Covid-19 Was a Trial Run for Future Government Controls
If there is one thing that people should have learned from the pandemic, it is that the more control government takes over our day-to-day lives, the less we have of everything that makes life worth living.
The list of questions about our dystopian Covid-19 response will be analyzed and investigated for years to come. It’s essential we continue the work of uncovering the lies and manipulation we’ve all experienced, and bring those responsible to account. Some things may never be adequately uncovered or explained, but we can’t get caught up in the many aspects of the pandemic response at the expense of the bigger picture.
The following examines two key realizations about the pandemic on which we need to focus, regardless of what else we discover and what actions are taken:
- The Covid-19 pandemic response was not based on sound medicine or science, and was not commensurate with the actual threat of the illness. Even if Covid-19 had proved to be as lethal as it’s falsely claimed to be, violating human rights and depriving individuals of personal autonomy are never the appropriate response to a pandemic. We must never let this happen again.
- The Covid-19 pandemic revealed movements, led by globalists and wealthy technocrats, but also supported by many of our government and public leaders, to grasp power in ways that have the potential to destroy the foundations of Western civilization. There is a push toward global governance, in which all citizens are tracked and controlled in every aspect of their lives through digital identification, under the guise of preserving and distributing Earth’s resources in a more “equitable” manner.
Some kind, or naïve, souls will still try to say that our Covid response was a result of the government and public health authorities trying to do the best they could, to handle a brand new virus that no one could predict. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Here are 10 facts we knew about Covid-19 in March 2020, which should have informed our pandemic response, but did not:
- Data from China and Spain informed us that Covid-19 was a disease that mostly impacted the elderly and those with chronic health problems. An early study from China confirmed that children could contract Covid, but with less severe symptoms than adults. From the petri dish Diamond Princess Cruise Ship, we knew that the virus spread rapidly in close quarters, but that most people who tested positive were either asymptomatic, or not seriously ill.
- We knew that SARS-CoV-2 was similar in structure and pathogenicity to the SARS virus of 2002, was likely spread through airborne transmission, and was made up of 29 proteins, of which spike protein was one. We knew that similarities in human and viral proteins could lead to vaccine-induced autoimmunity (when the body attacks itself), and that this had occurred when using spike protein in-vivo to elicit immune response in rodents during the first SARS outbreak. We knew that the spike protein has similarities to human DNA, and that instructing the body to make spike protein could possibly cause autoimmune illnesses or pathogenic priming, which is when the body overreacts to the virus, leading to systemic inflammation. Only one immunogenic (producing an immune response) epitope in SARS-CoV-2 had no homology to human proteins. For this reason it was recommended that the spike protein not be the basis of any vaccine developed to treat SARS-CoV-2.
- We still remembered what every medical student was taught: the purpose of a surgical face mask is to prevent dropping saliva or other contaminants into your patient while conducting surgery. (And in fact, studies that had been conducted on the benefit of masking in surgery found no difference in infection outcome, whether the surgery group was masked or not.)
- We knew that face masks were not effective at preventing the spread of respiratory diseases. In analyzing the Spanish flu of 1918, doctors and scientists had concluded that, “Masks have not been proved efficient enough to warrant compulsory application for the checking of epidemics.” This was also the conclusion of a meta-analysis of studies from different countries and settings that was published by the CDC in May of 2020. A study of 6,000 people, early in the Covid-19 pandemic in Denmark, found a less than one tenth of one percent difference in contracting Covid between those who wore masks while going about daily activities, and those who were unmasked.
- We were aware of six coronaviruses that infect humans, including four that regularly circulate and cause the common cold, and knew the basic pattern and treatment of the symptoms of coronavirus infections. We knew that coronaviruses mutate rapidly, and that all attempts to develop a vaccine for them in the past had failed, partly for that reason. In March 2020 we already knew that.
- We knew the mantra “early treatment saves lives.” No one considered it good medical practice to send an ill person home to tough it out, without any treatment other than to go to the ER if breathing was so labored your lips were turning blue.
- We knew that chloroquine, an antimalarial medication, was shown in vitro to be effective against SARS in the outbreak of 2002. We knew that hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), a slightly altered version of chloroquine, had been in routine use for decades, with so few side effects it was considered safe for pregnant women and children. Other antivirals, including ivermectin, were also being tested by doctors and found to be effective in treating Covid-19. (see Peter McCullough; Pierre Kory – Dept of Homeland Security; Pierre Kory U.S. Senate; Zev Zelenko)
- Pandemic planning scenarios prior to March 2020 had unequivocally determined that lockdowns of the general population were not a proper pandemic response because of the extreme damage they would cause the poor, the vulnerable, and the overall structure of society.
- We knew that influenza and other respiratory viruses are seasonal, hence the term “flu season,” and that some years are worse than others. For example in the severe 2017-2018 flu season, hospital resources were strained enough that they put patients in hallways, and even erected outdoor tents to make space for more patients, without creating fear and panic in the general population.
- It was accepted that hypothesis and experimentation, and the discussion and challenge of different ideas and methods are what lead to advances in science and medicine. If anyone had said in March 2020, “I represent science… Attacks on me are quite frankly attacks on science,” as Dr. Anthony Fauci did in November 2021 (see here and here), they would have been fodder for Saturday Night Live, not the object of sycophantic consideration on every mainstream media platform.
In looking back, March 11, 2020, when the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic, will be remembered as the day we threw our knowledge of science, medicine, good governance, and healthy society right out the window of a speeding train that was carrying democracies toward medical tyranny.
We slapped face masks on toddlers and children. We closed businesses, public schools, universities, and churches. We put little circles on the floor six feet apart, and directional arrows in the grocery store aisles, maintaining that 6-feet of distance that former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb said was an arbitrary number without scientific or medical basis. We shut down movie theatres, concert halls, and Broadway. We canceled trips, family gatherings, funerals, weddings, holiday celebrations, commencement exercises, and sporting and community events.
All this panic for a disease with an infection fatality rate similar to the flu (even lower than the flu, for children) as was established early on by John Ioannidis of Stanford University.
But no one seemed to want to draw on prior knowledge and maintain calm and perspective. Instead, the “dangerous nature” of this new Covid-19 disease was constantly outlined for us by our public health and government leaders. Mainstream media outlets reported case counts and death counts in serious tones of dismay every day, without any context or comparison to standard death rates and the impact of respiratory diseases in years past. Emotional abuse of the public was rampant, with the authorities blaming the natural rise and fall of Covid cases on people not properly complying with the pandemic mandates. Even as the public was driven to a panic, government leaders hypocritically violated the masking and lockdown rules that they imposed on everyone else.
Illogical fear, driven by a hyperactive media, and by cowardly and controlling government leaders and public health authorities ruled the day. One of the most insidious results of our descent into ignorance about medicine, and our discarding of social contracts and human rights, was the rise of self-righteous intolerance for, and censorship of, anyone who questioned what was happening.
The Covid-19 response revealed that there is a movement, being pushed by wealthy ideologues, to control people through medical mandates and digital identification. In January 2019, Bill Gates boasted a 20-to-1 return on vaccine investments in an interview at a World Economic Forum Davos meeting, having turned $10 billion into $200 billion over a 10-year period. Gates, who labeled the 2010’s the “decade of vaccines,” can’t get enough of pandemic simulation games in which every aspect of a future calamity is addressed.
In March 2020, while the rest of us were coming to terms with the idea that there was a pandemic, Gates was already talking about the need for a Covid mRNA vaccine (a product in which Gates had conveniently invested $20 million in 2016). Gates also happily opined that everyone would need digital proof of immunity in order to open the world back up and allow travel between nations. In March 2020, Gates, who had predicted a pandemic in a 2015 TED talk where he said “we’re not ready,” was talking enthusiastically about being better prepared for the next epidemic (having already invested heavily in vaccines, testing, and surveillance).
The requirement to show proof of Covid vaccination in order to participate in public life was brutally adopted in places such as New York City, Austria, and New Zealand, and in varying degrees in many other states and countries. The so-called “vaccine passport” was a trial run for a digital ID for every human being on the planet. Digital ID was already in process in Canada when the peaceful Freedom Convoy protestors, and their supporters, had their bank accounts digitally frozen and their truck licenses and ability to do business in certain provinces revoked. The complete control of citizens through digital ID is already in place in China where protestors recently saw their green Covid pass turn to red overnight, causing them to lose access to public transport and essential services, and removing the right to travel.
Digital identification for the whole world was a topic at the World Economic Forum Davos conference this year. “Our future is digital. If you’re not part of it, you’re out of it,” said a UN representative to the WEF Conference, as the group discussed “digital inclusion.” The UN’s International Telecommunication Union focused on the “world’s digital transformation” at their summit in Bucharest, Romania in September 2022.
The digital ID is touted as a convenient and uniform way for assuring medical “safety” for ourselves and others, but Brett Solomon, an expert on human rights in the digital age, states,”[D]igital ID, writ large, poses one of the gravest risks to human rights of any technology that we have encountered.” Journalist and author Naomi Wolf, who has for years studied the factors that destroy democracies, is adamant that vaccine passports are a foot in the door that leads to fascism. Wolf states, “Vaccine passports sound like a fine thing if you don’t know what those platforms can do. I’m CEO of a tech company; I understand what this platform does… It’s not about the vaccine, it’s not about the virus, it’s about data. And once this rolls out you don’t have a choice about being part of the system. What people have to understand is that any other functionality can be loaded onto that [digital] platform with no problem at all.”
Control of people through digital ID is the goal of the UN, of Bill Gates, the WEF, the WHO, and many government leaders worldwide. Covid-19 was just a vehicle for trying out what they could get away with. Now it’s climate change. In a Project Veritas undercover interview, CNN Technical Director Charlie Chester acknowledged that people were experiencing Covid fatigue, so “once the public would be open to it,” CNN would be focusing on climate change, “constantly showing videos of decline, and ice, and weather warming up, and, like the effects it’s having on the economy.” Chester stated, “There’s a definitive ending to the pandemic, you know it will taper off to a point that it’s not a problem anymore. The climate thing is gonna take years, so they’ll probably be able to milk that for quite a bit,” because, “Fear sells.”
Now in the name of “preserving the planet,” the same technocrats and billionaires who have orchestrated much of the pandemic response are pushing the green agenda at the expense of food and warmth, freedom, and life itself. While the globalist elites fly around in their private jets telling everyone else how to live and what they need to go without, government lackeys sucked into the globalists’ agenda are closing down farms and limiting the use of fertilizers and fuels, creating food insecurity and misery.
The globalists, oh so concerned about our planet, are coming up with lovely plans for innovations such as The Line, a glass-enclosed 105-mile long building that will house 9 million residents, rectifying the problem of “dysfunctional and polluted cities that ignore nature.” (Walk it in 20 minutes! No need for a car! Everything you need in one spot!) They’ve also designed the 15-minute-city, another “innovation” designed to corral and control the peoples of the world. (Check out the movie In Time if you want a feel for the concept of the 15-minute-city.)
Whether foisting Covid restrictions on humanity, or overturning our lives for the green agenda, the end goal is the same. Klaus Schwab’s right-hand man, Yuval Noah Harari, said at the ironically named Athens Democracy Forum in September 2020 that, “Covid is critical because this is what convinces people, to accept, to legitimize total biometric surveillance.” Harari said, “We want to stop this epidemic? We need not just to monitor people; we need to monitor what is happening under their skin… And Covid is important because Covid legitimizes some of the crucial steps [toward biometric surveillance] even in democratic countries.”
The marriage of Big Pharma and government in the pursuit of the Covid-19 vaccines was one of the most dangerous of all developments during the pandemic. A vaccine development process that normally takes 5-10 years was shortened to 9 months. As explained by Dr. Tess Lawrie of The World Council for Health, the randomized control trials shortened Phase I, merged Phase II and III together, and then the control group was given the vaccine, meaning there is no control group to follow long-term. A Pfizer spokesperson acknowledged that they did not test the vaccines for preventing transmission, yet multiple health and government officials continuously claimed they were 95% effective. No pregnant women were included in the trials, but our health officials recommended that pregnant women take the Covid shot.
The vaccines were proclaimed “safe and effective” ad nauseam, and the vaccination of millions began. The CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) accumulated thousands of reports of injuries and deaths associated with the Covid shots – more for the Covid shots than for all other vaccines combined in the previous 30 years – but the mantra of “safe and effective” was just proclaimed louder. On December 13, 2022 a documentary about people who have been injured by the Covid shots was released. Within 24 hours, YouTube took it down, labeling it “medical misinformation” because, “YouTube doesn’t allow claims about Covid-19 vaccinations that contradict expert consensus from local health authorities or the World Health Organization.” I guess if you’re injured by the Covid shots you have to call the WHO to confirm it happened? You can view the documentary here: “Anecdotals.”
The Covid-19 bivalent booster was tested on eight mice, and zero humans, but the FDA and CDC deemed these shots safe for everyone age 6 months and up as well. When the FDA gave full approval for Pfizer’s Comirnaty on August 23, 2021, two main points were made: Comirnaty and the Pfizer/BioNTech emergency authorized vaccine are the same formula, and can be used interchangeably, but are “legally distinct.” As in, you can’t sue a drug company for vaccine harms resulting from an EUA-only vaccine, but you can sue if you’re injured by a vaccine that has full FDA approval. Interestingly, Pfizer has not distributed Comirnaty to be used by the public, and has stated that it won’t. To date, all the available Pfizer and Moderna vaccines and boosters for Covid are only authorized for emergency use.
Every person who has received a Covid shot is participating in the largest long-term clinical trial in the history of the world. We will not know the full impact for years, but what we’ve seen so far is alarming and heartbreaking. How long will people ignore the evidence all around them of vaccine injury?
From dozens of performers dropping on the stage, or cancelling shows “due to illness” or the sudden death of a band mate, to people developing sudden chronic illnesses and cancers, to menstrual problems and an increase in miscarriages and stillborn babies, to athletes dropping dead on the field and young people dying in their sleep, to children having heart attacks, journalists keeling over mid broadcast, to the emergence of Sudden Adult Death Syndrome, the evidence is all around us. What we’re seeing is not normal, and the attempt of authorities to explain it all away as being caused by “stress,” or “dehydration,” or “just one of those unfortunate medical events,” is not going to be able to cover the vaccine damage forever.
The world was played during the pandemic. The pharmaceutical industry saw the rise of multiple new billionaires; government leaders flexed their emergency-powers muscles; the mainstream media promulgated lies; and people took their government-funded hush money and did what they were told.
Meanwhile fundamental human rights were taken from us, and dangerous precedents were set. Every freedom-loving person needs to step up, become informed, and be ready to speak out and push back, because the people who gained power and money during the pandemic want to keep the gravy train rolling.
A repeat of the medical tyranny we were subjected to during the pandemic, and the fulfillment of a vision of a “digital transformation of the world,” will only happen if we comply.
December 18, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, WEF |
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Samizdat – 17.12.2022
The White House announced “blockbuster” jobs growth in the second quarter earlier this year, allegedly reaching the highest levels in the last 40 years with the US economy adding 390,000 jobs in May alone. However, new data suggests that the figures were a spoof as the job market really stagnated.
The “record-high” Q2 employment surge reported by the Biden admin was overestimated by a million, according to the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank. This means that the actual job growth was “essentially flat”, reaching an astonishingly modest 10,500.
The research indicated that employment changes from March through June 2022 were “significantly different” in 33 states and DC compared with Current Employment Statistics (CES) estimates by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
“In the aggregate, 10,500 net new jobs were added during the period rather than the 1,121,500 jobs estimated by the sum of the states; the US CES estimated net growth of 1,047,000 jobs for the period,” the Fed said.
Among other problems, the release noted actual payroll jobs decline in Delaware and New Jersey, while earlier CES estimates suggested there was a firm upward trend. According to the new data, Delaware lost 4.1% of jobs in Q2 despite a previously reported 4.5% growth, while jobs in NJ fell 1.2% and not the allegedly 3.4% growth.
In the meantime, jobs in the Keystone state ran a flat line – new data on Pennsylvania shows zero growth (while CES previously reported a 2.9% boost).
The report has already prompted reactions of outrage: Florida Senator Rick Scott accused the Biden administration of lying and requested an immediate meeting with the Bureau of Labor Statistics chief to get to the truth.
December 17, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Economics | Bureau of Labor Statistics, United States |
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Early during lockdowns in 2020, when the whole of the media marched in lockstep with the most appalling reach of public policy in our lifetimes, two doctors from Bakersfield, California went out on a limb and objected.
Their names: Dan Erikson and Artin Massihi from Accelerated Urgent Care. They held a press conference in which they claimed that lockdowns would only delay but not finally control the virus. Moreover, they predicted, at the end of this, we would also be sicker than ever because of our lack of exposure to endemic pathogens.
You could say they were brave but why should it require bravery simply to share conventional wisdom that is part of every medical background? Indeed, the idea that reducing exposure to pathogens creates more vulnerability to disease is a point every generation in the last hundred years has learned in school.
How well I can recall the outrage! They were treated like seditious cranks and news media blasted their comments as somehow radically heterodox, even though they said nothing I had not learned in 9th-grade biology class. It was utterly bizarre how quickly lockdowns became an orthodoxy, enforced, as we are now learning, by media and tech platforms working closely with government agencies to warp public perceptions of science.
Among those warpings was an incredible blackout concerning the basics of natural immunity. My goodness, why did this happen? It’s not conspiracy to draw an obvious reason: they wanted to sell a vaccine. And they wanted to push the idea that Covid was universally deadly for everyone so that they could justify their “whole-of-society” approach to lockdowns.
Here we are three years later and the headlines are all over the place.
And so on.
Isn’t it time to give these doctors some credit and perhaps regret their vicious treatment at the hands of the press?
Video link
Meanwhile, it’s time we get clear on some basics. There is no one better to lay it out other than the greatest living theoretical epidemiologist, Sunetra Gupta. I think one way to understand her contribution is to see her as the Voltaire or the Adam Smith of infectious disease. The very essence of liberal political economy and liberal theory generally from the Age of Enlightenment to the present is the observation that society manages itself. It does not need a top-down plan and the attempt to centrally plan the economy or culture always produces unintended consequences.
So too for the issue of infectious disease. Dr. Gupta’s observation is that we evolved with pathogens in a delicate dance in which we share the same ecosphere, both suffering and benefiting from our entanglement with them. Disturbing that balance can wreck the immune system and leave us more vulnerable and sicker than ever before.
Writing in the Telegraph, she says “I am used to viewing infectious disease from an ecological perspective. Therefore, it did not come as much of a surprise to me that some non-Covid seasonal respiratory diseases almost immediately started to take a knock on the head during lockdown. Many took this to be an indication that lockdowns were working to stop the spread of disease, forgetting that the impact of lockdowns on already established or ‘endemic’ diseases is completely different to the impact on a new disease in its ‘epidemic’ phase.”
She explains that society-wide pathogenic avoidance creates an “immunity debt,” a gap in the level of protection that you have developed from previous exposure. There is a “threshold of immunity in the population at which rates of new infections start to decline — known as the herd immunity threshold. If we are below this threshold, we are in immunity debt; if we are above it, we are in credit — at least for a while.”
With normal diseases, we experience immunity debt in winter and so the herd immunity threshold rises. That’s when we experience more infection. As Fr. Naugle points out, this reality is reflected in our liturgical calendar during the winter months when the message is to look out for danger, stay healthy, be with friends and family, and intensify your concern for issues of life and death.
However, this period of conventional sicknesses gives rise to an immunity surplus as we move into spring and we can go about our lives with more confidence and a carefree attitude, and hence the symbolism of Easter as the beginning of new life. And yet the months of sun and exercise and party time gradually contribute to building up another immunity debt in the population which will be paid again in the winter months.
Notice that this pattern repeats itself in every year and every generation, all without the help of government public health agencies. However, writes Gupta, “disturbing this order can have a profound impact on an individual’s ability to resist disease. More than anything, it is clear that we are experiencing an entirely predictable perturbation in our finely balanced ecological relationship with the organisms which are capable of causing serious disease.”
Lockdowns changed nothing about these seasonal and natural processes except to make our immunity debt deeper and scarier than ever. To be sure, lockdowns in the end did not stop the pathogen that causes Covid. Instead, they only forced one group to be exposed earlier and more often than other groups, and this allocation of exposure took place entirely based on a politically scripted model.
As we saw, the working classes experienced exposure first and the ruling classes experienced exposure later. The policies entrenched a grim and medieval-style political hierarchy of infection. Rather than encouraging the vulnerable populations to shelter and everyone else to gain immunities through living normal life, lockdown policies pushed the working classes in front of the pathogen as a protection scheme for ruling classes.
And yet now, the results are in. Those who delayed infection for as long as possible, or otherwise tried to game the careful ecological balance with newly invented shots, not only eventually got Covid but made themselves even more vulnerable to diseases that are already endemic in the population.
What Gupta has explained with such erudition was actually the common understanding of previous generations. And nothing about the dangerous innovation of lockdown ideology has changed these natural processes. They only ended up making us sicker than ever. So there is some irony in reading stories of alarm in the high-end media. The right response to such alarm is simply to say: what else did you expect?
The Bakersfield doctors were right all along. So was my mother, her mother, and her mother before her. Together they had far more wisdom about infectious disease than Anthony Fauci and all his cohorts.
Jeffrey A. Tucker, Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, is an economist and author. He has written 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press.
December 14, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Covid-19, Human rights |
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The COVID-19 pandemic brought us a panoply of lies and evidence-light declarations that were less intended to inform Americans than to consolidate power and buy time. Among these were Anthony Fauci’s famous shift from arguing against wearing masks, to recommending wearing one, and, finally, to wearing two.
Fauci also tried to convince us that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was not manipulated in a lab even though his inner circle had emailed him about “unusual features” of the virus that looked “potentially engineered.” And, of course, we had “fifteen days to stop the spread,” an evergreen concept that dragged on for two years. Lest readers fault us for forgetting, there was also the “gain of function” controversy, the focused protection battle, school closures, lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and vaccine misrepresentations.
These topics have received much public attention. The one pandemic topic that hasn’t, and is nonetheless important, is the maligned ivermectin. It’s time to set the record straight.
If you’ve followed the news closely over the last two years, you’ve probably heard a few things about ivermectin. First, that it’s a veterinary medicine intended for horses and cows. Second, that the FDA and other government regulatory agencies recommended against its use for COVID-19. Third, that even the inventor and manufacturer of ivermectin, Merck & Co., came out against it. Fourth, that one of the largest studies showing that ivermectin worked for COVID-19 was retracted for data fraud. And, finally, that the largest and best study of ivermectin, the TOGETHER trial, showed that ivermectin didn’t work.
Let’s consider the evidence.
Ivermectin has a distinguished history, and it may have benefits comparable to those of penicillin. The anti-parasitic’s discovery led to a Nobel Prize and subsequent billions of safe administrations around the world, even among children and pregnant women. “Ivermectin is widely available worldwide, inexpensive, and one of the safest drugs in modern medicine.”
The FDA put out a special warning against using ivermectin for COVID-19. The FDA’s warning, which included language such as, “serious harm,” “hospitalized,” “dangerous,” “very dangerous,” “seizures,” “coma and even death,” and “highly toxic,” might suggest that the FDA was warning against pills laced with poison, not a drug the FDA had already approved as safe. Why did it become dangerous when used for COVID-19? The FDA didn’t say.
Because of the FDA’s rules, if it were to make any statement on ivermectin, it was obliged to attack it. The FDA prohibits the promotion of drugs for unapproved uses. Since fighting SARS-CoV-2 was an unapproved use of ivermectin, the FDA couldn’t have advocated use without obvious hypocrisy. Ivermectin’s discoverer, Merck & Co., had multiple reasons to disparage its own drug.
Merck, too, couldn’t have legally “promoted” ivermectin for COVID-19 without a full FDA approval, something that would have taken years and many millions of dollars. Plus, Merck doesn’t make much money from cheap, generic ivermectin but was hoping to find success with its new, expensive drug, Lagevrio (molnupiravir).
A large study of ivermectin for COVID-19 by Elgazzar et al. was withdrawn over charges of plagiarism and faked data. Many media reports seem fixated on this one dubious study, but it was one of many clinical studies. After the withdrawn studies have been removed from consideration, there are 15 trials that suggest that ivermectin doesn’t work for COVID-19 and 78 that do.
The TOGETHER trial received significant positive press. The New York Times quoted two experts who had seen the results. One stated, “There’s really no sign of any benefit [from ivermectin],” while the other said, “At some point it will become a waste of resources to continue studying an unpromising approach.”
While the Elgazzar paper was quickly dismissed, the TOGETHER trial was acclaimed. It shouldn’t have been. Researchers who have analyzed it have found 31 critical problems (impossible data; extreme conflicts of interest; blinding failure), 22 serious problems (results were delayed six months; conflicting data), and 21 major problems (multiple, conflicting randomization protocols) with it.
While the popular narrative is that the TOGETHER trial showed that ivermectin didn’t work for COVID-19, the actual results belie that conclusion: ivermectin was associated with a 12 percent lower risk of death, a 23 percent lower risk of mechanical ventilation, a 17 percent lower risk of hospitalization, and a 10 percent lower risk of extended ER observation or hospitalization. We have calculated that the probability that ivermectin helped the patients in the TOGETHER trial ranged from 26 percent for the median number of days to clinical recovery to 91 percent for preventing hospitalization. The TOGETHER trial’s results should be reported accurately.
Based on the clinical evidence from the 93 trials that ivermectin reduced mortality by an average of 51 percent, and on the estimated infection fatality rate of COVID-19, about 400 infected Americans aged 60-69 would need to be treated with ivermectin to statistically prevent one death in that group. The total cost of the ivermectin to prevent that one death: $40,000. (Based on the GoodRx website, a generic prescription for ivermectin is priced at approximately $40. Roughly 2.5 prescriptions would be needed per person to receive the average dose of 150 mg per patient.)
How much is your life worth? We’re betting it’s worth far more than $40,000.
When the next pandemic strikes, by necessity we’ll rely on older drugs because newer ones require years of development. Ivermectin is a repurposed drug that helps, and could have helped so much more. It deserves recognition, not disparagement. What we really need, however, is a way to inoculate ourselves against the lies and misrepresentations of powerful public figures, organizations, and drug companies. Sadly, there are no such vaccines for that contagion.
David R. Henderson is a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and a professor of economics at the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy, Naval Postgraduate School, in Monterey, California.
Charles L. Hooper is President and co-founder of Objective Insights, Inc. Prior to forming Objective Insights in 1994, Charley worked at Merck & Co., Syntex Labs, and NASA. Charley’s experience is in decision analysis, economics, product pricing, forecasting, and modeling. He is passionate about helping pharmaceutical companies think clearly about their business opportunities.
December 14, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, Ivermectin |
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Missouri’s Attorney General Eric Schmitt who, together with Louisiana’s Attorney General Jeff Landry, filed a lawsuit alleging collusion between the federal government and social media companies to censor certain speech, sent a letter to Twitter asking for the preservation of evidence related to communications between the company and federal government officials on content moderation and misinformation.
We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.
Schmitt, who was elected to the Senate in November, referenced the internal documents, dubbed “Twitter Files,” that are being released by CEO Elon Musk via journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger.
The files showed that then-deputy legal counsel Jim Baker, who was at the FBI before joining Twitter, was involved in the decision to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story.
After the release of the first batch of the Twitter Files, it was revealed that Baker was vetting the documents being released to Taibbi and other journalists. Baker was fired immediately.
On Monday, Schmitt announced: “We sent a letter to Twitter asking the platform to look into whether any key documents were deleted.”
The letter asks Twitter to preserve evidence related to the lawsuit, adding that the platform should take the necessary steps to prevent the destruction of evidence that might have happened at the direction of Baker.
“Further, we asked Twitter to reveal who from the federal government communicated with Twitter to censor speech. Based on our recent depositions, we believe the previous list we received pursuant to a third-party subpoena was incomplete,” Schmitt wrote. “Lastly, we asked Twitter to provide responsive documents pursuant to our original third-party subpoena.”
Related: Elon Musk hints censorship docs may have been hidden or deleted
December 14, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | FBI, Twitter, United States |
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Samizdat – 14.12.2022
Co-founder and former CEO of Twitter Jack Dorsey said on Wednesday that he was the one responsible for the company’s susceptibility to government and corporate influence.
“Social media must be resilient to corporate and government control. Only the original author may remove content they produce. Moderation is best implemented by algorithmic choice. The Twitter when I led it and the Twitter of today do not meet any of these principles. This is my fault alone, as I completely gave up pushing for them when an activist entered our stock in 2020,” he wrote in his personal blog.
Dorsey said he realized that companies have become “far too powerful” once Twitter suspended the account of former US President Donald Trump in January 2021.
His biggest mistake was investing in the development of tools allowing the company “to manage the public conversation,” instead of “building tools for the people using Twitter to easily manage it for themselves,” Dorsey added. This, according to the former CEO, “burdened the company with too much power” and made it susceptible to “outside pressure.”
Twitter’s new owner, US billionaire Elon Musk, has reportedly given access to internal papers to a few independent journalists to investigate politically-motivated censorship in the company before his takeover. Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi presented their findings in threads tweets earlier this month.
Weiss said she found that Twitter allegedly used to have a special team instructed to “build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics.” Taibbi alleged that prior to the 2020 US presidential elections, Twitter deliberately took measures to downplay the scandal around the laptop of US President Joe Biden’s son Hunter. The laptop reportedly had evidence of Hunter Biden’s participation in tax-related crimes, drug use, money laundering and illegal business dealings in foreign countries including Ukraine and China.
December 14, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | Human rights, Twitter, United States |
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British Royal Marines conducted high-risk operations in Ukraine in April, Lieutenant General Robert Magowan wrote in the force’s official journal. Before Magowan’s admission, Russia’s claims that NATO troops were active in Ukraine had been dismissed by Western analysts and media.
Members of 45 Commando Group of the Royal Marines left Ukraine in January after evacuating the British embassy in Kiev to Poland. However, some 300 members of the elite unit were sent back into the country in April to reestablish the British mission in Kiev, before going on to conduct “other discreet operations,” Magowan wrote in the force’s magazine, according to a report by The Times on Tuesday.
These operations took place “in a hugely sensitive environment and with a high level of political and military risk,” Magowan, who formerly served as commandant general of the Royal Marines and is now deputy chief of Defense Staff at the Ministry of Defense, stated.
While Magowan did not elaborate on what kind of missions the commandos carried out, his statement marks the first time that the UK has admitted its troops conducted special operations in Ukraine. The Ministry of Defense refused to confirm earlier accounts of British special forces training Ukrainian troops in Kiev in April.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has described the conflict in Ukraine as one between Russia and the “entire Western military machine,” and claimed in September that there are entire military units in Ukraine “under the de-facto command of Western advisers.”
Putin’s words were rejected by Western media outlets. “There is no evidence of NATO ground forces participating in Ukraine,” Edward Arnold of the Royal United Services Institute think tank told the BBC at the time. “Nor of NATO commanders directing Ukrainian units on the battlefield. There is also a very low likelihood of this happening in the future as Nato seeks to mitigate escalation risks.”
Magowan’s admission proves Arnold incorrect, but the UK is not the only NATO country to acknowledge the presence of its forces in Ukraine. An unnamed Pentagon official told reporters in October that an unspecified number of US troops were inspecting American arms shipments somewhere within Ukraine.
December 13, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism | NATO, UK, Ukraine |
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Samizdat – 13.12.2022
Tuesday marks the 21st anniversary of the decision by then-US President George W. Bush to quit the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, a landmark 1972 agreement which limited the anti-ballistic missile capabilities of the US and the USSR (and later Russia). The move became the canary in the coalmine of trouble in relations between Russia and the US.
“I have concluded the ABM Treaty hinders our government’s ways to protect our people from future terrorist or rogue state missile attack,” President Bush said, speaking to reporters at the White House Rose Garden on December 13, 2001. “Today I have given formal notice to Russia… that the United States of America is withdrawing from this almost thirty year old treaty,” he said. Six months later, on June 13, 2002, the agreement was history.
The ABM Treaty, signed by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and US President Richard Nixon in May 1972, limited Moscow and Washington’s ability to build ballistic missile interceptors, and was designed to slow the expansion of the superpowers’ arsenals of nuclear warheads and delivery systems, and to prevent either country from trying to gain an advantage over the other which would upset the global strategic balance.
What Did Russia Say and Do at the Time?
Vladimir Putin, then just starting his first term as president, told his US counterpart that Moscow was not surprised by the US decision, but considered the move an “erroneous one,” given that the treaty had served as a “cornerstone” of world security and stability.
A month before that, on November 13, 2001, during a state visit to the US, Putin informed his hosts that Russia and the US had “different points of view about the ABM Treaty,” but would “continue dialogue and discussions… to develop a new strategic framework that enables both of us to meet the true threats of the 21st century as partners and friends, not as adversaries.”
Publicly, Washington maintained at the time that terrorists, or so-called “rogue states” like North Korea or Iran (which the Bush administration labeled as members of an ‘Axis of Evil’) might create or obtain missiles to attack America or its allies.
Behind the scenes, Moscow suspected that the US was bluffing, and that the true purpose of new expanded American missile defenses would be to disarm Russia’s nuclear deterrent, which at the time was one of the only remaining factors standing in the way of total US global hegemony and the ‘new world order’ declared by President Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush, in late 1991.
To prove it, Putin and Sergei Lavrov (who became Russia’s Foreign Minister in 2004), concocted a diplomatic maneuver to test Washington’s sincerity. In July 2007, on the sidelines of a G8 summit in Germany, Putin threw Bush a curve ball by proposing the deployment of a joint missile defense system in Azerbaijan. The plan outlined the use of an X-band radar in the post-Soviet republic to guide anti-missile interceptors, and, if approved by the US, would confirm that Washington’s missile shield plans really were aimed at so-called “rogue states,” not Russia.
“This will make it impossible – unnecessary – for us to place our offensive complexes along the borders with Europe,” Putin said, referring to US plans at the time to create a series of radar systems in the Czech Republic, along with missile interceptors in Poland.
The Bush White House politely declined the proposal. “This is a serious issue and we want to make sure that we all understand each other’s positions very clearly,” Bush told Putin.
In April 2008, at a meeting in Sochi – their final one before Putin stepped down as president and became Russia’s prime minister, and less than a year before the end of Bush’s presidency, the leaders failed to come to an agreement on missile defenses. “This is an area we’ve got more work to do to convince the Russian side that the system is not aimed at Russia,” Bush said, speaking to reporters. “I want to be understood correctly. Strategically, no change has taken place in our… attitude to US plans,” Putin responded.
(Re)Birth of Russia’s Hypersonics Program
Still recovering from the catastrophic geopolitical and economic fallout of the collapse of the USSR, and watching closely as NATO expanded into Eastern Europe in several waves between 1999 and 2004, Moscow appeared to have gained the vague impression that behind the US rhetoric of friendship and partnership, Washington had not truly given up on its vision of Russia as an adversary after 1991.
In September 2020, during a meeting with Gerbert Efremov, the former director and chief designer at the legendary NPO Mashinostroyenia rocket design bureau – responsible for the creation of some of Russia’s new hypersonic weapons, Putin revealed that the US withdrawal from the ABM Treaty was the singular moment which prompted Moscow to develop these cutting-edge armaments, which the USSR had tinkered with at the twilight of the Cold War.
“America’s withdrawal from the ABM Treaty in 2002 forced Russia to start developing hypersonic weapons. We had to create these weapons in response to the deployment of the US strategic missile defense system, which would have been able to neutralize and render obsolete our entire nuclear potential,” Putin said. Russia’s hypersonic designs, gave Russia, for the first time in its modern history, “the most modern types of weapons, superior in terms of their force, power, speed and, very importantly, in terms of accuracy, compared to all which existed before them and exist today,” Putin said.
Putin returned to the fateful US decision on the ABM Treaty in remarks in October 2021, saying that Washington’s move opened a Pandora’s box of a new global arms race, and demonstrated that America was not looking to defend itself, but trying to “receive strategic superiority, effectively eliminating the nuclear potential of a potential rival.”
“What should we have done in response? I have spoken on this subject many times,” Putin said. “We could have either created a similar system, which would cost immense amounts of money, and it would be unclear in the end if it would work effectively or not. Or we could have created a different system which would definitely overcome missile defenses. I said that we would do this. The response from our American partners was that ‘our missile defenses are not directed against you, do whatever you want, we will proceed from the fact that your projects are not against us.’ We built our systems. What claims do they have against us now? Now they don’t like them,” Putin said.
Russia unveiled a series of new strategic weapons systems in 2018, with the arms, including the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle, the Kinzhal aero-ballistic air-to-surface missile, the Sarmat ICBM, and the Poseidon nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed autonomous torpedo, designed to assure that even if Washington did successfully build a missile shield, Russia would still be able to retaliate to hypothetical US aggression.
What Other Treaties With Russia Has the US Unilaterally Ripped Up?
The ABM Treaty wasn’t the only security agreement with Moscow that Washington had unilaterally quit in recent years. In 2018, the United States pulled out of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty – an agreement banning the deployment of ground-based strategic missile in the 500-5,500 km range. In 2020, the US left the 1992 Treaty on Open Skies – which allowed 35 partner nations to perform military reconnaissance overflights over one another’s territory using specialized aircraft. Moscow was forced to follow suit in 2021.
What’s Left?
In January 2021, the incoming Biden administration agreed to renew the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), an arms control treaty which obliges the two countries to reduce their nuclear arsenals to between 1,700 and 2,200 operationally deployed warheads. The Trump administration intended to let the clock run out on the agreement, demanding that China’s modest nuclear arsenal be added to any strategic treaties. The Biden administration agreed to extend it to February 2026.
With the collapse of the ABM Treaty, the INF Treaty and the Treaty on Open Skies, New START is now the last major security treaty between Russia and the United States. But there are two other international agreements, the Outer Space Treaty and the Chemical Weapons Convention, to which both Moscow and Washington are parties, whose future has also been threatened by US behavior.
The resolution was merely a political declaration, and no means exist to enforce it. However, in 2008, Russia and China recommended a binding agreement – the Proposed Prevention of an Arms Race in Space (PAROS) Treaty – outlining specific measures to ban the deployment of space-based weaponry, anti-satellite spacecraft and other technologies which could be used for military purposes, in orbit. Successive US administrations have spurned the proposed treaty, and in 2019, the Trump administration formalized the creation of a new branch of the US military called ‘Space Force’, signaling that Washington will has no plans to rein in its space-based military activities.
Space Force, and other US efforts to militarize space (such as the deployment of large networks of dual-use commercial communications and surveillance satellites), may be a violation of the Outer Space Treaty, a 1967 agreement signed by 112 countries, including the United States, which prohibits the deployment of weapons of mass destruction in space, restricts the use of the Moon and other celestial bodies to peaceful purposes, and forbids military bases, weapons testing and military exercises in space.
US scholars of international law have outlined a series of arguments on how the US may be in violation of the Outer Space Treaty, ranging from former President Trump’s statements about the need to assert US “dominance” in space, to Washington’s designation of space as a new “war-fighting domain.”
“These assertions violate major Outer Space Treaty principles, including the prohibition of establishing sovereignty in space and using space only for peaceful purposes. The creation of the US Space Force can also be seen as a ‘threat of force’ based on its history of aggressive and dominant remarks,” explained Rachel Harp, an associate member of the University of Cincinnati Law Review.
Finally, there is the Chemical Weapons Convention, another arms control treaty to which both the United States and Russia are parties, but where question marks remain regarding Washington’s commitment to the agreement. While Russia completed the destruction of the last of its Soviet-era chemical weapons in September 2017, under the watchful eye of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the United States has consistently revised deadlines to destroy its own chemical arms stockpiles.
Washington originally promised to eliminate the last of its deadly chemical agents by 2012, but now promises to do so by late 2023. With nearly 650 tons of chemical agents and munitions remaining in its arsenal, the United States now has the largest declared chemical weapons stockpile in the world.
December 13, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | ABM Treaty, Chemical Weapons Convention, INF treaty, New START, Outer Space Treaty, Russia, Treaty on Open Skies, United States |
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On Friday, Elon Musk confirmed that under previous leadership, political candidates were blacklisted on Twitter. In 2018, Twitter executives testified that the platform did not “shadow ban” people.
On Wednesday, journalist Bari Weiss published the second batch of “Twitter Files,” which showed that “teams of Twitter employees” built blacklists that were used to limit the spread of content.
People have always suspected that some users are shadow banned but Twitter has never been transparent about it and never tells users when they’re being suppressed. The documents obtained by Weiss showed that Twitter used “visibility filtering” to “suppress what people see to different levels.”
Weiss mentioned some of those who were added to the blacklists, including conservative commentators Dan Bongino and Charlie Kirk, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and Libs of TikTok. She did not say whether or not politicians were among those that were blacklisted.
Reporter Ian Miles Cheong asked both Musk and Weiss, “were any political candidates – either in the US or elsewhere – subject to shadowbanning while they were running for office or seeking re-election?” Musk responded, “Yes.”
Testifying before Congress in 2018, Twitter executives denied that users were suppressed based on political views.
“To be clear, our behavioral ranking doesn’t make judgments based on political views or the substance of tweets,” said Kayvon Beykpour, the former head of product.
“We don’t shadow ban, and we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints. We do rank tweets by default to make Twitter more immediately relevant (which can be flipped off),” said former CEO Jack Dorsey.
December 11, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | Covid-19, Human rights, Twitter, United States |
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A document has revealed that late Colonel Binyamin Gibli, head of Israeli Military Intelligence between June 1950 and March 1955, was directly ordered by then-Defence Minister Pinhas Lavon to bomb US and UK targets in Egypt in 1954, Arab48.com reported on Friday.
Known as Operation Susannah, Gibli ordered nine Egyptian-Jewish undercover agents, members of Unit 131, to bomb UK and US targets.
The bombing aimed to turn the US and UK against then-Egyptian revolutionary leader Gamal Abdul Nasser and push the UK to reverse its decision to withdraw from the Suez Canal, which was nationalised by Abdul Nasser.
Gibli wrote in his biography, which had been banned, that Lavon disowned him after the operation was uncovered.
According to the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, he accused Lavon of: “Throwing him to the dogs and turning him into a scapegoat.”
The operation failed as Egyptian security forces uncovered the unit and arrested its members. One of them committed suicide in prison, two were executed and others spent long periods in jail.
Israeli authorities carried out several investigations into the issue, known as the Lavon Affair, that led to contradictory findings, resignations and political divisions. The case was never closed.
December 11, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Egypt, Israel, Zionism |
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A leading British academic has depicted the integration of the UK-Israeli tech industry as a tool of Zionist “operatives” to infiltrate into the “very fabric” of the British governance.
David Miller, a former professor at Bristol University and a scholarly critic of Israel, made the comments on Press TV’s Palestine Declassified aired on Saturday, clarifying on the UK Israel Tech Hub’s true mission.
The UK Israel Tech Hub is based in the British Embassy in the occupied Palestine and is funded directly by the British taxpayer.
The organization, committed to Israel’s economic and tech interests, receives its financial resources through the British Foreign Office along with departments for Trade and Media.
The UK Israel Tech Hub, Miller said, is there to encourage integration between the tech industry in the UK and Israel, which is already happening and “on many occasions, we are seeing a penetration essentially into the very fabric of British governance by operatives of the Zionist regime.”
“A large number of people have gone straight from working for the Zionist entity into effectively working for the British taxpayer,” Miller said.
Indeed, when glancing at the employees of this organization who sit inside the British Embassy, the picture of state capture becomes clearer.
Haim Shani, the chairman of the UK Israel Tech Hub, previously served as director general of the Israeli ministry of finance. The director of this suspicious organization is Keren Shurkin, who started in the liaison department of the Israeli military.
The deputy director of the UK Israel Tech Hub is Ella Caplan, who claims to have been directly behind all interactions between a specific foreign army and the Israel military during her time in the liaison department.
Avital Levitsky went from working in Israeli military intelligence to the cyber security sector lead at the UK Israel Tech Hub in the British Embassy. And the list goes on.
Miller also added that the tech contracts between the UK and the Zionist regime are being used simply as a sort of data grab for the Israeli intelligence, citing Benjamin Netanyahu’s previous efforts to send people from Israeli intelligence organizations, in particular the signals intelligence Unit 8200, into the tech startups.
“These are people who are intended by the regime to carry the interests of Israel into the startups that they are engaged in,” he said.
Meanwhile, Mick Napier, a co-founder of the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign, also described the UK Israel Tech Hub a “job creation program” for Israelis and a part of “100 percent full spectrum complicity” between the UK and Israel.
Napier stated that such projects “clearly” aim to defeat the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaign “as far as it possibly can.”
It is worth mentioning that BDS works to end international support for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians and pressure Israel to comply with international law.
Israeli firms infiltrate NHS
It is “very worrying that Israeli tech firms, staffed by people from former Israeli intelligence agencies, are able to get access to data in the British National Health Service (NHS),” Miller said of the Israeli tech industry penetration into the UK NHS.
The British Embassy-backed project, UK Israel Tech Hub, has been integral to the signing of a memorandum of understanding between Israel and the Northern Health Services Alliance (NHSA) to facilitate the expansion of the Israeli tech industry into the NHS.
Accordingly, the UK-Israel Tech Gateway, established through the tech hub, is set to grant the access of vast swathes of British citizens’ health data to Israeli tech companies.
Napier also voiced concerns over Israel’s access to British citizens’ health data saying that it allows “all sorts of blackmail” and “force people to collaborate and change their political behavior.”
Miller termed the extensive digital collaboration between Britain and Israel as “melding” rather than integration which is not merely limited to business activities but have an “intelligence component or interest.”
“There is integration increasingly between the interests of the Israelis and parts of the [UK] government apparatus, there are many other examples of people who are effectively operating for the interests of the Israelis inside the governmental apparatus in the [Palace of] Whitehall at Westminster,” Miller concluded.
In another episode of Palestine Declassified aired on November 26, Huda Ammori, a Palestinian activist and co-founder of the direct action network Palestine Action said that tech companies including Amazon and Google, are working with the Israeli military, and aiding in human rights violations and the colonization of the Palestinian people.
Ammori was making a reference to the notorious Project Nimbus Google’s $1.2bn artificial intelligence and surveillance contract with Amazon and the Israeli military.
December 11, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | UK, Zionism |
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EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak, who worked closely with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, helped steer the media and scientific community away from questions about whether COVID-19 could have originated in a lab, emails released under the North Carolina Public Records Act show.
Emails between Daszak and University of North Carolina virologist Ralph Baric, another collaborator of the laboratory at the pandemic’s epicenter, offer new behind-the-scenes insights into Daszak’s influence. Baric’s experiments with the Wuhan lab included gain-of-function experiments to make viruses more transmissible or virulent.
The White House was dissuaded from investigating the possibility of a lab origin of COVID-19 in part by discussions that included both Daszak and Baric, according to a March 2020 email written by Daszak.
And in a separate May 2020 email, Daszak told Baric that he used talking points intended to discourage reporters from asking questions about potential gain-of-function work on coronaviruses.
Daszak has been a vocal proponent of a natural origin of COVID-19. EcoHealth Alliance has worked closely with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and received millions in government funding to discover and study animal viruses.
Though the public does not have a complete picture of the pre-pandemic work underway, none of the viruses published by EHA or the WIV could have directly sparked the COVID-19 pandemic.
These new revelations add to the evidence of Daszak’s central role in shaping public perceptions about COVID-19’s origins. He secretly organized a statement in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet deeming a lab origin a “conspiracy theory.” He served as the U.S. representative on the 2021 World Health Organization origins investigation in China, which dismissed a lab origin as “extremely unlikely.” He also formerly chaired a Lancet Commission probe into the origins of COVID-19 which was disbanded after Daszak declined to share his grant reports.
No lab release hypotheses ‘anytime soon’
Daszak told Baric in March 2020 that a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) discussion they participated in helped sway the Trump White House away from examining a possible lab origin of COVID-19.
Daszak and Baric both participated in the task force convened by the National Academies to inform the White House’s science office about information required to determine the origin of the pandemic.
In a February 3 call, the experts discussed the possibility of a lab origin of COVID-19 dismissively, other emails obtained under FOIA show.
National security staff were on the call, Daszak told Baric. This suggests that biothreat experts guiding the government’s response heard the scientists’ message.
The resulting letter to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in 2020 assumed a natural origin. The possibility of a lab-related incident was not mentioned.
Both Daszak and Baric were consulted as experts for the letter.
Daszak seemed to think that this letter he influenced – together with a letter in the journal Nature Medicine beset by conflicts-of-interest – were strong enough to sway White House opinion and prevent NASEM committees from delving into possible lab origins.
“I don’t think this committee will be getting into the lab release or bioengineering hypothesis again any time soon — White House seems to be satisfied with the earlier meeting, paper in Nature and general comments within [the] scientific community,” Daszak told Baric.
After more evidence in favor of a lab origin emerged, including Daszak and Baric’s undisclosed conflicts of interest, the National Academies issued a new statement in 2021 acknowledging that the origin of the pandemic is unknown, and that a lab-related incident is a possibility.
‘I practice lines like that’
In the May 2020 email, Daszak coaches Baric on how to deflect a reporter’s questions on COVID-19’s origins and gain-of-function research.
“I practice lines like that,” Daszak said before suggesting ideas to change the topic, such as vaccines or the risks of natural spillover.
“They [reporters] will eventually move on to that topic. I will from now on make everything extremely clear to reporters about the way this all happens,” he said.
He first recommends saying that gain-of-function research issues have already been resolved by the NIH.
“That’s already been debated extensively and decided on by NIH,” Daszak suggests telling reporters.
(NIH hosted a debate among scientists about the limits of gain-of-function research in the years before the pandemic. New oversight mechanisms were developed in 2017, but many scientists believe these remain too weak and opaque.)
Daszak then recommends citing the 2020 National Academies letter and the Nature Medicine article.
These efforts “clearly show the virus has a natural origin, no evidence of manipulation,” Daszak claimed.
However, neither source proved a natural origin for the pandemic.
Though the National Academies letter did not mention the possibility of a lab leak, discussions that led to the letter mentioned that a novel feature of the SARS-CoV-2 genome called the furin cleavage site could have arisen in a lab.
An early draft of the letter also mentioned the possibility of a lab origin, but the final draft did not.
The Nature Medicine paper, titled “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” was a correspondence rather than a scientific journal article presenting novel experimental results. Though it had an enormous impact, the paper was fraught with undisclosed conflicts of interest.
Keeping discussions ‘comfortable’
Daszak’s emails to Baric renew conflict-of-interest concerns about Daszak since he didn’t disclose to reporters the role he may have played in the National Academy proceedings he claimed proved a natural origin.
Elected as a member to the National Academies in 2018, Daszak was involved in many early discussions that may have influenced the research agenda of the COVID-19 task force advising the federal government.
Daszak also served on this National Academies task force and chaired a separate forum on microbial threats.
Following his nomination to the standing committee, Daszak offered to recuse himself from discussions concerning the origins of Covid-19.
“I got some questions from NAM (National Academies of Medicine) about my relationship to the Wuhan lab, but I explained that it’s purely academic (no funds from China to me), and I offered to recuse myself from any discussions about the conspiracy theories re. lab release or bioengineering,” wrote Daszak to Baric on March 17, 2020.
However, the extent of his recusal is unclear.
Documents written in April 2020 show Daszak on two NAM working groups, one whose goal was to examine “viral genetics, origin, and evolution of SARS-CoV-2.”
Notes in the document suggest their research focused on analyzing how the SARS-CoV-2 genome changed over time and in different countries. This information was needed for the “development of diagnostics and therapeutics” rather than determining how the pandemic began.
Yet in October 2020, Daszak appears to steer National Academy discussions with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) toward “natural history” hypotheses for the comfort of their Chinese colleagues.
“We discussed ways we could frame a future topic that would allow us to talk about some important issues around the ‘natural history’ of SARS-CoV-2, that might also be comfortable for our Chinese colleagues,” wrote Daszak.
Benjamin Rusek, a senior program officer at the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), appears to adopt or agree with Daszak’s suggestion.
“More discussion on the origin or “natural history” of the virus focused on preventing future outbreaks (since George Gao seems to be open to it) might be possible as well,” wrote Rusek about potential NAS-CAS dialogues.
In an earlier email dated May 7, 2020, Rusek suggests that there are “issues we should probably avoid” during US-China dialogues on COVID-19.
Rusek and Daszak’s sentiments may reflect a desire to maintain scientific collaboration on public health issues of mutual interest amid rising political tensions between China and the U.S. Indeed, joint NAS-CAS meetings focused on Covid-19 public health responses, understanding of the disease, “vaccine development and delivery”, and “immunity, testing, and diagnostics.”
Daszak didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The documents reported on in this article were obtained from the University of North Carolina through litigation under the North Carolina Public Records Act. Documents obtained by U.S. Right to Know about COVID-19 origins and risky virological research can be found here.
Emily Kopp is an investigative reporter with U.S. Right to Know.
Karolina Corin, Ph.D., is a staff scientist with backgrounds in both engineering and biology.
December 10, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | China, Covid-19, EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak, United States |
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