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A Tale of Two Reporters in Moscow

Malcolm Muggeridge, Walter Duranty, and the collision of ideology with evidence

Malcolm Muggeridge, Moscow correspondent for the Manchester Guardian
By John Leake | Courageous Discourse | November 7, 2022

Blinded by Ideology: Part 4 in a series on Willful Blindness

Malcolm Muggeridge was an exceptionally talented journalist who lived in Moscow in 1933, working for the Manchester Guardian. Though attracted to communism in his youth, the experience of being in Stalin’s Russia and observing what was going on in it caused him to become disillusioned. Especially disturbing was his realization that Stalin’s army and police were—as part of their collectivization program—starving millions of landowning peasants (known as kulaks) in the Ukraine by confiscating their grain. This massive organized crime—known as the Holodomor—resulted in the deaths of millions in the winter of 1933.

Muggeridge was the only western journalist to report what was going on. When his reports were published, many of his fellow writers—including George Bernard Shaw, Aldous Huxley, Jean-Paul Sartre, Upton Sinclair and Theodore Dreiser, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb—refused to believe them and passionately asserted that Muggeridge was spreading falsehoods about Stalin’s regime. Muggeridge was related to the Webbs by marriage, and years later he told a funny story about Beatrice.

I remember Mrs. Webb, who after all was a very cultivated upper-class liberal-minded person, an early member of the Fabian Society and so on, saying to me, ‘Yes, it’s true, people disappear in Russia.’ She said it with such great satisfaction that I couldn’t help thinking that there were a lot of people in England whose disappearance she would have liked to organize.”

For decades, Muggeridge’s accurate reporting of the Holodomor was denied and suppressed. The dominant narrative of Stalin’s Russia in the early thirties was that propagated by the New York Times Moscow bureau chief, Walter Duranty, who vehemently denied the Holodomor. While Muggeridge’s true and courageous reporting was denied, Duranty won a Pulitzer Price for his concealment of one of the greatest crimes of the 20th Century. It’s a testament to the power of Duranty’s mendacious work that most Americans have still never heard of the Holodomor.

Walter Duranty, Moscow bureau chief for the New York Times

Over the last two years I’ve often thought about Muggeridge and Duranty as I have watched courageous scholars like Dr. Peter McCullough persecuted and censored, while COVID-19 vaccine ideologues are rewarded. Most notable is the COVID-19 vaccine propagandist, Dr. Peter Hotez, who was recently nominated for the Nobel Prize.

One of the most bizarre features of our bizarre time is that an experimental, gene transfer technology has become an object of unshakable devotion. Among members of the COVID-19 Vaccine Cult, belief in the substance (about which they know nothing) is an article of faith.

In the 1930s, 40s, and even 50s, many of the most prominent journalists, writers, intellectuals, and artists believed in Stalin’s Cult of Personality. Muggeridge knew (from his own observations) that they weren’t seeing the reality of Stalin’s regime. Because they viewed the world through the highly distorting lens of ideology, they couldn’t see what was right in front of them.

November 7, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Why Does the UKHSA Vaccine Surveillance Report Never Mention Side-Effects?

BY AMANUENSIS | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | NOVEMBER 3, 2022

In the past few months I’ve read newspaper articles warning of the increased risk of death following gardening, stress at work, solar flares, sleeping in front of the television, hot weather, cold weather, shock of high energy bills, the price of food, laughing too much and sleeping in the wrong position – these recent warnings add to the multitude of stories on the health consequences of our dietary choices, sedentary lifestyle and climate change. If that wasn’t scary enough, we’ve also seen efforts to educate the public about how common sudden deaths are in younger adults and teenagers. Given this background of suddenly emerging risks to life resulting from our modern lifestyle, it is clearly very important to fully understand all risks that might be emerging resulting from the Covid vaccines, no matter how trivial.

With the above in mind, it is perhaps rather surprising that the Vaccine Surveillance Report from the UKHSA has never actually mentioned vaccine side-effects or complications. Sure, the word ‘safe’ is typically used a few times in each report, but there’s never been a mention of side-effects and their rates. They don’t even like to use the term ‘rare side-effects’ – as far as the Vaccine Surveillance Reports are concerned the vaccines are simply ‘safe’. They’ve never reported any of the data from the Yellow Card side-effect reporting system, nor mentioned any of the increasing numbers of scientific studies reporting on an increasing number of ‘complications’ after receiving the various vaccines.

I suppose at this point I could stop – since side-effects aren’t covered in the Vaccine Surveillance Reports, and this is a series of posts reviewing the UKHSA Vaccine Surveillance Reports, there’s nothing to discuss.  However, vaccine side-effects and complications are important, so I hope that I can be forgiven for exploring this aspect of the vaccines a little further in this post.

Over the past 18 months there have been many studies which have found worrying high side-effect rates following vaccination. The results of these studies have been discussed in multiple places across the internet, and many of these studies have been covered by the Daily Sceptic. The only common theme has been the remarkable insistence by authorities worldwide on ignoring the results of these studies, except where the evidence has become overwhelming and they are forced into some response.

The vast array of side-effects found by these investigative studies is now too voluminous to cover completely here, so instead I’ll focus on a few specific side-effects and discuss the response to these new findings.

Thrombocytopenia and blood-clotting related problems

The first inkling that there might be a risk of thrombocytopenia (low blood platelet count) after vaccination came in January 2021, a mere month after the vaccinations started, after a doctor in New York died of complications following acute thrombocytopenia about two weeks after being given the Pfizer vaccine.  Pfizer responded with a statement that this definitely wasn’t anything to do with their vaccine, despite acute thrombocytopenia being relatively rare and the doctor not being in a risk group. In the months that followed, many more cases of thrombocytopenia and other blood clotting disorders occurred, from Pfizer and the other vaccine offerings, but the official response remained coincidence. Eventually the volume of problems became too large to ignore, and in June 2021 the U.K. authorities decided that those aged under 40 shouldn’t be offered the AstraZeneca vaccine. I found this restriction to the AstraZeneca vaccine a bit odd, as the other vaccines appeared to have similarly high rates of clotting problems in the weeks following vaccination, but it appears that the authorities had chosen their demon to blame. Of course, older adults weren’t too keen to be told that they were going to have to take these risks, and demand for the AstraZeneca vaccine plummeted. A few months later the AstraZeneca vaccine was only made available to those who were unable to take the Pfizer vaccine (the only alternative in the U.K. at that time). Even though the known problems of clotting related disorders post-vaccination are bad enough, it isn’t clear if the instances of severe clotting related problems (resulting in hospitalisation) are also accompanied by higher numbers of clotting problems below the clinical threshold (‘microclotting’), or whether these mild cases might have longer term consequences. Another area of post-vaccine effects that demands more research.

Myocarditis

The risk from myocarditis first appeared in a leaked report out of Israel in April 2021 suggesting worryingly high rates occurring in younger males. Quite why it was deemed necessary for this safety-related information to be kept secret isn’t clear, but authorities worldwide responded quickly once the information was leaked to reassure everyone that this risk was very very low and that the vaccines were very very safe (and effective, of course). While the official line is that post-vaccination myocarditis is rare, studies keep on finding higher and higher incidence rates, particularly in the young male risk group. Indeed, in August a scientific paper describing the impact of Covid vaccination in Thailand suggested that the conditions suggestive of myocarditis and pericarditis after vaccination were found in over 29% of vaccine recipients aged between 13 and 18 years of age, and a similar result has since been described after vaccination in Switzerland. The longer term impact of these ‘mild problems related to the heart’ aren’t yet known.

Period related problems

All clinical studies into side-effects are mindful of the need to treat any issues related to sexual function carefully – individuals are less likely to seek medical attention when it comes to sex-related problems and those related to our reproductive systems in general. Thus it should have been a huge red-flag when anecdotal reports of heavy or missed periods following vaccination started to appear early in 2021. Alas, our authorities simply responded with the usual ‘it definitely isn’t the vaccines’ and ignored the problem. The complex situation regarding reporting of side-effects related to reproductive function is nicely illustrated by the number of problems reported to the Yellow Card side-effect reporting system – early May 2021 saw a huge increase in reporting of side-effects related to menstruation. The reason? Most likely, an article on the problem on BBC Radio 4’s Women’s Hour in late March, in which listeners were urged to report any problems into the Yellow-Card system. It is very disappointing that our side-effect reporting system could be so heavily influenced by a radio programme in this way. Really there should have been active monitoring of post-vaccination complications and side-effects, but the inadequate Yellow Card system is all we had. Official guidelines now state that problems related to menstruation are relatively rare but even if they do occur they’ll be of no consequence whatsoever and women shouldn’t worry about taking the vaccines. Eventually we’ll find out if this reassurance was correct.

What’s also troubling is the way that the only side-effects that are discussed in the traditional media are the ones that have been officially recognised (albeit under duress). What about the increase in hospital consultant activity for stroke victims over the last 18 months?

Or the increase in consultant activity for hormonal problems?

Or the increase in referrals for suspected cancers?

Like the significant increase in excess deaths that we’ve seen this year, there seems to be much going on but little interest on the part of our authorities to investigate these issues at all. Maybe they’re all the result of the lockdowns, maybe they’re due to Covid itself, maybe it was the vaccines, and perhaps it is all just a massive coincidence – but it simply isn’t good enough to decide that it can’t possibly be the vaccines and refuse to even discuss undertaking the research that might clarify the situation.

At least in recent weeks we’ve had an increase in calls for some robust investigations to be undertaken, such as discussed in the Daily Sceptic in mid October.  Then again, we’ve also had the brief hour-and-a-half spent a week ago by the House of Commons to debate the issues around vaccine safety. Despite some MPs detailing concerns about the safety of the vaccines, the Chair was quick to respond with empty reassurances and the debate ended with a statement urging people to get vaccinated to protect themselves, others and the NHS. I fear that there’ll be quite some way to go before the full impact of the vaccines is accepted by our authorities.

An important aspect of the rate of side-effects and complications is the impact on the risk-benefit analysis used by our authorities to determine who should take the vaccines. The risk of side-effects should be tolerable so long as the benefit offered by any medical product is greater than the risks. Since the vaccines were introduced back in December 2020 we have seen marked changes both in the risks posed by the vaccines (more side-effects and complications have come to light) and the benefits offered (the vaccines clearly offer little protection against infection, their protection against hospitalisation and death appears to be rather less than claimed, and at the same time Covid appears to have evolved to become much less virulent). In addition, nearly everyone in the Western world will now have had a Covid infection, resulting in at least some natural immunity. Unfortunately, our authorities have never actually published any of their risk-benefit analyses and how the ratio changes with age and morbidity, so we can’t tell how new information on risks and benefits has changed the calculation. Then again, I suppose it is easier to be inconsistent if you never actually tell anyone what factors your decisions are based upon.

One of the big problems regarding the Covid mRNA vaccines in particular is that there were only sparse data published on how long the mRNA would remain active in the body and where it would end up (pharmacokinetics and biodistribution). Originally the reassuring voices told us that the mRNA would break down within hours, and that the mRNA vesicles would remain close to the point of injection. However, evidence has emerged in the months since our authorities proceeded to inject everyone in the world that has suggested that the mRNA remains active for many weeks following vaccination, that it travels to multiple organs in the body and that the pharmaceutical companies knew this prior to the vaccines being released. Even worse, a recent study has suggested that the mRNA is present in breast milk for a short time following vaccination (for fairness I must point out that our authorities still think that it is completely and utterly safe for recently vaccinated mothers to continue breastfeeding). I find it concerning that we’re only now starting to find out the full complexity of the interaction of the mRNA vaccines with the body.

Recent studies have estimated the current rate of serious short-term side-effects after the Covid vaccines at around one in 800. I find this number interesting, as I suspect that this is as bad a side-effect rate as could be found for a supposedly benign or prophylactic treatment. I estimate that an incidence rate of around one in 1,000 marks the point at which problems become apparent even to a casual observer, provided sufficient numbers are given the medical product. If a side-effect rate for a benign or prophylactic treatment is worse than this people would notice and demand that the medicine or medical treatment is withdrawn. Thankfully, there aren’t too many examples of terrible medical mistakes – probably the most famous example is Thalidomide, where around one in 1,000 mothers who took the drug gave birth to a child with serious physical malformations. Even so, it took three years before the nature of the problem was understood and Thalidomide was withdrawn from sale. It is perhaps interesting to note that at least in the early stages of the problem being recognised the blame was put on the nuclear tests that had occurred in previous years – was this the 1950s equivalent of ‘climate change’?

Where serious side-effects are more common than this for a supposedly benign product, the response is typically more rapid. The famous example here is Elixir Sulphanilamide, a treatment for bacterial infections created in the 1930s that caused over 100 deaths in the few weeks that it was for sale. The problem with Elixir Sulphanilamide was that it hadn’t been tested before release and the manufacturers hadn’t realised that a primary component was highly toxic. The owner of the company that made the elixir famously denied responsibility, stating that “we have been supplying a legitimate professional demand and not once could have foreseen the unlooked for results”. It was this scandal that led to the creation of the FDA in the USA, along with stringent requirements for the testing of new medical products. After the disaster it was demanded that never again would a medical treatment be released and given to many thousands of people without being fully tested to explore all potential problems (and not simply the ‘looked-for’ problems). As a side note, the outcome of the Elixir Sulphanilamide scandal was that the scientist who developed the formula committed suicide as a result of the extreme guilt of causing so much harm, while the company that released the medicine without testing was given a nominal fine. The manufacturer went on to produce further drugs (and profits) and after a succession of takeovers is now part of the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline.  Funny how it all works.

Next time I’ll discuss one of the most wildly enthusiastic aspects of the Vaccine Surveillance Report – the predictions made by computer-models of the reduction in infections, hospitalisations and deaths offered by the vaccines.

Amanuensis is an ex-academic and senior Government scientist. He blogs at Bartram’s Folly.

November 6, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Jen Psaki says censorship deposition would be “burdensome” for her family life and new MSNBC gig

By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | November 6, 2022

Jen Psaki, the former White House press secretary, and Department of Justice (DOJ) are fighting a subpoena requiring her to testify in the lawsuit filed by Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general – alleging that the Biden administration colluded with social media platforms to censor certain viewpoints on the pandemic.

The motion to quash the subpoena was filed in a federal court in Virginia. It argues that the deposition would be “extremely burdensome” for Psaki, who is preparing to be the host of a new show on MSNBC.

We obtained a copy of the motion for you here.

“Among other things, I understand that I would need to devote several days preparing for the deposition, as well as attending the deposition itself, and that would be highly disruptive to both my work and my family,” Psaki wrote in the request.

Psaki has in the past admitted that the Biden administration was flagging people’s speech to social media platforms.

The DOJ argued that Psaki’s deposition would result in a debate over executive privilege considering she was a top adviser to President .

The DOJ lawyer said: “If permitted to proceed, the deposition of Ms. Psaki would inevitably set the Executive and Judicial Branches ‘on a collision course’ through adjudications of executive privilege, thrusting the court into ‘the awkward position of evaluating the Executive’s claims of confidentiality and autonomy,’ and ‘difficult questions of separation of powers and checks and balances’ would quickly be pushed to the fore.”

“Plaintiffs have not identified any evidence showing or even suggesting that Ms. Psaki ever communicated with any social-media company in her capacity as Press Secretary about misinformation, much less that she ‘exercised coercive power’ to compel a social-media company to take any action,” the DOJ added.

Other defendants that have tried to use a similar “burdensome” defense have already been shut down by District Judge Terry Doughty who said, “The Court finds that both the public interest and the interest of the other parties in preserving free speech significantly outweighs the inconvenience the three deponents will have in preparing for and giving their depositions.”

November 6, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Another Extraordinary Murder in Washington D.C.

Mary Mahoney was allegedly the victim of a botched robbery in the Georgetown Starbucks

Mary Mahoney, murdered on July 7, 1997
By John Leake | Courageous Discourse | November 6, 2022

When Seth Rich was murdered in Washington D.C. on July 10, 2016, the Metropolitan Police Department immediately proposed that it was a “botched robbery.” The case reminded me of the murder of Mary Mahoney in a Georgetown Starbucks on July 7, 1997.

Mary Mahoney was an intern in Bill Clinton’s White House during his first term. She then got a job working as a manager of Starbucks in Georgetown, which was frequented by many notable figures in the Washington political establishment. Her murder (along with her two coworkers) was the first triple murder in the neighborhood’s history. Prior to the crime, not a single homicide had been committed in Georgetown for eighteen months.

Robbery appeared an unlikely motive, as none of the day’s cash proceeds had been taken from the store. Mahoney’s murder occurred during the same period that Newsweek reporter Mike Isikoff was investigating allegations that President Clinton had sexually harassed White House employees—an investigation that would ultimately lead him to Monica Lewinsky. Attorneys for Paula Jones were also seeking corroborating cases of Clinton’s sexual harassment of young women.

A year after the murder occurred, the police received a tip to examine a man named Carl D. Cooper from a woman who had just watched an America’s Most Wanted episode on the triple homicide. For several months, investigators found no evidence linking Cooper to the crime. Then another informant came forth—a former drug addict named Eric Butera, who was himself later murdered in “a robbery gone wrong.”

Based on information gleaned from Butera’s associates, Carl Cooper was arrested. After a grueling four-day interrogation, Cooper confessed, stating that the triple homicide was a “botched robbery” (which just happened to be the official working hypothesis). While held at gunpoint, Mary, refused to give Cooper the keys to the safe—a heroic act to save her 50 billion market cap employer from losing a few thousand dollars. Because Mary refused to give Cooper the keys, he shot her five times, including a shot to the back of the head. He then shot her two coworkers, and then left the store without taking a dime.

Cooper was convicted on the grounds of his confession to the Metropolitan Police. However, in a subsequent interview with an FBI investigator, Cooper recanted his confession. Although the FBI investigator unequivocally stated this in his testimony, the court concluded that Cooper’s initial confession was sufficient for his conviction. Cooper was initially represented by a court-appointed attorney, but after his trial began, his court-appointed attorney was joined by the prominent Washington D.C. defender, Francis D. Carter, who initially represented Monica Lewinsky when Monica stated her willingness to remain silent about her affair with Clinton. Carter drafted an affidavit for Monica in which she stated that she had NOT had an affair with the president. Carter was forced to withdraw this affidavit after Monica made statements to Lynda Tripp (equipped with a secret recording device) confirming her affair with Clinton.

That Carter joined the Carl Cooper defense team strikes me as very peculiar, especially given that Carter did not change the defense strategy. I wonder if Carter’s primarily job was—under cover of client-attorney confidentiality—to deliver a message to Carter pertaining to his sentencing prospects and what he might reasonably expect for his wife (to whom he was apparently very attached) if he stuck with his confession.

Clinton Attorney General Janet Reno initially sought the death penalty for Cooper— the first death-penalty matter brought to trial in the District in nearly 30 years, but federal prosecutors later withdrew this request. To date, no evidence has been found linking Cooper to the triple homicide.

In a related case, the District of Columbia was successfully sued for the wrongful death of Metropolitan Police informant, Eric Butera, as the jury concluded the police had been negligent in protecting him during an undercover operation to obtain more information about the Starbucks triple slaying. The woman who gave the initial tip to America’s Most Wanted later publicly accused the police of refusing to protect her and fell under suspicion for being motivated primarily by the reward money offered by the show.

Since the murders occurred, the crime has been the subject of extensive media coverage, several documentary television features, and hundreds of online commentators. Conventional newspaper coverage of the crimes—primarily conducted by the Washington Post and the Washington Times—consisted entirely of straightforward reporting of information provided by police and judicial officers.

Given the controversial nature of the police investigation and judicial proceedings against the man who was charged for committing the crime, it is surprising how little the mainstream media questioned official accounts. Likewise, the TV documentaries simply presented narratives provided by law officers as though they contained nothing that was questionable. This is particularly notable given that substantial details of the official narrative, provided by the same investigating officers, are represented differently in different documentaries. Moreover, some of officers’ statements in the documentaries pertaining to Starbucks procedures and security protocols are NOT consistent with what a veteran Starbucks manager told me.

I would like to interview Carl D. Cooper in prison, but I cannot find him in the federal prison system. Though I have not had the time and resources to dig deep into this component of the story, my preliminary research suggests that his whereabouts in the federal prison system have been concealed.

In 2016, the lead homicide detective in the Mary Mahoney case — Detective James Trainium — published a book titled How the Police Generate False Confessions. It’s a detailed examination of how the police obtain false confessions, and the author is clearly writing from personal experience.

November 6, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

An Extraordinary Unsolved Murder in Washington D.C.

In the matter of SETH RICH, the FBI asks for 66 years to release his laptop contents Nov 5 DNC Staffer Seth Rich, murdered on July 10, 2016

By John Leake | Courageous Discourse | November 5, 2022

“A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both.” —James Madison

As an investigative author I’ve often dealt with the extreme frustration of making federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and state Open Records Act requests. So often, it seems that federal and state agencies don’t want to release the information, delay in responding, and then cite multiple exceptions to the law in order to justify keeping the information secret.

I therefore felt sympathy for my fellow Texan, Brian Huddleston, when I saw the recent Epoch Times report that his FOIA request for the information found on Seth Rich’s laptop is being thwarted by the FBI, which asked the judge who ruled in Huddleston’s favor to grant the Bureau 66 years to fulfill the request.

Readers of this Substack may find the FBI’s request reminiscent of the FDA’s request for 55 years to release COVID-19 vaccine data. Given the unfortunate reality of human mortality, one wonders what public interest will be served 55 or 66 years from now, apart from satisfying the curiosity of historians who aren’t yet born.

The murder of Seth Rich—in the middle of one of the most brutal presidential election years in history—has always struck me as an example of the authorities NOT investigating a matter of public interest. The mainstream media and half the country were so blinded by partisan passions that they couldn’t see the grounds for suspecting that the young man’s murder was politically motivated. Just a few hours after the incident occurred—before there was any time to perform an investigation—the Metropolitan Police Department announced that the murder appeared to be a “botched robbery.”

Since Seth Rich was murdered on July 10, 2016—12 days before Wikileaks published embarrassing DNC e-mails—there has been much speculation that he could have been the source because he was upset about how the DNC had treated Bernie Sanders. A good investigator wouldn’t speculate about the crime, but he would certainly notice that, statistically speaking, the murder is extraordinary.

Seth Rich was shot in the back near his apartment building, and though he was carrying a valuable watch, wallet, and cell phone, these were not taken by the assailant. Perhaps it was a botched robbery, as the Metropolitan Police Department quickly announced, but shooting a guy in the back without taking his valuables is not typical of armed robbery. Other robberies in the same neighborhood around the same time followed the conventional pattern of the assailant threatening the victim and demanding his or her valuables instead of opening fire on the victim.

In the year 2016, there were 135 homicides in Washington D.C., which has a resident population of 672,000, which comes to approximately one murder per 5000 residents— a dramatic decline from the city’s murder rate in the early nineties. Incidentally, the Metropolitan Police conducted an analysis of homicide for the years 1998-2000—after homicide rates had dropped significantly—and concluded that the primary motives were

1) Argument/conflict

2). Drug related

3). Revenge/retaliation

4). Robbery

5). Gang related.

During this period, homicides were not equally distributed throughout the city, but were concentrated in particular neighborhoods. 92% of the victims were African Americans 3.2% were Hispanic and 3.2% were white. Though one must consider the possibility that homicide trends in DC have changed since 2000 (apart from merely decreasing in numbers) it’s notable that, of the currently unsolved homicides in Washington DC in the year 2016, Seth Rich is the only white victim in a city that is now 44% white.

Julian Assange has always insisted the DNC e-mails were leaked and not hacked. Former NSA technical director William Binney has also insisted that if the DNC e-mails were hacked, it would be child’s play for the NSA to establish the precise routing of the hack, which indicates that the e-mails were more likely leaked by an insider.

Regarding motive, a good investigator would consider the hypothesis that Seth Rich was murdered NOT in retaliation, but to eliminate him as a witness that the DNC e-mails were leaked by an insider and not hacked by Russians. Almost immediately after the embarrassing e-mails were published, the DNC vehemently proclaimed it was Russian hackers who were responsible, though no evidence has been presented to support this accusation.

Regarding the assailant: A good investigator would consider the hypothesis that he was contracted to murder Rich but knew nothing about his target or the motive for killing him. This hypothesis is consistent with Rich being murdered as he approached the entrance to his home—that is, the contract killer was provided only with the address and a photograph of his target.

Another notable aspect of this crime has been the extremely emotional tone of press reporting from the same reporters who so passionately embraced the Russian meddling story. The mere suggestion that Seth Rich’s murder was politically motivated prompted these same people to angrily denounce this (perfectly reasonable hypothesis) as “wild, right wing conspiracy theory” and to demand that reporters cease and desist from exploring this hypothesis.

And yet, given that the crime remains unsolved, why not explore this hypothesis?

November 6, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception | , , , | Leave a comment

How Doctors and Nurses Betrayed Patients – and Themselves

Dr. Vernon Coleman | 21st Century Wire

NOTE: This article was first published over two years ago – on 12.7.20. Sadly, it remains perfectly valid today.

A growing number of doctors and nurses appear to be waking up and questioning the absence of any science behind the coronavirus hoax.

That’s very nice, and I congratulate them.

But what the devil took them so long?

Why did they wait so long to speak out?

Their silence betrayed their patients, their profession and themselves.

Only a complete moron could have thought that this manufactured ‘crisis’ necessitated the closure of hospitals and GP surgeries.

How could doctors stand by seeing cancer patients deprived of essential treatment? The NHS should have been stoned not clapped.

There was never any greater risk than there is with the flu every year.

Indeed, the figures show that the ordinary flu bug has always posed a much bigger risk than the coronavirus.

So far this year the coronavirus has affected 10 million people worldwide.

The flu can affect 1 billion people in the same period.

And the mortality rates for the two are almost identical.

We don’t close down hospitals and clinics whenever the flu appears.

So, obviously, this was a politically motivated closure of hospitals, shops, businesses and so on. And doctors should have seen that.

And just as the closure of hospitals will result in far more deaths than covid 19 so the wearing of masks will result in far more deaths than could possibly be saved. Wearing a mask reduces blood oxygen levels. I have seen car drivers with masks on. I’ve even seen bus drivers wearing masks. These things reduce blood oxygen. There will, before long, be a disaster with a bus crashing because the driver was wearing a mask and became hypoxic.Why else do you think governments everywhere admit that people with respiratory or heart problems don’t have to wear a mask?

And the stupid rules about social distancing were never justified. There was never any science to support them.

Anyone who believes in the twin heresies of social distancing and masks is, by definition, either certifiably insane, a cretin or on the dark side of the human race. Most are left wing, pro EU fascists and believers in the climate change nonsense.

Doctors and nurses who are now waking up to the fact that they’ve been tricked are claiming that they were told that if they spoke out they would be punished.

DANCING NURSES: In 2020, exhibitionist medical staff in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada took to social media and proceeded to make a mockery of a locked-down populace who were ordered to stay at home to in order to ‘save the healthcare system from being overloaded.’

Well, it’s true that the authorities are punishing doctors who dare to question the official line. I know of a doctor in the UK who was struck off the medical register for questioning the coronavirus story. And in the USA Dr Scott Jensen, a doctor who is also a state senator, is being investigated for making statements about the similarity of the coronavirus to the flu and about the way death certificates were being signed.

And it is also true that simple and effective remedies have been banned or demonised simply so that we could all be prepared for the vaccine.

But if most of the doctors in a big hospital spoke out no bureaucrat would dare to strike them all off the register. If 500 doctors stood up for the truth it would be impossible to take away all their licenses.

`I work in a hospital,’ wrote one brave NHS employee. ‘So far none of the nurses, doctors or domestics has been off sick. And patients with the coronavirus are transported all around the hospital, to X-ray, to CT scan and to the ward and yet mysteriously no one gets infected.’

What sort of spineless people are working in health care these days? That’s the sort of excuse popular with lesser war criminals.

Still, looking on the slightly bright side, some of them are waking up and now realise that the coronavirus hoax was exactly that – a piece of political trickery, conceived and executed by people with hidden agendas. The damage done by the hospital closures will be massive. And the mental issues caused by the fear will be long-lasting – even permanent. Millions are suffering from severe depression as a result of the lies that have been told. Suicide rates are going to rocket.

Any doctors who are still social distancing and wearing masks outside the operating theatre should be ashamed of themselves. They, like much of the rest of the population, have been made fools of and if they had any professional pride left they would be red-faced, embarrassed by their own gullibility and ashamed of how easily they’ve been made part of a wicked conspiracy and made to look like fools.

Now is the time for the medical and nursing professions to stand up and to demand some answers and explanations from the leaders of their professions and from the administrators who gave the orders which have led to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.

They should also insist that hospitals are now opened fully, and that patients are told that there is nothing to fear.

For although a growing number of doctors now realise that the coronavirus scare is hoax there are still hospitals and administrators who are behaving as though we were in the middle of an outbreak of the bubonic plague.

The latest piece of lunacy in the NHS is for the people in charge to suggest that patients who want treatment at an Accident and Emergency department should telephone and make an appointment.

NHS England’s national medical director has reportedly told the House of Commons health and social care committee that the health service wanted patients to telephone first and be given a timed slot to attend the A&E department.

I’ve heard everything now.

Patients who are desperate for help, bleeding, in pain, with bones sticking out at funny angles will be expected to telephone and make an appointment to be seen in the accident and emergency department. Triage will, it seems, now be done by teenagers on the telephone. What qualifications will they have? GCSE in woodwork, perhaps?

Distraught relatives will have to telephone and fix an appointment before going to the hospital. Is the plan simply to kill more patients? Did the hospital closures not kill enough?

I will tell you what is going to happen.

Everyone is going to ring for an ambulance. And who can blame them?

As for hospitals, well even the Royal College of Physicians admits that many NHS services will not get back to full capacity for more than a year.

Millions of patients will wait too long. Patients in pain will have to wait for more than a year for treatment. Waiting times will be obscenely long. Tens of thousands will not be seen until it is too late. Tens of thousands of people who could have lived will die.

Around the world the death toll from the hoax will be measured in millions.

Comparatively few will have died of the coronavirus.

The vast majority will have died because they were shut out, abandoned or too frightened to seek help.

And the medical and nursing professions have to take responsibility for all that pain, that sorrow and those deaths.

Doctors should not have accepted the unscientific gibberish behind the coronavirus hoax. Before allowing hospitals to be shut down they should have asked questions. It was never difficult to see that mistakes were being made.

Doctors and nurses betrayed their patients and their professions but they also betrayed themselves.

Too many were happy to accept the weekly applause and the praise when they knew that they deserved neither.

It is time now for the healing professions to make amends.

They should make it clear to the administrators and the politicians that they are no longer prepared to accept the coronavirus nonsense.

They should demand their government’s medical advisors be sacked. They should demand that all members of the elite, medical establishment be sacked too.

They should demand that social distancing be abandoned and that masks should be burned.

They should tell the public that there is nothing to fear.

And they should be prepared to work long hours to clear the backlog of patients as quickly as possible.

There really is no choice.

If doctors and nurses do not stand up then they will be truly unworthy.

This article was originally a script for a YouTube video in July 2020. The video was taken down almost as quickly as it was put up.

Vernon Coleman’s book Coleman’s Laws: Twelve Essential Medical Secrets Which Could Save Your Life is available as an eBook and a paperback on Amazon. His book Superbody: How to Boost Your Immune System is also available as a paperback and an eBook.

November 6, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

How the US regime attempts to control public perception of its aid to Ukraine

By Scott Ritter | RT | November 5, 2022

NBC News has reported that, according to four people familiar with the incident, a phone call between US President Joe Biden and his Ukrainian counterpart, Vladimir Zelensky, turned testy after the Ukrainian leader pressed Biden for more assistance.

On June 15, Biden called Zelensky to inform him of the recent release of some $1 billion in assistance (this included the drawdown of arms and equipment from US Department of Defense inventories valued at $350 million, and $650 million in additional assistance under the department’s Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative). This type of person-to-person communication had become commonplace since Russia’s decision to send troops into Ukraine in February 2022, with Biden informing Zelensky of each major assistance allocation in a program that had, as of June 15, seen the dispatch of some $5.6 billion in American military aid.

This time, however, rather than thank the US president, as had been the previous practice, Zelensky proceeded to ask for more assistance, citing specific requests for equipment that had not been included in the June allocation of aid. At this point, NBC’s sources say, Biden lost his temper. “The American people were being quite generous, and his administration and the US military were working hard to help Ukraine, he said, raising his voice, and Zelensky could show a little more gratitude,” the NBC story reports.

According to NBC, the source of Biden’s anger went beyond the lack of gratitude shown by Zelensky (NBC reports that the two leaders have since warmed to one another), but rather the growing realization on the part of the Biden White House that support for the blank check being written for Ukraine’s war effort is waning among members of Congress on both sides of the aisle. With the Republicans expected to retake control of the House of Representatives and positioned to do the same in the Senate in the upcoming mid-term elections, the Biden administration appears poised to try to squeeze out another $40-60 billion in aid during the lame duck session between the election and when the present term of Congress expires next January. It is expected that this new aid package will be challenged by the Republicans, who will seek to have its consideration postponed until the new Republican-controlled Congress is sworn in.

Shortly before NBC News broke the story of the contentious Biden-Zelensky phone call, The New Yorker ran a glowing review of the state of US-Ukrainian military cooperation. Entitled ‘Inside the US Effort to Arm Ukraine, the piece, authored by Joshua Yaffa, a contributing writer for the magazine, provides an expansive and yet intimate look at the complex interaction between the US and Ukraine about not only the provision of military equipment, but also the active cooperation between US and Ukrainian military and intelligence officials concerning the actual conduct of the conflict, including the provision of targeting data in support of US-provided artillery systems such as the M777 howitzer and the HIMARS multiple rocket launch system.

Its two main messages can be summarized as follows: first, American weapons are helping Ukraine stand up to Russia and showing the world Putin can be defeated, and second, the US is taking every care not to cross any lines that would escalate the conflict into a direct confrontation with Moscow.

Yaffa is an accomplished writer on Russian affairs. His most recent book, ‘Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin’s Russia’, has won several prizes, and he has published numerous articles in The New Yorker about the Russia-Ukraine conflict. But even this extensive journalistic record doesn’t prepare one for the scope and scale of the sources Yaffa was able to draw upon in writing his most recent article. It is a ‘who’s who’ of US and Ukrainian officialdom, both named and unnamed, all of whom are well positioned to provide Yaffa with the kind of inside information that makes his article so attractive, both from an informational aspect, and readability.

On the Ukrainian side, Yaffa interviewed Aleksey Reznikov, Ukraine’s defense minister; Mikhail Podoliak, a top adviser to Zelensky; Aleksey Danilov, Secretary of the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council; and “a senior Ukrainian military official” close to the commander in chief of the military, Valery Zaluzhny. Ukrainian officials habitually interact with Western journalists as part of their effort to shape the narrative about the ongoing conflict with Russia. The surprise isn’t that Yaffa was able to interview these individuals, but rather what they were willing to open up about – the hitherto obscure details of the sensitive cooperation between the US and Ukraine in the actual conduct of the conflict.

The US is very controlling about the release of information about classified cooperation with other nations. This reticence to be transparent extends not only to the US officials involved, but also to the foreign nationals participating in the secret work. In short, there is no way the three Ukrainians would have agreed to sit down and talk to Yaffa about these issues unless their participation had been green-lighted by the Biden administration beforehand.

The extent to which the Biden administration was behind the decision to cooperate with Yaffa on this story becomes clear upon closer examination of the anonymous sources drawn upon for the article. “A Biden administration official involved in Ukraine policy”; “a senior official at the Defense Department”; “a person familiar with Biden White House discussions of Ukraine”; “an administration official”;  “a senior US official”; “a US military official” close to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Milley; “a senior Biden administration official”; and “a senior US intelligence official.”

Numerous other sources, both named and unnamed, were also interviewed by Yaffa.

Anyone with any experience with sensitive national security activities knows that there are two hard-fast truths when it comes to such activities – they are highly classified and compartmentalized, and any unauthorized release of information pertaining to such activities is a serious violation of the law, subject to prosecution and imprisonment for anyone caught leaking such information to the press.

Accordingly, either every source cited by Yaffa had been simultaneously overcome with a Lemming-like desire to jump off a figurative cliff, risking losing their careers and going to prison in order to help the young New Yorker contributing writer pull off the scoop of a lifetime, or the Yaffa article was part and parcel of a Biden administration information operation designed to inject a positive narrative about US-Ukrainian military relations into the mainstream discussion on Ukraine in a concerted effort to shape public perception in the lead-up to the mid-term elections.

My money is on the latter.

Good journalism is all about ‘bottom-up’ reporting, where a reporter conceives a story and then runs it to the ground by seeking out interviews with relevant sources. Stenography is about having a story spoon fed to you by sources for the purpose of serving an agenda that has nothing to do with the pursuit of fact-based truth, but rather shaping public opinion about a matter of importance.

Yaffa’s ‘Inside the US Effort to Arm Ukraine’ is a clever piece of government-dictated stenography disguised as journalism and should be treated as such by all who read it.

November 5, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

Judge rejects Biden regime’s request to delay depositions in social media censorship lawsuit

By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | November 5, 2022

A US District Judge has rejected a request to delay the deposition of top officials in President Biden’s administration in the lawsuit filed by Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general, alleging censorship collusion between the Biden administration and social media companies.

District Judge Terry Doughty rejected a request for a partial stay of the deposition orders he approved for top officials in the current administration. Government attorneys requested a partial stay for the deposition of three officials pending a ruling by the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

The government wants the appeals court to vacate part of the deposition orders for deputy assistant to the president Rob Flaherty, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and Jen Easterly, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency director.

In their request for a partial stay, government lawyers argued that, “high-ranking governmental officials would be diverted from their significant duties and burdened in both preparing and sitting for a deposition, all of which may ultimately prove to be unnecessary if the Court of Appeals grants.”

Judge Doughty rejected the request because the government failed to show that the officials would be irreparably harmed by the depositions. According to the judge, being diverted from “significant duties” does not qualify as irreparable harm.

However, the plaintiffs could be irreparably harmed by the partial stay because they allege that the government violated their  rights, Doughty argued.

Quoting a ruling from another case, Doughty said, “The loss of First Amendment freedoms, even for minimal periods of time, unquestionably constitutes irreparable injury.”

“The Court finds that both the public interest and the interest of the other parties in preserving free speech significantly outweighs the inconvenience the three deponents will have in preparing for and giving their depositions,” Doughty added.

Following the ruling, the three officials will be deposed in December, unless the appeals court approves the government’s writ of mandamus on November 7. The writ requests the court to reverse the deposition orders for the three officials.

We obtained a copy of the order for you here.

November 5, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

NBC Quietly Removes Report Claiming Paul Pelosi Walked Away From Police, “Did Not Immediately Declare” Emergency

By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | November 5, 2022

The Paul Pelosi attack continues to grow more bizarre by the day.

On Friday, sources familiar with the investigation told NBC News that when the police responded to the high-priority call, they had no idea they had been called to the Pelosi residence. What’s more, Pelosi did not immediately declare an emergency or try to leave his home.

“After a ‘knock and announce,’ the front door was opened by Mr. Pelosi. The 82-year-old did not immediately declare an emergency or try to leave his home,” reports NBC. Instead, Pelosi “began walking several feet back into the foyer toward the assailant and away from police.”

What’s more, Pelosi and attacker David DePape were reportedly alone for 30 minutes.

Of note, NBC News has deleted the clip from their Twitter feed and scrubbed it  from their website.

Meanwhile, a neighbor living across from the Pelosis who was awake when the assault took place didn’t hear an alarm or anything unusual.

“No, not a thing, and you know we were awake at that hour in the morning; my husband was awake. We didn’t even hear sirens,” neighbor Sally McNulty told The Epoch Times.

McNulty, who has lived in the neighborhood for 20 years, said everything was quiet around the time of the 2 a.m. attack on Oct. 28.

This is one of the quietest streets in the city,” she said. “You can hear a pin drop at night.”

McNulty said she doesn’t recall ever hearing the Pelosis’ alarm go off in the past, though she has occasionally heard others in the neighborhood.

She said that Paul Pelosi had no enemies she knew of and was well-liked.

Other neighbors declined to comment.

Marjorie Campbell, a former neighbor of the Pelosis for 10 years, told the Daily Mail she recalled fleets of black SUVs surrounding the house around the clock when she stayed there.

Everyone in the neighborhood has alarms on their windows, and if glass were smashed, an alarm would sound, she told the publication. Campbell recalled her computers getting scrambled by alleged security measures to protect the congresswoman.

Nancy Pelosi was at her Pacific Heights home, the site of the attack, on Nov. 2 while several dark SUVs were parked outside. Capitol Police were present, too, as were multiple San Francisco Police Department cars.

Paul Pelosi had surgery to address a skull fracture and other injuries at the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, after 42-year-old David DePape allegedly fractured his skull with a hammer on Oct. 28.

DePape pleaded not guilty to an attempted murder charge during a brief appearance in San Francisco Superior Court on Nov. 1. -Epoch Times

As PJ Media reports,

Pelosi’s failure to call out for help or flee his home was a detail in the court filing that previously raised a red flag to me, and it seems that even NBC News finds it odd. “Why Pelosi didn’t try to flee or tell responding officers he was in distress is unclear,” NBC News’s Miguel Almaguer noted.

Nevertheless, the report suggested it was unknown whether Pelosi was already injured or what mental state he was in.

November 5, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Video | | Leave a comment

Dear Liberals, How Many Of These MSM Hoaxes Did You Fall For?

By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | November 4, 2022

How many recent mainstream media hoaxes did you fall for? … and/or still believe?

  • Russian collusion
  • Trump called neo-nazis “fine people”
  • Jussie Smollett
  • Bubba Wallace garage pull
  • Covington kids
  • Governor Whitmer kidnapping plot
  • Kavanaugh rape
  • Trump pee tape
  • COVID lab leak was a conspiracy theory
  • Border agents whipped migrants
  • Trump saved nuclear secrets at Mar-a-Lago
  • Steele Dossier
  • Russian bounties on US soldiers in Afghanistan
  • Trump said drinking bleach would fight COVID
  • Muslim travel ban
  • Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation
  • Andrew Cuomo best COVID leadership
  • Trump built cages for migrant kids
  • “Austere religious scholar”
  • Trump overfed Koi fish in Japan
  • Build Back Better will pay for itself
  • Trump tax cuts benefited only the rich
  • Cloth masks prevent COVID
  • If you get vaccinated you won’t catch COVID
  • SUV killed parade marchers
  • Trump used teargas to clear a crowd for a bible photo
  • “Don’t Say Gay” was in a bill
  • Putin price hike
  • Ivermectin is a horse dewormer and not for humans
  • “Mostly peaceful” protests
  • Trump overpowered secret service for wheel of “The Beast”
  • Officer Sicknick was murdered by protesters
  • January 6th was an insurrection
  • BYU students hurled racist insults at Duke volleyball player
  • And don’t forget “democracy is under threat…”

November 5, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Willful Blindness

When people don’t see what’s right in front of them

Bill & Elliott Rothstein in “The Last Ride of the Elephant Princess”
By John Leake – Courageous Discourse – November 3, 2022

Author’s Note: The following post is Part I of a series on Willful Blindness, Ideological Blindness, and other failures of perception.

According to Wikipedia:

Action is an American dark comedy series about a Hollywood producer named Peter Dragon, who is trying to recover from his last box-office failure. It aired on Fox during the 1999–2000 season. The series was critically praised for its irreverent and sometimes hostile look at Hollywood culture.

Peter Dragon’s Vice President of Production at Dragonfire Films is a former child actress named Wendy Ward, who also works as a high end courtesan for wealthy Hollywood denizens.

Episode 13, “The Last Ride of the Elephant Princess,” was shot in 2000. Action was cancelled before it was aired, but the episode was released on DVD and posted on YouTube. In this episode, Peter desperately needs to acquire a script, and is distressed to discover it is owned by Bill and Elliott Rothstein—extremely boorish brothers who have a knack for spotting and acquiring valuable properties.

Peter visits them at their favorite restaurant and offers to purchase the script. They tell him to have his cute Vice President, Wendy Ward, deliver the check to their house the following evening. Being an exceptionally good sport, Wendy decides to go into the Lion’s Den. Though she succeeds in her mission, she is so traumatized by her encounter with the Rothstein Brothers that she leaves Hollywood forever. As she puts it: “I’m through with this, Peter. I called a cab and I’m gonna go home and pack and I’m gonna move some place, some place clean.”

It now seems astonishing that such a brutal depiction of Hollywood was made for what was intended to be a popular television series. It also seems obvious that Bill and Elliott Rothstein are modeled after Bob and Harvey Weinstein. The habits, manners, and appearance of the former strongly resemble the latter.

A few years later, at a 2005 comedy event, Courtney Love was interviewed on the red carpet by comedian Natasha Leggero, who asked her if she had any advice for young girls moving to Hollywood. “If Harvey Weinstein invites you to a private party at his Four Seasons [hotel room] don’t go,” she said.

As “The Last Ride of the Elephant Princess” and Courtney Love indicated, it was no secret that being alone with Harvey Weinstein was a grave occupational hazard for a young woman’s body and soul.

Human affairs are more complicated and messy than we are often comfortable acknowledging. We all want things, and much of life is about gauging how much we are willing to accept and tolerate in order to get them. When Gwyneth Paltrow thanked Harvey Weinstein at her Academy Award acceptance speech in 1999, and Meryl Streep thanked him at the 2012 Golden Globe Awards by calling him “God,” both women were probably being perfectly sincere. During those moments, they were thinking about his extraordinary talent as a film producer, and not his terrible reputation with women.

Willful blindness—averting one’s gaze from bad conduct—is usually done with a simple calculation—namely, I can’t object to this conduct because doing so would prevent me from receiving a benefit I really want.

Most of us occasionally engage in some degree of willful blindness. It would be wildly impractical to go through life protesting every bit of bad behavior we encounter. However, it seems to me that—since around 2000—willful blindness on a spectacular scale has been endemic to American business, culture, and politics. The corporate scandals of the early 2000s, the Iraq War under false pretenses, massive fraud on Wall Street leading to the Financial Crisis, the Federal Reserve bailouts of the same people who caused the crisis. Then there was the Russian Collusion Hoax and the related, swamp of US government corruption in Ukraine—now a full-blown orgy for arms dealers and money launderers. Last but not least, the stupendous fraud and homicidal bad faith of the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex and its friends in Washington during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

All of the above could only happen because thousands of people in an array of organizations and institutions found it expedient to turn a blind eye to the innumerable signs they were participating in corrupt enterprises. It reminds me of a (perhaps apocryphal) quote attributed to Cicero: “Rome is made out of marble but it’s built on a sewer.

November 3, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Russophobia, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

US biolab accidents go unreported – Intercept

RT | November 3, 2022

America’s biolabs have admitted to hundreds of dangerous accidents in the past two decades, but even incidents involving exposure to deadly viruses have been kept from public view, an investigation by The Intercept has revealed.

“People have it in their minds that lab accidents are very, very rare, and if they happen, they happen only in the least well-run overseas labs,” Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard Ebright told the media outlet. “That simply isn’t true.”

The erroneous public perception could stem from the fact that, as The Intercept found, Americans don’t hear about US biolab accidents. The outlet obtained more than 5,500 pages of laboratory incident reports from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), compelling the agency to release the documents through a Freedom of Information Act request. Many lab mishaps are reported to the NIH, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, but the agency doesn’t pass on the information to the public, even in cases involving Level 3 and Level 4 biolabs.

One such incident occurred in 2016, when a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis accidentally pricked her finger with a needle after injecting a mouse with a recombinant strain of the Chikungunya virus, The Intercept said. The student didn’t tell her supervisor about the accident until after becoming ill and seeking treatment at a local hospital emergency room. The university disclosed the accident and infection to the NIH, where the report was kept under wraps until The Intercept came calling six years later.

“That’s not a good situation,” said Scott Weaver, a University of Texas immunologist and expert on Chikungunya. “If that person knew they had a needlestick and they were working with Chikungunya, they should have reported it immediately. And then whatever health care people saw them should have recognized that there was a very small — but not zero — risk of them transmitting the virus.”

Chikungunya, which was first identified in Tanzania in the 1950s, is a debilitating and potentially deadly virus that can lead to chronic arthritis. In the local Makonde language, its name means “bent over in pain.” Outbreaks of the virus were reported in Italy and the US between 2007 and 2017.

The Intercept investigation found a wide range of other biolab accidents over a period spanning 18 years. For instance, in 2018, a US Food and Drug Administration researcher in Maryland contracted MRSA after working with the antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The University of North Carolina reported five escapes of lab mice in 2013 and 2014. At least one of the rodents had been infected with SARS.

The Washington University Chikungunya incident was among five needle injuries reported by the school, despite its lab being a Level 3 facility where researchers wear double layers of protective gear, including two pairs of gloves.

November 3, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment