A federal judge in Texas has dismissed a lawsuit alleging Pfizer and two of its contractors manipulated data and committed other acts of fraud during Pfizer’s COVID-19 clinical trials.
Brook Jackson, a former employee of the Ventavia Research Group — which conducted some of the clinical trials for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine — in January 2021 sued Pfizer, Ventavia and ICON PLC, another Pfizer contractor, alleging the companies committed numerous violations of the False Claims Act (FCA) during the clinical trials.
According to Jackson’s complaint, the three companies “deliberately withheld crucial information from the United States that calls the safety and efficacy of their vaccine into question,” and as a result, they defrauded the U.S. government which purchased the vaccines.
The FCA allows the government or a party suing on its behalf, such as Jackson, to attempt to recover money for false claims made by parties in order to secure payment from the government.
Those parties can be held liable under the FCA if they knowingly made a false claim or used a false record or statement in order to secure payment.
Also under the FCA, whistleblowers can be rewarded for confidentially disclosing fraud that results in a financial loss to the federal government.
In February 2022, the federal government declined to intervene in the lawsuit on Jackson’s behalf.
In his March 31 ruling, U.S. District Judge Michael Truncale of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas-Beaumont Division ruled Jackson had not proved the companies violated the FCA.
However, in a footnote accompanying his decision, Judge Truncale left the door open for Jackson and her legal team to file an appeal, stating:
“The Court observes, however, that while Ms. Jackson has failed to state a claim for retaliation under the FCA, she may be able to bring her claim under another statute.
“The Court does not opine on the likelihood of success with respect to asserting retaliation under a different statute.”
In a statement posted on Twitter, Jackson sharply criticized Truncale’s ruling, writing:
“The dismissal of Pfizer’s case is a despicable & heinous betrayal of justice, a slap in the face to vaccine injured and whistleblowers, a blatant example of corruption, incompetence and cowardice, a declaration that the powerful are above the law.”
Jackson also tweeted:
A blueprint for federal contractors to commit fraud and get away with it?
Jackson, who had over 15 years of experience working with clinical trials, claimed she “repeatedly informed her superiors of poor laboratory management, patient safety concerns and data integrity issues” during the approximately two weeks she was employed by Ventavia in September 2020.
She also gave The BMJ a cache of internal company documents, photos and recordings highlighting alleged wrongdoing by Ventavia.
Ventavia, which describes itself as the largest privately owned clinical research company in Texas, operated several sites where it conducted clinical trials on behalf of Pfizer.
The documents Jackson provided contained evidence of falsified data, blind trial failures and awareness on the part of at least one Ventavia executive that members of the company’s staff were “falsifying data.”
Jackson’s documents also provided evidence of administrators who had “no training” or medical certifications, or who provided “very little oversight” during the trials.
According to The Epoch Times, the federal government’s agreement with Pfizer set, as its only condition of payment, delivery of a vaccine that was authorized or approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
As Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine has not been withdrawn, the federal government’s agreement with Pfizer remains valid, according to Judge Truncale, who wrote:
“In sum, Ms. Jackson has failed to plead that the Government conditioned payment on Defendants’ certification of compliance with regulatory provisions or clinical trial protocol.
“The upshot is that there is no liability under the FCA for making or using a false record or statement where the claimant is entitled to the payment. Pfizer was entitled to its claims for payment. Therefore, Ms. Jackson has not stated a claim for false record liability.”
Jackson described Judge Truncale’s decision as a “blueprint” on how government contractors can “commit fraud and get away with it. She and her lawyers said they will appeal the dismissal.
Judge: FCA not created to ‘second-guess’ federal policymakers
Judge Truncale said the FCA places the onus on the federal government to determine whether it had been defrauded.
He quoted another ruling finding that the FCA was not created to “second guess decisions made by those empowered through the democratic process to shape public policy.”
“When the government, at appropriate levels, repeatedly concludes that it has not been defrauded, it is not forgiving a found fraud — rather, it is concluding that there was no fraud at all,” that ruling went on to state.
This very argument was put forward by Pfizer during the case. As quoted by The Epoch Times, Judge Truncale asked the defense, “So if the FDA gets it wrong, they just get it wrong, and we live with it?”
To this, Pfizer attorney Carlton Wessel replied, “Exactly.”
Judge Truncale noted that the federal government has been aware of Jackson’s claims “for several years,” but despite this, granted an EUA “multiple times” and “continues to authorize and provide Pfizer’s vaccine at no cost.”
He also noted that Jackson’s complaint did not “identify any safety risk that was hidden from the FDA.”
A 2016 U.S. Supreme Court decision that expanded the scope of a legal principle known as “materiality” resulted in a series of federal court decisions in which fraud cases brought under the FCA were dismissed.
As interpreted by the Supreme Court, if the government continued paying a contractor despite the contractor’s fraudulent activity, the fraud was not considered “material” to the contract.
The FCA also allows whistleblowers to file claims on the basis of harassment, retaliation and threats if they are engaged in a “protected activity,” defined as being “motivated by a concern regarding fraud against the government.”
It is this aspect of Jackson’s claim that will be allowed to proceed on appeal.
Ventavia hired Jackson in September 2020. She reported problems she observed with the Pfizer vaccine trial to the company’s management that same month. When management didn’t respond, she took her claims to the FDA on Sept. 25, 2020. Ventavia fired her that same day.
Judge Truncale ruled that Jackson had not engaged in protected activity under the standard set by the FCA, but left open the possibility that she could file a retaliation claim under a different statute.
Pfizer previously was heavily fined in connection with the FCA. As part of a 2009 settlement, the company paid $2.3 billion in fines — the largest healthcare fraud settlement in the history of the U.S. Department of Justice — stemming from allegations of illegal marketing of off-label products not approved by the FDA.
In an attempt to strengthen the FCA’s anti-retaliation provisions and install new safeguards against industry-level blacklisting of whistleblowers seeking employment, Congress in July 2021 introduced the False Claims Amendments Act of 2021.
In December 2021, Pfizer hired a well-connected lobbyist, Hazen Marshall, and the law firm Williams & Jensen to lobby against the bill, which ultimately faltered in Congress.
A new bill, the Administrative False Claims Act of 2023 (S.659), was filed as part of the current Congressional session, sponsored by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who also sponsored the 2021 version of the bill.
This version of the bill passed the Senate via unanimous consent on March 30. It remains pending before the U.S. House of Representatives. However, its provisions are significantly more limited than the 2021 version of the bill, raising “the maximum amount of a fraud claim that may be handled administratively from $150,000 to $1 million.”
By contrast, the 2021 version of the bill stated:
“In determining materiality, the decision of the Government to forgo a refund or to pay a claim despite actual knowledge of fraud or falsity shall not be considered dispositive if other reasons exist for the decision of the Government with respect to such refund or payment.”
This language appears to be missing from the 2023 version of the bill.
It is not known if Judge Truncale issued his decision on March 31 in anticipation of the bill passing the House and potentially becoming law.
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
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.
April 4, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception | COVID-19 Vaccine, United States |
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Door cam footage of Natalya Vovk, Ukrainian national suspected of killing Russian journalist Daria Dugina.
The main suspect in the murder of prominent Russian military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky, Darya Trepova, has confessed to investigators details of her involvement in the incident, according to the news outlet Fontanka.
Tatarsky was killed in an explosion on Sunday at a cafe in St. Petersburg, after Trepova handed him a gift, a statuette, that contained an improvised explosive device (IED). The bombing, which also wounded 40 people, has been classified as a terrorist attack.
According to Fontanka, Trepova claims that it all started when she made friends with a certain activist online and was offered to move to Kiev to take up an editorial position at an unnamed media channel. Before she could be hired, however, she was told that she had to undergo an internship to “prove that she knows how to deal with Russian propaganda.”
Her first task was to go to the Listva bookstore in St. Petersburg and strike up a friendship with Tatarsky, who was holding an event there. Afterwards, she was reportedly told via Telegram that she had to travel to Moscow. There, a taxi driver, who was likely unaware of what he was doing, gave Trepova a package that contained a golden figurine.
Upon receiving the package, Trepova was instructed to go back to St. Petersburg to meet with Tatarsky at the Street Bar 1 café, where he was holding another event for his followers. She was allegedly told to give the figurine to Tatarsky as a gift, and “come up with something about the heroes of the Wagner PMC,” according to Fontanka.
“Then, we will act,” Trepova was reportedly told by her handlers, who said they had booked her a flight to Uzbekistan, where she would be transported to Kiev. Trepova reported her every move to her contact, sending messages such as “I’m arriving at the cafe,” “I’m about to present the figurine to Tatarsky,” and “I’ve handed it over.”
Trepova reportedly insists that she did not know the figurine contained a bomb and has repeatedly claimed that she was set up. Fontanka says her arguments seem plausible since she did not leave the building after handing over the statuette, and did not hesitate to sit next to it when Tatarsky invited her to join him on stage not long before it detonated.
Fontanka reports that explosives experts are now examining the blast site to confirm that the bomb was activated via SIM card, which would have made it possible to detonate it from anywhere in the world.
April 4, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, War Crimes | Russia, Ukraine |
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A North Carolina district court ordered Merck to turn over all of its Gardasil adverse events databases to plaintiffs suing the pharmaceutical giant for injuries allegedly caused by the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine.
The databases, which include information from the Merck Adverse Event Reporting and Review System (MARRS) — Merck’s version of the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) — should contain all of the reports pertaining to Gardasil adverse events submitted by physicians, patients and publications, plaintiffs’ attorney Michael Baum told The Defender.
In his March 20 order, U.S. District Judge Robert J. Conrad, Jr., said, “Plaintiffs’ and their experts should have the same opportunity as Merck to review and analyze the entirety of the data.”
Merck until now has refused to make the entire MARRS databases available to the plaintiffs’ attorneys.
Gardasil is a widely used vaccine commonly administered to teens and young adults before they are sexually active to protect against HPV infections, which can be sexually transmitted later in life.
HPV infections may lead to the development of cervical cancer. However, most infections are benign and resolve on their own.
The firm Baum Hedlund Aristei & Goldman and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Children’s Health Defense chairman-on-leave, have filed more than two dozen lawsuits on behalf of young people injured by Gardasil, alleging Merck knowingly and fraudulently concealed the vaccine’s risks.
The lawsuits are some of the more than 80 pending in the federal court system, and that number is expected to grow. In August 2022, a judicial panel consolidated the lawsuits into a single federal courtroom.
Some of the signature impacts observed following HPV vaccination — which afflict a number of the plaintiffs — include permanently disabling autoimmune and neurological conditions such as postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), fibromyalgia and myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, The Defender reported.
There have been thousands of reports of adverse events worldwide, peer-reviewed scientific literature from the U.S., Australia, Denmark, Sweden, France and Japan, and statistics published by public health agencies in each of these countries that demonstrate plausible associations between HPV vaccination and autoimmune conditions.
Merck maintains there is no safety signal in the data for autoimmune conditions. The plaintiffs allege Merck made this argument by discounting reports.
Baum told The Defender access to this full database of adverse event reports should allow experts to better analyze the full extent of post-Gardasil autoimmune symptom clusters, and demonstrate there is a “statistically significant causal connection between Gardasil and autoimmune conditions.”
Gardasil’s long history of autoimmune adverse events
While Merck markets Gardasil as “safe and effective,” safety signals emerged even early, during the vaccine’s clinical trials. However, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted the vaccine Fast Track approval after only a six-month review process.
In 2006, Gardasil was licensed across the U.S. and Europe. But within a few years, reports of serious adverse events appeared — first in the media and then in academic journals.
In 2013, Gardasil was responsible in the U.S. for three-fifths of all serious vaccine reactions reported in young women under age 30, including 64% of deaths and 81% of cases of permanent disability.
Similarly, disproportionately high rates of adverse events were reported in Australia, Japan, and other European countries at that time.
Yet in 2014, the FDA approved a new version of the vaccine, the nine-valent Gardasil 9. And in 2016 — when GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) withdrew its poorly competing bivalent HPV vaccine Cervarix from the U.S. market — Gardasil 9 became “the only game in town.”
Gardasil 9 is FDA-approved for males and females ages 9 through 45 years.
In 2015, because of the high number of serious adverse events reports in Denmark and around the world, the Danish Health and Medicines Authority asked the European Commission to investigate the relationship between Gardasil and serious adverse events.
Several months later, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) — a European equivalent to the FDA — issued a report concluding there was no link between HPV vaccines and serious neurological adverse events.
But a leaked, confidential EMA document showed substantial disagreement among the agency’s experts.
An article published in The BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine also revealed the EMA made its evaluation based on flawed data and analysis provided by vaccine manufacturers, dismissed compelling evidence from independent researchers and the Uppsala Monitoring Centre, and sought input from experts with financial conflicts of interest, in violation of its own rules.
Given the ongoing safety concerns associated with the revelations of the EMA’s flawed study, Rebecca Chandler et al. conducted further research on the link between the HPV vaccine and autoimmune disorders, which was published in Drug Safety in 2017.
Autoimmune disorders can be difficult to identify and take a long time to diagnose because they are typically characterized by combinations of a wide range of symptoms that can be linked to a number of illnesses.
Any one symptom on its own may not provide enough information to alert a physician to the underlying cause.
To identify autoimmune disorders associated with the HPV vaccine, Chandler and her team did a cluster analysis of VigiBase, the World Health Organization (WHO) international database of suspected adverse drug reactions.
They conducted a statistical analysis of reports on HPV adverse events, looking for clusters of symptoms associated with autoimmune conditions like POTS, CRPS and CFS — rather than looking only for cases where an autoimmune disorder was definitively diagnosed — and found statistically significant rates of serious adverse events associated with Gardasil.
It is one of several recent studies linking Gardasil with autoimmune issues.
As part of this now-consolidated lawsuit, the plaintiffs have been seeking access to Merck’s database for several years in order to do a cluster analysis on all of the data Merck has collected.
Suing Big Pharma for vaccine injury difficult — but possible
Vaccine makers can be held liable for injuries caused by a fully licensed vaccine — unless that vaccine is added to the CDC’s childhood vaccination schedule.
The HPV vaccine is listed on that schedule.
People injured by vaccines listed on the childhood schedule can seek compensation through the taxpayer-funded National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), a no-fault alternative to the traditional legal system for resolving vaccine injury claims.
But many people are unaware that claimants who are dissatisfied with the outcome of the VICP process can sue the pharmaceutical company directly in civil court as long as that claimant completed the VICP process.
Baum told The Defender that the VICP has paid out more than $70 million to people making claims regarding Gardasil, but that over the last few years, they stopped making payments for autoimmune conditions, without explanation.
The lawsuits against Merck alleging the HPV vaccine caused debilitating autoimmune complications are a result of this process.
Baum also told The Defender that a claimant has only three years from the onset of symptoms to file a complaint, but because autoimmune disorders are challenging to diagnose, many people are not diagnosed until the statute of limitations has expired.
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.
April 3, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | EMA, FDA, United States |
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Major windfarms are again reneging on their promise to deliver power to the national grid at agreed prices.
A year ago, Net Zero Watch reported that the Moray East windfarm had become fully operational, but had refused to activate its Contracts for Difference (CfDs), under which it had promised to sell cheap power to the grid. This gaming allowed it to sell at elevated market prices instead, costing consumers hundreds of millions of pounds.
Last week the windfarm advised that it will put back the date for activation another 12 months. In addition, the CfD start date for Phase 1 of the Hornsea 2 windfarm, which became fully operational in August last year, has also been pushed back into 2024.
Delaying its CfD may have earned Moray East as much as half a billion pounds last year; putting it back another year could easily bring in another hundred million pounds at current market prices. Hornsea 2 could earn a similar amount in 2023/24.
Windfarms are entitled to do this under the CfD scheme rules, and there is scope for further delays. Moray East will be able to put off a final decision about whether to activate its CfD until March 2025. Some of the phases of Hornsea 2 will be able to delay until 2026.
Andrew Montford, Net Zero Watch deputy director, said:
How long do Government and civil service think they can go on pretending that these windfarms are going to deliver cheap power? It is a deliberate, cynical deception and it needs to stop now.
April 3, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | UK |
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The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) met for three days — behind closed doors, except for a two-hour public comment period — to review the epidemiological, clinical and biological evidence on adverse events associated with COVID-19 vaccines.
The committee will generate a report that will be used to add injuries to the federal vaccine injury table, which lists known adverse events associated with existing vaccines.
This list helps the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) and Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP) — both part of the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) — to decide whether to compensate vaccine injury claims.
Historically, NASEM meetings have been open to the public — but this year’s meetings were closed, except for the two hours of public comment required by federal law.
NASEM livestreamed the public comment period, during which each speaker was limited to three minutes of comments.
Brian Hooker, Ph.D., P.E., chief scientific officer for Children’s Health Defense was among those who delivered comments.
Hooker told the committee:
“I have little hope that this National Academies committee of experts will do anything but simply rubber stamp the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines that were recommended and even mandated to the population of the United States.”
The committee is meant to be a neutral external body, but the review is done at the request of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and partially funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Hooker said:
“This is the same CDC that discovered as early as February 19, 2021, that mRNA vaccines were causing myocarditis in adolescent and young males, just 10 weeks after the rollout of the first vaccines.
“However, CDC immunization safety officials, including director Dr. Tom Shimabukuro, hid this information until they made the tacit assertion over three months later on May 27, 2021, that there might be a connection between vaccines and myocarditis.
“While CDC officials lied about this adverse event, the U.S. vaccination rate climbed from 8% to over 50% — increasing profit to the vaccine manufacturers who have fully captured this agency.”
Vaccine injury lawyer Aaron Siri told the committee that in his experience helping clients to file claims, past NASEM reports were “incredibly consequential.”
“They are documents that are going to be used by the federal government to fulfill their duty … to fight against any claim of compensation,” Siri said, adding:
“Your task, as I understand it, is to review the medical literature. But understand that pharmaceutical companies don’t have an interest in conducting the studies and neither do our federal health agencies.”
He said the experts he has deposed use the absence of evidence in these reports for any given side effect as evidence the side effect doesn’t exist. They then deny people’s injury claims on that basis.
Siri implored the committee to take seriously the testimonies offered by vaccine-injured people in the public comments when considering what to include in the report.
The committee is led by Kathleen Stratton, Ph.D., who was involved with the 2004 Institute of Medicine report cited as “proof” that vaccines don’t cause autism when there were 5,000 cases pending with the VICP.
Leaked documents showed that Stratton coordinated with the CDC to deny any links between vaccines and autism.
Reed Grimes, M.D., Ph.D., director of the division of injury compensation at the HRSA, and Dr. Tom Shimabukuro, deputy director of the CDC’s Immunization Safety Office, gave presentations at the committee’s first meeting, which was held in January and posted online.
The committee is also reviewing the literature on the administration of vaccines and shoulder injuries. Its findings are expected in March 2024.
Vaccine Injury Compensation Program ‘would be unrecognizable’ to its founders
The more than 30 people who made public comments included vaccine-injured people, physicians, attorneys, researchers working to identify vaccine injuries and treatments, and members of the React19 advocacy group, which has compiled 3,400 peer-reviewed studies listing COVID-19 vaccine adverse events.
Speakers shared extensive personal, scientific and legal evidence of adverse events associated with the COVID-19 vaccines.
Vaccine-injured speakers included Brianne Dressen, who received a dose of AstraZeneca’s vaccine as a volunteer in a clinical trial. Her debilitating side effects, including POTS, tinnitus and other symptoms were not included in the AstraZeneca clinical trial report, even despite the fact they were recognized by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Dressen told the committee she remained “perplexed” by the scientific process and said, “I ask for you to please take an honest and unbiased look at the literature that exists. Please do your part and make sure that these people that are suffering are not discarded, that we are not erased and we are not dismissed.”
Dr. Joseph Fraiman, the lead author of a peer-reviewed study on serious mRNA vaccine side effects, spoke to share the results of his research with the committee, emphasizing that there was “no question” that serious adverse events were associated with the mRNA vaccines.
The many speakers drawing attention to severe side effects linked to the vaccines included Dr. Peter McCullough, who drew the committee’s attention to the fact that “Pfizer reported 1,223 deaths that occurred in their 90-day mandatory part post-marketing data.”
He reminded the committee that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) attempted to block the release of Pfizer’s clinical trial data, and that research ongoing at multiple U.S. universities indicates hundreds of thousands of deaths are associated with the vaccine.
McCullough said:
“I conclude that the National Academies should join in support for full withdrawal of COVID-19 vaccines from current use in the United States, and they begin a fair evaluation and compensation for the large number of individuals who have suffered vaccine injuries, disabilities, and deaths.”
Dr. Meryl Nass, internist and biological warfare epidemiologist, said the committee must bear in mind the FDA’s Benefit-Risk Assessment and drug regulatory decision-making, which, she said, “states for a drug to be approved for marketing FDA must determine that the drug is effective and that its expected benefits outweigh its potential risks to patients.”
She presented data — noting the committee did not allow any commenters to share slides they had prepared for the committee — showing how quickly efficacy wanes for any of the vaccines.
Albert Benavides, who runs the Vaersaware.com website told the committee that miscoding or undercoding and delayed publication in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) has hidden thousands of serious adverse events.
Several speakers commented on the way these reports are misused by the VICP and the CICP.
Professor Renee Gentry, director of the Vaccine Injury Litigation Clinic at The George Washington University Law School, told the committee that over the last ten years, she witnessed, “the aggressive delegitimization of all non-table vaccine injuries by HHS.”
She said the HHS has aggressively fought against any claims regarding injuries not on the list, despite the fact that vaccine people are legally permitted to make claims for injuries whether they are on the list or not.
She said:
“The hard line drawn by HHS in contesting these cases, I believe, contravenes congressional intent as well as the intent of this committee and pushed the vaccine court further into the protracted litigation of the civil arena that Congress hopes to avoid.”
She explained that the stakeholders that created the VICP — vaccine manufacturers, lawyers and parents — set it up to be petitioner-friendly, informal, generous and non-adversarial, adding:
“The congressional record at the time recorded Congress’ admonition that it was better to compensate someone who was not injured by the vaccine than to fail to compensate someone who was …
“I believe the VICP as it exists today would be unrecognizable to those original stakeholders. In some circumstances, HHS’ unrelenting opposition to vaccine injuries using epidemiology discussed by this committee has resulted in the elimination of entire categories of injuries …
“In order to guarantee a strong and successful universal immunization program, you must have a vibrant safety net for those rare individuals who are injured. A compensation program must be a reasonable and meaningful alternative to civil litigation or it has failed.”
How does vaccine injury compensation work?
The PREP Act protects vaccine makers from liability for injuries or deaths associated with Emergency Use Authorization vaccines, but can be held liable for injuries caused by a fully licensed vaccine — unless that vaccine is added to the CDC’s childhood vaccination schedule.
The COVID-19 vaccine was added to the schedule earlier this year.
People injured by vaccines listed on the childhood schedule can seek compensation through the taxpayer-funded VICP, a no-fault alternative to the traditional legal system for resolving vaccine injury claims.
However, the revisions voted on by the ACIP committee last year explicitly state (slide 24) that the COVID-19 vaccines are not covered under the VICP.
Instead, the COVID-19 vaccines added to the childhood schedule will remain covered by the CICP.
As of Jan. 1, 2023, since the CICP was established in 2010, 11,596 claims have been filed (95% COVID-19-related).
Only 19 claims related to COVID-19 filed with the CICP have been found eligible for compensation, though no compensation has yet been paid.
10,604 claims are still under review.
During the first NASEM meeting, Dr. Chandy John, professor of pediatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine, asked HRSA’s Grimes when the COVID-19 vaccines that are fully approved by the FDA would move from coverage under CICP to VICP, saying many concerned parents were asking this question of their infectious disease group.
Grimes gave no timeline. Instead, he simply listed the steps in the process.
He said to move to CICP coverage, a vaccine needs to be recommended for routine administration for children and pregnant women, it needs to have an excise tax imposed upon it through the legislature, and there needs to be a notice of coverage published in the federal record.
“So once those things all happen that is when the CICP would cover the COVID-19 vaccines, if those three things were all to happen.”
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for . 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.
April 2, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | COVID-19 Vaccine, United States |
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James Bamford’s new book Spyfail: Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of America’s Counterintelligence devotes nine chapters to the impunity of Israel, its spies and U.S. lobby.
Bamford is best known as America’s premiere chronicler of the ultra-secretive National Security Agency in his books The Puzzle Palace and The Shadow Factory.
Unlike most authors published through mainstream publishing houses, Bamford has not held back on exposing extremely damaging and behind the scenes exploits of Israel and its lobby in this damning look at U.S. counterintelligence. That was a shock to the second most prominent reader reviewer on Amazon.com who claimed, “I did not expect a full-throated anti-Israel screed completely devoid of nuance or historical context.” Most other reviewers were much more appreciative of Bamford’s honest take.
Among the most scandalous episodes chronicled in Spy Fail are stunning new details about Hollywood movie producer Arnon Milchan’s espionage and weapons smuggling operations targeting the United States.
Bamford follows Milchan’s early efforts to prop up apartheid South Africa through well paid weapons dealing and propaganda, including the production of feel good theatrical works depicting exploited blacks as happy with their lot in South Africa. Milchan’s recruitment into Israel’s Bureau of Scientific Relations Lakam spy agency then leaves him scouring the U.S. for nuclear weapons related technology.
Since Israel had already stolen enough U.S. weapons grade uranium to build atomic bombs from NUMEC, Milchan was tasked to obtain high speed switches that could provide the precisely timed pulses to trigger a detonation. Milchan recruited the hapless Richard Kelly Smyth to set up the front company “Milco” in Huntington Beach California by bedazzling the failing businessman with stars and starlets at his Hollywood parties.
Smyth provided the triggers and many other export prohibited items, but always managed to give away what he was doing to vigilant federal government authorities. Smyth (but not Milchan) was eventually indicted and fled overseas. When he sought help, Milchan ghosted him while working to stay ahead of the law.
Milchan benefitted from mainstream press support to spread the word that the billionaire had no idea what was going on in his global network of companies. Perhaps the most valuable diversion was the New York Time’s Tom Friedman who quickly got wind of the Smyth indictment and promoted Milchan’s innocence. While Bamford mentions the Netanyahu-Milchan connection he does not delve into Smyth’s revelation that Israel’s current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu worked inside the “Project Pinto” krytron smuggling network at the Israel based Heli Trading company. Heli executed the purchase orders from the Israeli Ministry of Defense for export controlled items Milco misclassified and exported.
The devolution of the Milchan Netanyahu relationship is perhaps the most important revelation of extreme current relevance in the book. Milchan pressed Netanyahu to pressure U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry for a 10-year visa after the agency—finally wise to Milchan’s espionage—refused to renew it. The feckless John Kerry eventually acquiesced to Netanyahu and issued the visa. To this day Milchan continues to produce blockbusters and allegedly dodge taxes in the U.S.
But just as Milchan burned Smyth, Netanyahu began pumping Milchan for endless boxes of expensive cigars—“leaves”—and cases of $400 per bottle champagne—“bubbles”—and other gifts for his wife in exchange for the visa favor. Bamford’s depiction of this shakedown is as detailed as it is relentless.
The resultant Israeli corruption cases against Netanyahu have recently led him to seek judicial reforms, which could give his coalition power to shut the cases down. Netanyahu’s initiative has torn Israel apart and put the country on the verge of civil war as protesters sought to stop the gutting of court oversight.
Americans who read and fully digest Spyfail will come away with new insights about how the politicization of American counterintelligence produces media frenzies and scapegoats—such as Maria Butina—while continually steering clear of Israel’s hugely damaging covert intelligence operations against the U.S. Bamford pins this impunity squarely on the Israel lobby and the oversize role it plays in financing the political careers of ever-compliant U.S. elected officials and their political appointees.
Grant F. Smith is director of IRmep and forced the declassification and release of many of the NUMEC and “Project Pinto” documents cited in this book through FOIA lawsuits.
April 1, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Corruption, Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Israel, New York Times, United States, Zionism |
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A recent publication by the world-renowned scientific group, The Cochrane Collaboration, has shown that masks did little to nothing positive during the pandemic response. Following the release of this study, New York Times opinion writer, Zeynep Tufekci, along with the editor-in-chief of the Cochrane Collaboration, Karla Soares-Weiser, threw the authors of the mask study under the bus. Jefferey Jaxen does a deep dive to uncover the important details of this story.
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | March 30, 2023
Despite the CDC preparing for the COVID shot rollout in 2020, newly released internal documents reveal that VAERS, the system for tracking vaccine adverse events, was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of submissions despite expecting record reports. Even after planning for a ‘worse case scenario’ of 1,000 reports per day, an untenable deluge swamped the system and its contractors in just 6 days after going live. But it didn’t stop there. Jeffery Jaxen reports.
April 1, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Video, War Crimes | CDC, COVID-19 Vaccine, Joe Biden, United States |
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Hundreds of thousands of dollars in US artillery equipment, unspecified “weapons systems,” and specialized ammunition meant for US forces in Syria and Iraq have been stolen in recent years, The Intercept reported on 30 March.
According to criminal investigations files obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by The Intercept, at least four large-scale thefts and one loss of US equipment valued at some $200,000 have occurred in Iraq and Syria between 2020 and 2022. The lost items include 40mm high-explosive grenades stolen from US Special Forces.
The losses continue a previous pattern. The Intercept notes further that a 2020 audit by the Pentagon’s inspector general found that Special Operations Joint Task Force–Operation Inherent Resolve, the main unit that partners with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to illegally occupy northeast Iraq, did not properly account for $715.8 million of equipment purchased for the SDF.
The recent failure to prevent the theft of, and account for, US-supplied weapons is concerning because this previously played a key role in the rise of Al-Qaeda affiliated groups, including the Nusra Front and ISIS, in Iraq and Syria.
In the spring of 2015, an extremist coalition led by the Nusra Front successfully conquered Syria’s Idlib governorate, in large part thanks to US-manufactured and supplied TOW anti-tank missiles. The missiles were originally supplied to Free Syrian Army (FSA) groups working with closely with Nusra.
When Russia intervened in the Syria conflict to prevent the fall of the government to Al-Qaeda groups – including Nusra, ISIS, and Ahrar al-Sham – a few months later, in September 2015, US officials drastically escalated TOW missile shipments to FSA units working with these groups.
When journalist Sharmine Narwani asked why US-supplied weapons allegedly meant for FSA groups were showing up in the hands of the Nusra Front, CENTCOM spokesman Lieutenant Commander Kyle Raines responded: “We don’t ‘command and control’ these forces – we only ‘train and enable’ them. Who they say they’re allying with, that’s their business.”
ISIS was also a major beneficiary of US-supplied weapons. Conflict Armament Research (CAR), a UK-based organization that tracks the supply of weapons into conflict-affected areas, reported that “Unauthorised retransfer – the violation of agreements by which a supplier government prohibits the re-export of materiel by a recipient government without its prior consent – is a significant source of [ISIS] weapons and ammunition. The US and Saudi Arabia supplied most of this material without authorization, apparently to Syrian opposition forces.”
By way of example, CAR noted that it had recovered US-supplied anti-tank missiles used by ISIS in Ramadi in February 2016. CAR confirmed that the missiles had been exported from the United States in December 2015. This indicates that the weapons were diverted to ISIS “in a matter of days or weeks after their supply.”
March 31, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, War Crimes | al-Qaeda, Iraq, ISIS, Syria, United States |
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The US-led Western Mainstream Media (MSM) is furious after Russia arrested a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) employee on charges of espionage earlier this week. According to the FSB, that individual “acted in the interests of the US government” while trying to obtain classified information. The Yekaterinburg lawmaker with whom he was meeting confirmed that the so-called “journalist” wanted to learn about very specific details pertaining to Russia’s military-industrial complex in his region.
The Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman wrote on Telegram that “Unfortunately, this is not the first time that the status of a ‘foreign correspondent’, a journalist visa, and accreditation have been used by foreign nationals in our country to cover up activities that are not journalism.” Around the same time, the Kremlin spokesman confirmed that the arrested individual was indeed “caught red-handed” while meeting with the earlier mentioned local lawmaker when the FSB swooped in to stop him.
Keeping in mind what that Yekaterinburg official told TASS in the hyperlinked news item shared in the last sentence of the first paragraph, there’s no doubt that Russia had every right to arrest that WSJ employee for espionage. After all, if a Russian, Chinese, or Iranian citizen in the US on a journalist visa met with a local lawmaker to inquire about “whether the enterprises change their profile, how many shifts there are, and if they are appropriately staffed”, then they’d surely have been arrested as well.
There’s a very clear line between journalism and espionage. The first can only delve into very sensitive national security matters if a citizen from that same country is investigating particular leads, but even then, it might still be illegal depending on whatever regulations that particular country might have in place. As for the second, this always concerns sensitive information of serious interest for a foreign power such as specific details of its military-industrial complex, especially if a foreigner is seeking them.
That being the case, the WSJ employee indisputably crossed the very clear line between journalism and espionage by asking detailed questions of a local official in a foreign country about their military-industrial complex. He’d either done this before with someone else and thus got on the FSB’s radar or his outreach to that Yekaterinburg lawmaker indicated that he was illegally seeking certain information. Nothing else explains how he was able to be caught in the act red-handed like what happened.
In the first scenario, the FSB could have been aware of his meeting with that local official and coordinated with the latter to eavesdrop on the conversation in preparation of arresting that WSJ employee if he broke the law during their meeting. As for the second, that local official would have informed the FSB on his own for patriotic reasons and then offered to cooperate with them to help catch that individual in the act after they realized he planned to behave as a spy in their meeting.
Quite clearly, security officials in any country have the right to arrest foreigners like that WSJ employee who try to obtain specific information about ultra-sensitive national security issues from a local official, let alone during an ongoing conflict and not to mention while being a citizen of an unfriendly country. Russia’s arrest of that individual wasn’t so-called “political repression” like the MSM is dishonestly spinning it as, but the flexing of its sovereign rights in accordance with international law to defend itself.
March 31, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception | Russia, United States |
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After censoring experts who found that the victims in Douma could not have been killed by chlorine gas, the OPCW’s new IIT report continues the cover-up and baselessly accuses the Syrian government.
[Note: this article contains graphic images.]
On April 7th 2018, gruesome images of an alleged chemical attack emerged from the Syrian town of Douma.
Dozens of dead bodies, including children and infants, appeared heaped in piles inside of an apartment building. Others lay on the street in front as if trying to escape deadly gas. Strikingly, many of the victims displayed copious foam oozing from the mouth and nose. Along with their proximity to a clear escape route, these visible symptoms suggested that something extraordinarily poisonous had killed them instantly.
US officials immediately promoted the allegations of insurgent-tied groups that the Syrian army had killed the victims with chlorine gas or the nerve agent sarin, or even a combination of both. One week later, the US, along with the UK and France, bombed Syria in purported retaliation.
In public statements, however, experts raised doubts that chlorine caused the deaths in Douma. Leaked documents later revealed that German military toxicologists consulted by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in June 2018 went further. The Germans told the OPCW that the circumstances of the fatalities – apparent immediate death and collapse in piles at the center of two rooms, a failure to escape, and rapid profuse foaming at the mouth and nose – were inconsistent with chlorine poisoning.
The Germans’ findings had profound ramifications. While the Douma victims’ signs of rapid foaming were not consistent with exposure to chlorine gas, they were consistent with nerve agent exposure. But by that point, the OPCW’s chemical analysis had ruled out sarin or any other nerve agent as the killer because none of these chemicals were found at the scene or in biomedical samples from alleged victims.
If the rapid and profuse frothing was not the result of a nerve agent or chlorine poisoning, the possibility existed that there was no chemical attack at all – and that insurgents staged the incident to frame the Syrian government. The OPCW would be dealing with a faked chemical attack that triggered US-led airstrikes on Syria, and the unexplained deaths of 43 men, women, and children.
As The Grayzone has reported, the OPCW censored the German toxicologists’ input in a cover-up of findings that undermined allegations of a Syrian army chemical attack in Douma. More than three years since that suppression was exposed, the OPCW has never offered a rebuttal to the initial toxicology assessment, nor an explanation for why it was concealed. They have simply buried it.
In a new report on Douma released in January, the OPCW finally purports to offer a counter-narrative. The OPCW’s Investigation and Identification Team (IIT) claims that the “symptoms of the victims” in Douma “are, overall, consistent with exposure to chlorine gas in very high concentrations.”
The IIT shares this judgment as part of an effort to allege that the Syrian army killed the dozens of victims by dropping a chlorine gas cylinder on the apartment building — identified as Location 2 — where their bodies were filmed. (The Grayzone addressed the IIT’s claims about chlorine gas in a previous article). The victims would have been trapped and killed “within minutes,” the IIT report suggests, from exposure to a very high concentration of chlorine gas. By extension, the profuse foaming observed in victims’ mouths and noses would also have to have occurred immediately, or at most, within minutes.
In a statement, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his British, French, and German counterparts hailed the IIT’s findings and touted what they called “the independent, unbiased, and expert work of the OPCW staff.”
To advance its argument, however, the IIT continues to erase the original German toxicologists’ conclusions and engages in multiple acts of scientific cherry-picking. These include the following:
– The IIT has brought in a new toxicologist, without explaining why, who has contradicted the previously consulted experts by claiming that the symptoms of the Douma victims “are consistent with chlorine exposure.” There is no attempt to explain why the new expert’s opinion is more valid than the views of the numerous toxicologists who went before.
– Unlike previous experts, the new toxicologist has avoided ruling on any consistency of the frothing observed in videos and photographs of the deceased victims with exposure to chlorine gas — a controversy at the very core of the Douma deaths.
– The toxicologist sidesteps the frothing issue by instead focusing on whether uncorroborated and cherrypicked accounts of alleged witnesses were consistent with a chlorine attack. The IIT also avoids disclosing whether it considered the accounts of alleged witnesses who claimed to have seen immediate foaming at the Douma apartment building where the dead victims were filmed.
– On the only occasion when the toxicologist does weigh in on a possible cause of the frothing seen in the images, it is only to make the obvious and irrelevant assertion that the oral and nasal foam-like secretions (as well as miosis, a symptom of nerve agent poisoning, and skin discoloration) were “unlikely to have been as a direct result of ‘dust’ inhalation.”
The result is a continued OPCW cover-up of what has proved to be the Douma probe’s most important question: whether chlorine gas killed the dozens of victims filmed at the scene. Rather than provide an answer, the IIT report avoids the science and obscures the cause of 43 unsolved deaths.
Erasing the experts
The IIT’s narrative of almost instantaneous death in Douma, where heavy frothing would have occurred in minutes, defies both the scientific literature and toxicology experts’ previous assessments.
No recognized chemical weapons specialist has affirmed that chlorine gas could have caused the profuse foaming observed in video footage in the short time that the IIT suggests it took for the victims to die.
The first expert to comment on Douma was Professor Alastair Hay, a toxicologist working in the field of chemical warfare and then-member of the OPCW’s Education and Outreach board. Hay has received the OPCW-The Hague Award for his contribution to the Chemical Weapons Convention. On April 10, 2018 – three days after the alleged chemical attack in Douma – Hay challenged the notion that the victims could have been killed by chlorine gas.
The victims’ symptoms were “much, much more consistent with nerve-agent-type exposure,” Hay told the Washington Post. “Chlorine victims usually manage to get out to somewhere they can get treatment.” But in Douma, the victims “have pretty much died where they were when they inhaled the agent. They’ve just dropped dead.” The Post’s headline reflected Hay’s analysis: “Nerve gas used in Syria attack, leaving victims ‘foaming at the mouth,’ evidence suggests.”
A United Nations investigation in June 2018, based largely on the accounts of alleged witnesses, likewise acknowledged — in a reference that certainly includes the profuse frothing — that some of the “reported symptoms” in Douma “are more consistent with the use of another chemical agent, most likely a nerve gas.”
That same month, the OPCW received an unequivocal assessment that ruled out chlorine gas. According to leaked documents, top German military toxicologists told OPCW investigators that chlorine could not have been the murder weapon in Douma. They argued that if the victims had been exposed to high concentrations of chlorine, it “was highly unlikely” that they “would have gathered in piles at the centre of the respective apartments at such a short distance from an escape from the toxic chlorine gas to cleaner air.”
Image 1: In a photograph from Location 2, the dead victims are gathered in piles
The experts also pointed to “the onset of excessive frothing… observed in photos and reported by witnesses.” This was a reference to the images showing a profuse discharge of foam from victims’ mouths and noses. Some alleged witnesses interviewed by the OPCW also claimed that they saw the foaming develop quickly.
From the toxicologists’ point of view, such rapid foaming defied scientific logic. If the dead victims had been rapidly overcome by an incredibly high concentration of chlorine gas, there simply would not have been enough time for the foamy discharge observed on multiple bodies to develop.
Image 2: A female victim displaying profuse foaming after her body had been moved
Accordingly, leaked minutes from that meeting state, “the experts were conclusive in their statements that there was no correlation between symptoms and chlorine exposure.”
The minutes, drafted by Douma team member Dr. Brendan Whelan, were approved by two other participants who had also traveled to Germany to meet with the toxicologists: Dr. Marc Blum, the Head of OPCW Laboratory; and Dr. Soumik Paul, the Head OPCW Health and Safety Branch. In a leaked email, Blum recalled that one of the Germans even raised “the possibility of a staged attack” in Douma because “the circumstances of death for the victims do not match chlorine.”
The OPCW leadership’s response to this conclusive assessment was to make it disappear. When the Douma team included the Germans’ input in their initial report, completed in late June 2018, senior officials went around them and erased all traces of it. The meeting itself was then memory-holed: in the OPCW Fact-Finding Mission’s (FFM) final report on Douma published in March 2019, a detailed timeline omits the team’s visit to Germany.
The “Mission Timeline” of the OPCW’s March 2019 Final Report omits the June 2018 mission to Germany, where expert toxicologists ruled out chlorine gas as the cause of death in Douma
The FFM’s March 2019 final report also revealed that after the German toxicologists’ findings were suppressed, the OPCW consulted five new toxicologists in September and October 2018. But oddly, no detail was provided on what these replacement toxicologists concluded, including on the key questions of how the victims could have been poisoned, and how the profuse frothing could have developed so rapidly.
Instead, the March 2019 report avoided these issues by stating that “it is not currently possible to precisely link the cause of the signs and symptoms to a specific chemical.” This ambiguous language obscured the fact that the German toxicologists initially consulted by the OPCW had unequivocally ruled out chlorine gas. What is certain is that the FFM report never claims that these five additional toxicologists contradicted the Germans whom they replaced. In fact, after noting that these five new experts were consulted, the FFM report made no further mention of them.
In a leaked April 2019 letter to the OPCW Director General, Dr. Whelan, the chief author of the Douma team’s censored original report, complained that the March 2019 final report had “shockingly omitted” the German toxicologists’ findings while evading any explanation for how the victims died from chlorine exposure. “To say that this selective use of expert opinions and facts is disturbing is an understatement,” Whelan wrote.
Challenged publicly to address the Douma probe’s suppressed findings, the long-awaited IIT report instead attempts to cover the OPCW’s tracks with more selective deceptions.
The cherry-picked cherry-picker
Just like the March 2019 FFM report, the IIT avoids the issues raised by the censored German experts entirely. But whereas the FFM stated that it was “not currently possible to precisely link” the Douma victims’ symptoms to chlorine, the IIT attempts to make it possible nearly four years later.
The IIT claims to have consulted a new “independent expert (toxicologist) not involved in previous assessments of the incident,” who concluded that the “symptoms of the victims are, overall, consistent with exposure to chlorine gas in very high concentrations.” No explanation is given for why the findings of this “new” and supposedly “independent” toxicologist should override those of the previously consulted experts. The IIT also does not present any additional evidence that would justify reversing the Germans’ conclusions.
The very fact that the IIT has declined to consult those experts from “previous assessments”– and present them with coherent counterarguments or fresh evidence, if it existed – suggests that the IIT sought out this one “new” assessment to overrule the inconvenient “previous” ones.
When this cherry-picked “independent expert” does make an assessment, more cherry picking ensues. Unlike the German toxicologists who based their assessment on both the images of the dead victims and the “symptoms and times of onset reported by” alleged witnesses, the IIT has limited the toxicologist’s scope of assessment to just the accounts of alleged witnesses.
The new toxicologist, the IIT states, was provided with “accounts and data from 55 individuals interviewed by either the FFM or by the IIT” and requested to “make their own evaluation of the reported symptoms” (emphasis added). The IIT tells us that “the toxicologist independently assessed the anonymised witness statements (obtained from affected persons or other eyewitnesses to the symptoms) against the symptoms that could be expected from chlorine exposure.” Ultimately, the toxicologist “reached the conclusion that the accounts of the victims and medical personnel were consistent with the rapid release of a high dosage of chlorine gas, which led to the rapid and high fatality rate documented at Location 2.”
Relying on witness accounts evades the central question of whether the frothing seen in videos was consistent with rapid chlorine poisoning. It also presumes that these accounts are reliable and have been corroborated, which there is no evidence of. And whereas the IIT claims that it “assessed the accounts, overall, to be consistent,” it omits that the Douma FFM’s initial investigators found those accounts to be anything but. In the interviews conducted in Syria and Turkey, the censored original report noted, “[t]wo broad and distinct narratives” emerged, one supporting the use of chemical weapons and the other not. Whose account was it then that was consistent with a “rapid release of a high dosage of chlorine gas”?
Even the reported symptoms from those cherrypicked witness accounts are themselves selectively assessed. When it comes to alleged witness accounts of what they observed at Location 2, nowhere in the IIT report is there any explicit mention of the “rapid and in some reported cases, immediate onset of frothing described by [alleged] victims,” as detailed in the FFM’s original censored report. There is thus no evidence that the reported rapid frothing formed part of the IIT toxicologist’s assessment. Instead, the IIT report informs us that: “Symptoms described by affected persons, rescuers, and treating medical personnel included shortness of breath, coughing, suffocation, dizziness, and skin irritation.” These symptoms all happen to match chlorine exposure; the omitted rapid frothing does not.
By focusing therefore only on the accounts of alleged witnesses – in particular, accounts from those who claimed there had been a chemical attack, and only those symptoms that are consistent with chlorine exposure – the IIT avoids answering the central question: whether the rapid onset of the profuse frothing observed in videos is consistent with exposure to chlorine.
Avoiding the inconsistency
In the few instances when the IIT’s toxicologist does appear to weigh in on the images of the foaming, they again deftly avoid the consistency question.
In a passage citing the toxicologist, the IIT states that “symptoms observed in affected persons, including miosis, skin discoloration, and oral and nasal foam-like secretions, are unlikely to have been as a direct result of ‘dust’ inhalation.”
No one has ever claimed that “dust inhalation” was the cause of the Douma victims’ observed miosis and “foam-like secretions.” Why then has the IIT’s toxicologist gone out of their way to rule out “dust inhalation” as the cause of the victims’ foam-like secretions, but failed to tell us whether these foam-like secretions could have been caused by chlorine gas? The most likely reason is that the IIT did not want its toxicologist to answer that question.
In another passage, the IIT notes that “imagery and videos” from Location 2 showed “clear signs of corneal opacity, discoloration of the skin, white/off-white foam-like oral and nasal secretions and miosis.” Yet rather than tell us whether those observed foam-like secretions are consistent with chlorine gas, the IIT again avoids an answer. Instead, the report only states that “the specialists consulted by the IIT confirmed that the reported and observed symptoms of oral opacity are typically caused by… exposure to a high concentration of chlorine gas.” (emphasis added) Given its omission, these same specialists have not confirmed that the observed “foam-like oral and nasal secretions” can be caused by exposure to chlorine gas.
On another occasion, the IIT — notably, not the toxicologist — does manage to explicitly state that the “rapid onset of symptoms… observed in videos and pictures” for “fatalities recorded on the stairs and landings” (emphasis added) at Location 2 are consistent with a “high and lethal volume of chlorine gas.”
Given that foaming was seen in videos and photos, the IIT report leaves the impression that it is referring to those “symptoms.” But in the images from the “stairs and landings” at the apartment building, none of the three dead victims show any frothing. This allows the IIT to create a false suggestion that the foaming seen in the videos is consistent with chlorine exposure. In reality, the IIT is weighing in on images where no foaming can be observed, but that readers would unlikely check.
In another rare instance where it makes any reference to foaming, the IIT states that chlorine gas can lead “to the oral and nasal secretion of a foam-like substance.” That chlorine gas can cause a “foam-like substance” is not in question: the censored original report noted that “excessive frothing from the mouth” has been “reported in cases of exposure to lethal doses of chlorine gas.” But with this uncontroversial claim, the IIT is again avoiding the issue raised by the original report, based on the findings of the German toxicologists, that the “rapid, and in some reported cases, immediate onset of frothing described by victims is not considered consistent with exposure to chlorine-based choking or blood agents.”
Suppressing science, denying justice
Left with the scientifically unfounded scenario in which chlorine gas caused immediate profuse foam discharge from the victims, the IIT has resorted to deceptive claims that no recognized expert in toxicology has been willing to support. Accordingly, beyond the US and its allies’ bombing of Syria on unsupported grounds and the co-option of the OPCW to whitewash it, the core crime in Douma remains unexplained.
In April 2018, dozens of slain civilians were photographed in that apartment building. Images of their lifeless bodies stirred global outrage. Approaching the fifth anniversary of this horrific incident, the chemical weapons watchdog tasked with investigating their deaths continues to bury its own findings and present a baseless explanation for what occurred. So long as the OPCW continues to suppress the science, 43 Douma victims and their families will remain without justice.
————
Thank you to Dr. Piers Robinson for his input on this article. https://berlingroup21.org/.
Links:
Watch Aaron Maté’s March 24, 2023 presentation on the Douma controversy to members of the UN Security Council.
Read the first part of this report.
March 30, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular | OPCW, Syria, United States |
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The end of the last week was shaken by an unreal announcement. The ICC tribunal, which has its headquarters in The Hague, announced that it issued a warrant arrest against the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin.
For those who have not any familiarity with this court, it does not have any jurisdiction in Russia due to the simple fact that Russia never signed the treaty that instituted the ICC.
Moreover, the ICC does not have a good reputation at all. We are talking about the court that was illegally prosecuting, according to several jurists, former Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic with the charge of genocide.
Milosevic was very close to getting an acquittal because he was demolishing the case against him in court. Unfortunately, he could not get one because he died in never clarified circumstances before the end of his trial.
Some observers hold The Hague accountable for his death because Milosevic could have unmasked years of lies spread by NATO against him.
Nevertheless, the ICC prosecutor, Kharim Khan, showed himself before the world press and claimed that Putin was “guilty” of having trafficked Ukrainian children to Russia.
For those who don’t know much about Ukraine before the current war, the truth is quite simple. Ukraine was a world children supermarket. People from every part of the world ordered organs that were harvested from the bodies of innocent Ukrainian children.
Certainly, we are not talking about ordinary people. We are talking about people who travel in private jets. People who attend the WEF and who preach about pseudo-environmentalism while they’re the first to breach the rules of the insane and dystopian world that they imagine.
Therefore, if there is someone here who is guilty of child trafficking that would be the Ukrainian establishment, which is completely corrupt and handled by the foreign puppeteers who installed it in power.
The Euromaidan coup that was defined by Stratfor (a think tank quite close to the US deep state) as the “most blatant coup in history” is the “best” example of how the Ukrainian establishment is fully dependent upon the Anglosphere.
And the ICC has been silent for years about this horrendous traffic. It has not been saying a word about it. So if the ICC is really seeking who is responsible for the abuses suffered by the Ukrainian children, it should look at itself in the mirror. This trafficking has been taking place on the ICC’s watch, which has never lifted a finger to put an end to it.
However, this grotesque and provocative move has nothing to do with juridical issues. As we will see later, this is a political move that is deeply connected with two other announced arrests: that of Donald Trump and the one of the former Pakistani PM, Imran Khan.
The bogus case against Trump
On Friday 17th, Trump announced on Truth Social that the NY’s DA office was planning to arrest him for the Stormy Daniels case.
Basically, the case is founded upon the quite shaky legal grounds that Trump allegedly paid hush money to a pornstar, Stormy Daniels, in order to keep her quiet about his alleged affair with her.
Firstly, we should give a brief introduction about the US legal system and its developments in the latest years.
As many readers probably already know, the DAs in the US are elective assignments. They usually run for the Democratic or the Republican Party and they receive funds for their campaigns. And in recent years, a magnate who has spent a lot of money for getting elected DAs is George Soros. Soros has a very particular type of DA in mind to fulfill his “open society”.
Soros’ idea of a DA is an official who does not prosecute crimes and who allows the streets of his city to be ruled by criminals. The Open Society is literally allowing the dregs of society to have a free hand in harassing, raping, stealing and killing honest citizens.
The globalist world is where everything is upside down and where good is bad and right is wrong.
Therefore, if you happen to live in one of the cities where Soros DAs were elected and you’re a good citizen, you could be in trouble.
As a law abiding citizen, you’re not part of the open society. And you’re even more in trouble if you have political ideas keen to the principles of loving your country and defending it from foreign and domestic enemies.
And this is certainly the case of Donald Trump, who’s the target of never-ending political witch hunts.
In this case, the Soros DA who’s persecuting Trump is Alvin Bragg. Bragg would like to indict Trump for the 130,000 $ of hush money allegedly paid to Daniels. Money that was allegedly transferred to former Trump attorney, Michael Cohen, who, in turn, gave it to Stormy Daniels.
This round of transactions would constitute a falsification of Trump’s business records, according to the NY’s DA. But there’s a problem with all this theory. It is crumbling under the proofs to the contrary that are emerging in these days.
We are talking about crucial exculpatory evidence here like the letter signed by Cohen in which he clearly states that Trump never paid or reimbursed him for the money that he had given to Stormy Daniels in the first place.
In a normal world, the case would have been closed but in Soros’ world, it is not. Bragg’s probe seems to be falling under the blows of this evidence and the Grand Jury that should decide to proceed or not with Trump’s indictment keeps being postponed.
And this is happening because everyone in the legal arena, including Trump’s enemies, knows that Bragg does not have a case, and if he keeps overplaying his hand, he could be the one ending up indicted for abuse of power and for hiding crucial evidence who would immediately exonerate Trump from this bogus probe.
Therefore, Trump’s arrest seems to be less likely as the days go by. Never in the history of the United States, have we seen a President persecuted like Donald Trump.
From the very first moment when he went down the escalator of Trump Tower, he became enemy number one for the deep state.
Immediately, those powers who ruled Washington for decades tried to bar his way to the White House.
They started with the Russiagate hoax, also known as Spygate, which is an international plot that sees involved also British and Italian secret services in order to frame Trump by falsely accusing him of being a “Russian agent”.
They did not stop there. They even tried to physically remove him from the White House with at least two assassination attempts in August 2020 and with another at Mar-a-Lago in January 2021.
They even tried to oust him with the 2020 election fraud, which could be defined as the most blatant electoral fraud in history. Not to mention two attempted and failed impeachments against him, which were both based on preposterous and false accusations.
A war machine was clearly put in motion. It is the machine of those secret powers that have ruled the United States for far too long. Powers that hijacked the history of this country in order to subvert foreign leaders who were not obeying the orders of NATO and of the Israeli lobby. Powers that harmed and killed so many Americans and many other people all around the world.
The American people elected Trump to halt the exploitation of the United States. American people were fed up with seeing their country used to fulfill a global agenda whose only purpose is to establish a world totalitarian government.
And Trump is the political leader who has incarnated that spirit – the spirit of making America great again and of freeing this nation from the chains of her enemies.
The Bragg probe is just the latest attempt of this war against Trump and the American people. Trump is just inches away from officially returning to the White House and, as a result, the deep state launched this bogus investigation. It is an investigation that remains unclear if it will lead to an indictment and an eventual arrest.
The system has a very weak hand and Trump knows it. Most likely, his announcement aimed to expose this plot even if its probabilities of success are very low.
Imran Khan: the man who the deep state wants dead
Someone who is also running the risk of being arrested is former Pakistani PM, Imran Khan. Khan denounced last year a plot that was hatched by NATO’s circles to oust him from power.
Khan was and still is a very dangerous threat for the US deep state powers. The Pakistani leader aimed to establish relations with BRICS and, by doing so, Pakistan would have left the Anglosphere.
If this would come to fruition, NATO would lose another key strategic country in Asia.
That’s why he was removed with a confidence vote that was heavily swayed by foreign influences. But Khan didn’t throw in the towel.
He kept fighting for Pakistan. He keeps gathering massive crowds at his rallies. For the deep state, the risk was too high. They tried to kill him and if Khan is alive today, it is only for the result of miraculous circumstances.
On Saturday 18th, the police stormed his residence. Khan is facing a trial in Islamabad where the charge is of having sold watches that he received as gifts when he was still in charge. It’s not known what is the evidence of this “crime” but this case seems to be quite weak as the one against President Trump.
Therefore, the Pakistani leader could have the opportunity to run at the next election scheduled for this coming October. It’s a nightmarish scenario for the Anglozionist powers because Pakistan would definitely shift towards the multipolar world.
However, there are still some traps set on the way and Khan knows it. This is why he urged his supporters not to engage in any kind of violence because he knows that Sharif, the current PM, is seeking a way to frame him.
So we can see how all these three attempted arrests are connected to each other. Trump, Putin and Khan belong to the international patriotic alliance that is fighting against the globalist side.
On the one hand, we have a side of leaders who are fighting to preserve the sovereignity of their countries. On the other, we have unelected powerful banking families like the Rothschilds who have been trying to destroy the independence and prosperity of every country in the world.
What we saw in the last 14 days is just the latest chapter of this current war between these two sides.
And the globalist side is being inflicted tremendous blows.
Only in this week, Putin received more than 40 African leaders in a conference about the multipolar world. And why he was attending this event, he also received the Chinese president, Xi Jinping.
The BRICS are changing the lines of international politics. The world is shifting from the rule of the Anglosphere empire towards the restoration of the national States.
When Xi Jinping states that the changes that Russia and China are driving are unprecedented in the last 100 years, he’s quite right.
Even Saudi Arabia, a country forged by British and Zionist powers, understood that things went south and restored diplomatic relationships with Iran.
The world is changing at a tremendous speed. We are moving from the old globalized and centralized world towards one when there are no ruling powers. The age of the empires has died. The age of the nations has begun again.
After the defeat of NATO in Ukraine, which is running out of ammunitions, we will have passed the point of no return. NATO’s crisis will be so deep to the point that it could dissolve itself.
At that point, the EU, the last frail bulwark of globalism will be encircled. The crisis of the European establishment will aggravate and people in the EU countries will demand the end of neoliberal austerity and the normalization of relations with Russia.
Italy still seems to be the ideal candidate to run this process considering the fact that she has the most euro skeptical and most pro-Russia people in Europe.
And this is a perspective that scares a lot of members of both the Italian and EU deep state.
The old world of despotism is dying. The new world of free nations is being created.
We are certainly living in one of the most exciting and important times in history.
March 29, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception | European Union, ICC, NATO, Pakistan, Ukraine, United States |
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The Chinese Foreign Ministry has said the saboteurs of the Nord Stream pipelines must face consequences, as it condemned America’s failure to support a UN-led investigation into the incident. A Russian-sponsored resolution for an international probe did not pass a vote at the UN Security Council earlier this week.
Speaking at a media briefing on Tuesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning claimed that Washington is “keen to carry out so-called ‘investigations’ of developing nations, yet is secretive on this incident.” The diplomat argued that the US attitude was an example of “obvious double standards,” and suggested that officials in Washington were “afraid of” something. Mao added that China hopes the perpetrators will be “brought to justice” as soon as possible.
China, Russia, and Brazil backed the draft resolution for an international Nord Stream investigation in a UN Security Council vote on Monday, although 12 other members abstained. If adopted, the resolution would have requested the secretary general to establish a commission to conduct a “comprehensive, transparent, and impartial international investigation” of the incident, which happened in September last year.
The US claimed the proposal was intended to undermine the national investigations being run by Germany, Denmark, and Sweden. Germany was the intended recipient of Russian natural gas pumped through the sabotaged pipelines. Denmark and Sweden are conducting probes as the explosions which ruptured the energy link occurred in their territorial waters.
China’s deputy representative to the UN, Geng Shuang, argued that there was no obstacle to holding an international investigation in parallel with national ones.
Geng also noted that the trio of European nations had already had six months to conduct their probes. Beijing expects them “to increase their sense of urgency, report the progress of the investigations to the Security Council in a timely and regular manner, and find out and announce the results of the investigations as soon as possible,” the Chinese delegation said in a statement.
Veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh claimed last month that the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines was ordered by US President Joe Biden and was conducted jointly by America and Norway. Both nations have denied those allegations. Russian President Vladimir Putin said last week that he “fully agreed” with Hersh’s conclusions.
March 29, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | China, Germany, United States |
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