House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer moved to hold FBI Director Christopher Wray in criminal contempt of Congress on Tuesday after the agency refused to provide a subpoenaed document potentially implicating US President Joe Biden.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has refused to provide a form that “describes an alleged criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Biden and a foreign national relating to the exchange of money for policy decisions,” as per James Comer, R-Ky.
According to Larry Johnson, a veteran of the CIA and the State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism, the information in the FD-1023 form would require criminal charges to be filed against the incumbent president.
“It’s just that simple,” Johnson told Sputnik. “I think the evidence is conclusive that [Joe Biden and his son Hunter – Sputnik ] have been involved with bribery and with activities that are taking advantage of Biden’s position in government. It is corruption on a scale that is frankly astonishing. (…) [The FBI is] doing everything they can to try to cover for the president.”
What’s a FD-1023 Form?
Comer and his fellow lawmakers subpoenaed the FBI for the document in question last month. However, the bureau refused to provide it, claiming that a specific Justice Department policy “strictly limits when and how confidential human source information can be provided outside of the FBI.”
On May 30, acting assistant director of the FBI, Christopher Dunham, sent a letter to Comer, downplaying the significance of the document: “Investigative reports, such as an FD-1023, include leads and suspicions, not the conclusions of investigators based on fuller context, including information that may not be available to the confidential source.”
“That document is the record of somebody who is – of a source of an informant,” said Johnson. “That’s all it is, it’s a written account of someone’s testimony. So it is one piece of that. But apparently, it provides very specific facts about what the Bidens did. Joe Biden has become rich while being president. And I find it fascinating that the United States will always want to criticize or make claims about corruption in Russia, for example, when they’re guilty – the people of the United States – the Bidens are guilty of the very thing they accuse the others of.”
The very next day, on May 31, Wray held a phone conversation with Comer and Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and confirmed the existence of the aforementioned FD-1023 form. He further offered to provide the congressmen “an opportunity to review information responsive to the subpoena in a secure manner to accommodate the committee, while protecting the confidentiality and safety of sources,” as per the bureau’s statement.
“While Director Wray — after a month of refusing to even acknowledge that the form existed — has offered to allow us to see the documents in person at FBI headquarters, we have been clear that anything short of producing these documents to the House Oversight Committee is not in compliance with the subpoena,” Comer stated, adding that the Committee is ready to begin contempt of Congress proceedings.
Is the FBI Deliberately Delaying the Process?
Just hours after holding talks with Comer and Grassley, Wray “hopped” on the bureau’s jet and headed to the FBI’s Las Vegas field office to hold a meeting and attend a counterterrorism conference there, according to Just the News, an independent US media outlet founded by American investigative journalist John Solomon. The media outlet remarked that the trip allowed the FBI chief to escape “an increasingly hostile atmosphere” for himself in DC.
The FBI is interested in further delaying the congressional probe prior to the 2024 elections, believes former CIA station chief Philip Giraldi.
“The FBI works for Attorney General Merrick Garland who works for the president,” Giraldi told Sputnik. “The president will be badly damaged politically if the investigation is carried out diligently so it is on a slow schedule with no results out before next year’s election in all probability. Denying material to the House panel means that there will be procedural delays which will slow up the process even more.”
FBI and DoJ Have Record of Shielding Bidens
Sputnik’s interlocutors noted that the unfolding spat between GOP lawmakers and the FBI should be seen in a larger context of the Justice Department and bureau operatives hindering attempts to turn the spotlight on the Bidens’ potential wrongdoing.
“There is hard evidence of income from foreign sources that was not reported for tax purposes,” Giraldi said, referring to the ongoing Hunter Biden tax probe. “Also some evidence that Joe Biden took bribes from foreign governments and/or intelligence agencies to influence certain policies favorable to those governments. Whistleblowers inside the IRS have indicated that the FBI and attorney general have both been deliberately slowing down the investigative process, presumably to protect the president.”
In April, an IRS whistleblower came forward informing the US Congress about apparent violations during the Hunter Biden tax crimes investigation by the DOJ, citing “preferential treatment” and attempts to shield the first son.
He also alleged misleading statements to Congress by Attorney General Merrick Garland related to the probe. After that, the whistleblower’s team was abruptly suspended from the Hunter Biden investigation at the DoJ’s orders, as per IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel. According to the whistleblower, who turned out to be Gary Shapley, a 14-year IRS veteran, the expulsion could be nothing short of “retaliation.”
FBI agents facilitated the suppression of the New York Post’s Hunter “laptop from hell” story in October 2020 as his father, Joe Biden, ran for the presidency, according to Elon Musk’s Twitter Files expose.
In addition, 51 ex-top intelligence officials branded Hunter’s laptop from hell as “Russian disinformation” at the time. As it turned out in April, it was done at the request of then-Biden campaign top operative Antony Blinken, now serving as a secretary of state.
How Could FBI’s Doc Affect Biden’s 2024 Bid?
The unfolding row over the FD-1023 form replicates the circumstances of 2020, when Joe was amidst his presidential campaign.
“If the story will ever develop fully and appear in the mainstream media, which is unlikely, it could easily change the outcome of the 2024 election if Biden runs,” Giraldi suggested.
“I suspect the story will be played down by the media, however, and I would imagine Biden would not run again if he decides that he has been badly damaged.”
For his part, Johnson does not believe that Biden will be able to run.
“I think he will either decide not to run or may be removed from office before his term is out. So, I think there will be evidence coming out of the nature of this corruption that will be impossible to deny,” the former CIA analyst said.
Team Biden and their allies in the FBI and DoJ appear to have been doing “everything they can to try to obstruct justice,” Johnson noted. “That would be another charge that should be filed against them, they’re making sure that they’re not held accountable.”
The CIA installed malware on thousands of Apple phones used by Russian citizens and foreign diplomats working in the country, Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) has claimed.
The FSB said on Thursday that a joint operation with the Federal Guard Service (FSO) had “uncover[ed] a surveillance operation by American intelligence agencies, carried out with the use of Apple’s mobile devices.”
An assessment of Russia’s telecom infrastructure revealed “anomalies” in the operations of some iPhones, caused by “a previously unknown malicious program that uses software vulnerabilities provided by the manufacturer,” a statement by the agency read.
Several thousand phones made by Apple were infected with the malware, according to the FSB.
Not only Russian citizens were targeted, but also “foreign phone numbers and subscribers that use SIM cards registered with diplomatic missions and embassies inside Russia, including countries from the NATO bloc and the post-Soviet space, as well Israel, Syria and China,” the agency said.
The discovery is more proof of the close cooperation between Apple and the US intelligence community, the FSB claimed, adding that “the declared policy of ensuring the privacy of personal data of Apple users has nothing to do with reality.”
The FSB also accused Apple of “providing the American intelligence services with a wide range of opportunities to survey any persons of interest to the White House, including their partners in anti-Russian activities, as well as their own citizens.”
In March, the Kommersant newspaper reported that members of the Russian presidential administration had been told to discard their iPhones. According to the paper, the step was taken due to concerns that advanced cyberwarfare tools, such as the Israeli Pegasus software, could allow Apple gadgets to be breached, despite the producer’s claims of their enhanced security features.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to comment on the report, but noted that Russian officials were in any case barred from using smartphones “for work purposes” due to the potential vulnerability of devices.
US advocacy group America First Legal (AFL) has released a new package of emails that challenge US President Joe Biden’s prior statements that he knew nothing about his son Hunter’s ties with foreign business people.
The emails are dated from December 2009 to June 2010, the group said, adding that they had been provided by the National Archives at its request. They include emails sent by Hunter’s ex-business partner Eric Schwerin to top assistants of Joe Biden, then vice president in Barack Obama’s administration.
“Hunter’s business partner, Eric Schwerin, emailed the Office of the Vice President about a ‘China Lunch’ a couple of months before [former Chinese President Hu Jintao’s] official visit to the United States. Despite Joe Biden’s denial that he was aware of Hunter’s business dealings with China, the National Archives redacted this email because its ‘Release would disclose confidential advice between the President and his advisors, or between such advisors,'” AFL said.
Schwerin purportedly intended to secure an invitation for his colleague to a 2010 State Department dinner with high-ranking Chinese Communist Party officials.
Joe Biden has adamantly denied any knowledge of or involvement in any of his son’s business dealings as the Republicans in Congress are probing him over possible abuse of power.
Other emails indicate that Hunter Biden received confidential information from the vice-president’s office about a state visit to Africa in 2010.
“These records – which are only a small portion of the actual records that the National Archives possess – demonstrate for the American people, yet again, continued evidence of influence peddling and personal enrichment by the Biden family. The full extent has yet to be seen, but with each release, we are painting a fuller picture for the American people of the extent to which the Biden family business was intertwined with the official business of the United States,” America First Legal Vice President and General Counsel Gene Hamilton said.
In September 2020, a report by two US Republican senators revealed Hunter Biden and his associates were involved with foreign individuals in millions of dollars worth of questionable financial transactions. The transactions involved individuals with ties to the Chinese Communist Party and the wife of the former mayor of Moscow.
The State Department justified its funding of the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), an organization that provides blacklists of certain outlets for the purpose of demonetizing them.
In a letter sent in March, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) criticized the State Department for funding the GDI, and called for an investigation into the $100,000 grant the department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) awarded GDI in 2021. In a response sent last week, the department said it did not regret funding the GDI.
The letter to Rep. Issa, authored by the assistant secretary of the bureau of legislative affairs Naz Durakoglu, stated that reports that the “State Department funding may have been used to fund GDI’s work in the United States” are inaccurate.
The letter continued to state that Issa’s letter “raises several important points concerning free speech and the principles of democracy, both of which are fundamental to the Department’s representation of U.S. foreign policy and promotion of American ideals abroad,” Washington Examiner reported.
Durakoglu argued that the grant “focused on countering foreign disinformation overseas and, consistent with the GEC’s mission, no domestic-focused activities were included in the scope of work.”
“Funding under the award could not be used for any other purpose,” the letter added.
“America’s foreign adversaries and competitors have wielded information manipulation as a tool of statecraft for decades,” Durakoglu wrote. “The comparatively recent proliferation of global information and communications technology accentuates a contemporary national security risk. The Department stands by the work of the GEC and the crucial role it plays in helping to ensure that foreign disinformation operations do not undermine the policies, security, or stability of the United States, its allies, and partners.”
Speaking to the Washington Examiner, Rep. Issa said: “It is disappointing but not surprising that the Biden State Department hasn’t come close to offering a suitable explanation or corrective action for its role in the censorship of individual Americans and established conservative media. Make no mistake: Congress isn’t done holding State accountable.”
The GEC missed a deadline to hand over documents related to the GDI and other groups to the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Congress is also considering whether or not to reauthorize the GEC in 2024. Last September, the State Department’s inspector general said that the GEC had failed to thwart foreign threats and failed to determine how foreign groups spent money provided by the US government.
With great fanfare, the BBC has launched BBC Verify. The state broadcaster’s very own, specialist “disinformation and social media correspondent,” Marianna Spring, announced its arrival live on UK TV.
She explained that the BBC would verify video, fact check and “counter disinformation.” So rest assured, no one needs to think about anything. The BBC will “fact check” everything for us and tell us what “the truth” is.
Apparently, it “really matters” that the BBC acts as the UK government’s official arbiter of truth because, according to Spring, “mistruths” can “cause really serious harm to society.” Marianna has yet to define “harm,” but that doesn’t really matter. The government hasn’t either, despite the fact that it has placed its vague concept of “harm” at the centre of its equally ambiguous Online Safety Bill. Which is proposed state censorship legislation that Marianna is very keen to promote.
Marianna said that we can familiarise ourselves with BBC truth if we are shown the BBC news team’s “workings.” A strange choice of words.
While “workings” means “the way an organisation operates” it also means “a system of holes.” It isn’t clear which definition Marianna was using, although both seem appropriate in reference to BBC news coverage.
Marianna proudly announced that the BBC were “able to look at maps.” This presumably unique BBC capability supposedly enables their intrepid reporters to analyse “war zones.” And find them too, which is handy.
Spring is very concerned about, what she calls, social media “disaster trolls.” She is seemingly referring to people who understand that the UK government is among those that often rely upon false flag terrorist attacks when they want to pass oppressive surveillance legislation or justify their next war.
“Disaster trolls,” she alleges, “cause real world harm” by questioning the often implausible and contradictory accounts of people who claim to have been injured in, what evidently appear to be, false flag terrorist attacks. Marianna hasn’t clarified whether “disaster trolls” are the people who ask questions or the idiots who abuse others online. Te be fair, that distinction is probably moot because Marianna, the BBC and the government clearly want to silence everyone who disagrees with them.
Marianna told the nation that she’s a social media troll. She described the “undercover” accounts that she has “set up” to deceive people on social media. She claimed that these help the BBC news team understand “polarisation online.” Although, the BBC are seemingly causing a fair bit of “polarisation” themselves with their fake troll accounts and endless accusation levelled against anyone who questions the state.
Trolling, Marianna maintains, helps the BBC nail down “just how social media works.” It is a shame they felt the need to create a network of fake accounts to figure this out. They could have just asked my 80-year-old mum. She understands how it works.
Marianna’s said that her online trolling activities are helping her to investigate the “UK’s conspiracy theory movement.” I wish her well, but I fear this is going to be a monumentally difficult task because there is no such thing as the UK’s conspiracy theory movement.
“Conspiracy theory” is just a term the CIA weaponised for their propagandists to help them shut down any debate—about who shot JFK—by sticking the dismissive “conspiracy theorist” label on anyone who dared to question the US government’s official account. It really doesn’t mean anything more than that. Alleged “conspiracy theorists” are just people who question government narratives.
This may go some way to explaining why attempts by the Establishment to lucidly define “conspiracy theories” are frequently absurd. For example, according to the UN, a conspiracy theory is “a belief that events are secretly manipulated behind the scene by powerful forces with negative intent.”
Of course, no one can ever know what a secret is because it’s a “secret.” Typically, the people who get labelled “conspiracy theorists” point toward real evidence that possibly indicates real conspiracies. They only remain “secrets” if you refuse to look at the evidence.
If there are people who believe events can be explained by highlighting things that can’t be known, and there is no evidence that such a “movement” exists in the UK or anywhere else, that would indeed be rather silly.
The UN then adds to its own confusion by stating that a “conspiracy theory” can be identified, in part, because there is evidence that “seems to support the conspiracy theory.” Quite how you find evidence that “seems” to support something that is incomprehensible is mystifying.
However, we do get some contradictory clarification from the academics the UN selected to back up its bizarre contention. In the Conspiracy Theory Handbook , cited by the UN as “evidence,” Professor Stephen Lewandowsky and John Cook PhD, from George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication, stated:
Real conspiracies do exist. [. . .] The U.S. National Security Agency secretly spied on civilian internet users. [. . . ] We know about these conspiracies through internal industry documents, government investigations, or whistleblowers.
So conspiracies do exist! What are the UN rambling on about then? Are they secret or not? We get further clues from the UN’s eminent experts:
Real conspiracies get discovered through conventional thinking—healthy skepticism of official accounts while carefully considering available evidence and being committed to internal consistency.
Begging the question, what is the difference between the evidence that “seems to support the conspiracy theory” and the evidence that “seems” to expose a “real conspiracy”? The answer is, at least, forthcoming:
Conspiracy theories, by contrast, tend to persist for a long time even when there is no decisive evidence for them. [. . .] Typically, conspiracy theories are not supported by evidence that withstands scrutiny.
Ah, I see!
The real conspiracies are exposed by a novel type of evidence called “decisive evidence.” This is different from the evidence that “seems to support the conspiracy theory,” because only it can withstand scrutiny. Although, neither the UN nor its employed academics specify who should scrutinise it.
Perhaps we can now try to construct some sort of sense from, what otherwise appears to be, the UN’s garbled drivel.
The UN and its experts appear to suggest that “real conspiracies,” such as the US government spying on US citizens, are only revealed when “decisive evidence” is uncovered by, for example, US “government investigations.” Unless the evidence is officially acknowledged, or approved by the appointed experts, it is not evidence that stands up to scrutiny.
Right! Got it!
Presumably, we can therefore expect Marianna and the BBC Verify team to scrutinise the evidence offered by those she labels “conspiracy theorists” in order to “debunk” it. This will certainly represent a sea change for the BBC because, to date, they haven’t even reported any of the evidence offered by so-called conspiracy theorists, let alone scrutinised it.
Marianna promises to expose the nonexistent “UK conspiracy theory movement” with her new investigation, “Marianna in Conspiracy Land.” This, she claims, will enable the BBC audience to see how Marianna and her colleagues “piece together the truth.”
I suspect, BBC Verify will prove to be quite illuminating. But not for the reason’s that Marianna and the BBC hope.
The FBI has refused to provide records of its communication with Twitter, related to policing misinformation.
In December, as part of the Twitter Files, journalist Matt Taibbi published several emails between FBI officials and Twitter that showed that the FBI repeatedly contacted Twitter to flag alleged misinformation. The FBI’s National Election Command Post (NECP) and the Foreign Influence Task Force were in close contact with Twitter over election misinformation, according to the emails obtained by Taibbi.
In light of the Twitter Files revelations, watchdog Protect the Public’s Trust filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for all records of communication between the FBI and Twitter from January 2020 to November 2022.
The FBI refused to respond to the request, claiming it “will neither confirm nor deny the existence” of the records.
“The mere acknowledgment of the existence of FBI records on third-party individuals could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy,” the FBI told Protect the Public’s Trust.
“The FBI’s response to these requests is nothing short of bizarre,” Michael Chamberlain, director of Protect the Public’s Trust, told the Washington Examiner. “They twisted the substance of the requests and then asserted the right to deny acknowledging if records even exist based upon their mangled interpretation, and even though they have already admitted that the records exist.”
Chamberlain added that the lack of transparency from the FBI increases “suspicion about what the agency’s officials may have been involved in.”
The watchdog plans to appeal the FBI’s decision, arguing there is “tremendous public interest in knowing how the FBI interacted with Twitter, particularly with respect to suppressing speech by American citizens.”
“There is no substantial privacy interest in the entirety of the requested records,” the watchdog wrote in the appeal.
The family of a 24-year-old man who died from complications of COVID-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis today filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), which oversaw the development and distribution of the drug under Operation Warp Speed.
Ray Flores, the attorney representing the estate of George Watts Jr. filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia against the DOD and Lloyd Austin III in his official capacity as defense secretary.
The lawsuit alleges the DOD engaged in “willful misconduct” by continuing to exclusively allow distribution of the stockpiled version of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine that had been authorized for emergency use even after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted full approval to a different vaccine, Comirnaty.
According to the complaint, the DOD “capitalized on a quintessential ‘bait and switch’ fraud,” using the fact that Comirnaty was FDA-approved to bolster its claims that the vaccine authorized for emergency use was “safe and effective,” in a move that intentionally misled millions of Americans.
The DOD did this despite being fully aware that drugs granted Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) cannot legally be marketed as “safe and effective” because the FDA standard for EUA is only that drugs “may be effective.”
That means the DOD intentionally, without justification and with disregard for the risks, misrepresented an experimental vaccine as “safe and effective” when it could not legally use that terminology, the lawsuit states.
As a result, the lawsuit alleges, George Watts Jr. was misled into taking the investigational vaccine and he died as a result.
Attorney Michael Baum told The Defender in an email:
“This groundbreaking case filed by George Watts Jr.’s surviving family may provide a path for other Covid vaccine-injured individuals to seek recovery for their injuries.
“The Watts family’s complaint shines a light on the willful steps the Department of Defense took that led to Mr. Watts’ Pfizer-vaccine-induced death from myocarditis. Most people are unaware of the Department of Defense’s directing the development and distribution of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid vaccine …
“The DOD’s actions led to Mr. Watts’ improper injection with the unapproved vaccine. The Watts family’s case provides an opportunity for a wider public awareness of how the Covid vaccine sausage got made under DOD’s irresponsible guidance and the tragic results of that conduct for Mr. Watts and unfortunately much of the American public.”
Watts waited for a vaccine he thought was ‘safe and effective’
Watts was a student at Corning Community College in Corning, New York, when in the summer of 2021, the school mandated the COVID-19 vaccine for all students attending fall classes. The mandate was part of the mandate at the State University of New York (SUNY), a network of 64 colleges and universities.
Watts waited to get vaccinated until the FDA “approved” the Pfizer Comirnaty vaccine and got his first dose at Guthrie Robert Packer Hospital in Pennsylvania on Aug. 27, 2021. He was administered the EUA Pfizer BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.
The FDA approved the Pfizer Comirnaty vaccine on Aug. 23, 2021, but the DOD didn’t make it available.
Despite experiencing side effects from the first dose, Watts understood the vaccine to be “safe and effective,” so he took a second dose at the same location on Sept. 17, 2021.
Following the second dose, Watts experienced more severe side effects, including numbness in his extremities, difficulty grasping and holding objects, a sinus infection, cough and sensitivity to light. He visited the ER at the Guthrie hospital on Oct. 12, 2021, also complaining of a lump on the left side of his neck.
The hospital diagnosed him with sinusitis and prescribed an antibiotic. Watts returned to the ER on October 19, 2021, concerned that he was not improving.
After that, his health continued to decline.
On Oct. 27, 2021, at home with his mother, Watts began coughing up blood and then became unresponsive. His mother called 911 and administered CPR.
Watts was taken to the ER where he was found to be in cardiac arrest and subsequently died. He had no previous medical history that could explain his sudden death. Watts also tested negative for COVID-19 in a post-mortem test.
The medical examiner ruled his cause of death to be “complications of COVID-19 vaccine-related myocarditis.” His death certificate also listed COVID-19 vaccine-related myocarditis as the sole immediate cause of death.
An independent physician, Dr. Sanjay Verma, also attested the vaccine was the proximate cause of death as alleged in the complaint.
PREP Act protects vaccine producers, not vaccine-injured people
The CICP was established under the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness(PREP) Act, which protects “covered persons” — such as pharmaceutical companies, or the DOD in this case — from liability for injuries sustained from “countermeasures,” such as vaccines and medications, administered during a public health emergency.
The only exception to PREP Act immunity is if a countermeasure-related injury is caused by “willful misconduct” by a covered person or entity.
Since the start of the pandemic, people claiming injuries related to COVID-19 vaccines and other countermeasures submitted 11,686 requests for compensation.
Of those, only 23 have been declared eligible for compensation. Most of those are undergoing a “medical benefits review” to determine payment. Since last month, when the CICP started making payments to COVID-19 vaccine-injured people, it has made four payments — amounting to a total of $8,592.52. Three of the claims were for myocarditis.
Watts’ family filed a request for benefits with the CICP in August 2022. They received no determination from the CICP within the 240-day period in which the CICP is supposed to respond to complaints.
As a result, to seek compensation for the loss of Watts’ life, his family is suing the DOD.
The DOD, Operation Warp Speed and the COVID vaccines
In January 2020, then-Health Secretary Alex M. Azar of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services declared a public health emergency for COVID-19.
“(1) the existence of a serious or life-threatening disease; (2) a product ‘may be effective’ in treating or preventing it; (3) there is ‘no adequate, approved, and available alternative to the product for diagnosing, preventing or treating such disease or condition;’ (4) a risk-benefit analysis that measures both the known and potential benefits of the product against the known and potential risks of the product is positive; and (5) that the patient’s option to accept or decline the product is protected through informed consent.”
On May 15, 2020, the Trump White House announced Operation Warp Speed — a partnership between the White House and the DOD to accelerate the development, production and distribution of a COVID-19 vaccine.
Two months later, the DOD signed a contract with Pfizer to manufacture hundreds of millions of doses of its mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, guaranteeing that any vaccine produced under the contract would be protected under the PREP Act and therefore not subject to liability.
The FDA issued an EUA for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine on Dec. 11, 2020, and Army Gen. Gustave F. Perna, Operation Warp Speed chief operating officer, announced the vaccine would be rapidly distributed across the country.
Drugs fully approved by the FDA must be found to be “safe, pure, and potent,” but EUA drugs are held to a lower standard — they are required only to demonstrate that they “may be effective,” according to the FDA.
But Perna and his boss, Austin III, conveyed the message that the EUA vaccines were “safe and effective,” and urged the healthcare community to do the same, in order to “counter widespread misinformation” about the vaccines, the lawsuit alleges.
After the FDA approved the Comirnaty vaccine, the DOD did not initiate its production and distribution but instead continued to distribute existing Pfizer EUA products.
As a result, although Watts waited for the COVID-19 vaccine to be FDA-approved, he still received a version of the vaccine that had not been FDA-approved as “safe and effective.”
According to the lawsuit, the DOD blurred the line between the two legally distinct vaccines, promoting the idea that the COVID-19 vaccine was FDA-approved and therefore “safe and effective” — while administering the vaccine that was only “authorized,” and therefore not legally allowed to be described as “safe.”
The DOD knowingly blurred this line, the lawsuit alleges, because it had already been found liable for violating informed consent and of imposing an experimental vaccine. In the 2004 case of Doe v. Rumsfeld, et al., a federal court ruled the DOD could not mandate the EUA anthrax vaccine for service members because forcing them to take an experimental vaccine violated their right to informed consent.
That ruling stated that absent informed consent or a presidential waiver, “The United States cannot demand that members of the armed forces also serve as guinea pigs for experimental drugs.”
The current lawsuit further alleges that the DOD knowingly deceived Watts and other Americans for the purpose of mass human experimentation, which violates protections provided by the Nuremberg Code.
According to the complaint, the DOD committed “willful misconduct,” having “deliberately misled Mr. Watts and the public at large by blurring the critical distinction between EUA and fully licensed vaccines,” which would nullify the protections afforded the DOD under the PREP Act.
It concludes that Watts died because he believed he was receiving safe and effective vaccines, but in fact “received the deadly ones.”
The lawsuit seeks “general, special, compensatory and punitive damages.”
Commenting on the significance of the case, Kim Mack Rosenberg, acting outside general counsel for CHD, told The Defender :
“The PREP Act purports to provide an extraordinary liability shield to the government, manufacturers, distributors, and others, related to COVID-19 vaccines and other so-called countermeasures covered by the act. The Watts complaint is an important and unprecedented challenge to that liability shield.
“The complaint threads the act’s needle by pointing the finger squarely at Operation Warp Speed leadership while raising critical legal challenges to the act’s protection, particularly where, as is alleged in the Watts complaint, a defendant like the Department of Defense has engaged in willful misconduct.
“But the complaint does more than that. It will educate about the PREP Act’s far reach, actions by the DOD during the ‘state of emergency,’ and the general lack of accountability for entities and individuals protected by the PREP Act.
“The public needs to understand that this act intentionally allows potentially bad actors to go unpunished. Here, a young man lost his life, and the government has remained silent, hiding behind a legal shield.
“That is not justice for George Watts or anyone else.”
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.
I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had… Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What are relevant are reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period. – Michael Crichton, Lecture at the California Iinstitute of Technology, Pasadena CA, Jan 17 2003[1]
Within a few months of the SARS-Cov-2 vaccines being injected into millions of people, numerous types of adverse reactions were reported throughout the world. Information about adverse events became an object of intense denial and obfuscation by government agencies and state-funded and corporate-sponsored media, whether the information was in the form of rumors, amateur speculation, or serious scientific inquiry by qualified academics.
However, in 2023, government registries of vaccine injuries now reveal serious deficiencies of the vaccines designed to combat SARS-Cov-2. In a report published in the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research, the authors analyzed data from regulatory surveillance and self-reporting systems in Germany, Israel, Scotland, the United Kingdom, and the United States “to find long-term adverse events of the COVID products that cannot be captured during the expedited safety analyses.”This extract from the abstract goes on to state[2]:
Our data show, among other trends, increases in adverse event reports if we compare COVID products to influenza and pertussis vaccines and statistically significant higher numbers of hospital encounters in military personnel, as well as increases in incidences of thromboembolic conditions, such as menstrual abnormalities, myocarditis, and cerebrovascular events after the implementation of COVID injection mandates, compared to the preceding five years… Our meta-analysis of both national and international vaccine adverse events emphasizes the importance of re-evaluating public health policies that promote universal mass injection and multiple boosters for all demographic groups. In combination with informal reports from reliable witnesses, limitations of the safety trials, and the decreased lethality of new strains, our research demonstrates that the cost (both monetary and humanitarian) of injecting healthy people, and especially children, outweighs any claimed though unvalidated benefits.
In this late phase of the event that started in 2020, governments and their various propaganda platforms cannot hide these adverse events and are now engaged perhaps in what can be called the “cooling the mark out” phase of the pandemic. An article in The New Yorker in 2015 discussed this sociological phenomenon[3].
The term was used in a 1952 study by Erving Goffman to describe an important element of con artistry, but it also describes generally any social mechanism that is needed to help people adjust to material losses and humiliation. When a victim is forced to acknowledge he has been conned or ripped off, the perpetrators have to make some effort to help him adjust. Otherwise, he may do something “irrational” such as pursuing violent revenge, media exposure, criminal charges, or a lawsuit. He needs to be reminded that he still has precious things he could lose, so he has to just accept the loss and humiliation and go back to his wife and children. Governments are doing the same now: “Yes, there have been some rare adverse events. Get in line and fill out this form to apply for your legally entitled compensation. We will be with you shortly.”
Some of the adverse events are mild reactions such as fainting, dizziness, fatigue, and flu-like malaise lasting a few days—just like the viral infection itself, ironically enough. People under age seventy who had a 99.9% chance of recovering quickly from the infection chose instead to suffer this malaise, going along with the social coercion and accepting the unknown risks of vaccination[4]. As if it were a scheduled elective surgery, they were simply choosing the timing of when they were going to feel horrible—i.e. “I should get this over with now before my vacation.”
The less mild reactions are myocardial infarction, myocarditis, pericarditis, tachycardia, stroke, blood clots (embolism), aneurysm, tinnitus, Bell’s Palsy, Guillain-Barré Syndrome, transverse myelitis, cancer, heavy bleeding, menstrual irregularities, miscarriage, neurological symptoms, immune system disorders, skin rash, intense pain and numbness, memory loss, “brain fog,” and “inexplicable” sudden death. These conditions can be transitory or, like the last one on the list, permanent.
One can easily find peer-reviewed research papers that confirm the increased rates of these adverse health events after vaccination, yet a curious thing about them is that they often end very tentatively, including a phrase such as the one found in the extract below[5]:
The number of reported cases is relatively very small in relation to the hundreds of millions of vaccinations that have occurred, and the protective benefits offered by COVID-19 vaccination far outweigh the risks.
This tendency was also found in the recent Cochrane review on the efficacy of wearing masks[6]. Instead of stating emphatically that in numerous studies there is no evidence to show a benefit in wearing masks, the authors concluded by stating all the ways that the studies they reviewed might contain some undiscovered flaws. It was like they were afraid of having made an important discovery that should change government policy.
MINIMIZATION, EXAGGERATION, DIVERSION AND DISTRACTION IN MASS MEDIA AND SCIENTIFIC JOURNALS
Example 1: Putting a Positive Spin on Vaccine-Induced Cancer
Another such example, this one in the popular press, was the story told about the immunologist Dr. Michel Goldman in The Atlantic in September 2022[7]. As an advocate of many vaccines during his career, and in particular as a believer in the salutary effects of the mRNA vaccines, he was confronted with the images on a CT scan that showed lymphatic cancer spreading aggressively in his body soon after his mRNA shots, both after the first two shots and then again after a booster shot a few months later.
The cancer connection to the shots was hard to deny because the aggressive growth was extremely rare and also because the first shots were in the left arm and the cancer appeared on the left armpit. The booster was injected in the right arm, then the cancer appeared on the right side.
If the subject matter were not so dark, the article would appear to be a satire of people who can’t think logically or change their views when confronted with new facts. The author, Roxanne Khamsi, goes to extreme lengths to describe the struggle she had to write the story in a way that would not lend support to those who spread “anti-vaccine disinformation.” Dr. Goldman was just as determined, willing to see himself as one of the rare unfortunate ones who must suffer so that so many others may be saved by these supposedly miraculous new drugs.
As Piers Robinson’s lessons on propaganda have taught us, the propagandist doesn’t lie directly. Propaganda operates through exaggeration, omission, incentivization and coercion, and these are in evidence in The Atlantic, in this article, and in all of its coverage of the pandemic[8].
Roxanne Khamsi selectively focuses on the most hyperbolic reactions from the “fearmongers [who] have made the problem worse by citing scary-sounding data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System… with insufficient context.” She also had to mention that a vaccination center was set ablaze in Poland. Nowhere in the long article is there any mention of less radical reactions such as the hundreds of scientific papers describing adverse events—studies written by non-fearmongering sober-minded scientists. Such exaggeration and omission move the reader toward an acceptance of the necessity of mass vaccination.
Another facet of this propaganda is its use of what could be called “The New Yorker” genre of journalism. It is a “long read” piece (4,000 words) of narrative storytelling that uses the methods of fictional literature. It dramatizes the story arc of one individual, going deep into his biographical details, thoughts, and feelings. This is the genre that is natural and expected by the educated professional class of people who wake up on Sunday mornings and look for something serious to read, something that will make them feel smart before going back to the grind the next day. It is also a genre used by documentary filmmakers. They may have an important social problem to expose, but they have to find a person at the center of it and tell a story. Otherwise, the audience will tune out. The TED talks tell us it is hardwired in our brains. Humans are storytellers.
The New Yorker genre makes the educated class feel informed and serious: 4,000 words, a deep read, not the superficial stuff that the deplorables read in the New York Post! The length of the piece makes it likely that readers won’t be using their time to read anything else. Most importantly, the use of this genre diverts attention away from the need for an objective understanding of a phenomenon that involves billions of victims. The writer and the subject, Dr. Goldman, say much about the need to understand the science and not inflame radical reactions from the so-called low-information types, but this genre is itself un-scientific, subjective, sentimental, and narrow in its scope.
The most stunning omission in the article is that neither the author nor Dr. Goldman makes the obvious logical conclusion that, considering both the apparent and the still unknown risks, mandatory or coerced vaccination is unethical, especially for a viral infection that 99.9% of people under age seventy can survive. After learning of what happened to Dr. Goldberg, persons in good health, if not propagandized to think otherwise, would logically decide in favor of taking their chances with an infection that will pass in a few days. This is especially true for people who, unlike Dr. Goldman, don’t have a brother who is head of nuclear medicine at a university hospital and may not have timely access to the high quality of health care that Dr. Goldman had.
The article concludes thus:
And as a longtime immunologist and medical innovator, he’s still considering the question of whether a vaccine that is saving tens of millions of lives each year might have put his own in jeopardy. He remains adamant that COVID-19 vaccines are necessary and useful for the vast majority of people.
Many would disagree and say that the vaccines are, at best, only for the non-vast minority of high-risk individuals who accept them with informed consent. Despite his own experience of suffering vaccine-induced aggressive lymphoma, Dr. Goldman believes that a vast majority of people should subject themselves to the risk of suffering the same fate. In September 2022, the time of publication, it had been officially acknowledged that the mRNA shots had not stopped the spread of the virus, had not induced lasting immunity, and may not have lowered the fatality rate of the illness. Other possible explanations:
(1) The virus harmed most of the vulnerable population before the vaccines arrived.
(2) Doctors learned how to treat the disease without resorting to deadly practices such as delayed treatment, ventilators and Remdesivir.
(3) The virus evolved into less deadly variants.
The purported benefits of the vaccines remain unprovable, and explanations (1)-(3) remain as matters of controversy.
Example 2: The Feint After Post-Vaccination Fainting
Other examples of this genre applied to the Covid-19 event are plentiful and easy to find in the media that have been funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation or sponsored by Pfizer and other hidden hands. I will describe just one more that shows that it was still being used in April 2023, three years on as the official narrative becomes untenable.
On April 10th, 2023, NBC News published a 3,400-word piece on the “fainting nurse” social media frenzy that occurred in December 2020 when frontline healthcare workers in the US started to receive the mRNA shots (9). The vaccination of nurse Tiffany Dover was recorded by a local television news crew because it was the big day when the savior vaccines had arrived to supposedly end the pandemic. Unfortunately, the cameras recorded her fainting shortly after receiving her injection.
The article describes how “conspiracy theorists” created an episode of “participatory misinformation” as they circulated her story on social media, exaggerated what the fainting meant, spread rumors of her death, and engaged in a campaign of harassment (a.k.a. doxing)[10]. Tiffany remained steadfastly supportive of the vaccination program and believed that her fainting was inconsequential, yet she was traumatized by the doxing and chose to remain silent for two full years. Unfortunately, this choice only intensified the rumors of her death or of her enforced silence.
My critique of this article includes no support for the people who engage in doxing and wild speculation. My criticism is that this genre of journalism consistently associates all disagreement with the official narratives as the work of wild-eyed, deplorable bullies. It consistently ignores the hundreds of scientists who are publishing peer-reviewed articles on vaccine injuries and questioning the abandonment of standard public health policy that started in 2020.
Brandy Zadrozny, the author of this article about Tiffany Dover, felt it was necessary to associate Tiffany’s story with other instances of unhinged conspiracy theory such as the 2020 election being stolen from Donald Trump and the denial of the murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Thus, the very intentional implication here is that if you are concerned about the accumulation of medical journal articles describing a long list of vaccine-related injuries, think twice. You don’t want to be dismissed as one of those cruel and deranged fools who have lost touch with reality. Your family, friends and colleagues are all being trained to ostracize you for wrongthink, so forget about it. You are the mark that needs to be cooled out.
Instead of treating the “participatory misinformation” campaign as a problem of the deplorables that the righteous must struggle to solve, the writers of such articles could start to wonder if there is some legitimate anger driving such regrettable phenomena. There were very sound reasons to worry about a pharmaceutical product being rushed to market in less than a year, especially one that was based on a novel biotechnology.
Additionally, fainting, after all, is not always a minor incident, and it is rational to be concerned about it happening so soon after a medical treatment. Furthermore, it would not be unreasonable for a healthy person to decide he would rather risk infection with the virus than suffer side-effects from an unproven vaccine. Not everyone has the good fortune to faint “into the arms of two nearby doctors” (as the fainting was described in the article). Some people break bones and sustain skull fractures. Some people have their adverse reaction after they leave the clinic and are driving home. Some have it months later.
After more than two years since vaccinations began, it should have been clear that, because the mRNA treatments were not as safe and effective as promised, no one should have ever been coerced into taking them. Their heavy promotion, backed by well-funded propaganda campaigns of half-truths and bold lies, was unethical, as was the gaslighting, shaming and shunning of the people who demanded bodily autonomy.
However, at this late date, after so much has been officially admitted about the adverse effects, including death, the author claimed that Tiffany’s story became a rallying point for those “who falsely believe that vaccines are killing and injuring people in droves.” (italics added) Those last two words were probably chosen carefully because without them one could not say they “falsely believe.” It is a fact that they are killing and injuring people, but “in droves” may be ambiguous enough to make the statement passable for a quibbling fact checker. The sentence is now “partially true” if one wants to see it that way.
One can denounce the campaign of coercion and still let Tiffany have her proclaimed “belief” in the vaccines. The issue that should be discussed is the failure of medical ethics in public policy that led to the vilification of people who had a different belief. They did not want to submit themselves to a medical therapy that had been rushed to market with no long-term safety data to support its use. Despite the facts, this issue remains utterly invisible to the writers who specialize in this genre.
The final thing to mention about this article is that, like the article in The Atlantic, it uses the devices of fiction. It focuses on the emotional and physical condition of the subject and thus leads the reader to an engagement with her story. Her eyes are “wide and bright and terribly blue.” They are described again at the end of the article as “electric blue.” The writer emphasizes this because a post-vaccination photo of her was not lit well and her eye color was not visible, and this is what set off rumors that it was not really her in the photo. Nonetheless, the descriptions are unnecessary embellishments.
Readers don’t need to know her hair dye choices, either, but these too were described. This news article about a controversial pharmaceutical product could also be reported without the accompanying glamor photos of the very photogenic victim. There are, after all, less glamorous and less fortunate victims of vaccination who suffered fates worse than fainting[11]. Tiffany is alive and healthy, and she did not refuse to be filmed on the day of her vaccination. This isn’t really about a story about her fainting and its aftermath, however. The purpose of this genre is the feint—the fake out and distraction from what the public should really be paying attention to.
Example 3: Minimization in Scientific Journal Articles
Let’s return to the scientific journal articles. Concluding statements in scientific papers are not always about objective findings. They are interpretations and opinions by the authors, and they often seem to go in the direction of minimizing the problems revealed by the study. It has always been standard practice for researchers to be humble about the impact of their work, for their conclusions may be disproven by subsequent research. Nonetheless, when it comes to any research related to Covid-19, excessive hesitancy and even fear are evident.
For some reason, the medical specialists authoring these papers never express alarm or suggest a halt to vaccination of individuals who are at low risk of suffering serious harm from the viral infection. Recall that the infectious mortality rate was found to be about 0.1%, more or less, depending on one’s age. It is this low for healthy individuals and higher for the elderly and the unhealthy. As mentioned above, the rate became lower as doctors learned how to treat the infection and abandoned dangerous interventions. Another factor was the virus itself becoming less deadly.
Readers might respond that I am ignoring the millions of cases of “long covid,” but my response is that there is no clinical definition for it, and it may be no different than the post-viral syndrome associated with influenza—a phenomenon which never aroused alarm in society before 2020. The alleged symptoms of long covid also overlap with adverse reactions to the vaccine, so if we must be concerned about long covid, we also have to object to the continued use of therapies that use the spike protein to induce immunity. Doctors are developing treatments for reactions to the spike protein, whether they came from the virus or the mRNA jabs. It is also likely that “long covid” is a side effect of “long type 2 diabetes” and various other chronic (i.e. long duration) illnesses that are the root causes of death by SARS-Cov-2.
The ritualistic minimization of vaccine injuries in the scientific reports is obviously an essential bow of fealty to the scientific priesthood. It is the modern equivalent of Galileo in the 17th century affirming the existence and greatness of God in order to, hopefully, have heliocentrism taken seriously. These researchers may feel privately that the matter is urgent, but they know that in order to shine any light on the issue in a respected medical journal, they will have to bow down to the official doctrine.
They justify it as the only way to shine some light on the problem and change the system from within. If they really thought the matter was so trivial, they wouldn’t study it. Medical personnel could just treat their patients without worrying about the speculative role vaccines might have played in their illnesses. A doctor treating a cancer rarely worries about whether it was caused by fallout from nuclear weapons testing because identifying this cause would make no difference in the treatment. Her job is to treat the patient. However, in the late 1950s, some doctors saw a reason to speak out and create the political pressure that halted nuclear tests in the atmosphere in 1963.
The paper cited in the appendix below, to conclude this long essay, was chosen as an example of this minimization. It is concerned with liver diseases following vaccination. I found this one because recently I took note of the 15th mRNA-jabbed person in my social circles to suffer a severe health crisis since January 2021. In the two years before then, I knew of only one medical emergency among friends, family, and colleagues. In the 15th person’s case, it was a pyogenic liver abscess that put him in the ICU and almost killed him.
In studies like this that conclude by minimizing the problem, there is an obvious problem in saying the number of cases is “very small in relation to the hundreds of millions of vaccinations.” When one considers all of the research on adverse events in all other organ systems, one starts to think, as Yogi Berra said, “Little things are big.”
Yogi Bear was smarter than the average bear, and Yogi Berra, the “dumb” sage of baseball legend, was, it seems, far smarter than the average immunologist. Little things do start to add up. One case of lymphoma, or fainting, or liver disease may seem insignificant when seen is isolation, but when all the adverse events are seen together from a distance, along with a sharp rise in all-cause mortality, we can start to ask the right questions[12].
They are similar to the questions we should ask about the compounding effects of numerous environmental toxicants and pollutants humans are exposed to. One chemical might be declared safe at a certain exposure, but what is the combined effect of hundreds of such chemicals? It looks like the harms are extremely rare only when cases and types of injuries are studied in isolation and the victims are also kept isolated.
We could also add Yogi Berra’s other gems of wisdom that apply to the entire Covid phenomenon. When we find that not much has changed since Galileo’s time, recall that Yogi Berra said, “it’s like déjà vu all over again,” and when you think about all that has happened since March 2020, remember he said, “the future ain’t what it used to be.”
Background:Liver diseases post-COVID-19 vaccination is extremely rare but can occur. A growing body of evidence has indicated that portal vein thrombosis, autoimmune hepatitis, raised liver enzymes and liver injuries, etc., may be potential consequence of COVID-19 vaccines.
Objectives: To describe the results of a systematic review for new-onset and relapsed liver disease following COVID-19 vaccination.
[…]
Results: Two hundred seventy-five cases from one hundred and eighteen articles were included in the qualitative synthesis of this systematic review. Autoimmune hepatitis (138 cases) was the most frequent pathology observed post-COVID-19 vaccination, followed by portal vein thrombosis (52 cases), raised liver enzymes (26 cases) and liver injury (21 cases). Other cases include splanchnic vein thrombosis, acute cellular rejection of the liver, jaundice, hepatomegaly, acute hepatic failure and hepatic porphyria. Mortality was reported in anyof the included cases [sic]* for acute hepatic failure (n = 4, 50%), portal vein thrombosis (n = 25, 48.1%), splanchnic vein thrombosis (n = 6, 42.8%), jaundice (n = 1, 12.5%), raised liver enzymes (n = 2, 7.7%), and autoimmune hepatitis (n = 3, 2.2%). Most patients were easily treated without any serious complications, recovered and did not require long-term hepatic therapy.
Conclusion: Reported evidence of liver diseases post-COIVD-19 vaccination should not discourage vaccination against this worldwide pandemic. The number of reported cases is relatively very small in relation to the hundreds of millions of vaccinations that have occurred, and the protective benefits offered by COVID-19 vaccination far outweigh the risks.
* * *
Special mention to Dr. Denis Rancourt for bringing the work of Erving Goffman to my attention.
NOTES:
[1] J.R. Barrio, “Consensus science and the peer review.” Molecular Imaging and Biology. April 2009, 11(5): 293. doi: 10.1007/s11307-009-0233-0. PMID: 19399558; PMCID: PMC2719747 [back]
[3] Louis Menand, “Crooked Psychics and Cooling the Mark Out,” The New Yorker, June 18, 2015. “The classic exposition of the practice of helping victims of a con adapt to their loss is the sociologist Erving Goffman’s 1952 article ‘On Cooling the Mark Out.’ … ‘After the blowoff has occurred,’ Goffman explained, about the operation of a con, ‘one of the operators stays with the mark and makes an effort to keep the anger of the mark within manageable and sensible proportions. The operator stays behind his team-mates in the capacity of what might be called a cooler and exercises upon the mark the art of consolation. An attempt is made to define the situation for the mark in a way that makes it easy for him to accept the inevitable and quietly go home. The mark is given instruction in the philosophy of taking a loss.’ What happened stays out of the paper.”[back]
[4] Angelo Maria Pezzullo, Cathrine Axfors, Despina G. Contopoulos-Ioannidis, Alexandre Apostolatos, John P.A. Ioannidis, “Age-stratified infection fatality rate of COVID-19 in the non-elderly informed from pre-vaccination national seroprevalence studies,” Environmental Research, January 2023. This study found that Covid-19’s infection fatality rate (IFR) by age was under 0.1% for those under 70. The breakdown by age was 0.0003% at 0-19 years, 0.003% at 20-29 years, 0.011% at 30-39 years, 0.035% at 40-49 years, 0.129% at 50-59 years, and 0.501% at 60-69 years.[back]
[5] S. Alhumaid et al., “New-onset and relapsed liver diseases following COVID-19 vaccination: a systematic review.” BMC Gastroenterology, October 2022; 22(1):433. doi: 10.1186/s12876-022-02507-3. PMID: 36229799; PMCID: PMC9559550. The abstract states, “Mortality was reported in any of the included cases.” Was the erroneous use of any in this sentence a typographical error or a deliberate ambiguity put into the abstract? There are three options for a correct interpretation: 1. Mortality wasnot reported inany of the included cases… 2. Mortality was reported in many of the included cases… 3. Mortality was reported in all of the included cases. It is difficult to know the authors’ intended meaning regarding this significant finding from their research. The sample sizes (six figures indicated as sample sizes, n=x) total 41 cases out of the 275 cases studied. This is a fatality rate of 15%, but it is difficult to know what the intended meaning of the 32 authors is, due to the ambiguity described above. One can conclude that any of, many of, all of, or not any of the authors read the abstract carefully before it went to press. In any case, even if there were no deaths, one could take issue with the statement that “patients were easily treated without any serious complications, recovered and did not require long-term hepatic therapy.” Many patients would not feel so optimistic about having had such damage inflicted on a vital organ which is, considering the contemporary food supply and environment, already exposed to enough harm.[back]
[10] It is important to note that this phenomenon has many precedents that occurred long before social media existed. The Dreyfus Affair (1890s) and the death of Azaria Chamberlain in Australia (1980) are just two examples one could refer to. The latter one was the butt of several jokes in poor taste broadcast on mainstream media outlets (referencing the apocryphal phrase “A dingo ate my baby!”) Back then, the incident was referred to benignly by the mass media as a regrettable “media circus.” The panic in the mainstream media about the new panics is interesting in the way it views professional journalism as beyond reproach and “participatory misinformation” as an urgent new threat posed by irresponsible, out-of-control social media platforms and a monstrous new type of people that apparently did not exist in the past.[back]
[12] Ed Dowd, “Cause Unknown”: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 & 2022 (Skyhorse, 2022). Website: https://www.theyliedpeopledied.com/: “Between March of 2021 and February of 2022, 61,000 millennials died excessively above the prior 5-year base trend line… The relative timespan and rate of change into the fall of 2021 is a signal that a harmful event occurred to this 25-44 age group. This means that millennials started dying in large numbers at the same times when vaccines and boosters were rolled out. The vaccine clearly had a role, as many previously hesitant folks were forced into compliance.” Or see Aubrey Marcus, “Why Are Healthy People Dying Suddenly Since 2021? w/ Ed Dowd,” January 5, 2023. (31:40~).[back]
Dennis Riches studied French language, history and literature, and language pedagogy and applied linguistics during his undergraduate and graduate studies. Since 2004, he has taught English and modern history at Seijo University in Tokyo. In recent years, he has done translations and written extensively on his personal blogs, and some of those articles have been published in the online journals Global Research and The Greanville Post. He authored the book Sayonara Nukes: The Case for Abolishing Nuclear Energy and Nuclear Weapons, which was published in 2018 by the Center for Glocal Studies at Seijo University.
Four months after The Guardian and other European media outlets revealed the world’s leading carbon credit certifier sold worthless offsets to major corporations, the head of Washington-based Verra has stepped down.
“I am writing to let you know that after nearly 15 fantastic years as the CEO of Verra, I have decided to step down,” Verra’s CEO, David Antonioli, wrote in a LinkedIn post last week. He’s leaving the role after dominating the multi-billion dollar carbon offset market for years and certifying over a billion dollars in credits through its verified carbon standard (VCS).
Antonioli expressed gratitude towards the current and past employees and was proud of Verra’s accomplishments as the world’s leading standard-setter for climate action and sustainable development. He did not give a reason for his abrupt departure.
Antonioli’s exit comes four months after The Guardian, German weekly Die Zeit, and SourceMaterial, a non-profit investigative journalism organization, revealed a damning report on how Verra approved tens of millions of dollars of worthless offsets to Disney, Shell, Gucci, and other big corporations.
The report found Verrra issued “phantom credits” to major corporations that don’t represent genuine carbon reductions. Some corporations purchased these fraudulent credits and labeled their products as “carbon neutral.”
Days after The Guardian’s report in January, Antonioli rejected the findings, calling them “outlandish claims” and heavily defended Verra’s certification of carbon credits. But after all that, Antonioli is still stepping down.
Meanwhile, “Some firms are moving away from offsetting-based environmental claims, such as Gucci, which has removed a carbon neutrality claim from its website that heavily relied on Verra’s carbon credits,” The Guardian said.
Diego Saez Gil, the CEO of Pachama, a carbon offsetting firm, said Verra should update its programs to improve the company’s integrity. He told The Guardian :
“This is a pivotal moment for carbon markets. In order to scale the critical funding required for carbon sequestration at a planetary scale, we must ensure integrity, transparency, and real benefits for local communities and biodiversity. A new generation of innovative players is collaborating with standard bodies, academics, corporates, and communities, creating a new era of carbon markets that gives me hope.”
Despite having previously purchased “worthless” carbon offsets, companies such as JPMorgan, Disney, and BlackRock continue their ESG commitments. In particular, JPMorgan pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase credits for carbon removal.
Insiders have spoken up about the murky ESG industry. Take, for example, an insider who told Bloomberg in 2021 that TotalEnergies SE orchestrated a “carbon-neutral” liquified natural gas shipment with China National Offshore Oil Corp on math that was “guesswork” and involved lots of “googling.”
Recall Elon Musk tweeted one year ago, “ESG is a scam. It has been weaponized by phony social justice warriors.”
Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr recently said that if he becomes president, he will ban pharmaceutical advertising on US television.
“It’s not good to have pharmaceutical advertising on TV,” said Kennedy. “It’s good for the television stations, it’s good for the pharmaceutical companies, but it’s not good for public health.”
The US and New Zealand are the only two nations globally that allow drug companies to promote their products directly to the consumer – known as direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA).
Kennedy said that because of pharmaceutical advertising in the US, Americans use more prescription drugs than anywhere else in the world, and yet, they have the worst outcomes.
Americans have the lowest life expectancy compared to other wealthy nations and the highest rate of avoidable deaths, despite spending nearly 18% of GDP on healthcare in 2021.
Kennedy told me he blames “the influence of the pharmaceutical lobby in Washington, and indirectly, the influence of media companies that earn some $18 billion in revenue annually from direct-to-consumer drug advertising.”
Drug advertising in the US
In the 80s, there were few prescription drug ads broadcast on US TV because the regulatory standard made it difficult to provide adequate information about drug labelling to consumers. David Kessler, FDA Commissioner between 1990 and 1997, also vigorously opposed DTCA.
But when Kessler left the agency, the new administration eased regulatory restrictions and the floodgates opened. Within a decade, DTCA went from US$2.1 billion in 1997 to US$9.6 billion in 2016.
“They do it because it works,” said Barbara Mintzes, professor of evidence-based pharmaceutical policy at the University of Sydney. “Drug companies would not be spending the money if it did not lead to expanded sales.”
Proponents argue that DTCA empowers the consumer with information about diseases and drug treatments by encouraging informed discussions between patients and their medical providers. But Mintzes is not convinced.
“I totally agree that people need information on medicines but getting that information from advertising is not the same as getting it from an unbiased source,” said Mintzes.
Mintzes has long argued against DTCA saying, “There is no public health rationale and no reliable evidence that it leads to better care, public or patient empowerment, or to the type of information needed for shared informed treatment choices.”
Many Americans are unaware of the persuasiveness of DTCA. A national FDA survey found that 29% of consumers believed that only completely safe medicines could be advertised on TV. In California, it was 42% of consumers.
Advertised drugs offer little benefit
The decision about which drugs are advertised is not made on public health grounds, but on what will maximise profits.
“It’s a marketing decision,” says Mintzes. “Often, it’s a small, select group of drugs that are very expensive, on patent, and are not necessarily the best available treatments in terms of effectiveness or safety.”
According to a recent study published in JAMA, most of Big Pharma’s spending (68%) on the top-selling prescription drugs in 2020, were of ‘low added benefit’ for patients.
The study’s lead author Michael DiStefano, a researcher at Johns Hopkins said it’s probably a strategy of the pharmaceutical industry to “drive patient demand for drugs that clinicians would be less likely to prescribe.”
“When a consumer sees these advertisements on TV or social media, they should really question if it’s the best drug for them and have a conversation with their provider,” said DiStefano.
Poor FDA oversight of DCTA
The FDA regulates the promotion of medicines and the content of DTCA, under the authority of the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act (FFDCA). It requires that advertising is accurate, and only promotes the drug for approved conditions, clearly stating harms and ways to get more information.
However, the agency lacks the resources to police it properly.
A 2002 Government Accountability Office report found the FDA’s oversight of DTCA was lacking. The agency had allowed some drug companies to repeatedly disseminate new misleading advertisements for the same drug.
Further, a change in the FDA’s procedures for reviewing draft regulatory letters led to a significant lag in issuing letters to demand the removal of misleading advertising – some regulatory letters were not even issued until after the advertising campaign had run its course.
Vioxx ads led to unnecessary deaths
From 1999 to 2004, Vioxx was among the most aggressively advertised medicines in the US. Merck spent more than US$100 million per year in advertising to consumers and generated annual sales of more than US$1 billion.
But Merck ran a deceptive advertising campaign, which misrepresented the safety of Vioxx and improperly concealed the drug’s increased risk of stroke. Vioxx was estimated to have caused 88,000–140,000 heart attacks in the USA alone – 44% of which were fatal.
A significant proportion of those people who died, took Vioxx after seeing it advertised on TV.
FDA promoted covid products
During the pandemic, the FDA began promoting covid-19 products – antivirals and vaccines – something that is not in the agency’s remit.
FDA commissioner Robert Califf, for example, repeatedly advertised the benefits of Pfizer’s antiviral drug paxlovid and covid-19 vaccines for reducing the risk of long covid.
“The FDA commissioner can’t tweet like this,” wrote Vinay Prasad, a practicing haematologist-oncologist at the University of California San Francisco. “How does the FDA preserve the authority to regulate truthful marketing, when the FDA commissioner is a billboard for Pfizer? These claims are not validated by the highest methods. This is unbelievable.”
In addition, director of the FDA’s vaccine division Peter Marks, featured in multiple videos on the FDA’s website, encouraging people to take the newly authorised bivalent boosters.
“It always feels odd to see the FDA promote products,” said Jessica Adams, a regulatory affairs expert. “The agency used to go out of its way to respect patient-provider decision-making and not interfere with the practice of medicine.”
In fact, the FDA’s own homepage was promoting the covid-19 vaccines.
“The FDA acts like a cheerleading or marketing arm of pharma companies, not a regulatory agency” said Aaron Siri, attorney at Siri & Glimstad law firm. “By promoting these shots, the FDA has hopelessly conflicted itself from later admitting these products have serious issues.”
“It is not the role of the FDA to promote vaccines or advise people to get them. Its role is to objectively assess whether they are safe and effective to its standard,” added Siri.
FDA’s revolving door
Kennedy has renewed calls to put an end to the FDA→Big Pharma “revolving door” which leads to undue influence over the agency.
Ten of the last 11 commissioners have gone on to secure roles with the pharmaceutical or biotech industries they once regulated – most within a year or two of leaving the FDA (see table).
Califf was announced as FDA commissioner on 17 Feb 2022 (his second time). SEC filings indicate that he resigned from the board of directors of Centessa Pharmaceuticals, the day before the announcement.
“That is an indication of just how completely industry has captured this agency,” said Kennedy vowing to shake up the system if he becomes president.
“We will institute new rules extending the waiting period before former officials can enter industry, consulting, and lobbying. We want real public servants in positions of public trust,” he added.
Kennedy believes the key to reforming the FDA will be to put qualified people in positions from outside the pharmaceutical industry, and to call on whistle-blowers, dissidents, and other people of integrity from within the FDA.
The FDA did not comment on the agency’s ‘revolving door’, nor did it answer whether the agency had considered instituting an extended waiting period between the time officials leave the FDA and enter industry.
Hillary knew. She knew her campaign paid for Russian disinformation (including the alleged pee tape accusations) to be washed through a report by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. She knew the information was false but could potentially allow her to win the election. Hillary lied to the FBI about all this, and lied to the American public. Such was her appetite.
The FBI knew. They knew none of the information in the Steele Report could be corroborated, and they knew most of it was false. They turned a blind eye, purposefully and with the intent to defeat Donald Trump in the 2016 election, to basic investigative and tradecraft rules to use the corrupt information to surveil the Trump campaign via the FISA court. When Trump won the election anyway, the FBI continued to use this information to assault the loyalty and viability of President Trump and ultimately tried to use the information via the Robert Mueller investigation to impeach or indict Trump.
Only one person went to jail for all this, a minor player named Kevin Clinesmith for provided false info to the FISA court. No changes are planned for the FBI. No charges are to be brought against Hillary Clinton. The Deep State came within an eyelash of bringing down an unwanted president as surely as they are believed to have done in Dallas ’63. Words were the weapon this time, not bullets.
These are the conclusions of the final Durham Report released last week. The report was written by former Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham, who was chosen in 2019 to examine the FBI probe known as “Operation Crossfire Hurricane.” Durham provides the only comprehensive review of what came to be called Russiagate, and shows how close to the edge our democracy came to falling into the abyss at the hands of the Deep State. It all sounds dramatic, as those terms have been bandied about so often and in so many contexts they may have lost some of their meaning. But make no mistake about it — the FBI tried to shape the 2016 election and failing, tried to run Trump out of office. If you thought the “Hunter Biden Letter,” the one signed by dozens of intelligence professionals calling the Biden Diaries potential Russian disinformation was just wrong, you should find the conclusions of the Durham report a horror show.
There was nothing true in the Steele Report, for example, this key paragraph: “Speaking in confidence to a compatriot in late July 2016, Source E, an ethnic Russian close associate of Republican US presidential candidate Donald TRUMP, admitted that there was a well-developed conspiracy of co-operation between them and the Russian leadership. This was managed on the TRUMP side by the Republican candidate’s campaign manager, Paul MANAFORT, who was using foreign policy advisor, Carter PAGE, and others as intermediaries. The two sides had a mutual interest in defeating Democratic presidential candidate Hillary CLINTON, whom President PUTIN apparently both hated and feared.”
The FBI had no intelligence about Trump or others associated with the Trump campaign being in contact with Russian intelligence beyond Steele. Despite being unvetted and uncorroborated and coming from a single source with direct political ties to Trump’s opponent, the FBI used such accusations to justify a full-spectrum surveillance operation against the Trump campaign, the first known such operation in American history. The FBI omitted the fact from its FISA application that Carter Page was in fact not a Russian agent but a paid source for the CIA who had been vetted by the Agency as loyal and reliable. They just lied and even when the lie could not be ignored the FBI lied more times to keep the surveillance application alive before the FISA court.
Durham found investigators “ignored exculpatory evidence, put too much stock in information provided by Trump’s political opponents, and carried out surveillance without genuinely believing there was probable cause to do so.” “Throughout the duration of Crossfire Hurricane, facts and circumstances that were inconsistent with the premise that Trump and/or persons associated with the Trump campaign were involved in a collusive or conspiratorial relationship with the Russian government were ignored or simply assessed away,” Durham wrote. The FBI acted “without appropriate objectivity or restraint in pursuing allegations of collusion or conspiracy between a U.S. political campaign and a foreign power.”
It could not be more clear. The FBI knew what it was doing was wrong and did it anyway because the ends, defeating Trump, appeared to justify the means. No surprise, that has been the slogan behind every democratic election U.S. intelligence agencies have overthrown overseas, so why not follow the same logic when the tools of war came home to attempt to drive the 2016 election to Hillary Clinton.
We now know that almost all of the disinformation in the Steele Report came from one man, Igor Danchenko (whom the FBI had until 2011 investigated as a Russian spy.) Danchenko also fed disinfo to a Clinton supporter and registered foreign agent for Russia, Charles Dolan (who was known to but never interviewed by the FBI) to pass on the Steele to further obscure its origin. But according to the Durham report “The failure to identify the primary sub-source [Danchenko] early in the investigation’s pursuit of FISA authority prevented the FBI from properly examining the possibility that some or much of the non-open source information contained in Steele’s reporting was Russian disinformation (that wittingly or unwittingly was passed along to Steele), or that the reporting was otherwise not credible.”
Everyone knew. The Durham Report confirms on August 3, 2016, the Russiagate allegations were briefed to President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and FBI Director James Comey by CIA Director John Brennan at an Oval Office meeting. None of the men briefed, and none of the agencies involved, did anything to intercede in the FBI’s efforts alongside the Clinton Campaign to manufacture collusion between Trump and Russia. Indeed, everyone allowed the falsehoods to linger into the Mueller Report and when that document concluded publicly there was no collusion between Trump and the Kremlin, pivot the same pile of falsehoods to claim Trump somehow obstructed an investigation which actually exonerated him, concluding without indictment as it did.
As for the FBI, the Durham report brutally tells us “the FBI failed to uphold their important mission of strict fidelity to the law.” That they “displayed, at best, a cavalier attitude towards accuracy and completeness.” That the Bureau “disregarded significant exculpatory information that should have prompted investigative restraint and re-examination… there were clear opportunities to have avoided the mistakes and to have prevented the damage resulting from their embrace of seriously flawed information that they failed to analyze and assess properly.” And that “senior FBI personnel displayed a serious lack of analytical rigor towards the information that they received, especially information received from politically affiliated persons and entities.” That “important aspects of the Crossfire Hurricane matter were seriously deficient.” The Report concludes “although recognizing that in hindsight much is clearer, much of this also seems to have been clear at the time.” As for recommendations, the Report states “more training sessions would likely prove to be a fruitless exercise if the FBI’s guiding principles of Fidelity, Bravery and Integrity are not engrained in the hearts and minds of those sworn to meet the FBI’s mission of “Protect[ing]the American People and Uphold[ing] the Constitution of the United States.”
Without the help of the FBI Russiagate would have been nothing but a flimsy Clinton campaign scam. Thus the Durham Report offers one over-arching implied conclusion: Be skeptical of the FBI and watch accusations of collusion and foreign interference closely around the 2024 election. Treason is indeed a twisty path.
The FBI has again refused to turn over documents subpoenaed by the US Congress regarding bribery accusations against President Joe Biden, prompting House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer to warn that he will seek to hold the agency’s director in contempt for “obstructionist” tactics.
“The FBI’s decision to stiff-arm Congress and hide this information from the American people is obstructionist and unacceptable,” Comer said on Tuesday in a statement.
The Kentucky Republican added that the committee will take steps to hold FBI director Christopher Wray in contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with a lawful subpoena.
“Americans deserve the truth, and the Oversight Committee will continue to demand transparency from this nation’s chief law enforcement agency,” Comer added.
At issue is an FBI informant file detailing allegations that Biden accepted $5 million in foreign bribes in exchange for policy favors when he worked as vice president under then-President Barack Obama. The FBI received the tip in June 2020. The allegations came to light earlier this year, when a whistleblower informed Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of their existence.
FBI officials have missed multiple deadlines to comply with the subpoena, including Comer’s latest demand that the documents be handed over by Tuesday. Wray has claimed that the allegations against Biden were unverified and that the so-called FD-1023 file in the case must be kept private to protect FBI informants.
House Republicans have sought the documents to weigh the substance of the allegations against Biden and examine whether the FBI has handled the case properly. Comer argued earlier this month that the agency has had the evidence for years and has apparently “done nothing” with it.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, said on Tuesday that he will lead members of his party in voting to hold Wray in contempt if the FBI director refuses to turn over the FD-1023. He added that any sensitive information on the informant could be redacted.
The FBI issued a statement saying any discussion of pursuing contempt proceedings against Wray is “unnecessary.” The agency said it had offered in a letter to Comer to provide information to the committee “in a format and setting that maintains confidentiality and protects important security interests and the integrity of FBI investigations.” Wray is scheduled to discuss the issue with Comer on Wednesday in a phone call.
Comer has said the allegations “fit a pattern” of then-Vice President Biden flying to various countries, taking an unusually active role in US foreign policy decisions, then receiving wire transfers from those nations into bank accounts linked to his family members.
The House Oversight Committee released documents earlier this month showing evidence of the bank transfers. Biden, meanwhile, argued that the committee’s findings were “not true.”
If you regard the United States as perhaps flawed but overall a force for good in the world . . .
If you scoff at the notion that the US, a republic founded on principles of freedom and democracy, has morphed into a world empire, perpetrating assassinations, coups d’état, acts of terror and illegal warfare . . .
If you want to promote peace but haven’t yet explored deceptive events that precipitate US warmongering . . .
. . . here is a volume that will clear the air and paint an honest picture of the significant, not-so-rosy impact US foreign policy and actions have had in the world around us.
USA: The Ruthless Empire, by Swiss historian and peace researcher Daniele Ganser, is the newly published English language translation of his book Imperium USA, originally written in German and published in 2020. Here is a summary of key points — including some lesser-known ones — along with remedies for a more peaceful future, that are covered in the book. … continue
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If you regard the United States as perhaps flawed but overall a force for good in the world . . .
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