The United States government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), within the Department of Homeland Security, is raising the alarm about the threat of “foreign influence” that is “leveraging misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation.” CISA defines “malinformation” as information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.” In 2021, CISA, along with the White House and private sector partners, successfully persuaded Facebook and Twitter to censor accurate information about the origins of the SARS-2 coronavirus and covid vaccines.
And yet CISA is failing to do its job when censoring malinformation, misinformation, and disinformation about climate change, including by “threat actors,” often funded or employed by foreign governments. A Google survey of over 2,300 people conducted last year by the nonpartisan research organization Environmental Progress, which I founded and lead, found that 53% of people surveyed in the U.S. agree with the false statement, “Climate change is making hurricanes more frequent,” while 46% agree with the false statement, “Climate change threatens human extinction.”
But it’s notable that the censorship-industrial complex has shown no interest in censoring climate misinformation that has led people to believe that climate change is making hurricanes more frequent and threatening human extinction. “An example of malinformation is editing a video to remove important context to harm or mislead,” writes CISA. And yet that is precisely what foreign disinformation threat actors like Greta Thunberg, her allies at the German government-funded Potsdam Institute, and even the U.N.’s own Secretary-General Antonio Guterres routinely do when they share videos of people in poor countries suffering from flooding, which is a direct result of lack of flood management infrastructure, not slightly more precipitation from climate change.
Moreover, the censorship-industrial complex has sought to censor accurate information about climate change and energy. Last June, former Biden Administration Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy demanded censorship of those who criticized the failure of weather-dependent renewables during the blackouts in Texas in February 2021, even though such criticisms were factual. “The tech companies have to stop allowing specific individuals over and over again to spread disinformation,” said McCarthy.
In her interview, she went on to falsely claim that critics of renewables are funded by “dark money” fossil fuel companies — the same false claim that Democrats made of the world’s most influential scientist studying hurricanes and climate change, Roger Pielke, Jr. of the University of Colorado. As such, McCarthy spread disinformation in order to undermine the legitimacy of her opponents.
The U.N. continues to wage its disinformation campaign against the people of the world, as today’s headlines about its new report show. “‘The climate time-bomb is ticking,’” reads the CNN headline. “Scientists release ‘survival guide’ to avert climate disaster,” says BBC. “Earth to hit critical warming threshold by early 2030s, climate panel says.” The U.N. most journalists are implying that scientists have determined that a temperature increase beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels would be catastrophic.
The U.N. report is malinformation. The supposed 1.5-degree “threshold” is political, not scientific, as Pielke and others have shown. Global warming causes incrementally greater risk. Temperatures are expected to rise less than most thought as recently as 10 years ago, thanks to abundant natural gas. And humankind’s physical security is assured, given our success at adapting to more extreme weather and producing more food on less land.
All of this raises a question. Why, if the U.N. and U.S. governments are so committed to censoring disinformation, are they themselves spreading it? Why, in other words, do U.N. officials perfectly fit their own definition of “disinformation threat actors,” and often foreign ones at that?
On the night of 19-20 March, 2003, the US air force began bombing the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. The EU and NATO were deeply divided on whether to join the aggression: While newer NATO members from Central and Eastern Europe were in favor of the war, European heavyweights Paris and Berlin opposed it.
The Iraq war also marked the onset of diplomatic coordination between Moscow and Beijing at the UN Security Council (UNSC). The two countries began in 2003 to apply similar voting patterns in the Council, first on Iraq, then on Libya in 2011, and over Syria in several key votes. That early Russia-China UN coordination has, 20 years later, transformed into a determined joint policy toward “guarding a new world order based on international law.”
Looking back at March 2003 from the vantage point of March 2023, the invasion of Iraq unleashed geopolitical consequences far beyond the obvious ones, like the proliferation of terrorism, a decline of US power, and regional chaos. In 2003, a foundational, global shift in the balance of power was surely the last possible consequence envisioned by the war’s planners in Washington and London.
Disconnecting the dots
The destruction of Iraq, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army by the first “US Consul” Paul Bremer in May 2023, the outflow of refugees to neighboring states such as Syria and Jordan, and the exponential growth of extremism and terror attacks are among the consequences of this misguided war.
The flimsy reasons for the war, such as non-existent weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and Baghdad’s alleged support of terror groups like Al Qaeda, were debunked extensively in the following years. By the spring of 2004, evidence was already rife – whether from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) or from the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group (ISG) – that Iraq had no WMD program at all.
Rarely before had disinformation campaigns – what is now commonly referred to as “fake news” – been so meticulously executed. The “with us or against us” narrative had firmly taken hold: Western think tanks were out in full force promoting regime change and “democracy” (not a stated goal of the US-led invasion) in Iraq, while those who opposed it were labeled anti-Israel or anti-America.
Despite unprecedented, massive public protests across western capitals in opposition to the Iraq war, the US and its allies had already set in motion their considerable war machine, led by figures such as British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Spanish Prime Minister José Maria Aznar.
A false narrative linking Baghdad and the September 11 attacks had already been well-seeded, despite there being no connection whatsoever between the government of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the bombers. It should be noted that there were no Iraqi or Afghan citizens among the terrorists who piloted the 9-11 planes, who were predominantly Saudi nationals.
Unfinished Business
In the autumn of 2001, war scenarios for an invasion of Iraq and regime change were already being laid out in Washington. Johns Hopkins University dean Paul Wolfowitz – an avid supporter of regime-change and US military expansion into Iraq – was named deputy secretary of defense in February 2001, a full seven months before the 9-11 attacks. Wolfowitz’s working hypothesis was that Iraq, with the liberalization of its oil industry, would be able to finance a post-war reconstruction from its own petroleum exports.
The group around Vice President Dick Cheney, which included Wolfowitz and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, was influential in shaping President George W. Bush’s position on Iraq. Unlike his father, George H. Bush, who was an experienced CIA director and analyst, the younger Bush lacked a distinct personal worldview on foreign policy, which he outsourced to his hawkish coterie.
Nevertheless, he was determined to finish what he saw as his father’s “unfinished business” from the 1991 ‘Gulf War’ aimed at expelling Iraqi forces from Kuwait. That conflict was executed under a UN Security Council resolution, authorizing legal measures against Iraq as a state, but which did not constitute a war under international law.
In 1991, only Jordan‘s King Hussein took a position supporting Saddam Hussein, with all other nations backing the coalition assault against Baghdad. The US government adhered to the UN resolution, which aimed to restore Kuwait‘s territorial integrity – but not to overthrow the Iraqi government.
Instead, the US supported Iraqi Kurds in the north of the country and encouraged them to revolt against Baghdad. The Iraqi army crushed that rebellion, as it did an uprising in the Shia-dominated south. Perhaps the rebels had hoped for more concrete military aid from the US, but regardless, Hussein remained firmly in power despite military defeat elsewhere.
From Washington’s perspective, the US had failed to unseat Hussein, and within the Bush family, there was a desire to settle a score. For George W. Bush, the invasion of Iraq provided an opportunity to step out of his powerful father’s shadow by executing the elusive regime-change goal. The September 11 attacks provided a justification for this obsession – what remained was to connect Iraq to the US terror attacks and galvanize public and political support for a war, both domestically and internationally.
The UN Security Council in turmoil
In the run-up to the Iraq invasion, there was a great deal of division among UN Security Council (UNSC) members. US Secretary of State Colin Powell presented questionable evidence of Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, while the foreign ministers of Germany and France publicly opposed the aggression, for which they occasionally received applause in the Council.
China and Russia, who vehemently opposed the war, began coordinating their decisions and responses, in part because of their respective oil interests in Iraq. This cooperation between Moscow and Beijing set the stage for a coordinated multilateral approach between the two nations. Both governments understood that a war would open Pandora’s box, leading to the collapse of Iraqi institutions and resulting in widespread regional disharmony.
Unfortunately, this is precisely what happened. The subsequent years saw weekly attacks, an expansion of Salafi terror groups like Al Qaeda, the rise of ISIS in 2014, and perpetual internal Iraqi conflict. Anyone familiar with the country‘s conditions was aware of the looming catastrophe when the illegal invasion of Iraq began on 20 March, 2003.
China and Russia and the multipolar order
Twenty years to the day, Chinese President Xi Jinping will embark on a three-day state visit to Moscow, and the focus will extend beyond bilateral energy relations, which have been a consistent priority since 2004.
As previously stated in their joint declaration in Beijing in February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart aim to coordinate their foreign policy and advance it together. Their discussions may also touch on the Ukraine dossier, although media expectations in the west may be overestimated.
It may be pure coincidence that the meeting coincides with the 20th anniversary of the Iraq invasion. Yet it also highlights how extensively Russian and Chinese strategies have intertwined over the past two decades.
Today, increasingly, “orientation comes from Orient.” Cooperative geostrategic leadership and sound alternative propositions to resolve global conflicts are being shaped in Beijing and Moscow – because the old centers of power can offer nothing new.
Twenty years after the US invasion of Iraq, a failed ‘war on terror,’ the proliferation of extremism, millions of dead and displaced in West Asia, and never-ending conflict, China and Russia have finally teamed up to systematically advance their view of the world, this time with more resolve and global clout.
As catastrophic as it was, the Iraq war ended the practice of direct US military invasions, ushering in a war-weary era that desperately sought other solutions. That global division of opinion that began in 2003 over Iraq is, 20 years later, being institutionalized by emerging multipolar powers that seek to counter forever wars.
In his doubling down of support for the war in Iraq, David “Axis of Evil” Frum all but exonerates the architects and promoters of the war (which would include himself, being a speechwriter for President Bush until 2002, then a media cheerleader) as such:
To my mind, the most important lessons regard government decision making, offering a warning against groupthink and self-deception. Crucial decision makers started with an assumption that regime change in Iraq would be cheap, easy, and lightly contested. They then isolated themselves from all contrary information—until it was too late.
Frum, like his contemporary Eli Lake, is an interesting case because each has in the last few weeks attempted to both acknowledge the conventional wisdom after 20 years that the war was a failure, while still arguing best intentions and look, “Iraq really is better off without Saddam Hussein.” On the latter, I will let my colleague Connor Echols’ heartbreaking interviews with actual Iraqis answer that. What I’m keen to explore is Frum’s assertion that: “I don’t believe any leaders of the time intended to be dishonest. They were shocked and dazed by 9/11. They deluded themselves.”
It is highly doubtful that Frum vulcan mind-melded with each of the architects, or saw into their souls a la Bush and Vladimir Putin. We know from highly documented accounts that, contra Frum’s simplistic summation, the Bush administration was influenced by a vanguard of well-placed neoconservatives who had set regime change into motion back in the Clinton administration. This was no 9/11 hangover. As Jim Lobe pointed out in these pages in 2021, the 2001 attacks enabled leaders and operators like Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Scooter Libby, Robert Kagan, and Bill Kristol to have the war they wanted long before those planes flew into the Twin Towers.
Frum’s flimsy rationalization conveniently ignores that the mainstream media was totally and willingly co-opted into this “delusion” too, and without it, the invasion and aftermath, which included eight years of occupation and then another two years of military assistance to help the Iraqis roust ISIS (which the U.S. invasion created) wouldn’t have carried on in the manner that it did.
I say that because as the polling showed the American people losing faith in the war by January 2005, the mainstream media backgrounded all of the bad news (like military massacres, civilian deaths, torture, sectarian violence, PTSD) while foregrounding Pentagon talking points that said new counterinsurgency methods and tactical wins meant victory was “right around the corner.” They lied about reconstruction progress, too, as Peter Van Buren points out right here.
An entire ecosystem of information management ensured that the major networks, newspapers and radio, owned by only a handful of conglomerates, were singing the same tune, all of the time.
Frum, Lake, and columnists like Max Boot, who now, conveniently, says he regrets it, were what Spock would call top “lifeforms” in that ecosystem.
We must talk about this because these men and their compradores in the Washington swamp want to dismiss any comparison to how we view Ukraine and how the media is covering U.S. policy in that war. They have not learned any lessons about meddling and the limits of American power writ large, just in failed wars of the past.
Formal scientific institutions took a battering during the pandemic, and deservedly so. From the wildly inaccurate predictions of SAGE modellers to the denial of natural immunity by signatories of the John Snow Memorandum, ‘Science’ (uppercase ‘s’) has not had a good three years.
A particularly striking illustration of this is citation patterns in the scientific literature. If things were working well, the best studies would get cited the most. Unfortunately, that appears not to be the case: citations have flowed disproportionately to studies that uphold The Narrative.
In June, 2020, researchers from Imperial College London (including our old friend Neil Ferguson) published a paper in the prestigious journal Nature titled ‘Estimating the effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 in Europe’.
They concluded – on the basis of a complex model-fitting exercise – that lockdowns had saved the lives of 3.1 million people across 11 European countries. That’s right, 3.1 million lives saved, and during the first three months of the pandemic alone.
Doesn’t sound very plausible, does it? After all, Sweden didn’t lock down, and they saw about as many deaths – or even fewer – than the countries that did lockdown. So how did the researchers get to the figure of 3.1 million lives saved?
As Philippe Lemoine notes, they just assumed that death numbers would have been far greater in the absence of lockdowns, and then took the difference between those numbers and the ones that were actually observed, and concluded the difference was due to lockdowns. Okay, but what about Sweden?
Well, the researchers fit a model in which the effect of different interventions could vary from country to country. And while Sweden didn’t have a lockdown, they did have a ban on public gatherings (of more than 500 people). So in the researchers’ model, Sweden’s ban on public gatherings ended up having the same impact as lockdown in all the other countries.
They were effectively claiming that, in France, Italy, the UK etc., lockdowns succeeded in preventing hundreds of thousands of deaths, but in Sweden, the same effect was achieved by simply banning public gatherings. Like I said, not very plausible. In fact, it’s preposterous.
The paper has beenheavilycriticised. However, that hasn’t stopped it being cited 2779 times! Most researchers don’t get that many citations in their entire career, let alone on a single paper.
Now let’s look at the number of citations accrued by papers finding that lockdowns didn’t have much effect.
Simon Wood’s paper ‘Did COVID-19 infections decline before UK lockdown?’ concluded that “infections were in decline before full UK lockdown”. It has been cited a total of 40 times (across two different versions).
Christian Bjørnskov’s paper ‘Did Lockdown Work? An Economist’s Cross-Country Comparison’ found “no clear association between lockdown policies and mortality development”. It has been cited a total of 57 times.
Eran Bendavid and colleagues’ paper ‘Assessing mandatory stay-at-home and business closure effects on the spread of COVID-19’ did “not find significant benefits on case growth of more restrictive NPIs”. It has been cited a total of 205 times.
Christopher Berry and colleagues’ paper ‘Evaluating the effects of shelter-in-place policies during the COVID-19 pandemic’ did “not find detectable effects of these policies on disease spread or deaths”. It has been cited a total of 68 times.
While none of these papers is perfect, they’re all vastly more rigorous than the Imperial College study published in Nature. Despite this, none of them has garnered even 1/10th as many citations as that study.
Something has gone seriously wrong when a flawed study gets almost three thousand citations, while more rigorous studies only pick up a few dozen. As to what explains this disparity, I can only speculate that most scientists haven’t come to terms with the fact that the ‘experts’ dropped the ball.
Way back in the spring of 2020, the provocative title of an article caught my eye. Upon reading it, I learned that researchers were rushing to create a vaccine before the COVID-19 virus mutated, which would render the vaccine nugatory and destroy all hopes of creating a blockbuster panacea. Curious at the time, such a warning can be viewed today as having been prophetic. (Note: That article, which offered a business slant on the historic vaccine competition, is no longer available through Google—“some results have been removed,” and are seemingly irretrievable—but here’s one with a similar title from April 2020: “Coronavirus mutation could threaten the race to develop vaccine.”)
“Viruses that replicate in the human respiratory mucosa without infecting systemically, including influenza A, SARS-CoV-2, endemic coronaviruses, RSV, and many other “common cold” viruses, cause significant mortality and morbidity and are important public health concerns. Because these viruses generally do not elicit complete and durable protective immunity by themselves, they have not to date been effectively controlled by licensed or experimental vaccines.”
Accustomed as everyone is by now to a relentless barrage of contradictory proclamations and retaliatory responses to them, the claim that mRNA was never fit to purpose for rapidly mutating coronaviruses might be written off by the usual suspects as the ravings of yet another antivaxxer conspiracy theorist. Except that this paper was co-authored by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the most visible and persistent pusher of the newfangled COVID-19 vaccines throughout 2021 and 2022. So what happened?
Against all conventional wisdom on the ethical practice of medicine, Fauci did everything in his power to achieve maximal uptake of an experimental treatment by human beings across all cohorts, without regard to patient health, age, or any other identifying factor beyond their possession of an arm into which to inject a novel product granted Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) after an accelerated review by the Food & Drug Administration (FDA). Not only did Fauci ignore the vast disparities in vulnerability to severe illness and death between healthy infants and frail nonagenarians, but he also conducted himself for two years as though natural immunity through previous infection were somehow irrelevant to the question of whether a patient should roll up his sleeve.
Now, in the light of Fauci’s own published scientific findings, it would appear that he was right, in a sense, about natural immunity all along, albeit in an unexpectedly perverse way. First of all, as we already witnessed in real time, coronaviruses as a class, including SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19), mutate rapidly in order to propagate themselves. This “discovery” served as the basis for the development of “boosters,” which, it was claimed, became necessary when “fully vaccinated” persons continued to become infected with COVID-19. Major outbreak-inducing strains such as Delta and Omicron, which arise through mutation, will always be one step ahead of last year’s vaccines, having survived precisely by evading the antibodies induced by injection into the body of the previous virus generation’s mRNA.
According to Fauci’s own findings, however, there is a second, even more compelling reason for denying that either vaccine or natural immunity to COVID-19 can ever be permanent. The primary difference between diseases such as measles, for which vaccines work, and the seasonal flu or SARS-CoV-2, for which they do not, is that the body’s natural immune response rises only to the level of the severity of the pathogen. Since most people can survive coronaviruses, the minimal response needed to defeat the invader is rather mild, which is why immunity dissipates rapidly over time and people can become reinfected again and again, even if they have recovered from natural infection, and whether or not they have undergone vaccination.
There are of course people who die of the flu or COVID-19, but they nearly always have comorbidities, infirmities or weaknesses, rendering them vulnerable to a pathogen which healthy bodies are capable of defeating. Notwithstanding the massive propaganda campaign for universal vaccination, most healthy young persons would have survived COVID-19, and would not have been hospitalized, with or without vaccination. Given the abundance of statistical evidence, there is simply no sense in which it can be truthfully asserted that healthy young persons with no comorbidities were “saved” by the shots. On the other hand, extremely frail and elderly persons can indeed be killed by the virus, regardless of how many “vaccines” they have taken. When it comes to the mercurial class of coronaviruses—instantiated by not only the common cold and the seasonal flu, but also COVID-19—so-called vaccines will never transcend their pedestrian identity as mere shots, for they are constitutionally incapable of offering longterm protection, not only because these viruses rapidly mutate, but also, and more fundamentally, because the body’s natural response to infection by such transitory viruses is never robust enough to be permanent. Just as having survived the flu one year has nearly no bearing on whether one will contract another case of the flu, from a different variant, in the future, no so-called vaccine solution to COVID-19 can confer longlasting protection.
Take as many boosters as you like, until the end of time, but having done so may or may not prevent you from contracting the latest iteration of the virus—or protect anyone else—since every booster or flu shot is the result of researchers’ “best guess” of what the specific properties of the next generation of viruses will be. It appears, then, that the widely celebrated and aggressively marketed, and in some cases mandated, COVID-19 vaccines, paid for thrice by the recipients of “free” shots, were in fact launched on a wing and a prayer. There was really no hope all along that the shots would or could offer longterm protection, although it was claimed for marketing purposes that they were highly effective and would save millions of lives. That those selling points were in fact lies may explain why they were supplemented all along the way with such eerily self-contradictory slogans as: “The vaccinated need to be protected from the unvaccinated!”
Dr. Fauci’s surprising publication reveals that the abundant optimism exuded by him and others in attempting to maximize vaccine uptake was scientifically unfounded from the beginning. Neither the mRNA technology nor the traditional vaccines (which introduce a small amount of the live or dead pathogen into the body to elicit an immune response) can be effective for rapidly evolving pathogens such as coronaviruses to which the highly efficient human body mounts the weakest possible effective response. But this is hardly news, for we already knew long before 2020 that, despite assiduous efforts spanning decades, no one ever managed to develop a vaccine against the common cold. Likewise, the widely touted flu shots, marketed in very public ad campaigns only slightly less aggressive than those for the COVID-19 treatments, are in fact mediocre at best, as Fauci himself has averred.
If vaccine technology, whether vector- or mRNA-based, is simply a mismatch for the nature of rapidly mutating viruses, and this is a matter of common knowledge, readily accessible to anyone working in virology, then how are we to understand Fauci’s comportment throughout the Coronapocalypse? And why did he and his coauthors boldly reaffirm in January 2023 what many other researchers have been saying for years, including a few brave souls who were silenced when they tried to suggest the same from 2020 to 2022?
Fauci faces something of a “Charybdis or Scylla” dilemma here, for if he was ignorant of basic truths of immunology known by competent and knowledgeable scientists before 2020, then he had no business serving as the nation’s fount of public health wisdom. Double-masked Fauci devotees, in the aftermath of what was empirically indistinguishable from a full-scale psyop spanning more than two years, will no doubt remain reluctant to renounce their allegiance to the person who, they believe, “guided” us through the pandemic. Confronted with the revelations of Fauci et al.’s January 2023 publication, such followers may most charitably conclude that the object of their reverence did genuinely believe in the mRNA vaccines and continues to follow “The Science” where it leads, in this case, to finally acknowledge failure.
That Fauci honestly did not know that the mRNA shots would never work has also been the conclusion of a few of his most vociferous critics, including Alex Berenson, who somewhat ironically was spurned as “The Pandemic’s Wrongest Man” by The Atlantic back in April 2021. (Morally speaking, that title surely belongs to Dr. Anthony Fauci himself, for the sheer brazenness with which he defied all known principles of medical ethics in pushing for universal vaccination across all cohorts.) Berenson was banned from social media under pressure by no less a power than the U.S. government itself when he dared to question the Fauci script at the height of the Coronapocalyptic hysteria. (Berenson’s lawsuit alleging the government’s violation of his First Amendment right to free speech is pending.)
Notwithstanding the superficial appeal (and attendant Schadenfreude) of the “Fauci was ignorant and is now eating crow” hypothesis, the Scylla horn of the interpretive dilemma would seem to cohere far better with the character of a man who remarkably responded to his critics on national television that “You’re really attacking not only Dr. Anthony Fauci, you’re attacking science.” Certainly such a person is not someone whom we would ordinarily regard as endowed with the humility needed to admit either ignorance or error. To my mind (and others, such as Dr. Robert Malone, agree) Fauci’s recent publication is yet another gambit perfectly consistent with his comportment throughout the pandemic. While Fauci’s admission that the mRNA technology is not fit to purpose for coronaviruses may on its face seem surprising, in fact, it is entirely true to form.
Yes, Fauci’s gambit is most plausibly interpreted as the latest chapter in his time-tested “fail forward” playbook: to use the outcome of the COVID-19 shot experiment to rally for yet more funding for the pharmaceutical industry. Like all good bureaucrats, Fauci uses government fiascos as a springboard to increase the reach and budget of his domain. In other words, Fauci, having quite effectively painted the COVID-19 virus as the most evil bogey man of them all, is simply continuing his efforts to impel politicians to dole out even more billions of dollars to the government-boosted industry which he has loyally supported throughout his entire career, as has been ably documented by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. In addition to being consistent with Fauci’s dismissive, smug, and seemingly shameless character, this interpretation coheres well with the general modus operandi of the pharmaceutical industry, which has displayed in recent decades an uncanny capacity to “fail forward” by pivoting and innovating so as to be able to reap massive profits even when their products generate consequences worse than the conditions which they were intended to address.
Note that slippery snake-oil salesmen such as Pfizer’s CEO, Albert Bourla, carefully calibrated their pitches from the beginning so as to protect themselves from future allegations of fraud by equivocating about the “efficacy” of their COVID-19 treatments. When directly questioned in December 2020 about the vaccine’s ability to limit transmission of the virus, Bourla offered casual, off-the-cuff replies such as, “I think that’s something that needs to be examined. We’re not certain about that right now.” His colleague, Ugur Sahin (co-founder and CEO of BioNTech), cagily couched his anticipatory optimism in these terms: “The first interim analysis of our global Phase 3 study provides evidence that a vaccine may effectively prevent COVID-19.” [my emphasis]The rest is history. When it later emerged, to the surprise of everyone whose understanding of the crisis was shaped exclusively by the Pfizer-sponsored mainstream media, that the company never even tested the shots for their ability to prevent transmission, gaslighting fact-checkers rushed to the defense of the executives. Why in the world would anyone ever have believed that the new vaccines would prevent transmission and infection?
The government-subsidized pharma giants succeeded in profiting enormously from the politically amplified crisis by persistently touting the efficacy of their products against a virus which 99+% of people were perfectly capable of surviving on their own. The shot salesmen claimed victory when injected persons did not die, when in reality most of them would have survived even if they had declined the treatment or been injected with an inert placebo instead. But the scheme ultimately worked because marketers (including public health authorities such as Anthony Fauci and Rochelle Walensky) unerringly referred to the shots as “vaccines,” a piece of sleight of hand made possible by the CDC’s own diluted redefinition of the term in 2021 to mean “a preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.” This linguistic legerdemain worked wonders to promote the new shots, when in fact the new definition is so broad and open-ended as to make it possible to label as a vaccine anything that strengthens the immune system, including leafy green vegetables, vitamins C and D, etc.
In retrospect, there can be no doubt that the populace and the politicians crafting policy all assumed that the labeling of the mRNA treatment as vaccines implied that the shots stopped transmission and infection, even while the savviest of the snake-oil salesmen evinced ignorance from the start about the most important question of all: whether these “vaccines” were indeed like all of the other vaccines, capable not just of “stimulating” the immune system, but of producing dependable and durable immunity.
Given the statistics now available, even the more modest claim, continually chanted by pharma marketers and their lackeys in the media, that the mRNA treatment greatly diminished severe illness and hospitalization, may have been false. For the death toll of COVID-19 victims increased rather than decreased in the year after the “vaccine” launch, and the countries with the worst vaccine uptake had some of the best outcomes. On top of the virus deaths, thousands of people were diagnosed with post-vaccine injuries of a variety of sorts, believed by many of them, their families, and at least some of their doctors to have been caused by the shots. Some of the vaccine injured ended up dying long before their time, and excess deaths were also caused by the disastrous political response to the virus, with fatal drug overdoses reaching record levels. Millions of persons missed vital health screenings, having been terrorized into believing that they could not leave their homes (much less enter COVID-19–infested health facilities!) without contracting something akin to the Black Plague. Among those who sought help for their ailments, some were flat-out denied treatment for acute illnesses, either because they were not dying specifically of COVID-19, or because they had refused the experimental treatment.
In coming to terms with what transpired over the past three years, it is helpful to bear in mind pre-2020 history. When the pharmaceutical industry’s newfangled psychotropic medications did not work as advertised, they created and blitz-marketed “add-on” drugs to increase the efficacy of antidepressants now known to have exhibited success in clinical trials on a par with placebos, but with far worse longterm adverse effects, up to and including addiction and suicidal ideation. Similarly, the slick pivot of the industry in response to the opioid catastrophe (caused by itself) was to launch and market drugs which could help people in the throes of narcotics addiction.
The flu shots marketed in collaboration with and subsidized by governments have been demonstrated in clinical trials to succeed on a par with placebos, while post-flu shot deaths are invariably written off as “coincidental.” Nonetheless, the industry capitalizes on the fact that they are starting anew each year—the previous year’s flu shot results being irrelevant to the next year’s projected success. As a result, when heavily lobbied and propagandized authorities impose mandates in some places (such as the State of Massachusetts), this may lead others to follow suit. Crony capitalist windfall profits ensure the ever-augmenting marketing budget of pharma firms, with the result that each subsequent year’s sales will exceed the previous year’s tally.
Given such precedents, no one should be surprised if the failure of the COVID-19 shots to prevent infection and transmission, or even to diminish the number of persons who died from the virus, does indeed end up serving as the pretext for governments to infuse even more money into research and development of new and what are promised once again to be “miraculous” cures to be used in the future. Not long after the launch of the COVID-19 vaccines, auxiliary treatments such as Pfizer’s Paxlovid and Merck’s Lagevrio were developed to treat people who became infected with the virus despite having been “fully” vaccinated. As clear evidence that many people’s capacity for critical thought continues to be compromised by fear, when legislation to rescind the utterly illogical and unscientific COVID-19 vaccine mandate on foreigners entering the United States made it to the floor of the House of Representatives, 201 Democratic congresspersons voted to keep the executive order in place.
The ongoing support of the official government pro-pharma narrative by the president, the press secretary, the defense secretary, and most Democratic members of Congress, even in the face of ample evidence (including post-vaccination positive COVID-19 tests) demonstrating that the shots did not diminish the incidence of infection is best explained by the fact that policymakers prefer not to own up to their mistakes. Ordinarily, individuals base their future actions on what they have learned from past experience. The question arises in the present circumstance: Why is there still a push for vaccine passports when the COVID-19 vaccines do not in fact confer immunity? The assumptions funding the push for universal vaccination continue to be embraced, as though the vaccines worked resplendently, despite an accumulation of scientific evidence to the contrary.
Now that Fauci himself has clearly explained why the mRNA technology will never offer a lasting solution to COVID-19, why would anyone, including Joe Biden and other advocates for the WHO (World Health Organization), still be in favor of implementing a universal health passport system regulating the movement of persons throughout the world? The current crop of shots do not offer longterm protection and do not moderate illness except in the case of persons in a very narrow cohort. Why require anyone to demonstrate that they participated in the experimental mRNA trial more than two years ago in order to be able to enter a country where the circulating variants bear little resemblance to the strain used to determine the formula of the first crop of vaccines?
There is no plausible health pretext available to explain why political leaders around the world would be keen to impose such a restrictive health passport program on free people, preventing them from traveling unless they first demonstrate their willingness to comply with future possible arbitrary orders decreed by public health authorities. That anyone not holding pharma stocks would support at this point the adoption of a health passport is best explained, again, by the politically induced trauma which appears to have psychologically scarred some persons for life. But just as the failure of the lockdowns to “stop the spread!” impelled leaders at every level of government—local, state, and federal—to prolong and intensify the lockdowns, those who pushed vaccine mandates will continue to press for universal vaccination passport requirements under the flatly false assumption that the reason why so many people died of COVID-19 was because of the evil antivaxxers who refused to comply.
What we are witnessing, the strangely intransigent push for vaccine passports, is entirely consistent with the comportment of the very persons who just succeeded in selling billions of shots. They will continue to insist that what we need to do is provide even more government funding to the pharmaceutical industry so that they can develop more and better cures for our ills. As disturbing as this may be, the most plausible explanation for the vigorous attempt to impose a health credential system on the people of the world is to provide the pharmaceutical industry with a limitless supply of not only customers, but also future experimental subjects.
As we have seen, the addition of the COVID-19 shot to the CDC’s immunization schedule for children—whose chances of dying from the virus are minuscule—serves only industry interests, by ensuring an endless crop of healthy young arms into which to inject the latest and greatest snake oils claimed to be panaceas (until it emerges that they are not). Likewise, the implementation of a universal health passport scheme restricting the motion of persons who opt not to undergo medical treatments of which they have no need would not only reap massive profits to the pharmaceutical industry but also represent the dawning of the pharma-techno state, in which citizens are subjects whose bodies are owned by their government.
The upshot here is that all of the pro-mRNA treatment propaganda and the incredibly vicious efforts to denounce and blame the noncompliant as the reason for the lengthy duration of the COVID-19 pandemic were nothing more than marketing ploys. That those who work behind the scenes of this well-oiled marketing machine were willing to destroy people’s relationships, their livelihoods, and in some cases even their very lives, reveals that their true motives were never to save the world from the virus but, instead, to profit from it. This is why we must resist any and all attempts by these same people and their toadies to foist upon us legal requirements to serve as guinea pigs in their future experimental trials, which is precisely what “health passports” would bring.
Laurie Calhoun is the Senior Fellow for The Libertarian Institute. She is the author of We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age, War and Delusion: A Critical Examination, Theodicy: A Metaphilosophical Investigation, You Can Leave, Laminated Souls, and Philosophy Unmasked: A Skeptic’s Critique, in addition to many essays and book chapters. Questioning the COVID Company Line: Critical Thinking in Hysterical Times will be published by the Libertarian Institute in 2023.
No one can say that Seymour Hersh hasn’t earned his spurs as a reporter of U.S. government and military skulduggery. In 1970 he won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting of the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam. In 2003 he accurately disputed the Bush Administration falsehoods about its grounds for invading Iraq. In April of 2004 he reported how U.S. military units in charge of the Abu Ghraib prison were torturing and abusing prisoners. Now, at age 85, “Sy” shows no sign of slowing down.
Nevertheless, the Biden Administration vehemently denied Mr. Hersh’s report. Last week, in response to these denials, Mr. Hersh gave a long interview in which he reaffirmed his claim that the Biden Administration is responsible for destroying Russia’s gas pipeline, which supplied Germany with a vast source of affordable, clean-burning energy.
Shortly after the sabotage, former CIA Director John Brennan told CNN that Russia was “the most likely suspect” for sabotaging the pipeline—as though destroying its immensely valuable, strategic asset somehow yielded a greater advantage to Russia than simply shutting it down.
IF Hersh is correct and his protected source is telling the truth, it must surely be one of the whackiest things a U.S. President has ever done. Like Cortez burning his ships when he landed in Mexico in 1519 in order to impress upon his men that there was no turning back from their adventure to conquer the country—Biden (or whoever is pulling his marionette strings) ordered the sabotage in order to reinforce Germany’s commitment to the U.S. proxy war against Russia.
How do the German people feel about an American presidential administration wrecking their industry, high standard of living, and consigning them to paying 400% more to heat their homes?
As Hersh describes it, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is indistinguishable from Biden’s “lapdog.” Why? What has the U.S. done for Germany since reunification in 1990 that has instilled such a feeling of slavish docility in a German chancellor today?
As recently as 2015, America’s blundering wars in Iraq, Libya, and Syria caused a major refugee crisis in Europe, and it was Germany that bore most of the cost and responsibility. One wonders why the Germans don’t tell the U.S. government to retreat to Washington to deal with its own, innumerable domestic problems of its own making.
The veteran investigative journalist best known for blowing the lid off major US government lies, from Watergate and the My Lai Massacre to the Syrian gas attacks, penned a series of explosive Substack pieces last month revealing direct US complicity in the Nord Stream pipeline attacks.
Seymour Hersh says he has even more details corroborating the Biden administration’s involvement in the Nord Stream sabotage attacks, but cannot share them for fear of outing his sources.
“Biden authorized the blast. And the people involved know what he did. You know what orders came. I know a lot more about this than I want to say. But I have to protect the people who talk to me,” Hersh said in an interview with Austrian media.
“I know what I wrote is true. I know that it is right. I know the meetings I have described and the details of what happened in Norway. I’ve been involved with the intelligence community for 50 years,” the 85-year-old veteran journalist said, addressing the smear campaign being run against him by the legacy media in the wake of his bombshell Nord Stream-related publications.
Commenting on the story put out by The New York Times and German media earlier this month claiming that a “pro-Ukrainian group” without links to any state blew up the pipelines using a rented commercial yacht, Hersh called this version “stupid,” “unbelievable,” and a “crazy story with no sources.”
The veteran investigative journalist, one of the few in the contemporary US media landscape who still believes in the media’s role as the fourth estate, also took aim at the legacy media for ignoring his story in fealty to power. “If 90 percent of editors were fired, we’d be much better off, because they’re so afraid to write anything critical of Biden, thinking they’re going to put a Republican back in the White House,” he said.
Hersh said the attack on Nord Stream was a “signal” to the Western Europeans from Biden – that if they didn’t “want to go all the way” in the conflict with Russia, the US would cut them off. “He did it. And the price for that will be very high in Europe. Europe will not have the gas it needs and you will have to pay more for it,” he said.
Hersh, a sympathizer of the Democratic Party when it comes to social, environmental, and immigration issues, characterized Biden’s foreign policy as a disaster, with Washington’s badmouthing of China and Russia ultimately helping to “weld the two of them together.” As for the crisis in Ukraine, the journalist expects the NATO proxy conflict to fail. “Russia is going to win this war,” he said.
Seymour Hersh published his first piece on the Nord Stream attacks on February 8, detailing how US Navy divers laid the explosives that blew up the pipelines in June 2022 under the cover of NATO’s BALTOPS drills, with a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance aircraft triggering them to explode three months later. Hersh subsequently wrote several follow-up stories with additional information and historical context.
US and German media rolled out their own stories this month, citing intelligence officials, claiming that a “pro-Ukrainian group” without any ties to Kiev blew up the pipelines independently using a rented yacht. Moscow dismissed these stories as “disinformation” designed to divert attention from the real perpetrators, and repeated long-standing calls for thorough and transparent probes into the acts of terror.
Those who control the United States government also control the major media and educational institutions so often create false realities. Anyone who questions obvious lies is demeaned and branded a conspiracy theorist. The best example in modern times occurred in 1996 when a US Navy missile accidentally shot down a huge airliner killing 230 people. The federal government and its lapdog media managed to suppress what happened despite overwhelming physical evidence and hundreds of eyewitnesses.
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“Allegations that a missile hit Flight TWA 800”; Pierre Salinger news conference; March 13, 1997; • France-Allegation…
“Flight TWA 800 Independent Investigation”; C-SPAN; August 27, 1999; • TWA Flight 800 In…
The British government’s favourite pollster has been deployed once again.
Only a few days ago, audaciously declaring Brits should “forget the conspiracy theorists”, YouGov tweeted the results from a new poll about 15-minute-cities. They reported that 62% of all Brits support the schemes. While 23% oppose them and 15% don’t know.
Forget the conspiracy theories, 15 minute neighbourhoods are popular in Britain.
Here's what amenities do Britons want within a 15 min walk from their home
Bus stop: 90% Post box: 87% Pharmacy: 85% GP surgery: 83% Park: 81%
In the survey, they explained how such schemes aim to make everyday amenities like banks, shops, and schools closer to residential areas. The major benefit, proponents argue, is as well as convenience, they will negate the need for driving and thus, reduce carbon emissions.
The only problem is, in reality, 15-minute-cities are vastly more complex urban redevelopment models. Integrated as a part of them is “technology and policy interventions” that create “compact urban cells” – at least according to one of its original proprietors, Kent Larson. Not to mention that they were born from the smart city model, which prioritises “electronic methods and sensors to collect specific data”.
This is where Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) come in. Intending to do exactly what they say on tin, they limit traffic. They seek to do so by limiting residents’ ability to drive in certain areas and at certain times. It is a 15-minute-city precursor designed to purge traffic and free up space.
Now, YouGov contends us desperate conspiracy theorists are over-egging the pudding here. Apparently, conflating 15-minute-cities and LTNs is a mistake. This is despite both sharing a practically identical goal to “improve” accessibility via urban spatial management (or rather dictation).
One could easily argue that without LTNs, 15-minute-cities would not be viable or indeed efficient.
Then, there is the digital surveillance. In order for LTNs to offer “benefit”, there has to be a policing system. London currently possesses seven LTN zones, all of which are monitored via camera. If residents fail to buy the correct permit to drive in a certain area, at a certain time, a camera will capture their license plate and send a fine to the corresponding address. If one ignores that fine, one can be jailed.
According to RAC, almost 7.5 million penalty tickets were issued to drivers breaking LTN rules in London last year. Transport for London (TfL) data further reveals the total number of fines, which cost up to £160, increased by 2.2 million from 2020 — an increase of 41% to 7,472,886.
YouGov failed to notify survey participants of any of this information.
The data they collected amounted to the equivalent of someone asking “hey, do you like the idea of your local shop, bank, or GP surgery being closer to you?” Farcical.
Indeed, YouGov shares a very profitable relationship with the British government. During 2020, the polling firm received a £6,85 million contract to carry out surveys for the Cabinet Office up to January 2023. This equated to a reported 7% of the company’s annual revenue in 2020.
The firm is also directly connected to the government. Nadhim Zahawi, the former jab-passport endorsing vaccine minister, founded YouGov back in 2000 alongside the former owner of Conservative Home, Stephan Shakespeare, an outlet that persistently publishes articles written by various conservative MPs.
It’s well-established as a party-line mouth piece…
These curious conflicts of interest do not stop at the lower levels. British PM Rishi Sunak’s family also runs a company that is actively pushing for further urban digitalisation. The father of Sunak’s wife, Akshata Murthy, is the founder of Infosys, an Indian information technology company that aims to develop the technological infrastructure to implement a global “social credit score” system – a scheme directly tied to the smart city initiative.
So we have a dubious survey, distributed by a polling company riddled with various conflicts of interest, partnered with a government whose head would indirectly benefit if these schemes were adopted…
Politicians fully understand the capability of polling. A 2020 study published in the International Journal of Public Opinion Research that measured the effect of online polls on voting behaviour found advertising majority opinions can sway voting by 7%. In short, voters can be heavily influenced by percieved support for a cause, even if it is unpopular in reality. The same study further found this effect was not confined to general elections but all sorts of political issues.
YouGov knows what it is doing… they just don’t care.
Our recent “Null Hypothesis” article postulates and evidences a succinct summary of the happenings of the last three years: “The hypothesis that will likely stand the test of time goes like this: a nasty — if not particularly unusual — respiratory disease season was turned into a catastrophe by human misadventure, and this catastrophe was compounded by efforts to save face and justify the unjustifiable”.
In answering the question ‘what happened’, we did not attempt to tackle the obvious follow-up question (apart from a brief discussion about social contagion): ‘why did it happen’?
The sceptical community – living up to its decentralised worldview – is not short of opinions and theories, robustly debated. These are too numerous to cover in detail in this short piece: it suffices to say that they cover a wide spectrum ranging from calamitous ineptitude (and innumeracy) of politicians and civil servants, deceitful and underhand sales & marketing by nefarious global corporations, efforts by the elite to enrich themselves by impoverishing the middle classes and the digital enslavement of the masses, through to some more esoteric beliefs covering depopulation agendas, eugenics and long-in-the-planning Satanic plots… the list just goes on and on.
As many of the most ardent supporters of both pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical interventions (PIs and NPIs) begin to wake up to the collateral damage they helped bring about, it is instructive to stand back and observe tried-and-tested Biblical precedent being re-enacted. Few are not enjoying seeing the pantomime villain Matt Hancock being hoist by his own self-promoting petard via the Oakeshott WhatsApp trove. After all, who does not take some satisfaction from the fall of a petty tyrant? But much like the goat that gets bestowed with the sins of the community in Leviticus (“the goat will carry on itself all their iniquities” ) before being cast out into the wilderness (thus avoiding a full and frank ‘lessons learned’ exercise), the demonisation of this preening ’cock (or monkey) does not necessarily get us much further in terms of identifying whodunnit — who was the organ grinder? After all, a self-promoting chancer whose self-confessed epidemiological education is based on a studious viewing of the film ‘Contagion’ is demonstrably not an evil Blofeld mastermind. Indeed, some sceptics have attempted to use the Telegraph’s Lockdown Files to scotch any discussion of conspiracy and underscore their belief that the disastrous events of 2020-2022 were ‘merely’ a cock-up.
But that simplistic take assumes that the former Secretary of State for Health was more than just a bumbling low-grade chaos agent intent on filling his boots via fast-track procurement channels. Loathsome though he might be, Hancock and his cronies are a symptom – not a cause – of the pit we find ourselves in. Why did he – and the Prime Minister at the time, Boris Johnson – get themselves into such a pickle such that they were not able to navigate a more rational – and less damaging – course through the crisis?
The answer is probably to be found somewhere within what one might term the ‘pandemic preparedness industry’ as outlined a few months ago in the Daily Sceptic :
“The response to the COVID-19 pandemic represented the triumph of a pseudo-scientific biosecurity agenda that emerged in 2005 and has been pushed ever since by a well-organised, well-funded and well-embedded network of ideologues. These fanatics promote and perpetuate the ideas underpinning the draconian new approach by publishing them in leading journals, planting them in public policy and law, pushing them in the media and smearing those who dissent, however eminent or well-qualified.
This avenue of investigation is, we believe, more likely to lead to the source of our misadventure than attempting to rationalise ‘scorched earth’ attempts at containment, suppression and eradication of a killer virus. There was only ever a warped logic to these actions, unless – one way or the other (perhaps for the ‘greater good’ or simply for old-fashioned crony capitalist ends) – you wanted to create a favourable backdrop for a new set of medical interventions that might otherwise have met with limited take-up or even downright opposition. CMO Chris Whitty advised government ministers in February 2020 (!) that covid was not deadly enough to justify fast-tracking vaccines. Put another way, earth could not have been scorched in this way if seasonal respiratory disease had not been given a name such that scariants could be ‘deployed’ to ‘frighten the pants off’ the general populace.
Whether the driving force behind these fanatics is saintly goodwill, pure greed, corruption – or even a Luciferian conspiracy for that matter – is beside the point: what is essential to understand is how a nasty seasonal respiratory disease season was weaponised to drive one of the greatest policy failures of all time. There does not necessarily need to be a single cartoon villain masterminding events to avoid multiple parties conspiring (“breathing together”) to create a great evil.
With this backdrop one does not even need to ferret around in the weeds to find out more. Last summer’s detailed POLITICO/WELT Special Report sheds plentiful quanta of light on the matter:
Four [supra-national] health organizations, working closely together, spent almost $10 billion on responding to Covid across the world. But they lacked the scrutiny of governments… While nations were still debating the seriousness of the pandemic, the groups identified potential vaccine makers and targeted investments in the development of tests, treatments and shots.
The four organizations had worked together in the past, and three of them shared a common history. The largest and most powerful was the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the largest philanthropies in the world. Then there was Gavi, the global vaccine organization that Gates helped to found to inoculate people in low-income nations, and the Wellcome Trust, a British research foundation with a multibillion dollar endowment that had worked with the Gates Foundation in previous years. Finally, there was the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, or CEPI, the international vaccine research and development group that Gates and Wellcome both helped to create in 2017.
… The World Health Organisation (WHO) was crucial to the groups’ rise to power. All had longstanding ties to the global health body. The boards of both CEPI and Gavi have a specially designated WHO representative. There is also a revolving door between employment in the groups and work for the WHO: Former WHO employees now work at the Gates Foundation and CEPI; some, such as Chris Wolff, the deputy director of country partnerships at the Gates Foundation, occupy important positions. Much of the groups’ clout with the WHO stems simply from money.
… “They’re funded by their own capabilities and or endowments and trusts. But when they step into multilateral affairs, then who keeps watch over them?” a former senior U.S. official said. “I don’t know the answer to that. That’s quite provocative”.
Consider this small early 2020 cameo featuring senior executives from one of these four organisations:
“When it first became clear that this disease was appearing, Richard [Hatchett] and I sat down and said, we know what happened with the last swine flu pandemic, where wealthy countries bought up all the doses [of Pandemrix] that were … available for the developing world, we have to try to do something different about that…”.
Most normal people draw entirely different conclusions from the swine flu saga, not least the absolutely devastating tale of Pandemrix, a giant swindle involving misuse of taxpayer funds to purchase these doses in the first place, the substantial human damage that they then caused, a subsequent cover-up and then further cost to the taxpayer compensating those affected.
Contrast this with CEPI’s ‘mission’: “Vaccines are one of our most powerful tools in the fight to outsmart epidemics. The development of vaccines can help save lives, protect societies and restabilise economies”.
There you have it: the ‘saviour vaccine’, a sacred cow extolled with messianic zeal. It seems that one of the world’s greatest policy failures happens to neatly coincide with the stated aims of the Fantabulous Four. Food for thought given that there is no example of a vaccine ever defeating a sudden onset viral epidemic, let alone a ‘pandemic’ (there is also the question of whether viral pandemics are in any way even a hypothetical threat to modern societies — unless, of course, one incorrectly pins the blame for iatrogenic collateral damage on said virus).
Following the money, therefore, it is not that much of a surprise what came next: while — as pointed out above — “nations were still debating the seriousness of the pandemic” (i.e. correctly monitoring the possibility of a slightly-more-serious-than-usual respiratory disease season), the Fantabulous Four were busy setting the scene with targeted investments to create fertile ground to fulfil their aims. Consider then:
Who might have benefitted from a social media campaign showing those faked ‘deaths in the street’ in China?
Who might have considered funding a social media ‘bot army’ to promote lockdowns, interventions that as per Neil Ferguson’s ‘seminal’ fear-mongering 16 March 2020 paper could only conceivably make any sort of logical sense if they were followed in short order by a ‘saviour vaccine’, as explicitly stated by Ferguson and co-authors in that paper (“these policies will need to be maintained until large stocks of vaccine are available” )?
Who might have benefitted from squashing an early ‘lab leak’ theory that might have implicated some of the Fantabulous Four and the justification for a fast-track vaccine roll-out?
Conversely, once said roll-out had been successfully funded and procured at eye-watering expense, who might have benefitted from re-floating the ‘lab leak’ theory to help justify future ‘pandemic preparedness’?
Who might benefit from tightly controlling media output and censorship (after all, “true content … might promote vaccine hesitancy”)? Who was writing this script?
WHO might wish to publish — in 2022 — detailed recommendations about how those in authority should respond to a ‘vaccine crisis’ (defined as any occurrence that ‘will most likely or has already eroded public trust in vaccines … and may create uncertainty’)?
Why only the vaccine ‘pillar’ of the WHO’s wish list, the ACT-A (Access to Covid Tools Accelerator), received the funding that was sought? And why did all others on that ACT-A list — most notably cheap therapeutics that might have saved many lives (while of course competing with lucrative vaccines) — remain well short of their funding targets?
This congruency of the categorical trinity — means, motive and opportunity — is difficult to explain away. It is true that much that happened from March 2020 was anarchic, uncontrolled, panicked and unscripted. But there was method to the madness, an ultimate aim to the chaos, namely to make way for a ‘saviour vaccine’ that would only be accepted if the intended recipients had had ‘the pants frightened off them’, i.e. were sufficiently afraid of the alternatives to risk such an unproven medical intervention.
It may conceivably be that many people involved in the Fantabulous Four believe that this collective action was necessary. But collective action – however well meaning – that is dictated by a group and imposed on everyone else is tyranny, pure and simple. It gets worse if authorities are sufficiently captured by this tyranny such that they deploy subversive psychologicalweaponry on their citizens and suppress any dissent.
These are grave misdeeds that led to great harm, both in terms of bad outcomes and collateral damage from unnecessary non-pharmaceutical interventions, but also from the utterly unnecessary coercion used to foist pharmaceutical interventions on those that did not need them.
Even if we presuppose that there are no evil Blofeld-types standing behind all of this, it is beyond doubt that a fanatical ideology has inspired an evil tyranny. As per the Daily Sceptic :
“This ideology is the enemy, and seeing it for what it is is the first step to defeating it”.
There has been a remarkable development to the story previously reported here.
Following that fiasco, I submitted a subject access information request to Elsevier (who publish The Lancet ) asking for all internal correspondence between editors and reviewers relating to the submission (and ultimate rejection) of our letter.
After a lengthy delay I received the response today. First their cover letter:
It is remarkable that most of the details are redacted even though it clearly is not done solely for the legitimate protection of the names of third parties. It is clear that I was being discussed in a negative light as they were referring to me as ‘an ongoing issue’. It is also clear that they only reached out after I publicised their initial delayed rejection letter on twitter (they were getting a lot of heat as a result of that).
It is disturbing to realise how much effort was spent in an attempt to ensure that an obviously flawed study promoting the Pfizer vaccine was not challenged.
Despite most of it being redacted there are still some alarming unredacted highlights (imagine what the redacted stuff says about us!) First they seem to reluctantly concede that I have a legitimate academic appointment:
In the following they mention ‘helpful background on Fenton’. Did they try to dig up dirt on me on their own or did the 77th brigade furnish them with my dossier?
They are worried about the close proximity of vaccine misinformation sources!
Next, they accuse me and (most likely) Martin Neil of retweeting ‘anti-vaxx posts on Twitter’. I’d be interested to know precisely who they are referring to and what posts:
They also refer to ‘holding off further email’ suggesting their offer to consider the letter was not genuine:
I am not happy about the scale of the redactions in the Elsevier response. If the Lancet editors were not making disparaging comments about me and colleagues, then there should be no reason to redact them. What do they have to hide?
The redactions suggest Elsevier have not acted in good faith, and neither have they acted in the spirit of FOIA.
Hence, I have informed Elsevier that if they are unable to provide a proper and full response with most of these comments unredacted, I will have no choice but to report them to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).
This is not the first disgraceful episode in the recent history of the Lancet where, under Richard Horton’s leadership, clearly flawed papers promoting the ‘official narrative’ on covid have been published. Remember LancetGate when they published a fraudulent study that effectively stopped the use of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) to treat covid patients. At least that paper was eventually retracted. In this case, rather than even allow a proper response to a flawed study, they have instead attacked their critics, accusing them of being spreaders of misinformation and ‘anti-vaxxers’.
It is worth noting that (as shown here), The Lancet is by no means the only major academic journal routinely rejecting any articles/letters that in any way question the accuracy of studies claiming vaccine effectiveness or safety. It is now fair to conclude that not a single major peer-reviewed study claiming vaccine effectiveness and/or safety can be trusted to be valid.
The Medicinesand Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), on whom we have to rely for Covid-19 vaccines damage data, are masters of both doublespeak and normalisation, two key means of the global transformation imposed on us over the last three years.
They don’t disappoint with their latest and last of their regular Yellow Card updates published last week. If you have sharp eyes, you will spot in it a neutral-sounding subheading, ‘Update on publication status’. What it tells us is that since the Commission on Human Medicine (yet another quango who, would you believe, advise ‘ministers on the safety, efficacy and quality of medicinal products’ and whose many members you can find here) has advised that ‘given the end of the autumn 2022 booster campaign and the stable safety profile of the Covid-19 vaccines, the MHRA should transition to routine data publication and communication of safety concerns for Covid-19 vaccines. This report is therefore the last regular publication of the Summary of Yellow Card reporting for Covid-19 vaccines‘ (my emphasis). The ‘new interactive‘ will continue with monthly updates, but this is now in line with regular monitoring (whatever that entails) and many other drugs viewed as having an acceptable safety profile. In view of the new spring booster just launched for vulnerable people, who are receiving perhaps their 6th dose of a novel mRNA injection, and the seemingly tolerated (by the the MHRA) level of associated adverse events and deaths for the CVax then this still and wrongly gives the impression that there is ‘no cause for concern’.
How very convenient for all involved, since these embarrassing and counter-narrative Yellow Card reports of adverse events continue to mount. In the last four weeks reported there were another 776 reports, of which 75 per cent are deemed serious by the MHRA itself, and 23 more reports with ‘fatal outcomes’. That means death in plain English.
Exactly how is the phrase ‘given the stable safety profile of the Covid-19 vaccines’ to be interpreted other than doublespeak or a plain lie? How can it be seen except as a slap in the face for the nearly half-million vaccine-injured (75 per cent of whom are seriously injured and who may be only 10 per cent of the total) and a perverse denial of the published data? What a callous way of normalising death and injury.
For what we know is that despite the many, many more adverse events and deaths associated with the Covid vaccines than with the previously rushed-out swine flu vaccines, none of the Covid-19 vaccines has been similarly formally withdrawn. Nothing, but nothing, has been learnt from President Ford’s warp-speed attempt to vaccinate the entire US population in 1976. The Ford administration agreed to indemnify Big Pharma and, like Boris Johnson, Ford politicised the vaccine and was photographed being vaccinated. Although the predicted ‘pandemic’ never materialised, the vaccine side effects did – dozens of cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare problem where the body’s immune system attacks the nerves, potentially leading to paralysis and death. Hundreds of compensation claims followed for years after.
The story was repeated in the UK in 2009 when Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London hyped a swine flu outbreak here. Based on Ferguson’s advice, the government said a ‘reasonable worst-case scenario’ was 65,000 deaths in the UK and ordered 90million doses of the swine flu vaccine from GlaxoSmithKline – more than enough to vaccinate the entire population, and more per head than any other country in Europe. The order was part-cancelled it when it was recognised that it was not a pandemic after all. (The Guardian reported: ‘GSK will not suffer from the cancellation – the deal involves a commitment by the Department of Health to buy some of its other products instead.’) Furthermore it was later acknowledged that one in every 55,000 unnecessary jabs had caused narcolepsy, many of the sufferers being children. Years later vaccine injury claims against the DoH are still being fought, with no compensation paid out.
But no lessons were learnt, and today the Big Pharma lobby is hugely more powerful with its tentacles reaching into academe, public health and government quangos and agencies, most often under the guise of philanthropy and independent scientific research.
So let’s see what this ‘last regular publication’ reports.
The notable points for me are:
· an inexorable rise of injuries and deaths now standing at 478,329 people impacted and 2,459 deaths.
· 6,697 children of whom 71 per cent are seriously impacted and more than ten dead
· 39,801 20 – 29yr olds, 73 per cent of whom are seriously impacted
Why aren’t people more angry about this? What are we doing sacrificing children on the altar of an experimental vaccine for which they had no need?
In the next week we will be publishing our own report on the devastating consequences of the vaccine for reproductive health.
MHRA Yellow Card reporting summary up to February 22, 2023
(Data published March 8, 2023) New interactive format
Adult & Child – Primary, Third Dose & Boosters (mono/bivalent)
· 3rd doses – people having one or more booster – 40,622,659 (up to February 20)
All boosters = 67.26million doses
· Pfizer – 33.1m (monovalent) & 11.5m (bivalent)
· AstraZeneca – 60,900
· Moderna – 13.3m (monovalent) & 9.3m (bivalent)
· Novavax – 1,200
Additional all-brand doses given in last 4 weeks – 3,230 (Pfizer-mono) + 127,312 (Pfizer-bivalent) + zero (AZ) + 176 (Moderna-mono) + 4,335 (Moderna-bivalent) + 200 (Novavax) = 135,253
TOTAL DOSES administered (approx.) = 171.8million doses including all booster programmes
Overall 1 in 112 people injected experience a Yellow Card Adverse Event, 1 in 151 reports are classified as SERIOUS*, 1 in 195 reports are fatal, which may be less than 10 per cent of actual figures according to MHRA.
Fatal – 867 (Pfizer-mono) + 30 (Pfizer-bivalent) + 1,364 (AZ) + 88 (Moderna-mono) + 42 (Moderna-bivalent) + 68 (Unknown) = 2,459 (0.5 per cent of reports) (increase of 23 reports with fatal outcome in 4 weeks)
Over 386 of the above fatalities are of ‘Unknown Age’ = 16 per cent of all fatalities
CHILDREN & YOUNG PEOPLE SPECIAL REPORT Last available data setfor Under 18s in Nov 2022
· 4,213,500 children (1st doses) – majority Pfizer
· 2,910,500 (2nd doses) – majority Pfizer
· 485,900 boosters
Yellow Card Adverse Events Reported – Below combined 0-19yrs – many categories retracted (^) ‘due to less than 5 reports in line with MHRA duty of confidentiality to patients and reporters’
0-19yr old reports classified as SERIOUS* by MHRA = 71.3 per cent
4,650 (Pfizer-mono) + 34 (Pfizer-bivalent) + 1,457 (AZ) + 517 (Moderna-mono) + >7 (Moderna-bivalent) + >32 (Unknown) = 6,697
0-19yr old reports classified as FATAL by MHRA
>10 (Pfizer-mono) + zero (Pfizer-bivalent) + <5 (AZ) + <5 (Moderna-mono) + <5 (Moderna-bivalent) + <5 (Unknown brand) = greater than 10
20-29yr old reports classified as SERIOUS* by MHRA = 73.2 per cent
19,965 (Pfizer-mono) + 103 (Pfizer-bivalent) + 14,542 (AZ) + 4,973 (Moderna-mono) + 127 (Moderna-bivalent) + < 5 (Novavax) + 91 (Unknown) = 39,801
20-29yr old reports classified as FATAL by MHRA
15 (Pfizer-mono) + <5 (Pfizer-bivalent) + 28 (AZ) + zero (Moderna-mono) + zero (Moderna-bivalent) + zero (Novavax) + zero (Unknown brand) = greater than43
* MHRA definition of ‘serious’ – patient died, life threatening, hospitalisation, congenital abnormality, persistent or significant disability or capacity, deemed medically significant by MHRA medical dictionary or reporter
The US Democratic Party has embraced a transgender agenda that amounts to “the normalization of sadism,” author A.J. Rice has said, warning that radical trans policies would return if the party is allowed to regain power.
Speaking to RT’s America First host Scotty Nell Hughes about his new book, ‘The Curse of the Bearded Lady: How the Trans Mafia Whacked American Sanity’, Rice argued that activists have gained significant influence in schools, medicine, and corporate America while people who questioned the agenda have faced pressure to stay silent.
The author described the “trans mafia” as the sprawling network of people and institutions that have helped the movement gain influence. He singled out parts of academia, wealthy backers, and corporations, and stated that providers of transition-related treatment also have a financial incentive to keep young people in their care indefinitely.
Rice argued that the consequences of these policies ultimately fall on children who are being drawn toward gender-affirming medical treatments and on girls who are expected to share locker rooms or compete in sports with biological males.
He noted that while voters rejected the Democrats’ approach to gender in 2024, the party, which has been “captured by madness,” has since only doubled down and is seeking what is effectively “the normalization of sadism.” … Full report
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