Gmail’s Czech Election Campaign Interference
By Přemysl Janýr | February 5, 2023
On 18 January, a few days before the presidential election, I received an email from a non-political group of friends with an anti-Babiš pamphlet. I replied with an anti-Petr picture that I had received shortly before. Out of a group of forty recipients, seven emails were returned to me as undeliverable because “This message does not pass authentication checks” (SPF and DKIM both 5.7.26 do not pass).
This has never happened to me in decades of assiduous email communication. From time to time some mail is undeliverable, the address no longer exists, it has overflowed, etc., but so far no one has ever blocked the delivery of my message and withal to such an extent. I checked all seven error messages, all of them gmail.com addresses. So a few minutes later I sent out another email to the group informing that gmail.com was blocking Petr Pavel’s picture. It was delivered to all of them, including the seven.
So the difference in deliverability was clearly not related to authentication requirements, but to Petr Pavel’s picture. I pasted it directly into the email body without any comment, not as an attachment. I don’t know how long it had been circulating on the Internet, but gmail.com knew it, recognizes it in emails by the content, and takes it into account in its algorithms to determine which messages to deliver to its clients and which to hide from them. Gmail is owned by the US corporation Google. And since Czech elections have to be irrelevant to it from a business point of view, it is obviously accommodating other entities for which they are not irrelevant. Of course, someone familiar with the Czech conditions had to evaluate Petr Pavel’s picture for them.
Mail, like a letter or any verbal or telephone conversation, is a private communication between two or more persons. The censorship of content described is analogous to the post office unsealing letters and deciding whether to deliver them based on their content. Or to a telephone provider listening to what you are talking about and cutting the connection if the subject matter is inappropriate. According to Czech law, it is a criminal offence.
This is compounded by the delicate fact that our private communications concerned electoral preferences, and that gmail.com was apparently disturbed not by a pamphlet disparaging Andrej Babiš, but by a picture disparaging Petr Pavel. This corresponds to a manipulation of the Czech election campaign by a foreign entity in favour of one of the candidates. And if we consider that Google offers not only an e-mail server, but also a virtually monopolistic search portal and a number of other services used by Czech citizens, it can covertly influence electoral preferences to a considerable extent. Even this is a criminal offence.
On the same day, I filed a criminal complaint with the prosecutor and a notification of election manipulation with the Ministry of the Interior. I published both submissions, including the suppressed image, in a posting on my blog http://www.janyr.eu and sent out a notice to my readers with a link, but forgot to release the posting before doing so. The notifications reached all recipients without any problems.
In no time, the first responded that the posting was unavailable. I immediately corrected that and sent out the notification again with an apology. Twenty addresses on gmail.com denied the delivery. I sent another email to those affected informing them that they had not received the link to the posting together with a link to my blog where they could find it. It went through to all twenty.
Thus over a course of hours, I‘ve accumulated a lot of material to analyze. In the first case, gmail.com recognized the suppressed image in the message body. In the second, it had to double-check the contained link and determine that the image was located at the destination address.
A statistical recap:
– I sent a total of 220 emails to recipients on gmail.com. 90 of them contained the suppressed image or a link to the posting where it was used.
– Of the emails with the image or link, 27 were undeliverable.
– All emails without the image or link, including those to “undeliverable” addresses, were delivered without issue.
Thus, the dependence of delivery on content is evident, but at the same time, gmail.com also delivered most of the emails with a link to my posting. So how is the decision actually made?
I sent out the notification in five batch emails. So I listed the recipients and marked those undelivered. In fact, the censorship affected only one of the five emails and consistently blocked all twenty gmail.com addresses contained. So apparently the censorship check is done randomly. If I add the original email with the picture, which just as consistently blocked all of the gmail.com addresses, only two, or one-third, of the six emails were censored. So if you get mail returned to a recipient on gmail.com with the reasoning that it doesn’t meet the authentication requirements, it will probably bypass censorship when resent.
If the reader is communicating with friends about topics that may contain a critical political charge, I can only recommend that he use a mail server other than gmail.com. Out of over a hundred servers, it is the only one I have encountered this behavior on.
DID THE CIA SET UP NSA LEAKER REALITY WINNER?
By Kit Klarenberg | MintPress News | February 2, 2023
Throughout January, a deluge of previously concealed evidence exposing how journalists, spies and social media platforms perpetuated and maintained the RussiaGate fraud has entered the public domain at long last, via the Elon Musk-approved “#TwitterFiles” series.
While Twitter’s Pentagon-connected owner evidently has a partisan agenda in releasing this material, the at-times explosive disclosures amply confirm what many independent journalists and researchers had long argued. Namely, false claims of Kremlin-directed bot and troll operations online were duplicitously weaponized by an alphabet soup of U.S. intelligence agencies to bring major social networks to heel, and enduringly enshrine their status as subservient wings of the national security state.
Yet, while RussiaGate only becomes ever-more dead and buried over time, and the true purposes it served becomes increasingly stark, a central component of the conspiracy theory stubbornly clings to life. In June 2017, The Intercept published a leaked N.S.A. document, which it claimed revealed “a months-long Russian hacking effort against the U.S. election infrastructure.”
Ever since, it has been an article of faith in the mainstream media and among Democratic politicians that Russian G.R.U. cyberwarriors “hacked” the 2016 election, if not others too, by malevolently attempting to alter vote tallies to skew results. Moreover, Reality Winner, the N.S.A. analyst who leaked the document and ended up in jail as a result, has been elevated to the status of a heroic whistleblower on a par with Edward Snowden.
These outcomes, or at least something like them, may well have been the specific objectives of the individual and/or entity that furnished the N.S.A. with the information contained in the leaked report. For as we shall see, there are strong grounds to believe Winner unwittingly walked into a trap laid by the C.I.A.
G.R.U. “HACKING OPERATIONS”
Before The Intercept had even published its scoop on the leaked file, Reality Winner was in jail, pending trial for breaches of the Espionage Act. Her arrest, announced by the Department of Justice on the same day the story was published, only added to the mainstream frenzy that erupted in the wake of its publication.
Overnight, the hitherto unknown Winner, a United States Air Force Intelligence Squadron veteran who’d received a medal for aiding the identification, capture, and assassination of hundreds of “high-value targets,” became a major cause célèbre for Western liberals, and campaigns calling for her release backed by major press freedom and digital rights groups sprouted in profusion.
Winner’s incarceration, and the failure of the N.S.A. to take action on the report’s findings publicly or privately, also furthered suspicions that proof of Donald Trump’s ties to the Kremlin being subject to a politicized coverup at the highest levels, in which the ostensibly independent U.S. intelligence community itself was implicated.
It is perhaps due to Winner becoming the main focal point of the scandal, combined with desperation among liberal politicians and journalists to substantiate the RussiaGate narrative, that the leaked report’s details were never subject to serious mainstream scrutiny.
While The Intercept declared the document “displays no doubt” that a wide-ranging cyberattack in which spear-phishing emails were dispatched to over 100 local election officials mere days before the 2016 election “was carried out by the G.R.U.,” its contents suggest nothing of the kind.
The report, authored by an N.S.A. intelligence analyst, does attribute this activity to the G.R.U. But the underlying “raw intelligence” – evidence upon which that conclusion is based – is not contained in the file. It is abundantly clear, though, the finding was far from concrete anyway.
For one, the report states, “it is unknown if the G.R.U. was able to compromise any of the entities targeted successfully.” Still, more significantly, the agency is said only to be “probably” responsible – an “analyst judgment” based on the purported hacking campaign having “utilized some techniques that were similar to other G.R.U. operations.” The analyst is nonetheless forced to concede “this activity demonstrated several characteristics that distinguish it [emphasis added]” from known prior G.R.U. hacking operations.
Yet further cause for doubt about the report’s clearly unsupported headline claim is provided by the extremely unsophisticated methods employed by who or what was behind the spear-phishing efforts, which included the use of a blatantly fraudulent Gmail account. Evidently, this was not a professional operation and had very little chance of succeeding. Why would an elite intelligence agency stoop to such rudimentary tactics, particularly if its operatives were seriously determined to compromise U.S. election integrity?
Even more dubiously, among the named recipients of a purported G.R.U. spear-phishing email is the election office of American Samoa, an unincorporated U.S. territory located in the South Pacific, southeast of Samoa itself. Its population is just 56,000, and they cannot vote in mainland elections.
While a criminal hacker might have an interest in personal data held by such an entity, it is difficult to conceive what possible grounds a military intelligence agency would have for seeking access to such a trove. This interpretation is furthered by a chart in the N.S.A. report referring to how the same hacker also attempted spear-phishing campaigns targeting other email addresses, including those registered with Mail.ru, a Russian company.
These shortcomings, rather than a concerted coverup, may account for why the report was not publicized or acted upon by the N.S.A. The Intercept, however, bombastically dubbed the document “the most detailed U.S. government account of Russian interference in the election that has yet come to light.”
“SPEED AND RECKLESSNESS”
When asked by journalist Aaron Maté in a September 2018 interview about “the possibility that the significance of this document has been inflated,” Jim Risen, senior national security correspondent at The Intercept and director of First Look Media’s Press Freedom Defense Fund (which supported Winner’s legal defense) was at a total loss.
Audibly flustered and irritated by this repeated line of questioning, Risen then terminated the interview abruptly when Maté sought to probe him over “criticism” of how The Intercept handled the document, which all but ensured Winner’s identification and imprisonment.
Now departed co-founder of The Intercept Glenn Greenwald rightly branded Winner’s exposure “deeply embarrassing,” claiming it resulted from “speed and recklessness.” A New York Times post-mortem of the debacle confirmed the two reporters who took the lead on the story, Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito – whose sloppiness and dishonesty landed C.I.A. whistleblower John Kiriakou in jail in 2012 for disclosing secrets about the Agency’s torture program – were “pushed to rush the story to publication.”
It would be entirely unsurprising if this pressure emanated from Betsy Reed, then editor-in-chief of The Intercept, a committed RussiaGate advocate who in 2018 slammed left-wing skeptics of the narrative as “pale imitations” of Glenn Greenwald, lacking his “intelligence [and] nuance.” When former FBI director Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation conclusively found no indication of a secret relationship between Trump and the Kremlin the next year, she claimed the failed probe, in fact, identified “plenty” of “soft loose” collusion.
The outlet’s haste to publicize the leaked N.S.A. report meant in-house digital security specialists at The Intercept were not consulted, leading Cole and Esposito to make a number of shocking blunders in attempting to verify the document pre-publication. First, they contacted a U.S. government contractor via unsecured text message, informing them they had received a printed copy of the document in the mail, postmarked Augusta, Georgia, where Winner then lived. This contractor subsequently informed the N.S.A.
Then, The Intercept approached the N.S.A. directly with a copy of the report. As Winner’s arrest warrant attests, examination of the material showed pages within it were creased, “suggesting they had been printed and hand-carried out of a secured space.”
While all color printers embed borderline invisible patterns on each page, allowing for individual devices to be identified via serial number, the N.S.A. simply checked which of its staffers had printed the document. Six had, and Winner was among them. Further checks of the sextet’s desk computers showed she, and only she had used hers to contact The Intercept.
The outlet’s failure to undertake even the most basic measures to protect their source terminally damaged its reputation and remains a stain upon it and its senior staff to this day. Nonetheless, there has never been any acknowledgment of how inept and incautious Winner’s own actions were.
Even if The Intercept had not readily handed over distinguishing clues to the N.S.A, her highly self-incriminating use of a work computer to email the outlet, along with identifying the specific area where she resided, were in themselves smoking guns that almost inevitably would have led to her exposure.
“IGNORE DISSENTING DATA”
Winner has always claimed she acted alone, and there is no reason to doubt that she felt it was her patriotic duty to release the document. But her clumsiness, naivety and incompetence suggest she may well be easily manipulable, and a great many individuals and organizations had an interest in the dud intelligence report’s release. Foremost among them, elements of the C.I.A. loyal to John Brennan, Agency director between 2013 and January 2017.
Two weeks before Donald Trump took office, Brennan presented an Intelligence Community Assessment (I.C.A.) on “Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections.” It declared American spooks had “high confidence” that Moscow interfered in the 2016 election to help the upstart outsider seize power. While the document contained nothing to substantiate that charge, its dubious assertions were eagerly seized upon by the media.
It was not revealed until four years later that this “confidence” wasn’t shared by the U.S. intelligence community. Instead, Brennan personally authored the report’s incendiary conclusions, then selected a clique of his own confidantes to sign off on them. This subterfuge irked many analysts within and without the C.I.A. who assessed Russia, in fact, favored a Hillary Clinton victory, given Trump was an unpredictable “wild card” calling for much-increased U.S. military spending.
“Brennan took a thesis and decided he was going to ignore dissenting data and exaggerate the importance of that conclusion, even though they said it didn’t have any real substance behind it,” stated a senior U.S. intelligence official.
The only trace of dissent to be found in the I.C.A. is a reference to the N.S.A. not sharing the “confidence” of the C.I.A. in its findings. While wholly overlooked at the time, this deviation was massively consequential, given the N.S.A. closely monitors the communications of Russian officials. Its operatives would therefore be well-placed to know if high-level figures in Moscow had discussed plans to assist Trump’s campaign or even viewed him positively.
Brennan fudged the I.C.A. findings to keep the F.B.I. Trump-Russia “collusion” investigation alive. Launched by the Bureau in 2016, it found no evidence Trump or members of his campaign were conspiring with Moscow. The N.S.A. publicly breaking ranks would have inevitably been poorly received by Brennan and his allies in Langley, given it undermined their malign objectives.
As such, it is an obvious question whether Winner’s leak – in addition to furthering the RussiaGate fiction and damaging Trump – also served to discredit the N.S.A. by creating the illusion it had been asleep at the wheel over Kremlin meddling, if not actively suppressing evidence of this activity from the public.
Winner need not have been a willing or conscious collaborator in this scenario; the introduction of the report she leaked notes opaquely that information about the purported G.R.U. hacking effort became available in April 2017. The nature of this information and its source is unstated; could it have been the C.I.A. or operatives thereof?
“EXPOSING A WHITE HOUSE COVERUP”
Winner was convicted in August 2018 and jailed for 63 months, the longest sentence ever imposed for the unauthorized release of classified information to the media in U.S. history. Her appallingly harsh sentence was accordingly framed as politically motivated, yet further proof then-President Donald Trump had been compromised by and/or owed his upset election victory to the Kremlin and was desperate for this to be swept under the rug.
Released in June 2021, Winner remains under probation until November 2024, is not allowed to leave southern Texas, has to obey a strict curfew, and must report any interaction with the media in advance, a shocking coda to her time behind bars. Still, while allegedly facing imprisonment for discussing the document she leaked publicly, a documentary on her case is in production, and she has conducted multiple interviews with both mainstream and independent journalists.
In Winner’s most prominent media appearance to date, in July 2022, CBS aired a highly sympathetic, lengthy sit-down discussion with her, likely watched by millions. Apparently unconcerned about legal ramifications, she made a number of bold claims and statements throughout, at total odds with comments at her sentencing, when she told the judge, “my actions were a cruel betrayal of my nation’s trust in me.”
For its part, CBS rather unbelievably declared, based on the word of “two former officials,” that her leak “helped secure the 2018 midterm election,” as it revealed the “top secret emails” used by the hackers. Quite what threat those addresses could have posed, or why they would continue to be used a year-and-a-half after the report became publicly available, is not clear.
The program’s framing of Winner, in her own words, “exposing a White House coverup” as “the public was being lied to” was even more curious. A clip of Trump being interviewed by John Dickerson – “typical of the time,” according to CBS – was inserted, in which the President stated, “if you don’t catch a hacker in the act, it’s very hard to say who did the hacking.”
“I’ll go along with Russia, could’ve been China, could’ve been a lot of different groups,” he added before a CBS narrator stated dramatically, “but it was Russia, and the NSA knew it,” as Winner “had seen proof in a top-secret report on an in-house newsfeed.” The program then cut back to the former N.S.A. analyst: “I just kept thinking, ‘My God, somebody needs to step forward and put this right. Somebody.’”
In that clip, Trump was, in fact, discussing which party was responsible for purported cyberattacks on the Democratic National Committee servers (D.N.C.), not the spear-phishing attack on election officials detailed in the leaked N.S.A. report. This dishonest sleight of hand by the program’s producers is nonetheless illuminating, for it highlights another potential utility of that report’s leak from the perspective of the C.I.A. – obfuscating its own role in the hack-and-leak of Democratic Party emails.
That the D.N.C. servers were hacked by Russian intelligence is widely accepted, a conclusion based primarily on the findings of D.N.C. contractor CrowdStrike. Yet, when grilled under oath by the Senate Intelligence Committee on the matter in December 2017, the company’s chief, Shawn Henry, revealed he, in fact, possessed no “concrete evidence” the files were “actually exfiltrated” by anyone – dynamite testimony that was hidden from public view for over two years.
CrowdStrike’s case for Russian culpability was predicated on a number of seemingly injudicious errors on the part of the hackers, such as their computer username referencing the founder of the Soviet Union’s secret police, Russian text in their malware’s source code, and ham-fisted attempts to use the Romanian language. However, WikiLeaks’ Vault 7 disclosures show the CIA’s “Marble Framework” deliberately inserts these apparent failings precisely into a cyberattack’s digital footprint to falsely attribute its own hacking to other countries.
The Agency would have had good reason for falsely attributing the emails’ source. For one, at this time, the C.I.A. was tearing its proverbial hair out attempting to link WikiLeaks – the organization that published them – and its founder Julian Assange with a foreign actor, preferably Russia, to secure legal justification for engaging in hostile counterintelligence operations against the organization and its members.
By framing the emails as Russian-hacked, media and public attention were also diverted from the communications’ contents, which revealed corruption by the Clinton Foundation and meddling in the Democratic Party primaries to prevent Bernie Sanders from securing the Presidential nomination. Meanwhile, concerns about whether D.N.C. staffer Seth Rich’s still-unsolved July 2016 murder was in any way related to his potential role in leaking the material were very effectively silenced.
The fate of Assange (and perhaps Rich, too) is a palpable demonstration of what can so often befall those who publish damaging information powerful people and organizations do not want in the public domain. Winner’s veneration by the U.S. liberal establishment, and post-release promotion by the mainstream media, should, at the very least, raise serious questions about who or what ultimately benefited from her well-meaning, personally destructive actions.
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist and MintPresss News contributor exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. His work has previously appeared in The Cradle, Declassified UK, and Grayzone. Follow him on Twitter @KitKlarenberg.
Drink it, snort it, smoke it – the vaccine juggernaut rumbles on
By Roger Watson | TCW Defending Freedom | January 28, 2023
More good news on vaccine, folks. First, you may be required to take only one Covid-19 shot per year, and if all goes well you will not even have to do that. You will be able to drink or even inhale your vaccine. No more painful injections, just a quick slurp or a snort and the job’s a good ’un. That’s you safe from the deadly virus for another year.
We could even make it fun. Why not hold Covid-19 vaccine parties? A selection of flavours in shot glasses (they don’t call them shot glasses for no reason) or add your vaccine to a vape and puff away until your immune system is primed.
I glean all this garbage from Global Health Now, the daily newsletter from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The first story concerns how the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States is considering ‘simplifying the Covid vaccination schedule, allowing most people to get the currently available booster, regardless of how many doses they had received before that’. This means that if you are boosted up to the eyeballs or have never had one before and suddenly made the incomprehensible decision to start now, then Bob’s your uncle; roll up your sleeves.
Please note that nothing has changed; there is no new vaccine and no new threat. The FDA is just making an arbitrary decision to change the schedule. Clearly the aim is to get more people to accept the vaccination. But it is also clear that they are making this stuff up as they go along. They have no further evidence that the vaccines will work any better this way.
The information that is available to them is the abundant and accumulating evidence of vaccine harms which, incredibly, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MRHA) in the United Kingdom admits can be serious while insisting that the vaccines are safe. If truth is the first casualty of war – it certainly died early in the Covid-19 madness – logic is not far behind it. The MRHA is willing to trade off serious vaccine side effects against minimal protection from a virus which is virtually harmless to the vast majority of people. Perhaps the FDA is trying to reduce the number of boosters it says people will need in the hope that vaccine injuries will go away. Alternatively, it may be keen to accelerate the rollout before the general population wakes up to the fact that they are being conned, if they are lucky, and killed if they are not.
The potential for a drinkable/snortable/inhalable vaccine comes courtesy of US Speciality Formulations, a company which has produced the QYNDR vaccine. If QYNDR is a bit of a consonant-rich mouthful, then be informed that the official pronunciation if ‘KINDER’. And the advent of QYNDR is closer than you think. Phase 1 trials have already been completed in New Zealand (where else?) and all that is required is more funding to proceed with further trials. Apparently, it is very difficult to formulate a vaccine that survives the vicissitudes of the digestive tract.
And why do we need these vaccines? Well, according to US Speciality Formulations: ‘Covid-19 is still here and deadly.’ Also, I imagine that the inventors and investors envisage that this will make them shedloads of money. It clearly pays to perpetuate the Covid-19 narrative and to pepper it with as much panic as possible.
At some point in the panic-demic, the vaccine rollout became a juggernaut. Large and hard to stop. With the widespread and obvious extent to which people are gullible, government and drug manufacturers are willing to lie, health professionals are willing to stay silent and there are bucks to be made, it is unlikely that the juggernaut will be halted any time soon.
Who knows what’s next? Perhaps they will develop a vaccine that one can stick up one’s bottom. Whether or not they do, I strongly advise them that is what they can do with the present products.
Is the UK Health Security Agency Careless, Trolling or Knows Something We Don’t?
A strange Job Posting
The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | February 3, 2023
The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) is currently advertising to recruit an individual for the position of “Vaccine Supply Operation Lead”. You have until 14th February 2023 to apply and can earn up to £62,286 (USD $76,174).
Nothing strange about that so far so why am I writing a post about it?
The weird part comes in the description about the job. In the ‘Job summary’ section it says the following: (emphasis my own)
The role of Vaccine Supply Operations Lead is a new post to support the operations, providing accurate and timely reports for a range of stakeholders during what is expected to be the UK’s largest vaccination programme which will be delivered at pace and will be a key Ministerial priority. The role will be directly responsible for the daily operational management of all covid related products, ensuring their timely distribution across the UK, Crown Dependencies, and Overseas Territories.
“The UK’s largest vaccination programme which will be delivered at pace and will be a key Ministerial priority.” Surely no vaccination programme could be larger than the Covid one? What could they be talking about?
As I see it, there are three possible explanations for this ominous sounding job description:
- The most obvious and likely reason is that the UKHSA have been sloppy. They have recruited someone to write an advert who is lazy, recycled previous material from the pandemic and hasn’t checked their work. However, I have tried to find a previous job description from which the wording may have been taken but with no luck so far. Furthermore, this posting has been up for a few days now, so you would think that any mistake would have been highlighted and corrected. When searching for the job, it is the third paragraph in the job summary, so not something buried away in mountains of text.
- The second reason is that someone in the UKHSA is trolling people like me who have been suspicious about the mRNA roll out. This may sound unlikely but they have recent form in this area. At the beginning of the pandemic, someone in the Civil Service who had clearly had enough, tweeted the following about the government.
- And the third and least likely reason is that the UKHSA are aware of some reason why a massive vaccination campaign may need to start up again. Whilst the least likely of the three options, it would be unwise to dismiss the idea completely.
Pfizer: sales before child safety
The inside story of how we held Pfizer to account for misleading parents about Covid vaccine safety
UsForThem · Broken Custodians · February 2, 2023
Free pass promotional opportunity given by BBC to Pfizer
On 2 December 2021, the BBC published on its website, its popular news app and in the BBC News at One programme, a video interview and an accompanying article under the headline ‘Pfizer boss: Annual Covid jabs for years to come’.
The interview by the BBC’s medical editor, Fergus Walsh, conducted as a friendly fireside chat, gave Dr Albert Bourla, the Chairman and CEO of Pfizer, a free pass promotional opportunity that money cannot buy — as the UK’s national public service broadcaster, the BBC is usually prohibited from carrying commercial advertising or product placement.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Pfizer made the most of that astonishing opportunity to promote the uptake of its vaccine product. As the BBC’s strapline suggests, the key message relayed by Dr Bourla, responding to an obediently leading question from Mr Walsh, was that many more vaccine shots would need to be bought and jabbed to maintain high levels of protection in the UK. He was speaking shortly before the UK Government bought another 54 million doses of Pfizer vaccines.
Misleading statements about safety
Among his explicit and implicit encouragements for the UK to order more of his company’s shots, Dr Bourla commented emphatically about the merits of vaccinating children under 12 years of age, saying “[So] there is no doubt in my mind that the benefits, completely are in favour of doing it [vaccinating 5 to 11 year olds in the UK and Europe]”. No mention of risks or potential adverse events, nor indeed the weighing of any factors other than apparent benefits: Dr Bourla was straightforwardly convinced that we should immunise millions more children in the UK. In fact, it later emerged that the BBC’s article had misquoted Dr Bourla who in the full video interview recording had ventured the benefits to be “completely completely” in favour of vaccinating young children.
Despite the strength of Dr Bourla’s unconditional and superlative pitch for vaccinating under-12s, the UK regulatory authorities would not authorise the vaccine for use with those children until the very end of 2021; and indeed this came just a few months after the JCVI — the body which advises the Government on whether and when to deploy vaccines in the UK — had already declined to advise the Government to roll out a mass vaccination programme for healthy 12 to 15-year-olds on the basis that “the margin of benefit, based primarily on a health perspective, is considered too small to support advice on a universal programme of vaccination of otherwise healthy 12 to 15-year old children…”.
In response, soon after the interview aired, UsForThem submitted a complaint to the UK’s Prescription Medicines Code of Practice Authority (PMCPA) — the regulator responsible for policing promotions of prescription medicines in the UK. The complaint cited the overtly promotional nature of the BBC’s reports and challenged the compliance of Dr Bourla’s comments about children with the apparently strict rules governing the promotion of medicines in the UK.
A year-long, painful process
More than a year later, following a lengthy assessment process and an equally lengthy appeal by Pfizer of the PMCPA’s initial damning findings, the complaint and all of the PMCPA’s findings have been made public in a case report published on the regulator’s website.** Though some aspects of that complaint ultimately were not upheld on appeal, importantly an industry-appointed appeal board affirmed the PMCPA’s original findings that Dr Bourla’s comments on vaccinating 5 to 11-year-olds were promotional, and were both misleading and incapable of substantiation in relation to the safety of vaccinating that age group.
Even after UsForThem involved a number of prominent Parliamentarians, including Sir Graham Brady MP, to help accelerate the complaint, the process was dragged on — or perhaps ‘out’ — while the roll-out of Pfizer’s vaccine to UK under-12s proceeded, and the BBC’s interview and article stayed online. Even now the interview remains available on the BBC’s website, despite the PMCPA in effect having characterised it as ‘misinformation’ as far as vaccinating children is concerned.
When news of the appeal outcome was first revealed in November 2022 by a reporter at The Daily Telegraph newspaper, Pfizer issued a comment to the effect that it takes compliance seriously and was pleased that the “most serious” of the PMCPA’s initial findings — that Pfizer had failed to maintain high standards and had brought discredit upon and lowered confidence in the pharmaceutical industry — had been overturned on appeal.
It must be an insular and self-regarding world that Pfizer inhabits, that discrediting the pharmaceutical industry is considered a more serious matter than making misleading and unsubstantiated statements about the safety of their products for use with children. This surely speaks volumes about the mindset and priorities of the senior executives at companies such as Pfizer.
And if misleading parents about the safety of a vaccine product for use with children does not discredit or reduce confidence in the pharmaceutical industry, it is hard to imagine what standard can have been applied by the appeal board which overturned that initial finding. Perhaps this reflects the industry’s assessment of its own current reputation: that misinformation promulgated by one of its most senior executives is not discrediting. According to the case report, the appeal board had regard to the “unique circumstances” of the pandemic: so perhaps the view was that Pfizer can’t always be expected to observe the rules when it gets busy.
Multiple breaches. No meaningful penalty
Indeed, a brief look at the PMCPA’s complaints log confirms that Pfizer has been found to have broken the UK medicines advertising rules in relation to its Covid vaccine a further four times since 2020. Astonishingly, though, for their breaches in this most recent case, and in each of the other cases decided against it, neither Pfizer nor Dr Bourla will suffer any meaningful penalty (the PMCPA will have levied a small administrative charge to cover the cost of administering each complaint). So in practice, neither has any incentive to regret the breach, or to avoid repeating it if it remains commercially expedient to do so.
And this is perhaps the crux of the issue: the PMCPA, the key UK regulator in this area, operates as a division of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, the UK industry’s trade body. It is therefore a regulator funded by, and which exists only by the will of, the companies whose behaviour it is charged with overseeing. Despite Pharma being one of the most lucrative and well-funded sectors of the business world, the largely self-regulatory system on which the industry has now for decades had the privilege to rely has been under-resourced and has become slow, meek and powerless.
The UK Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) in principle has jurisdiction to hold the BBC accountable for what seems likely to have been mirroring breaches of the medicines advertising rules when it broadcast and promoted Dr Bourla’s comments, but no action has yet been taken.
This case, and the apparent impunity that companies such as Pfizer appear to enjoy, evidence that the system of oversight for UK Pharma is hopelessly outdated and that the regulatory authorities are risibly ill-equipped to keep powerful, hugely well-resourced corporate groups in check. The UK regulatory system for Big Pharma is not fit for purpose, so it is time for a rethink. Children deserve better, and we should all demand it.
** Endnote: an undisclosed briefing document
As part of its defence of UsForThem’s complaint, Pfizer relied on the content of an internal briefing document that had been prepared for the CEO by Pfizer’s UK compliance team before the BBC interview took place. Pfizer initially asked for that document to be withheld from UsForThem on the grounds that it was confidential. When UsForThem later demanded sight of the document (on the basis that it was not possible to respond fully to Pfizer’s appeal without it), UsForThem was offered a partially redacted version, and only then under terms of a perpetual and blanket confidentiality undertaking.
Without knowing the content of that document, or the scope of the redactions, UsForThem was unwilling to give an unconditional perpetual blanket confidentiality undertaking, but reluctantly agreed that it would accept the redacted document and keep it confidential subject to one limited exception: if UsForThem reasonably believed the redacted document revealed evidence of serious negligence or wrongdoing by Pfizer or any other person, including evidence of reckless or wilful damage to the public health of children, UsForThem would be permitted to share the document, on a confidential basis, with members of the UK Parliament.
This limited exception to confidentiality was not accepted. Consequently, UsForThem never saw the briefing document and instead drew the inference that it contained content that Pfizer regarded as compromising and which it therefore did not wish to risk ever becoming public.
Douma locals, medical personnel deny veracity of 2018 ‘chemical weapons attack’
The Cradle | February 2, 2023
Locals and medical personnel from the Syrian city of Douma in the Damascus countryside confirmed on 2 February during a press conference in the country’s Foreign Ministry headquarters that the alleged 2018 chemical attack on the city was, indeed, staged.
This follows the release of a new report by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) on 27 January, which once again renewed the accusation that Damascus was behind a 2018 chlorine gas attack on civilians in Douma.
“I live 400 meters from the place of the alleged incident, and I only learned of its occurrence the next day through social media,” Syrian lawyer Muhammad al-Naasan said during the press conference.
Another testimony is that of Dr. Hassan Oyoun, an ambulance worker at Douma Hospital, who claimed that “information was published a day before the alleged incident that it was necessary to prepare for an event that would result in a large number of injuries.”
This confirms that “prior preparations” were underway for the staging of the attack, Oyoun said, referring to the incident as a “fabricated play that was filmed.”
“What the terrorists announced about 800 injuries from chemical substances is incorrect, and the number of people who visited the hospital that day did not exceed 35,” he added.
According to Dr. Mumtaz al-Hanash, a Douma local, Douma Hospital announced just one day after the alleged attack that no chemically induced deaths were recorded whatsoever. He went on to say that the “photographed cases” did not provide evidence that chlorine, or any other weaponized chemical, was used.
An imam and preacher at a local mosque, Sheikh Ratib Naji, said: “We did not see with our own eyes any injured or dead, as they claimed, and those whom the terrorists claimed were dead, their bodies did not appear, and when we demanded them, they assaulted us.”
Syria’s permanent representative at the Hague-based chemical weapons watchdog, Milad Attiya, affirmed that Damascus does not recognize the OPCW investigation team’s third and latest report, as it rejected the last two. Attiya added that the report relies heavily on western sources, as well as groups such as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and the White Helmets, an Al-Qaeda affiliated rescue organization with links to organ trafficking networks in Syria.
Since 2013, armed groups in Syria have attempted to pin chemical attacks on the government to instigate internationally-led regime change operations against it. This comes in the form of staged attacks, or actual false-flag chemical attacks which leave many dead and are designed to implicate Damascus – as was the case in Ghouta in 2013 and in Khan Sheikhoun in 2017.
On 28 January, the Syrian government released a statement rejecting the OPCW report, which it said ignored “objective information which was provided by some … experts … and former OPCW inspectors with knowledge and expertise,” referring to the fact that the organization suppressed the findings of its initial report on Douma, as revealed by WikiLeaks in 2019.
NYT: Covid Vaccine Makers and Bill Gates’ GAVI Screwed Everyone
US Government and Other Governments are Holding The Bag
By Igor Chudov | February 1, 2023
This New York Times story from today is very illustrative of the current times.
Vaccine Makers Kept $1.4 Billion in Prepayments for Canceled Covid Shots for the World’s Poor
Separately, Johnson & Johnson is demanding additional payment for unwanted shots, confidential documents show.
It turns out that makers of Covid vaccines expertly screwed their customers, keeping a large part of the prepayment money advanced to them without shipping vaccine doses that no longer find any demand.
As global demand for Covid-19 vaccines dries up, the program responsible for vaccinating the world’s poor has been urgently negotiating to try to get out of its deals with pharmaceutical companies for shots it no longer needs.
Drug companies have so far declined to refund $1.4 billion in advance payments for now-canceled doses, according to confidential documents obtained by The New York Times.
The worst example is J&J, manufacturer of the Janssen vaccine, which was pulled from use worldwide due to blood clots. Despite that, J&J demands that more money be given to it “because of existing contracts.”
If it cannot strike a more favorable agreement with another company, Johnson & Johnson, it could have to pay still more.
Gavi and Johnson & Johnson are locked in a bitter dispute over payment for shots that Gavi told the company months ago it would not need, but which the company produced anyway. Johnson & Johnson is now demanding that Gavi pay an additional, undisclosed amount for them.
New York Times is lamenting this situation and highlights appeals to the conscience of vaccine makers:
Covid vaccine manufacturers “have a special responsibility” because their products are a societal good and most were developed with public funding, said Thomas Frieden, the chief executive of the global health nonprofit Resolve to Save Lives and a former director of the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Who is Thomas Frieden? He is a former director of the CDC and also a convicted sex offender, in my opinion.
Vaccine makers resist Frieden’s appeals to their conscience because they do not have any.
Bill Gates’ GAVI is not asking Pfizer for refunds: Pfizer was paid directly by the US government. Did Bill Gates pull strings to have the US government hold the financial bag in the case of Pfizer?
If so, Bill certainly had personal financial reasons for this!
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation invested 55 million into Pfizer’s vaccine maker BioNTech in Sep 2019.
This investment was made when BioNTech was an obscure company with no vaccines in the pipeline. That “unexpectedly” changed mere months later when BioNTech was selected to become the largest producer of Covid vaccines. Such lucky timing for Bill!
So, Bill Gates, having a financial interest in BioNTech, did not want his own GAVI to pay for BioNTech vaccines that eventually found no buyer; instead, the US government paid Pfizer directly. Pfizer will keep the funds, giving the US government an “option” to buy vaccines that nobody wants anymore.
Under the revised deal, a total of 600 million Pfizer doses will be made available to the US by the end of the year, giving the administration more time to find countries who want them. Pfizer had originally agreed to sell a billion shots at cost by this month.
Bill Gates-funded GAVI seems to have screwed its donors innovatively: the donors gave money towards Covid vaccinations, which fizzled. Hence, GAVI received back 1.6 billion out of 2.3 donated billions it gave Covid vaccine makers. Gavi, however, will not refund 1.6 billion to the donors and will use the money it recovered for other purposes, inflating its budget:
Had some vaccine manufacturers not been willing to renegotiate their contracts with Gavi, the costs to the organization could have been much higher. Gavi would have been on the hook for $2.3 billion for the doses it wanted to cancel, the documents show, but it saved $1.6 billion by exiting those contracts.
…
Donations for Covid shots substantially inflated Gavi’s budget, and the lost prepayments for canceled Covid vaccines do not threaten its regular childhood-vaccination work.
Such is the current state of the pandemic. The money is gone; vaccines do not work; people are dying suddenly; the government and Big Pharma do not want the public to pay attention.
If you, my reader, are in the United States, remember that the US government’s money is your money. Say bye-bye to it.
Will there be any real investigations?
UK government used an Army unit to spy on citizens so it knew “how scared people were” during Covid
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | January 31, 2023
The report, “Ministry of Truth: The Secretive Government Units Spying On Your Speech” – an extensive, over 100-page long deep dive into the subject matter, among other things analyzed how the UK government used the country’s military to glean “how scared people were” during Covid.
Read the report here.
This, the Big Brother Watch privacy and civil rights group – that says the report is based on Freedom of Information Act responses and whistleblower accounts – meant creating a facade of dealing with “fake news,” while in reality conducting “large-scale monitoring of the British public on social media.”
According to the newly released document, the unit involved was the British Army’s 77th Brigade (aka 77x), whose purpose is to conduct “information operations” – within the military – including audience analysis and spreading “counter-propaganda.”
Previous “clients” they targeted included the Taliban and al-Qaeda, but now, it was time to turn to Twitter users and suss out anything that the authorities might consider to be Covid “misinformation.”
In late 2020, we reported that the 77th Brigade was used as support for the Cabinet Office’s Rapid Response Unit (RRU) effort to push vaccination, but the Ministry of Defense insisted they were “not used against UK citizens” and that their focus was on the international arena.
The report, however, goes on to detail what kind of social media posts found their way into something called “The Disinformation Daily,” compiled by said unit.
In early June 2020, the Cabinet Office received one, and its contents concerned posts about the possibility of Covid being a vascular disease (based on a Lancet medical journal article), while two other items, dismissed as “disinformation” were videos – one that 77th Brigade claimed was a “conspiracy video” about UK laws, and another that accused the UK government of deliberately terrifying, threatening, and manipulating citizens during the pandemic.
The report also contains testimony from a whistleblower who shed light on how the brigade really carried out its work as a “disinformation force.”
Although the involvement of the military was justified by the need to fend off “foreign actors” apparently trying to frighten Britons, the whistleblower reveals that the monitored posts “did not contain information that was untrue or coordinated – it was simply fear and domestic dissent.”
And – “We learned from the feedback that the government were very keen on hearing what the public thought about their COVID-19 response and how scared people were.”
The whistleblower also spoke about the concern that the government was “so interested in individual Twitter posts that they devoted an entire unit to monitoring what scared and otherwise powerless people had to say,” adding – “and I regret that I was a part of it.”
MHRA Caught Not Doing Its Promised Vaccine Safety Monitoring (Again)
BY NICK DENIM | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | JANUARY 28, 2023
We all know, I hope, about the significant and sustained number of excess deaths since May 2022. Most recently, you probably saw Esther McVey MP asking if the Department of Health would commit to an urgent and thorough investigation.
Maria Caulfield MP, one of the health ministers, replied saying that it’s also happening elsewhere and there is a range of factors. Implicitly, she was refusing to investigate. Outrageous.
However, it actually reminded me that way back in February 2021, MHRA promised to do a whole range of routine population-level data analysis “to quickly detect a potential safety signal” for the Covid vaccines. It announced it here under the section “Rapid Cycle Analysis and Ecological Analysis“. It explains what it involves as follows:
[A]s COVID-19 vaccination records (i.e., those given outside of GP surgeries) begin to get updated within GP systems, the MHRA will implement a form of active surveillance known as ‘Rapid Cycle Analysis’. This method involves proactive, weekly analysis of a range of pre-defined events (theoretical side effects) to quickly identify safety signals – it again involves ‘observed vs expected’ analyses (i.e. comparing rates after vaccination to rates in unvaccinated comparator groups) but doesn’t rely on people directly reporting any concerns through the Yellow Card scheme. It is also a more robust way to quickly determine if rates are likely to be consistent with a coincidental association. It also uses the MaxSPRT approach with adjustments made for the expected delays in the recording of events presenting to and diagnosed in secondary care settings. The list of pre-defined events of special interest is not fixed and can be expanded at any time.The MHRA will also use the CPRD data to conduct ‘ecological analyses’. This involves monitoring trends in the rates of pre-defined events within given population cohorts, based on prioritisation groups for vaccine roll out, to see if they are occurring to a greater extent amongst those targeted for vaccination after it is deployed compared to historical rates from the pre-deployment period. Comparisons can also be made to trends seen in groups not targeted for vaccination at the same time. This approach is most useful when we see high vaccine uptake and is another way to quickly detect a potential safety signal.
So I had a poke around MHRA’s website to see how it is getting on with this. Not very well, it turns out.
One of MHRA’s five divisions is called Clinical Practice and Research Datalink (CPRD) and it maintains a bibliography of peer-reviewed research and reports which have used data provided by MHRA from NHS datasets for things like ICU, A&E, inpatients, outpatients, cancer registration and pregnancy. When I looked, the bibliography had been updated as recently as January 9th 2023. So well and truly up-to-date. So far, so good.
Imagine my surprise when I could only find two population-level studies relating to the Covid vaccines, both relating to thrombocytopenia (low blood platelet count), one from February 2022 and one from October. So just one type of adverse event has been put through MHRA’s promised ecological analysis in the last two years. It doesn’t say much for MHRA’s commitment to use population-level data “to quickly detect a potential safety signal”.
Imagine my further surprise that none of the datasets which MHRA’s CPRD Division provides for research contains data after June 2021.
So in conclusion, all about as useless as the other strand of Covid vaccine surveillance it promised, Targeted Active Monitoring, which I noted in a recent article it quietly dropped 15 months ago.
For me, there are only two possible conclusions: either the MHRA is not doing the Covid vaccine surveillance it promised, or it is doing it and not making the results publicly available. Either way, it’s high time that MPs, the Covid Inquiry and the media started asking MHRA some searching questions.
Until Nick retired a few years ago, he was a Senior Civil Servant in a Government Department.
Researchers bamboozling journalists with mythical comparison of vaccinated and unvaccinated
Where are the numbers? by Norman Fenton and Martin Neil | January 31, 2023
From: XXXXXX
Sent: 30 January 2023 12:33
To: Norman Fenton
Subject: Hart GroupDear Professor Fenton,
Apologies for any intrusion, but I’m contacting you directly since the Hart Group (which I understand you to be a member of), have not replied to my earlier emails – all very busy people, I do understand.
As a small group of individuals who between us have some journalistic and medical-science history, we are working on a presentation (with a further view to establishing a website), which aims to offer a wider range of information concerning Covid policies and treatment than, it appears, is usually available through current mainstream and social media.
Given that our aim is a balanced juxtaposition and presentation of arguments, hopefully allowing better-informed opinions to be arrived at, we do have a range of “issues” we’d love to understand better in order to present them fairly.
You are (I imagine) well-placed to comment on one specific matter, and I would be enormously grateful if you would spare a minute to advise, assuming this enquiry doesn’t create any conflict of interest or other problems for you:
The Times and other media recently reported on a QMUL study* which indicates that unvaccinated individuals with certain medical conditions are more likely to suffer “serious outcomes” than vaccinated individuals. I believe presenting this this demands careful attention to context and contrasting with other possible perspectives.
Dr Aseem Malhotra in a Twitter-hosted video makes reference to de-bunking claims about how this story has been reported, but makes no reference I can find to where such a de-bunking can be found; and sadly, he too seems unavailable to comment!
Probably, Dr Malhotra’s position is not an issue you are required in any way to comment on. However, in general, I do think that those who would like to see “better”, more balanced reporting on Covid should find time to speak to others, like us, who are trying to support exactly that cause – presumably it’s in everyone’s interest. But that’s just a peripheral observation on my part!
It would be truly helpful if you can find a moment to provide some pointers to help us present a balanced picture of the study referred to above.
Many thanks, and best wishes.
Your’s faithfully,
XXXXX
* Also reported on the QMUL website: https://www.qmul.ac.uk/media/news/2022/smd/unvaccinated-individuals-with-heart-problems-up-to-9-times-more-likely-to-die-or-suffer-serious-complications-from-covid-19.html
The study referred to is this one.
Here is my self-explanatory response:
Dear XXXXX
I should make it clear that, although I just briefly discussed this with one or two members of HART, my response below should certainty not be construed as ‘the HART response’.
The most important point to note about the QMUL study is that it certainly does not claim anything like what either you or The Times seem to think it claims, i.e it certainly does not show that “unvaccinated individuals with certain medical conditions are more likely to suffer serious outcomes than vaccinated individuals.” In fact, no comparison with a vaccinated cohort was undertaken.
All the study actually did was look at the outcomes for covid patients with pre-existing conditions like myocarditis. This is something very different to the later studies (such as those Aseem Malhotra referred to) which compared incidence of myocarditis occurring post-vaccination with the base rates for unvaccinated. So, all the study actually shows is that “that individuals with certain pre-existing medical conditions who get covid are more likely to suffer serious outcomes than those without such medical conditions who get covid.” That is hardly novel, since this has been widely known since March 2020.
In fact, the authors of the study are demonstrating a very clear bias by referring to the people in the study as ‘unvaccinated’. Of course, they were unvaccinated – it was a meta-analysis of 110 published studies between 1st Dec 2019 and 16th July 2020. There was, of course, no vaccinations anywhere during that period so referring to these people as ‘unvaccinated’ must have been done to fit a particular mischievous agenda. I am actually pleased you brought this study to my attention since it needs to be exposed for leading people like the Times and yourself to believe it was showing something that it wasn’t.
One major conclusion in the paper seems sensible – that having diabetes or hypertension or ischaemic heart disease predicts for poorer outcomes (although the same could be said for many other conditions so there is hardly anything novel in this). But the first part of the conclusion seems entirely wrong. Just because you see covid hospitalising a lot of people who had pre-existing cardiac comorbidity certainly does not mean that covid caused their comorbidity. It seems that this part of the conclusion may have been influenced by possible conflicts of interests (see below).
There are a number of other specific concerns about the study:
- They included studies published from 1st Dec 2019 – but that was before covid was formally accepted to exist, so how could any study published in Dec2019/Jan2020 have patients with suspected covid? Any study published pre-mid Jan 2020 should be excluded by default, since even the flawed confirmatory PCR test was not available until then. There would be no way of knowing if ‘is covid’ results was a mix of ‘not covid’, ‘possibly covid’ and ‘probably covid’.
- How is ‘suspected’ the same as ‘confirmed’? When the symptoms used for Covid marry to any number of other conditions that are common (and even endemic) then how can you say that suspected covid is even ‘a thing’?
- Someone hospitalised with exacerbation of an existing condition is NOT the same thing as someone who gets a new diagnosis OF that condition after vaccination.
- Including so many Chinese studies clearly biases the work – and using China and USA to predict for LMIC (in the Introduction) is strange to say the least.
A colleague also noted the link between Prof Gupta (the senior author) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other potential conflicts of interest:
- In this report Gupta is acknowledged as having provided the statistical support for a report that seeks to help the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Clinton Foundation find new ways to support medical/health research in the UK. There are also a number of links between Gupta before he came to QMUL and functions (like some project called D3140 for the Rotary Club funded by BMGF in Mumbai, and research out of Imperial College) supported by the Gates Foundation. He is also heavily involved in Wellcome Trust AND the WHO – and is listed on the minutes of meetings between the two.
- Gupta and the lead author (Sher May Ng) are both on this study that was in part funded by the NIH (Grumbach acknowledges an NIH grant while at the UCal Nursing School. My colleague managed to find that she also has an NIH.GOV email address).
- Co-Author Kenneth Rice has worked on studies like this with staff from BMGF.
- Kenneth Rice and Gupta are two of the over 200 doctors who are part of a research collaborative called TOPMed – funded by the NIH with a combination of US Gov and BMGF money.
I hope this helps you.
Yours
Norman Fenton
For clarification of the potential conflict of interest with BMGF, Scott McLachlan has provided the following information:
Bill Gates is the world’s largest single shareholder of Covid-19 vaccine manufacturer stocks and therefore every time Pfizer, Moderna, Lilly (Eli), GSK, CureVac or even AstraZeneca (he had something like 8% in AstraZeneca shares at one point) sell a vaccine, that’s money back in his pocket. (see here)
And while fact checkers claimed Gates would not profit from Gilead (Remdesivir), he actually purchased a significant chunk of Gilead and 27,000 shares in Merck in 2018 in preparation. (Merck are one of the manufacturers who licensed to manufacture Remdesivir in their plants)
The thing that journalists get confused on is the idea that he, through his foundations, made ‘grants’ to Moderna et al. These were not ‘grants’ in the way we get grants from EPSRC or UKRI – they are grant investments. Various companies in control of the BMGF are shareholders in Pfizer and Moderna. In return for sinking $50mil+ into Moderna, Gates’s foundation took a large slice of Moderna’s shares.
Further, Gates sells access to “investment opportunities” through GAVI COVAX and AMC. The ‘investor’ (usually a rich western govt or pharma/healthcare company) gives money to GAVI in their rich country where they make profits and need a tax write-off… then, they get included in the contract with some LMIC govt to sell them vaccines. The whole model works by shifting where the pharma/healthcare company make their profits. Pharma companies ‘invest’ by subsidising vax initially and then, over time the contract shifts to the country’s govt paying extortionate rates for future vax.
As one of the links above says – as the world keeps getting sicker Gates keeps getting richer. He invested $555mil into COVID vax companies during 2019/20 and has made an estimated $4bil return. Nice work if you can get it.
FDA Adviser Inadvertently Confirms Pfizer is Doing Gain-of-Function Research
BY WILL JONES | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | FEBRUARY 1, 2023
They’re starting to come now – the ‘debunkings’ of the Pfizer undercover video sting, in which executive Jordon Trishton Walker, “Director of Research and Development – Strategic Operations and mRNA Scientific Planning”, tells his ‘date’ that Pfizer is looking to mutate the virus “so we could create preemptively developed new vaccines, right”.
Pfizer released a statement on Friday, which notably did not deny that Dr. Walker works for the company (a fact which has anyway been confirmed via internet searches). Now the latest ‘debunking’ effort comes from Medpage Today.
After making the odd claim that “it is currently unclear if the man in the video is actually an employee of Pfizer, and if that is his real name” (journalism isn’t what it used to be), writer Michael DePeau-Wilson notes that Pfizer’s statement “summarily debunk[ed] the claims made in the video”, as the company stated that it “has not conducted gain of function or directed evolution research” related to its “ongoing development of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine”.
While it is true that the statement does say this, it also says that “we have conducted research where the original SARS-CoV-2 virus has been used to express the spike protein from new variants of concern”. Furthermore, it admits that:
When a full virus does not contain any known gain of function mutations, such virus may be engineered to enable the assessment of antiviral activity in cells. In addition, in vitro resistance selection experiments are undertaken in cells incubated with SARS-CoV-2 and nirmatrelvir in our secure Biosafety level 3 (BSL3) laboratory to assess whether the main protease can mutate to yield resistant strains of the virus.
Despite the initial denial, then, what is being described here plainly is gain-of-function research – after all, the company is engineering the original virus to express the spike protein from new variants of concern, variants which are ‘of concern’ precisely because their spike protein has immune-evasive properties.
In case there is any doubt about this, FDA vaccine adviser Dr. Paul Offit inadvertently confirms it in the Medpage piece.
“Usually, when people talk about gaining function, they’re talking about making it so that the virus is either more deadly or more easily transmitted or that it now can jump species,” Dr. Offit says.
“[T]rying to make the virus more immune-evasive or more contagious… would be considered gain-of-function research,” he adds.
Right, so exactly what Pfizer has said it is doing – engineering “the original SARS-CoV-2 virus… to express the spike protein from new variants of concern”.
Offit tries to obfuscate, stressing that “Pfizer has been working with an mRNA platform that is coded for coronavirus spike proteins, not a whole virus”.
Yes, the vaccine does not use whole virus. But no one said it does. The matter at hand is what Pfizer is doing to the virus as part of its vaccine development research. And Pfizer is clear that it is engineering “the original SARS-CoV-2 virus… to express the spike protein from new variants of concern”. The whole virus, note.
Offit then implies that it isn’t gain-of-function research because the variant has already been created by “mother nature” and Pfizer is just reproducing what nature has already done.
If there was some evil hand back there that was trying to make the virus more immune-evasive or more contagious, that would be considered gain-of-function research, but it’s not happening. The evil hand is mother nature.
But even if the variant already exists in nature, that doesn’t mean it’s not gain-of-function research to engineer a virus to gain the immune-evasive mutation in the lab. Besides, how can you be sure you’re producing the exact same variant and not some subtly (or not-so-subtly) new and more immune-evasive variant?
Offit then appears to betray an ignorance of the process of making the vaccine, as he says the “remarkably effective” development involved sequencing SARS-CoV-2 in “a matter of months”. In fact, the virus was sequenced several times even in the last week of December 2019, and took a couple of days each time, not months.
Perhaps needing to restore his reputation with the politico-medical establishment after his criticism of the boosters last month (is this why he was given the job of defending Pfizer?), he is now effusive with praise for the mRNA vaccines. “This is the best medical achievement in my lifetime,” he says. “And my lifetime includes the development of the polio vaccine.”
Thus, despite the denials that what Pfizer is doing is gain-of-function research – denials which presumably take advantage of the fact that ‘gain-of-function’ is not rigorously defined – it’s clear that what Pfizer admits to doing falls squarely within the definition cited by Dr. Offit, namely the commonly accepted one, which includes making the virus more “immune-evasive”.
And they appear to tacitly acknowledge that, which is why they make their excuses. In Pfizer’s case, that it is “required by U.S. and global regulators for all antiviral products” and “carried out by many companies and academic institutions in the U.S. and around the world”. In Offit’s case that Pfizer was just copying “mother nature”.
In fact, though, as Dr. Robert Malone has pointed out, Pfizer has previously been upfront that it is doing this research, including in an August 2021 article in STAT News, and almost nothing in the undercover video is new. Why such a fuss was made about scrubbing it from the internet is therefore an interesting question – though this may be more linked to the sensation around it than the facts, which Pfizer’s response anyway did not deny. How could it, when those facts were already on public record?
Perhaps the main lesson, then, is that we all need to be paying more attention.
We also need to think hard about what kind of research should be allowed and what should be banned. The reaction to the Project Veritas video suggests a strong feeling that this kind of work should not be done – including when it is (supposedly) imitating what nature has already created. The fear in the public is real and justified, and relates to the folly of engineering viruses to make them worse. Can this ever be a good idea? My feeling is there’s no need to go beyond the viruses and variants nature already provides us with, and to stick to using real specimens, not engineered ones. But the current regulatory regime and scientific establishment clearly disagrees.
Whatever the right answer, we need to be able to talk about this properly. Not be subject to global, military grade censorship when someone tries to raise the topic as a matter of public concern, albeit in a sensational (and entertaining) way.
What is covered by the “pictures of the Russian train”?
By Konstantin Asmolov – New Eastern Outlook – 31.01.2023
We recently wrote about the ways the United States’ allegations of North Korean munitions shipments to Russia had created a new standard of proof. However, it appears that the US side is not content with having hit rock bottom once again.
On January 20, 2023 National Security Council Strategic Communications Coordinator John Kirby raised new allegations against the Wagner PMC and Russia, claiming that the US had presented its intelligence findings to the relevant expert group of the UN Security Council (Committee 1718, which is in charge of sanctions against the DPRK). Although this was the first time ever any “evidence” had been presented, it was unfortunately a very peculiar type of proof.
The world was shown “rare, declassified photographs of Russian rail cars traveling between Russia and North Korea in November” and what Kirby described as the original delivery of North Korean weapons to the Russian PMC. According to the US statement, the photos were of a five-car train that ran between the Khasan (Russian Federation) and Tumangan stations on November 18 and 19, 2022, and those cars contained ammunition for Wagner.
“We obviously condemn North Korea’s actions and call on North Korea to immediately stop these shipments to Wagner,” Kirby said at the start of the daily White House press briefing. He then stated that “while we estimate that the amount of material delivered to Wagner has not changed the dynamics of the fight in Ukraine, we anticipate that it will continue to receive North Korean weapons systems” and therefore “will not preclude imposing additional sanctions if deemed appropriate at the UN”. As an aside, it was noted that North Korea continues to circumvent sanctions with the help of Russia and China.
On January 23, State Department spokesman Ned Price also stated that the United States and South Korea regularly discuss how to counter threats from North Korea, including “the supply of weapons and other military equipment from North Korea to Wagner units for use in Ukraine”.
Not coincidentally, not only Russian but also Western experts who deal with North Korea professionally have noted this reference with some surprise. Even those who dislike the North reacted in the style of “maybe the US has other evidence that has not been shown to us, but this is just a hint.”
Asked by RIA Novosti if it could be said with certainty that the pictures show weapons being transported from the DPRK to Russia, NK News director Chad O’Carroll said the photos do not show what is called hard evidence that would confirm US claims. The photos DO NOT show weapons or grenades being loaded and only include an image of Russian rail cars in North Korea – which, he adds, Russian media have also written about. That White House officials, according to O’Carroll, “show some level of specificity by releasing satellite images of a certain date showing rail cars and cargo” only means that Washington is very confident in its intelligence, but “anyone would be happy to see more detailed evidence”.
Another US expert noted that the pictures provided by Kirby show covered rail cars in which containers of ammunition would not fit, especially since they are loaded on platforms and not in boxcars. He also pointed out that “the versions voiced by Washington keep changing. In September, they claimed that North Korea was supplying Russia with millions of artillery shells and missiles. They claimed Pyongyang was trying to make it appear that the supplies were going to the Middle East and Africa, but in fact they were going to Russia. Now that version is forgotten – there is a new one. Meanwhile, one million shells is 50,000 tons, which is several large ships.”
The claim that the data were sent to the committee that investigated the sanctions is also not identical to the fact that the experts who examined them agreed with the American version.
In this context, the author will try to explain to the audience what more reasonable evidence of this kind would look like, using pictures of the train: Here is a picture of what looks like a military factory, and of containers of ammunition being loaded into wagons; here is a traceable route (because it is not particularly difficult to trace their path through the consignor system) by which a train from North Korea went directly into the front line area where it was unloaded, whereupon the shell shortage ended in that section of the front line. Such things can still be used as evidence, although indeed some questions remain.
The second thing that came to the author’s mind was a quote from a Russian cartoon, “This picture is useful: it covers a hole in the wall,” and he draws attention to two events that paralleled Kirby’s statement.
The first event is that on January 19, 2023, the day before Kirby’s statement, the Pentagon asked United States Forces Korea (USFK) to provide some of its equipment in support of Ukraine, stressing that its security operations on the Korean Peninsula would not be “affected in any way” by this move. USFK spokesman Col. Isaac Taylor said, “The Department of Defense continues to provide military assistance from its reserves in support of Ukraine. US forces in Korea have been asked to support this effort by providing some of their equipment… This does not affect our operations or our ability to fulfill our ironclad commitment to protect our ally, the Republic of Korea. There should be no doubt that we are ready to fight tonight as well”.
Taylor did not specify, however, what equipment, or in what quantity, would be delivered for use in Ukraine. The ROK Department of Defense also declined to comment on the issue.
The New York Times had previously reported that the US Department of Defense had drawn on US artillery stockpiles in South Korea and Israel because of Ukraine’s urgent need for munitions assistance.
USDOD deputy spokeswoman Sabrina Singh clarified this information, pointing out that the withdrawal of munitions and military equipment from US depots in South Korea and other countries in support of Ukraine had no impact on US defense capabilities and had little to do with reducing domestic stockpiles. It has also come to light that the US is in talks with Korean military contractors to replenish empty depots.
To the author, this information indicates two important things.
First, despite the loud declarations about the danger of the North Korean threat and the need to give money to counter it, it appears that the US does not in fact particularly believe that the North will attack the South in the relatively near future. Otherwise, they would not have moved an arsenal to Ukraine from a place where these munitions could be urgently needed.
Second, the fact that ammunition is being sent from Korea means that the arsenal of democracy is not bottomless and is slowly running out. Weapons and ammunition even need to be withdrawn from long-term storage. As we noted in one of our articles, it appears that their talk of Moscow’s “ammunition shortage” is masking their own ammunition scarcity, which is not so much affecting Russia as it is Ukraine and its allies.
Combined with a number of other news items, this suggests that the Europeans are growing weary of the conflict and increasingly reluctant to hand over new arms tranches to Kiev. This is a rather important sign, suggesting that in a certain situation Kiev will come to understand that for all the need to “defend democracy,” it has to do it alone.
The second event is a statement by Russian Foreign Intelligence that Ukrainian authorities are placing munitions from the West in nuclear power plants because they know that Moscow will not dare to bomb them. Foreign Intelligence Director Sergei Naryshkin said, “The Foreign Intelligence Service receives reliable information that Ukrainian forces are storing weapons and ammunition supplied by the West on the premises of nuclear power plants. This applies to the most expensive and scarce missiles for Haymar’s multiple rocket launchers and foreign air defense systems, as well as large-caliber artillery ammunition the AFU lacks most. Just in the last week of December 2022, several railroad cars with lethal cargo were delivered from abroad to the Rovno NPP via the Rafalovka station.”
Naryshkin’s statement does not contain exhaustive evidence, but the reasoning is somewhat more detailed than Kirby’s and contains some specifics. Apparently, it is precise data on where and how Ukrainian ammunition stocks move.
Mykhailo Podolyak, advisor to the head of the Ukrainian Presidential Office, then stated on social networks that “Ukraine has never stored weapons on the territory of the nuclear power plant” and noted that Ukraine is “always open” to inspection bodies, especially the IAEA.
In this context, the author once again reminds us that it is not unusual in war to attribute to the enemy acts committed by one’s own side in order to divert attention from oneself. So if you want to make the next lofty claims of DPRK intrigue, look at the holes in the wall this picture covers.
Konstantin Asmolov, PhD in History, is a leading research fellow at the Center for Korean Studies of the Institute of China and Modern Asia, the Russian Academy of Sciences.
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Why Saudi Ties to 9/11 Mean U.S. Ties to 9/11
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Media interest in Saudi Arabian connections to the crimes of 9/11 has centered on calls for the release of the 28 missing pages from the Joint Congressional Inquiry’s report. However, those calls focus on the question of hijacker financing and omit the most interesting links between the 9/11 attacks and Saudi Arabia—links that implicate powerful people in the United States. Here are twenty examples. … continue
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