shed light on the (expensive) economic conditions for the purchases of vaccines, a legal solution could be found at the state level and its jurisdiction, in this case, Belgium.
Moreover, a dozen European states, including Poland and Bulgaria, are now questioning the purchase price of vaccine doses and are concerned about the obligation to recommend products that, besides widespread doubt about their real effectiveness, are no longer useful since the Covid-19 epidemic phenomenon is over.
In France, 46 million doses remain in the health administration’s warehouse and will go to waste. There are more than 30 million doses in Italy and more than 10 million in Belgium. A real waste. How to support – or how it was possible to support – the idea that even more doses need to be purchased under threat of being sued for non-compliance with a commercial contract … that nobody gets to see?
This situation has handed all the cards to the pharmaceutical industry, primarily to Pfizer, which has grabbed more than three-quarters of the sales contracts. This prompts European Parliament Member Michèle Rivasi, from Europe Ecology-The Greens (EELV), to say:
“It seems as if it is the pharmaceutical companies that have been holding the pen at the EU Commission.”
She has discussed the case in several French media, such as the left-wing newspaper l’Humanité, which has presented the subject on its YouTube channel. The newspaper Valeurs Actuelles brought up the subject in a column by Patricia de Sagazan. The EU news website EURACTIV covered the subject. Sud-Radio also addressed this news thanks to André Bercoff, who left the word to Diane Protat and Frédéric Baldan.
A Catastrophic Silence for Democracy
The subject could quickly go from soap opera to a major legal and political scandal. The President of the EU Commission, who already has a turbulent past with the German justice system from when she was the country’s defense minister, has shown many signs of close friendship with Albert Bourla, not least through her husband, who works in the pharmaceutical field.
The exchanged text messages must be shown to the public to not further discredit the EU institutions, short-circuited by von der Leyen’s wish to handle this matter herself. EU institutions suffer from an apparent worrying structural weakness, namely, being overly exposed to the power behind industrial and financial lobbying groups.
Since the beginning of the “health crisis” in 2020, mainstream media has shown a clear inactivity on these issues. The ethical rules for journalists established in the Munich Declaration of 1971 aim to guarantee citizens objective and factual information about the dangers threatening public affairs and the common interest. Today’s corps of journalists often seems to have forgotten these rules.
This silence is serious for democracy and stability in the political sphere in Europe. While citizens’ mistrust of the media continues to grow in Europe, this situation also damages the image of the EU, and its member states that do not react to the deficiencies in the supranational institutions that now largely govern the countries.

If you regard the United States as perhaps flawed but overall a force for good in the world . . .