By Ilya Tsukanov – Samizdat – 01.10.2022
Blasts rocked the Nord Stream 1 and 2 natural gas pipelines on Monday, with each pipeline reportedly hit with the force of over 500 kg of TNT – which when combined is equivalent to the explosive power of a micro nuke. The Kremlin called the incident an act of terrorism, while Russian intelligence has pointed to a Western trace.
In his address before lawmakers and the nation on Friday on the entry of four new territories into the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin said that the attacks against Nord Stream were the next logical step for the US and its allies after exhausting anti-Russian sanctions. “It seems incredible but it is a fact – by causing explosions on Nord Stream’s international gas pipelines passing along the bottom of the Baltic Sea, they have actually embarked on the destruction of Europe’s entire energy infrastructure,” the Russian president said.
Officials in Denmark, Sweden and Berlin have not ruled out deliberate sabotage, and NATO paid lip service to “support” for “investigations underway to determine the origin of the damage.” A Pentagon official refused to comment on a Flightradar24 analysis showing US military helicopters circling for hours in the areas where the explosions hit prior to the incident. Meanwhile, former Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski tweeted and then deleted a “Thank you, USA” message alongside a picture of a massive methane leak emanating from one of the damaged pipelines, and boasted that “now, $20 billion of scrap metal lies at the bottom of the sea.” Meanwhile, some Western officials and media continue to claim that Russia sabotaged its own pipelines.
The attacks against Nord Stream are not the first time that a ‘Western trace’ has been suspected in the sabotage of gas pipelines operated by Moscow.
In the summer of 1982, the Urengoy-Surgut-Chelyabinsk pipeline carrying natural gas south and west toward Ukraine, where it can be taken further west toward Europe, was rocked by a massive explosion. The explosion’s causes were unknown, and Soviet media never reported on the incident.
In 2004, former Reagan special assistant for national security affairs and National Security Council official Thomas Reed published an autobiography entitled ‘At the Abyss’ in which he alleged that the Central Intelligence Agency had sabotaged the pipeline by adding a virus into software the USSR had purchased from a Canadian company to operate the infrastructure.
“The pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines and valves was programmed to go haywire, to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to the pipeline joints and welds. The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space,” Reed recalled.
The former official said the act of sabotage was aimed at disrupting the USSR’s gas infrastructure, “its hard currency earnings from the West and the internal Russian economy,” and that the scheme was thought up by National Security Council technology and intelligence advisor Gus Weiss.
Portions of the operation were disclosed earlier, in a 1996 paper in CIA journal Studies in Intelligence by Weiss. In it, the former official recalled how, at an economic summit in Ottawa in 1981, French President Francois Mitterrand had informed Ronald Reagan that a KGB double agent named Vladimir Vetrov had come forward to provide French intelligence with 4,000 documents and photographs related to alleged Soviet efforts to get their hands on Western technologies which the US and allies refused to sell due to sanctions and embargoes. The collection of documents was dubbed the ‘Farewell Dossier’.
In January 1982, Weiss said, he proposed the pipeline sabotage idea to CIA director William Casey. “Reagan received the plan enthusiastically” and “Casey was given a go,” Reed wrote in his account.
Reed recalled that when the explosion occurred, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) – the organization tasked with aerospace early warning, initially feared a Soviet “missile liftoff from a place where no rockets were known to be based. Or perhaps it was the detonation of a small nuclear device. Before these conflicting indicators could turn into an international crisis, Gus Weiss came down the hall to tell his fellow National Security Council staffers not to worry.”
As has long been the case with the Nord Stream pipelines, the United States had adamantly opposed Soviet projects to deliver gas from Siberia to Western Europe, characterizing them as a means for Moscow to project influence over the Europeans. In 1982, the Reagan administration banned pipeline equipment sales to the USSR, prompting the European Economic Community – forerunner to the European Union, to issue a formal protest over Washington’s interference in the bloc’s economic affairs. Germany, France, Italy and the UK declared the restrictions illegal, and promised to defy the ban. Washington eventually reneged, and the first gas deliveries from Urengoy to Western Europe began in January 1984.
To this day, Russian officials have never conceded that the 1982 explosion was the result of CIA interference. In the 1990s and 2000s, when relations between Russia and the US still looked rosy, engineers and ex-KGB agents came forward to tell media that industrial negligence or even shoddy workmanship, and not sabotage, was to blame.
The CIA never directly confirmed its involvement in the Urengoy-Surgut-Chelyabinsk pipeline explosion. However, in a page on the CIA’s official website, the agency did boast that “flawed turbines were installed on a gas pipeline” as part of a broader US technological sabotage campaign against the USSR.
October 1, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | CIA, European Union, United States |
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The evidence for the presence of thermite at the World Trade Center (WTC) on 9/11 is extensive and compelling. This evidence has accumulated to the point at which we can say that WTC thermite is no longer a hypothesis, it is a tested and proven theory.
Therefore it is not easy to debunk it. But the way to do so is not difficult to understand.
To debunk the thermite theory, one must first understand the evidence for it and then show how all of that evidence is either mistaken or explained by other phenomena. Here are the top ten categories of evidence for thermite at the WTC.
- Molten metal: There are numerous photographs and eyewitness testimonies to the presence of molten metal at the WTC, both in the buildings and in the rubble. No legitimate explanation has been provided for this evidence other than the exothermic reaction of thermite, which generates the temperatures required and molten iron as a product.
- The fires at Ground Zero could not be put out for several months. Despite the application of millions of gallons of water to the pile, several rainfall events at the site, and the use of a chemical fire suppressant, the fires would not subside. Thermal images made by satellite showed that the temperatures in the pile were far above that expected in the debris from a typical structure fire. Only thermite, which contains its own oxidant and therefore cannot be extinguished by smothering it, can explain this evidence.
- Numerous eyewitnesses who were fleeing the area described the air mass as a hot wind filled with burning particles.[1] This evidence agrees with the presence of large quantities of thermite byproducts in the air, including hot metallic microspheres and still-reacting agglomerates of thermite.
- Numerous vehicles were scorched or set on fire in the area. Photographic evidence shows that cars parked within the lower-level garage areas of the WTC complex burned as if impacted by a super-hot wind like that described by the eyewitnesses. All non-metallic parts of the cars, including the plastic, rubber, and glass, were completely burned off by a hot blast.
- There was a distinct “white smoke” present—clearly different from smoke caused by a normal structural fire—as indicated by eyewitnesses and photographic evidence.[2] The second major product of the thermite reaction is aluminum oxide, which is emitted as a white solid shortly after reaction.
- Peer-reviewed, scientific research confirmed the presence of extremely high temperatures at the WTC. The high temperatures were evidenced by metallic and other microspheres, along with evaporated metals and silicates. These findings were confirmed by 9/11 investigators and by scientists at an independent company and at the United States Geologic Survey.
- The elemental composition of the metallic microspheres from the WTC dust matches that of metallic microspheres produced by the thermite reaction.
- The environmental data collected at Ground Zero in the months following 9/11 indicate that violent incendiary fires, like those produced by thermite, occurred on specific dates. Peer-reviewed scientific analysis of these data show that the components of thermite spiked to extraordinary levels on specific dates in both the air and aerosol emissions at Ground Zero.
- Carbon nanotubes have been found in the WTC dust and in the lungs of 9/11 first responders. Formation of carbon nanotubes requires extremely high temperatures, specific metal catalysts, and carbon compounds exactly like those found in nanothermite formulations. Researchers have discovered that nanothermite produces the same kinds of carbon nanotubes. That finding has been confirmed by independent analysis in a commercial contract laboratory.
- A peer-reviewed scientific publication has identified the presence of nanothermite in the WTC dust. One of the critical aspects of that paper has been confirmed by an independent scientist. A visual comparison between nanothermite residues and particles found in the WTC dust is remarkable.
There is also a great deal of indirect evidence for the thermite theory. This includes the attempts by the government agency NIST to downplay the evidence for thermite. It also includes things like a weak effort by Rupert Murdoch’s National Geographic Channel to discredit the ability of thermite to cut structural steel, which was itself roundly discredited by an independent investigator. It is now unquestionable that thermite can cut structural steel as needed for a demolition.
Therefore, debunking the WTC thermite theory is not easy but is very straightforward. Doing so simply requires addressing the evidence listed above point by point, and showing in each case how an alternative hypothesis can explain that evidence better. Given the scientific grounding of the thermite theory, use of the scientific method, including experiments and peer-reviewed publications, would be essential to any such debunking effort.
That is almost certainly why we have seen no such debunking. Instead, the people working to refute the WTC thermite theory have resorted to what might be called a case study in how NOT to respond to scientific evidence.
The failed thermite theory debunkers have produced:
- Thousands of chat room comments and other posts yet not one peer-reviewed scientific article.
- Alternate hypotheses that have little or no evidence to support them. For example, the mini-nuke hypothesis and the “Star Wars Beam” hypothesis.
- Government scientists declaring that the evidence simply doesn’t exist.
- Attempts to exaggerate the meaning of the evidence, for example by saying that thermite or nanothermite could not have caused all of the effects seen at the WTC.
- Deceptive efforts to introduce the government contractors who created the official accounts as independent scientists.
The last of these methods has been the most popular. Trying to debunk the tenth piece of evidence for WTC thermite, NIST contractor James Millette produced an unreviewed paper that purports to replicate the finding of nanothermite in the WTC dust. This was apparently organized in the hope that doing so would discredit all of the evidence for thermite at the WTC.
Millette is well known for having helped create the official reports on the analysis of WTC dust. He was responsible for creating the form that was used to pre-screen all materials found in the dust prior to any analysis by official investigators. Those official reports did not mention any of the evidence listed above, in particular failing to report the abundant iron microspheres scattered throughout the WTC dust. Additionally, Millette’s official report team did not find any red-gray chips, let alone nanothermite.
As he worked to debunk the WTC thermite research, Millette was still unable to find any iron microspheres. But he did claim to have finally found the red-gray chips. Curiously, he did not attempt to replicate the testing that would determine if those chips were thermitic.
Claiming to have found the chips, Millette perfomed an XEDS analysis for elemental composition but failed to do any of the other tests including BSE, DSC, the flame test, the MEK test, or measurement of the chip resistivity. Having inexplicably “ashed” the chips at 400 °C in a muffle furnace, thereby proving that they were not the materials of interest (which ignite at 430 °C), Millette ignored the remainder of the study he had set out to replicate.
Because he did not do the DSC test, he could not do XEDS of the spheres formed from the chips. Since he had still not found spheres in the dust, he could not test those and this allowed him to ignore the testing of spheres from the thermite reaction.
Millette rested his case on FTIR, which I have also performed on chips from WTC dust but with a much different result. Like Millette’s paper, my FTIR work is not yet part of a peer-reviewed publication and therefore should not be taken as authoritative evidence. There has been less urgency to this supplemental work because what has been done to date has received no legitimate response from the government or from much of the scientific community. That sad fact should be the central point of discussion today.
In any case, Millette attempted only one tenth of the tests in his struggle to replicate (or refute) one tenth of the evidence for thermite at the WTC. His un-reviewed “one percent approach” was nonetheless very convincing to many people, including some of the people who produced the official reports for 9/11. But it is obvious to others that Millette’s work was not a replication in any sense of the word.
I’m looking forward to the peer-reviewed scientific article that finally does replicate the nanothermite paper or any of the other peer-reviewed scientific papers that document the evidence for thermite at the WTC. Hopefully, we can approach those efforts without concerns about the sources and without recalling all the deception and manipulation that preceded them.
Until then, it is important to recognize the difference between the superficial appearance of science and the actual practice of science. Ignoring 90 percent of the evidence is not scientific. And replication of the 10 percent means actually repeating the work.
If thermite debunkers and alternate hypothesis supporters can find the courage and focus to step through that challenge, maybe they can begin to add to the discussion.
Kevin Ryan is a chemist, former laboratory director, and prominent voice in the 9/11 Truth movement.
October 1, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | 9/11 |
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After months of investigation that identified networks of reviewers and editors manipulating the peer review process, Hindawi plans to retract 511 papers across 16 journals, Retraction Watch has learned.
The retractions, which the publisher and its parent company, Wiley, will announce tomorrow in a blog post, will be issued in the next month, and more may come as its investigation continues. They are not yet making the list available.
Hindawi’s research integrity team found several signs of manipulated peer reviews for the affected papers, including reviews that contained duplicated text, a few individuals who did a lot of reviews, reviewers who turned in their reviews extremely quickly, and misuse of databases that publishers use to vet potential reviewers.
Richard Bennett, vice president of researcher and publishing services for Hindawi, told us that the publisher suspects “coordinated peer review rings” consisting of reviewers and editors working together to advance manuscripts through to publication. Some of the manuscripts appeared to come from paper mills, he said.
We asked what prompted the investigation. Bennett told us:
In April 2022, Hindawi’s Research Integrity team led an initial investigation into a single Special Issue (SI) after a Chief Editor raised concerns about some of the papers published in it. The team decided to investigate the content of the journal further. Through this investigation, the team highlighted a pattern of irregular and concerning reviewer activity and identified potential ‘bad actors’ that were present across many of these publications.
These concerns prompted the Publishing Insights and Research Integrity teams, enabled by recently enhanced analytic capabilities and newly developed dashboards providing views across all reviewer activity, to conduct a wider investigation to determine whether these same bad actors were involved in peer review manipulation elsewhere in the Hindawi portfolio.
Following the discovery that these bad actors were present in other journals, the Hindawi leadership team put in place a cross-functional working team combining the manual and data-driven investigation which resulted in the identification of further published articles.
In early August, Hindawi expanded the investigation under a combined investigation team comprising Research Integrity experts, data and analytics experts, publishing and operational teams, and legal counsel from both Wiley and Hindawi. This team evaluated in depth review activity across all potentially impacted articles and manuscripts. This resulted in a list of ‘compromised’ reviewers and editors in addition to the bad actors already discovered, identification of networks that exist between them, patterns of review activity, and insight into published articles and manuscripts at each stage in the review process that we could initially label as ‘compromised’. On September 6, the combined investigation team began assessing published articles which led to the initial recommendation to retract 511 articles that are compromised based on reviewer activity alone. We expect ongoing investigations to result in further retractions.
The publisher also held up the review and production of submitted manuscripts in which “potentially compromised” individuals were involved, and will begin assessing those articles.
We asked about what Hindawi will do to prevent something similar from happening again, but Bennett declined to share specifics, “as we believe it will simply open up new targets for those who seek to exploit a system based on trust.”
He did say that the publisher has banned the individuals its investigation identified, will contact research integrity officers or department heads as appropriate, and has shared its findings with industry groups:
It is increasingly apparent to all involved in safeguarding and investigating issues of research integrity that closing rings down at one publisher can simply move the problem to others. We are committed to taking an active role in preventing that.
Other publishers have announced large batches of retractions recently. IOP Publishing earlier this month said it planned to retract nearly 500 articles likely from paper mills, and PLOS in August announced it would retract over 100 papers from its flagship journal over manipulated peer review.
In a prepared statement, Liz Ferguson, Wiley senior vice president of research publishing for Wiley, said that attacks on research integrity such as paper mills, manipulated peer review, and image duplication and doctoring “are sophisticated and appear to be coordinated.”
Her statement continued:
As these attacks increase in frequency and intensity, we remain committed to upholding research integrity throughout our publishing programs. We have and will continue to share our findings with our peers and industry bodies to advance a cross-industry approach. This is absolutely essential to safeguard trust in research.
It’s something that we at Wiley are committed to and as a result we have taken the step of sharing our findings as transparently as possible, not just with our peers, but with industry associations, third party databases, and others.
These conversations have been very constructive. Our industry is one of trust – this remains our greatest asset. Only through concerted and collaborative action will we succeed together. This is our goal, and Wiley and Hindawi will continue to advance it tirelessly.
September 29, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science |
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They Tried Hard NOT to Find Anything!
My recent post about scientists finding mRNA nanoparticles containing Covid vaccine genetic code, in the breast milk of vaccinated mothers, and mentioning an infant documented to have died thereof, got quite a bit of traction online.
Today, I want to look at a study from a year ago that purported to NOT find mRNA nanoparticles in breast milk. We will see why exactly the team having Bill Gates and CDC-sponsored researchers, could not find what the independent scientists could find a year later!
I decided to compare the two studies (one that found mRNA in breast milk and the other that did not) very closely and compare their methodologies using the “Modern Discontent” method.
Modern Discontent has a great post about his method, but he mostly is saying “pay close attention and understand the whole f… thing”, which is basically what I usually do with something interesting and important anyway. He posted his method three days ago, and I had my substack for a while longer. So, I intuitively used many of his approaches, but he laid them out very systematically and clearly. His article is extremely useful for all people writing about biomedical science, so take a look:
How I Tackle Reading Papers
At first sight, both studies, which I will call the 2022 shedding study (which I discussed two days ago) and the 2021 no-shedding study, superficially appear to be similarly designed. They took several lactating women and tested their milk. One study found shedding, while the other did not. Upon a closer look, the differences between these studies turned out to be extremely important!
Here’s a summary of their differences:
You can see that the study that found mRNA lipid nanoparticle shedding, was done more thoroughly. The shedding study had:
- More participants (11 vs 7)
- More milk samples were taken (131 vs 13!)
- Samples better preserved (frozen immediately)
- Samples were taken at varied moments post-vaccination including within mere hours, and also days
- Looked at very important Extracellular Vesicles
As a result of being more thorough and covering more cases, the shedding study found actual shedding! Surprise!
What if the women in the shedding study, getting the same vaccines, were analyzed using the poorer methodology of the no-shedding study?
I took the chart from the shedding study showing five women with milk samples positive for mRNA nanoparticles. I crossed out samples that WOULD NOT BE DETECTED, if the no-shedding study methodology was applied to the samples of the shedding study:
You can see that if the researchers in the shedding study used the crippled methodology of the no-shedding study, they would detect only two positive samples, instead of seven.
The methodology of the no-shedding study would miss all extracellular vesicle (EV) samples because they did not look at EVs. That is shown in the column on the right that is entirely crossed out.
The no-shedding study would also miss the 1 hour and three-hour samples because they did not take those samples (save for just ONE woman who happened not to be positive).
As a result, had the less thorough no-shedding study methodology been applied to the shedding study, only 2 positive samples, instead of 7, would be detected!
Since the actual no-shedding study collected only 13 samples and not 131 samples and used deficient methodology, no wonder they missed all positive instances!
It is as if the no-shedding study was intentionally designed not to find anything. Hmmm…
Let me give an analogy that many will understand — fishing using fishing nets.
Let’s say that a good fisherman (the shedding study) was asked to do his best job fishing to see if a particular lake has fish (mRNA nanoparticles). A bad fisherman, on the contrary, would be asked to design his fishing expedition to not catch any fish, so as to falsely prove that the lake has no fish. What would they do? This infographic shows the difference:
What’s up with Bill Gates and the CDC?
By pure coincidence, the study that did not find mRNA nanoparticles in breast milk (the no-shedding study), had key scientists sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. They also received money from the CDC. You can see that Prof. Gaw and Dr. Flaherman were key participants, making the most important decisions and analyses!
Did these sponsorships influence the authors’ approach to designing the experiment? We cannot know this. We can only wonder.
Why would a fisherman try to NOT catch fish?
September 29, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | CDC, COVID-19 Vaccine, Gates Foundation |
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The Lancet recently released its long-awaited COVID-19 commission report. The report well reflects the current state of public health science and addresses the business needs of the Lancet. It may have been naïve to expect further, but health is an important area and should be taken more seriously.
The level of obfuscation of evidence, misrepresentation of prior knowledge, and disregard for diversity of scientific evidence and opinion does not reflect well on either Lancet or the commission itself.
The Lancet in context
Medicine and public health are particularly dependent on truth and transparency, as the lives and health of people cannot be entrusted to dogma and superstition. Clear and open debate is fundamental to minimizing mistakes, which can kill, and to building the trust that patients and populations need to follow guidance (as they must ultimately be the decision-makers). These two related disciplines are also increasingly lucrative for practitioners and for the companies supplying the wares they employ. These forces inevitably pull in different directions.
Private companies making these wares, such as those in the pharmaceutical industry, have a responsibility to maximize profits for their shareholders. This means encouraging more people to use their tests or drugs, rather than putting people in states of health where they do not need them (either good health, or death).
This is not an extreme position, it is a simple truth – it is how this industry is structured. If there is a wonder drug in a lab somewhere that resolves all metabolic disease with a single dose, and it is easy to manufacture and copy, then the Pharma industry would collapse. Pharma has a duty to build a market, not heal.
Transparency and truth, on the other hand, could mean admitting certain highly profitable drugs are not needed or even dangerous; that an alternative safe and cheap drug, previously available for other purposes, will be more cost-effective and lower risk.
We cannot expect private companies to state this, as it will damage or destroy their income (their business). If they do not try to block a repurposed drug that puts their own investments at risk, they would be betraying their investors. What they should do, for their investors, is overemphasize the advantage of their own product, maximize the desire of people to use them, and run public campaigns to ensure this situation is prolonged as far as possible. This is what any for-profit business does – it is their job. It is not unexpected.
We have long relied on medical journals to act as a conduit for information from researchers to medical practitioners and the public. This is a plausible model if journals are independent and the staff and owners of the journal promote truth above politics or company profit.
This was once the case; the Lancet, a subject of this article, was once family-owned and that could hold to the values of Thomas Wakley and his descendants, standing against medical authorities up to 1921. It has since been owned by other for-profit companies, now a subsidiary of a larger Dutch-based publishing conglomerate, ‘Elsevier.’
Elsevier in turn is owned by RELX group (back in London), a large company with a typical list of major institutional investors including BlackRock (and so its major owner Vanguard), Morgan Stanley and Bank of America – the same list as major pharmaceutical and biotech corporations whose products Lancet publishes on.
The above does not tell us there is intentional wrong or malfeasance, just intrinsic conflicts of interest of the type journals such as Lancet are supposed to guard against. Lancet’s ultimate ownership has a duty to shareholders to use their portfolio of assets to maximize return; on this measure alone Lancet should favor certain pharmaceutical companies. The only thing that could stand in the way is lack of competence by the owners, or a moral code that rates investors below integrity.
In this context, Lancet’s track record over COVID-19 has been checkered. In February 2020 it published a major letter on COVID-19 origins that ignored major conflicts of interest in which nearly all authors were implicated in the alternative lab origin hypothesis. It published clearly fraudulent data on hydroxychloroquine that were significant in halting early treatment studies.
A lack of early effective treatment was necessary to secure Pharma profits for later COVID-19 medications and vaccines. The later exposure of the fraud was subsequently described by The Guardian and was one of the biggest retractions in modern history.
In 2022 Lancet published a weakly-evidenced opinion advocating medical fascism; dividing and restricting people based on compliance with pharmaceutical interventions. Lancet’s top leadership has remained unchanged throughout. This is relevant context for understanding the report of the Lancet ‘commission’ on COVID-19.
The Lancet COVID-19 Commission’s Report
In mid-2020 Lancet recruited people from various aspects of public life to review various aspects of the COVID-19 outbreak. This ‘commission’ (a somewhat grand name for a privately-convened group from a private for-profit business) was headed by economist Jeffrey Sachs, who preceded the recent release of the report by publicly discussing conclusions on the potential source of SARS-CoV-2, highlighting the probability of a laboratory origin as opposed to direct animal-human spread.
This part of the commission’s investigation had been halted early when Sachs discovered that several panel members had undisclosed conflicts of interest amounting to receipt of funding to conduct the very laboratory gain-of-function research widely suspected of promoting rapid human spread. Some had been authors of the earlier Lancet origins letter.
The Executive Summary provides a foretaste of the quality of work to come, noting IHME estimates of “17·2 million estimated deaths from COVID-19,” a “staggering death toll” as the commission notes, particularly staggering as it is higher than the WHO estimates for total excess deaths throughout the pandemic period. These WHO estimates include all deaths caused by lockdowns and those where virus detection was incidental. It is an implausible figure, even ignoring the lack of context here (nearly all in late old age, and with severe comorbidities).
Ironically, the commission reports in its main text over 2.1 million excess deaths from malaria, tuberculosis and HIV arising from the COVID-19 response in 2020 alone. However, this is a misunderstanding by commission members of WHO’s actual estimates – WHO does report significant excess 2020 deaths from these diseases but not this many – though many more will accumulate through subsequent years.
Reflecting the lack of inclusiveness of the commission itself, the report recommends censorship of the alternate approaches, considering “failure to combat systematic disinformation” to be a contributor to severity. The commission then inadvertently provides an example of disinformation in its characterization of the Great Barrington Declaration, misrepresenting it as calling for “uncontrolled spread of the virus.”
This, based on the declaration itself, must be a lie, as the commission must not have read the declaration within the two years they had available. Did they not consider it pertinent to question those who wrote it or (over 900,000) signed it? Whether the declaration was correct or not, it reflected prior WHO evidence-based policy. Ignoring this is simply untenable for a serious inquiry.
The overall findings of the commission are extremely disappointing from the point of view of science, public health, and simple honesty. Its apparent lack of familiarity with prior public health norms and practice, including that of the World Health Organization (WHO), may have been genuine, or may be contrived to emphasize a narrative it was intended to support. Given Lancet’s COVID-19 track record and business imperatives, the latter would not be entirely unexpected, but it is disappointing to see adults in positions of influence producing a document of this nature.
Summary of key findings
The Report helpfully provides a three page ‘Key Findings’ section. While missing aspects of the main body such as the euphemism “prosocial behaviour” to denote social exclusion, and extolling the “logic” of the completely illogical WHO slogan for mass COVID-19 vaccination, “No one is safe until everyone is safe,” it generally captures the main thrust of the whole text. Reading the rest is however recommended to understand how modern public health thinking has so clearly gone off the rails.
The key findings are stepped through here. Anyone with a public health background is encouraged to refute the concerns raised, as many of the commission’s assertions appear to involve common traps that seem inexcusable for public health professionals. They hang heavily on a failure to grasp three fundamentals of COVID-19 and public health:
- Public health interventions are about risk and benefit. Interventions have positive and negative impacts. Recommendations therefore cannot be given without considering the potential harms they may cause in the short and long term, weighing these against perceived benefits.
- COVID-19 mortality is highly skewed towards very old age, and heavily associated with comorbidities. Therefore it is imperative to consider COVID-19 disease burden relative to other diseases in terms of life-years lost, not raw mortality (from or with) COVID-19.
- Prolonged lockdowns, workplace and school closures were not part of prior policy, or were partially recommended only in far more severe outbreaks. This is not implying the interventions were good or bad, it is just a fact that they defied public health norms and prior evidence. They were recommended against due to the harm they potentially cause. This lands most heavily, as WHO notes, on low income people and populations.
Highlights of the commission’s key findings:
“WHO acted too cautiously and too slowly on several important matters: … declare a public health emergency… restrict travel … endorse the use of facemasks…”
The commission seems unaware of the prior WHO pandemic influenza guideline. It is not among their 499 references. WHO specifically warned against restricting travel in this guideline, also noting that evidence on facemasks is “weak.” Travel restrictions can be significantly harmful to economies – cutting tourism income alone in low-income countries can increase mortality through poverty. The report fails to mention costs that extending these response measures would impose. Where lockdown costs are mentioned at all, it is in the context of costs of ‘failure’ to implement earlier or heavier, never in terms of weighing harm avoided against that caused. Ignoring relative costs, including the long-term health costs of increased poverty from longer lockdowns, is anathema to good public health policy.
Metanalyses of randomized control trials of community masking do not show significant benefit, and trials during COVID-19 show similar results. At a minimum, WHO was therefore evidence-based when recommending against community-masking – the organization is yet to provide evidence to back its later endorsement of their widespread use. The Lancet commission appears to be specifically recommending against the use of evidence-based approaches.
“… most governments around the world were too slow to acknowledge its importance and act with urgency in response….”
Most people live in low and middle income countries with low COVID-19 mortality and far higher burdens from other infectious disease, which occur in far younger people. This statement therefore seems strangely Western-centric. If they had known earlier, what would countries have actually done? (if earlier implementation of poverty-inducing responses, then for how long?)
The commission appears unaware of serological evidence of spread prior to January 2020, in some cases backed by PCR. This would negate any benefit from this recommendation, even ignoring the harms.
Citing the Western Pacific Region as an example of ‘lockdowns working’ similarly makes little sense, as comparisons elsewhere (e.g. Europe) did not show significant benefit, while in crowded slum areas they are clearly pointless. Evidence of early wide transmission (e.g Japan) indicates that low mortality was due to other factors.
“Epidemic control was seriously hindered by substantial public opposition to routine public health and social measures, such as the wearing of properly fitting face masks and getting vaccinated.”
This statement is ignorant or disingenuous. If the commission members have experience in public health, they know that quarantine of healthy people, prolonged ‘distancing’ and workplace closures were never used at scale before, and that widespread lockdowns were not ‘routine public health and social measures.’ If they did not know this, they had two years to find out. The world, including Lancet, knew by March 2020 that COVID-19 overwhelmingly targets the elderly and has little impact on healthy working-age adults.
The vaccines do not significantly reduce overall transmission – heavily vaccinated countries continue to show high transmission – so to suggest low vaccination hindered epidemic control is a vacuous statement. It may seem intuitive (e.g. it occurs with some other vaccines) but the commission had 18 months to observe COVID-19 mass vaccination.
“Public policies have also failed to draw upon the behavioural and social sciences.”
This is an extraordinary statement to use regarding COVID-19. Many Western governments have openly employed behavioral psychology in an unprecedented way in the COVID-19 outbreak. No public health campaign has ever gained such media attention or had such uniform suppression of non-official messaging from media outlets. It is strange to see a statement so removed from reality.
“Heavily burdened groups include essential workers, who are already disproportionately concentrated in more vulnerable minority and low-income communities.”
This appears to be a nod to compassion for vulnerable populations. It is true that certain groups did suffer higher rates of severe COVID-19, though these are highly correlated with rates of comorbidities (obesity in Western countries is unfortunately associated with poverty, and poverty with certain ethnic groups).
However, the burden was overwhelmingly on the elderly – to a rate several thousand times that in young people. It is the response that burdened these groups most clearly and the report does mention inequity-driving school closures, but this appears forgotten elsewhere in an apparent blind support for faster and harder lockdowns.
“In low income and middle-income countries (LMICs)… better outcomes were seen when previous experiences with outbreaks and epidemics were built upon, and when community-based resources—notably community health workers—were used to support screening and contact tracing, capacity and trust-building within communities.”
This claim appears false. Sub-Saharan African countries did well irrespective of prior experience, with a relative exception of South Africa where obesity is more prevalent and there is a higher proportion of old people. Tanzania instituted very few COVID-19 specific measures but has similar outcomes. More than half the sub-Saharan population is less than 20 years of age, an age-group with extremely low mortality in the West. Actual spread in Africa, confirmed by WHO, has been very high.
“… the support for vaccine production in LMICs, for use in those countries, has come at a great cost in terms of inequitable access to vaccines.”
Nearly all people in low and middle income countries (except perhaps China) will by now have immunity. Post-infection immunity is equal or more effective to vaccine-induced immunity. Therefore, mass vaccination of a whole population with COVID-19 vaccines that don’t significantly reduce transmission cannot plausibly provide much benefit, whilst resource diversion is harmful. This statement is therefore devoid of public health sense.
“Economic recovery depends on sustaining high rates of vaccination coverage …”
Economic recovery depends on removing impediments to a functioning economy (lockdown measures). Vaccinating immune people with a vaccine that does not stop transmission cannot help to ‘reopen’ an economy. This statement parrots official mass-vaccination messaging elsewhere, but Lancet’s commission had an opportunity to promote logic and evidence-based policy.
“The sustainable development process has been set back by several years, with a deep underfinancing of investments needed to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.”
This is indeed clear. Poverty is worse, malnutrition is worse, and preventable disease burdens are higher. Women’s rights are greatly reduced across much of the world, and school attendance has been denied to hundreds of millions of children, entrenching future poverty. Acknowledging this is important, but it also calls into question much of the remainder of the report. Recommendations that acknowledge these mass harms which are concentrated on populations with lowest COVID-19 risk, but go on to recommend more of the interventions that caused them, do not seem well considered.
The remainder of the key findings recommend policies of mass vaccination ‘to protect populations,’ more money for the World Health Organization, and more money internationally for supporters of the growing pandemic agenda. This plays to Lancet’s gallery, but does not consider the harms of resource diversion, the actual very low mortality from pandemics over the last 100 years, or the heterogeneity of human populations and of risk to disease.
If vaccines worked in reducing mortality (for all-cause mortality (the Pfizer and Moderna randomized controlled trials have not shown this to date), if vaccination was confined to highly vulnerable groups where benefit is most likely, and if the trillions of dollars spent on lockdown compensation, mass testing and mass vaccination had been spent on chronic and endemic disease burdens and poverty mitigation, does the Commission really believe more people would have died and outcomes been worse?
A travesty of public health and science
The commission members appear convinced that lockdowns and mass vaccination were a net benefit, but It also appears that in two years of consultation they have not considered the alternative. The loss of decades of progress on infectious disease, human rights, and poverty reduction caused by lockdowns has not been given sufficient pause for thought.
A virus that mainly targets people over 75 years of age was addressed with a public health response that targets the children and the economically productive, cementing long-term poverty and inequity. They support this approach, but consider it should have been instituted earlier, and was lifted too soon.
After emphasizing mandatory and restrictive measures throughout, and misrepresenting or ignoring alternative approaches, the report ends on a note that it should perhaps have started with. “We note the timeliness of recommitting to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN’s moral charter, as we celebrate its 75th anniversary in 2023.”
This declaration includes rights to work, travel, socialize, and express opinions freely including, specifically, through any media. A quick read of the WHO’s charter would also have helped – health includes social and mental well-being (and physical well-being beyond a single disease). The report is void of such thinking – a travesty of both human rights and public health.
The report could well have been written based on slogans from WHO, Gavi and CEPI (whom the Lancet recommends should receive more money), from Pharma companies (on whose support Lancet is heavily directly or indirectly reliant) and from the World Economic Forum (who seem everywhere these days).
Some will have hoped for careful and considered thought, wide consultation, and a strong evidence base. It seems the corporate world may no longer have time for such indulgence. This is, in the end, a rich person’s club, seeking increased taxpayer funding for their favorite project. They are doing this in the name of public health.
It was reasonable to have hoped for better. What would Thomas Wakley have thought?
David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a public health physician and biotech consultant in global health. He is the former Program Head for malaria and febrile diseases at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, Switzerland.
September 28, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine |
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A federal court in Texas is giving the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) until Friday to release the first batch of data on adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination collected by the agency via its V-safe app.
The order by the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas-Austin Division follows a series of lawsuits filed by the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), an Austin-based nonprofit “focused on the scientific integrity of vaccines and [the] pharmaceutical industry.”
According to ICAN, the court order requires the CDC to release the first batch of 19 months’ worth of data collected from millions of participants who reported adverse events related to COVID-19 vaccination via the V-safe app between Dec. 14, 2020, and July 31, 2022.
In all, the CDC will be required to release more than 137 million health V-safe entries.
The CDC describes V-safe as a smartphone app that “provides personalized and confidential check-ins via text messages and web surveys,” enabling users to “quickly and easily share with CDC how you, or your dependent, feel after getting a COVID-19 vaccine.”
According to the CDC, “This information helps CDC monitor the safety of COVID-19 vaccines in near real time,” adding that the purpose of the V-safe app “is to rapidly characterize the safety profile of COVID-19 vaccines when given outside a clinical trial setting.”
Public will ‘see for themselves the actual self-reported data’
The data collected via the V-safe app is “collected, managed, and housed on a secure server by Oracle,” with only the CDC having “access to the individualized survey data.”
Oracle’s access is limited to “aggregate deidentified data for reporting.”
This distinction led to the main thrust of ICAN’s lawsuits against the CDC. ICAN argued that “based on the CDC’s own documentation, the data submitted to V-safe is already available in deidentified form (with no personal health information) and could be immediately released to the public.”
ICAN submitted three Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for the deidentified data collected via V-safe, “in the same form in which Oracle can currently access it.”
However, ICAN said, the CDC “had apparently not read its own documentation regarding V-safe” and refused ICAN’s requests, claiming “information in the app is not deidentified.”
Even when ICAN clarified its FOIA request to specifically ask for “all data deidentified after [emphasis original] it was submitted to the V-safe app,” the CDC “administratively closed this request stating it was duplicative of the original request.”
ICAN responded by suing the CDC in federal court in December 2021, via its attorney, Aaron Siri, for the release of this data.
Siri also represented Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency, the organization that sued the U.S. Food and Drug Association (FDA) for the release of data from the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine trials — a lawsuit that was successful.
Following a new FOIA request by ICAN in April 2022, for the release of “all data submitted to V-safe since January 1, 2020,” and the CDC’s subsequent refusal, ICAN filed a second lawsuit in May 2022.
ICAN said these successive refusals on the part of the CDC came “despite the CDC’s ability to immediately release this deidentified data pursuant to its own protocol,” based on the claim that “the information in the app is not deidentified.”
ICAN commented on the significance of the ruling, stating in a press release:
“This is a huge win for ICAN and for the American public, who will finally start to be able to see for themselves the actual self-reported nationwide data about the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines.”
Brian Hooker, chief scientific officer for Children’s Health Defense, called the ruling an “absolutely huge development.”
Hooker told The Defender :
“This is an absolutely huge development and I’ll be waiting with anticipation as the V-safe data are released.
“With CDC’s reluctance to release this information, one can only imagine that it will not reflect well on the whole COVID-19 vaccination program, especially given irregularities seen with VAERS [the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System] reporting and the shifting narrative of the CDC regarding COVID-19 guidance.”
Hooker has faced similar obstacles to those encountered by ICAN when requesting data from the CDC. He said he “submitted a FOIA for the V-safe pregnancy data early in the process and was denied.”
“I’m glad that Aaron [Siri] and ICAN stuck with it,” Hooker said. “I can only think of the lives that could have been spared if the CDC would have been forthcoming with this information in the first place.”
The data collected via the V-safe app is distinct from the data submitted to VAERS. ICAN described the distinction:
“The FDA and CDC have admitted their existing safety monitoring program, VAERS, was incapable of determining causation and therefore unreliable.
“The CDC has therefore deployed a new safety monitoring system for COVID-19 vaccines called V-safe, and now claims that these ‘vaccines are being administered under the most intensive vaccine safety monitoring effort in U.S. history.’”
Historically, VAERS has been shown to report only 1% of actual vaccine adverse events.
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., is an independent journalist and researcher based in Athens, Greece.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
September 27, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception | CDC, COVID-19 Vaccine, United States |
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Last week, The Epoch Times reported that Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), admitted the CDC had stopped monitoring the safety of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines using a method of analysis called proportional reporting ratio (PRR).
Walensky promised to resume the monitoring.
What The Epoch Times missed is that PRR is a fraudulent measure of vaccine harm, designed by the CDC expressly for the new COVID-19 vaccines to disguise the devastation the vaccines are causing.
Why? Because PRR measures the pattern of different vaccine side effects, but it is indifferent to the number of people reporting those side effects.
If some completely new vaccine side effect appears with the introduction of a new vaccine, PRR will catch that.
But the COVID-19 vaccines are associated with huge numbers of people reporting side effects on an unprecedented scale — and, by design, PRR misses this completely.
For example, if one person in a million dies from vaccine A and one person in a thousand dies from vaccine B, then vaccines A and B can have exactly the same PRR score!
PRR is a single number that compares the variety of different side effects for a new vaccine to the variety of side effects from past vaccines.
Of course, there have been many vaccines with different side-effect profiles in the past, and it is difficult to stand out among such a diversity of profiles.
Where the new mRNA vaccines do stand out is the unprecedented number of bad outcomes, including deaths, reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
Of all the reports in the 30-year history of VAERS, two-thirds of them were from the COVID-19 vaccines, introduced in the U.S. in December 2020.
This includes three-fourths of all deaths reported to VAERS and three-fourths of all hospitalizations.
Since the introduction of the COVID-19 vaccines, reports to VAERS have skyrocketed off the charts.
Credit: OpenVAERS
These numbers represent only the reports VAERS has processed and posted. Jessica Rose, Ph.D., has reported that VAERS is months behind in posting these reports because its staff has not increased, while its workload is roughly 50 times greater since the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines.
The sheer volume of VAERS reports, including deaths, should have set off alarm bells within weeks after the vaccines were introduced.
Reporting only PRR and not the actual count provided a convenient cover for “business as usual.”
I am grateful to Mathew Crawford for pointing this out in an article last year.
Josh Mitteldorf, Ph.D., has a background in theoretical physics. Since the 1990s, he is best known for his contributions to the biology of aging, including many articles and two books.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
September 26, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | CDC, COVID-19 Vaccine, Rochelle Walensky |
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Twenty years ago, the “Cheney-Bush junta” — as Gore Vidal called it — launched its propaganda campaign to invade Iraq, effectively casting the dye for much of the historic period since.
On Sunday, Sept. 8, 2002, the New York Times ran on its front page the story “U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts” by Michael Gordon and Judith Miller.
The same day, then Vice President Dick Cheney appeared on Meet the Press with Tim Russert, hyping the New York Times story as evidence that Hussein was attempting to acquire “the kinds of tubes that are necessary to build a centrifuge and the centrifuge is required to take low-grade uranium and enhance it into highly-enriched uranium which is what you have to have in order to build a bomb.” Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice followed Cheney’s lead on other shows.
In 2005, I confronted Miller about her reporting, asking her at if she would name the anonymous lying source who she allegedly relied on to falsely report “the best technical experts and nuclear scientists at laboratories like Oak Ridge supported” the CIA claim that the tubes were for a nuclear weapons program. In fact, it would later be established, the nuclear scientists did not support such an assessment and were effectively muzzled. When I questioned her, Miller refused to name the source that fed her this false information and Marvin Kalb, the moderator of the event, see video, ran interference, stopping further follow-ups. (See my piece “Should Media Expose Sources Who Lied to Them?”)
Many serious analysts early on deduced that the source was Cheney himself, likely through his chief of staff, Scooter Libby.
Even the mainstream Bob Simon of CBS would later remark to Bill Moyers about Cheney: “You leak a story, and then you quote the story. I mean, that’s a remarkable thing to do.”
Remarkable is actually an understatement. It’s engaging in a de facto conspiracy to deceive the U.S. public into war.
In April of 2020, a journalist asked at the daily White House press briefing: “Mr. President, I wanted to ask Dr. Fauci: Could you address these suggestions or concerns that this virus was somehow manmade, possibly came out of a laboratory in China?”
Anthony Fauci replied: “There was a study recently that we can make available to you, where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences there and the sequences in bats as they evolve. And the mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.”
What Fauci was talking about was the piece “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” in Nature Medicine.
That article was widely accepted by the major media as eviscerating the possibility of lab origin of Covid, shutting down debate at that critical time and continuing to hinder it to this day.
The thing is, Fauci seems to have had a serious role in that article’s appearing.
One of the few people objecting to the piece when it was first published, in the Spring of 2020 was Meryl Nass, who asked: “Why are some of the US’s top scientists making a specious argument about the natural origin of SARS-CoV-2?” She would go on to argue that the signers of the Nature Medicine article were pushed to write it.
In 2021, limited Freedom of Information Act findings showed that Fauci had at minimum effectively coordinated with the named authors of the Nature Medicine article. See Nass’ write-up and subsequent reporting by some mainstream outlets such as USA Today.
Thus, this insidious tactic of helping to plant a story pushing the line you want in a media outlet and then citing it as evidence for your case was employed by both longtime creatures of Washington at historic junctures.
There are other notable parallels. Both Fauci and Cheney have also both been leading beneficiaries of Trumpwashing.
Ashley Rindsberg makes some serious arguments in his piece, “How Dick Cheney created Anthony Fauci,” including about the buildup of US bio“defense” after 9/11 (actually the anthrax attacks) — a trend several observers have noted. Alexis Baden-Mayer traces such arguments back to 1976, when Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld apparently pressured President Ford to order massive inoculations in the Swine Flu scare, which he would be widely mocked for.
While the antiwar forces and “left” criticism of the Iraq WMD propaganda were wholly inadequate, they at least manifested themselves on the national stage to some extent. Covid origins has hardly been recognized as an antiwar issue by most and the “left” at times has actually played a detrimental role, explicitly doing the establishment’s bidding in irrationally denying or minimizing the possibility of lab origin of the pandemic.
One thing that should be kept in mind as one parses through the claims and “exposés” is that some are de facto cover stories.
The Bush administration ramped up their propaganda campaign for the Iraq invasion, as noted at the beginning of this article, in September of 2002.
Why then? Sophisticates at the time would quote Andrew Card: “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August” said Bush’s chief of staff.
With the Bush administration cynically using the one year anniversary of 9/11 as a backdrop to launch their push for invading Iraq, the rationale articulated by Card was actually a remarkably benign motivation, a likely cover, in comparison to the war makers actual thinking.
September 26, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | Anthony Fauci, Covid-19, United States |
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World-renowned Critical Care Specialist, Dr. Paul Marik, joins Del to talk about the harrowing fight to keep his medical license, after treating critically-ill Covid-19 patients with lifesaving early treatments that were against hospital policy. Fellow FLCCC co-founder, Dr. Pierre Kory, joins the conversation to reflect on their first battle against Academia; the shocking struggle with a corrupt medical system to utilize a life-saving, cheap, and safe protocol for sepsis, the leading cause of death in the world.
September 25, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Covid-19 |
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A judge this month is hearing evidence in a lawsuit filed in 2011 by a group of individuals who developed cancer, allegedly as a result of radiation from their cellphones. Depending on how the judge rules, the lawsuit could finally head to a jury trial.
Evidentiary hearings in Murray v. Motorola began Sept. 12 in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, and are scheduled to continue until Sept. 30. Expert testimony will be presented during the hearings before the case goes before a jury.
In a parallel case that may have repercussions for the D.C. case, a similar lawsuit before a federal court in Louisiana — filed by the widow of a man who died of an aggressive form of brain cancer allegedly caused by cellphone radiation — also is headed to trial.
The D.C. case is proceeding without the plaintiffs being able to present a significant category of evidence pertaining to the defendants’ liability. However, that evidence will be heard in the Louisiana case.
In an exclusive interview with The Defender, Hunter Lundy, a lawyer representing plaintiffs in both cases, discussed the evidence and expert testimony and the potential significance rulings in this case could have.
D.C. case: lawsuit filed in 2001 finally headed to a jury
In 2001 and 2002, six individuals, including Michael Patrick Murray, sued the telecommunications industry.
The six plaintiffs had developed brain tumors beneath where they held their cellphones. Additional plaintiffs joined the case in 2010, 2011 and thereafter — with the number of plaintiffs now exceeding 80, according to Lundy.
The defendants are a who’s who of major telecommunications companies, including AT&T, Bell Atlantic, Bell South, Motorola, Nokia, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sanyo, Sony, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon and many other companies.
The lawsuit also names the Federal Communications Commission and the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CITA), an industry lobbying group.
After 21 years and multiple delays, many of the plaintiffs have since died.
Despite efforts on the part of the defendants to get the lawsuit dismissed or relocated to federal court in Maryland, the case was initially remanded from the D.C. District Court to the D.C. Superior Court — where the complaints were dismissed in 2007, before being partially reinstated in 2009, by the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals.
The case continued to wind through the courts, with evidentiary hearings finally beginning this year.
Lundy discussed key details about the lawsuit, stating that the plaintiffs alleged: “the radiation frequency … the microwave radiation coming out of cellphones increased the risk of individuals getting brain tumors.”
The plaintiffs further alleged that “the cell phone industry, the manufacturers and the carriers knew when these [cellphones] were put out on the market that they had dangers that they didn’t warn people about,” said Lundy.
However, Lundy said that the main thrust of the case concerns gliomas — tumors that impact the brain and spinal cord.
According to Lundy, “There are several kinds of gliomas … the most prevalent one is the glioblastoma,” a type of malignant glioma.
Other gliomas, such as acoustic neuroma, are benign, Lundy told The Defender, but form on the cerebral nerve inside the brain, growing without their victims being aware of them. Eventually, their growth leads to hearing loss and their removal results in residual brain damage.
Ultimately, most such cases result in death, said Lundy. With glioblastoma, for instance, diagnoses range from having three to four months — to five years at most — to live.
“There’s not a lot of optimism when you get a glioblastoma,” said Lundy. “And so, whether it’s directly or indirectly, [the gliomas] have a genotoxic effect which will end up having a mutagenic effect and then a tumor coming out of it.”
Referring to the plaintiffs in the D.C. case, Lundy said, “Many of them have died, and many of the cases are just death cases right up front, or the widows or family members brought the suits.”
“This is what the battle is [about] … that’s our case in a nutshell,” explained Lundy.
The victims were impacted by first-, second- and third-generation analog cellphones produced in the 1980s and 1990s. “The antennas were up at the top of the phone and some of them were operated on three watt and greater power,” Lundy said, whereas “Today you’ve got smartphones operating on a quarter watt.”
Lundy told The Defender :
“There was a long period of years in which people were getting high exposure from cellphone radiation because they were using them so much … and there wasn’t sufficient information, instruction or warning by the industry to the user of the dangers involved. That’s the thrust of the case.”
“Our argument is that if you continue to use the analogue [phones] and you use the second- or some of the third-generation [devices], you’ll see a linear effect” regarding radiation exposure and latency, Lundy added, where the effects of such radiation become apparent over time.
As an example, Lundy referred to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, where “it was still 40 years before … you saw tremendous numbers of cancers developing.”
Although the plaintiffs were from different parts of the U.S., the initial lawsuits — later combined into the current case — were filed in the District of Columbia “because [of] the idea that the lobbying institutions of the wireless industry [are] located in D.C.,” said Lundy.
However, these lobbying groups — and the rest of the defendants — “don’t want us to have a trial in front of a jury,” said Lundy, which resulted in the defendants using a variety of delay tactics.
In 2013, a Frye hearing was held, during which, according to Lundy, the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses “had to pass a standard before they could testify in front of a jury.”
“The Frye standard had to be met where you proved that the methodology used by the expert … was generally accepted in the scientific community,” Lundy said.
In the period between 2013 and 2015, the five experts put forth by the plaintiffs were approved according to the Frye standard and a trial was held, Lundy said. However, the defendants, on appeal, were able to get the case reversed and to get the standard by which the plaintiffs’ experts were evaluated changed, to the Daubert standard.
According to Lundy, in this second standard, “you had to prove that not only was the science [accepted], you had to prove that it was reliable and that it was readily available.”
“In the interim,” according to Lundy, “we have been through several judges.”
Ultimately, the plaintiffs were not allowed to supplement the opinions of the initial experts with new witnesses and new science, unless it “somehow [was] related to the old opinion,” Lundy said. This hamstrung the plaintiffs and subsequent judges hearing the case, he added.
But “We’re going forward with other witnesses … and then the case will be submitted to the court again and there will probably be post-hearing briefs,” Lundy said. “At some point, the court will make a ruling and then both parties will have a right to appeal … and so, the process goes on.”
Louisiana case an opportunity for more expert testimony to be presented
The related case, Walker v. Motorola et al., filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, may present an opportunity for plaintiffs to present expert testimony that was shut out of the D.C. case.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., chairman of Children’s Health Defense, is co-counsel in this case.
According to Lundy, this lawsuit has the potential to quickly go to trial.
“Ahead of what’s going on in D.C., we just want a case to go to trial somewhere … we need a ruling before people go forward,” Lundy told The Defender.
Referring to the D.C. case, Lundy said:
“We haven’t been able to get … liability document production, discussing the development of the products, the interaction between risk management and others.
“So I think in Louisiana, if we prevail, we will get the discovery [of such evidence]. It’s a different ballgame.”
In the Louisiana case, the family of Frank Aaron Walker sued the telecommunications industry, alleging the pastor’s death from an aggressive brain cancer was brought on by cellphone radiation, the health risks of which the industry has known for decades.
According to the suit, the telecommunications industry “suppressed credible cell phone safety concerns and has conspired to conceal or alter results of safety studies to make them more ‘market-friendly.’”
Walker was “a 25-year user of cell phone products,” the suit claims, before dying on Dec. 31, 2020, age 49, following “a two-year battle with glioblastoma that included extensive radiation, chemotherapy and surgery.”
During this two-year period, Walker experienced severe symptoms including “seizures, visual auras, excessive fatigue, migraines, light sensitivity, memory problems, psychological and emotional stress, anxiety, and depression,” the lawsuit alleges.
Similar to the D.C. case, the defendants in the Louisiana lawsuit include several major telecommunications industry players, such as AT&T, Cricket Communications, CITA, Motorola, the Telecommunications Industry Association and ZTE.
In a 2021 press release issued after the lawsuit was filed, Lundy stated:
“For generations, the telecom industry has fought the release of scientific studies and information regarding ties between mobile phone use and brain tumors. The industry manipulated the science to the detriment of consumers.
“With this lawsuit, Mr. Walker’s family hopes to help reveal the telecom industry’s secrets and hold them accountable for harm done to consumers.”
In the same release, Lundy alleged the telecommunications industry “downplayed, understated, and/or did not state the health hazards and risks associated with cell phones.”
The press release also quoted Walker’s widow, April Marie Walker:
“Throughout his battle with cancer, Frank never lost his faith or his sense of humor, but he suffered terribly.
“Our family’s hope now is that we can force the telecom industry to let consumers make informed choices about the products we buy.
“If the telecom industry knew holding a cell phone next to one’s head is dangerous, then the public should have known this information.”
In remarking on the broader significance of this case, Lundy said:
“There needs to be an exposure of truth. I just believe everybody should be accountable.
“We have not been allowed to do liability discovery. We have done scientific discovery and evidence about science. But we do not yet have the industry’s documents.
“I think we’ll be able … to do liability discovery here in federal court in Louisiana when we go forward.”
Industry concealed studies linking cellphone use to brain and DNA damage, plaintiffs allege
The Louisiana lawsuit also cites a significant number of scientific studies and industry actions taken since the 1980s, “including the firing, defunding or denigration of researchers who discovered adverse effects associated with cell phone use.”
According to the lawsuit:
“At all times herein mentioned, Defendants were aware of numerous studies and experiments that demonstrated the health hazards of RF radiation dating back to the late 1940s and continuing to this day, yet Defendants have consistently maintained to the public at large that cell phones are absolutely safe.”
The lawsuit alleges “scientific and medical research, published in peer-reviewed literature, has demonstrated a correlation between biological effects and the exposure to RF radiation within the radio frequency band of 300 megahertz to 2.4 gigahertz,” noting, however, that such peer-reviewed journals are not typically read by the general public.
Radiation exposure standards adopted by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), initially in the 1960s, and subsequently modified in the 1980s and 1990s, “excluded cell phones,” states the lawsuit, as “the cell phone industry manipulated the research and pressured members of the ANSI Safety Committee to exempt cell phones from regulation and compliance.”
However, as scientific and public concern over radiation produced by cellular phones increased in the 1990s, “defendants, individually and through their trade associations … undertook with public fanfare to fund scientific studies to prove the safety of cell phones,” resulting in the formation of the Scientific Advisory Group in 1993.
Subsequently, industry associations CTIA and Telecommunications Industry Association hired an expert, Dr. George Carlo, to direct the Scientific Advisory Group and conduct research into cellular phone radiation. However, as the lawsuit states:
“When this industry-funded research failed to corroborate the industry’s claims of safety and, in fact, presented new evidence supporting health concerns, the industry responded by terminating the research funding and publicly disparaging Dr. Carlo as well as suppressing and minimizing the results of his studies.”
Nevertheless, numerous other scientific studies followed, calling into question the industry’s claims regarding the safety of their mobile devices. These studies are cited in the lawsuit and include:
- A 1995 University of Washington study conducted on rats exposed to “radiation similar to the type of radiation emitted from the antenna of a cell phone,” found the radiation caused damage to DNA. The industry funded research that aimed to disprove these fundings, but which ultimately confirmed them, leading the industry to refuse to publish the results.
- Another scientist who subsequently replicated the DNA damage found by the University of Washington research had his findings “suppressed” by the industry, pressuring him and threatening to withdraw funding.
- A 1996 study of Air Force personnel found those exposed to RF radiation had a “risk of brain tumors 1.39 times higher … versus those not exposed.”
- A 2000 study by Sweden’s Orebro Medical Center “found the risk of tumors developing on the same side of the head cell phone users hold their cell phones is significantly higher than it is for the other side.”
- In 2000, the World Health Organization (WHO) launched a decade-long multinational research study, the “Interphone Study,” ultimately finding that “the use of cell phones for a period of 10 years or more can increase the risk of glioblastomas by 40% in adults” and that “tumors are most likely to occur on the side of the head most used for calling.”
- A 2002 Swedish study found “the risk of developing brain tumors from first-generation cell phones … was as much as 80% greater than those who did not use cell phones.”
- Another Swedish study, in 2003, published in Environmental Health Perspectives, a journal of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, which in turn operates under the aegis of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, “found electromagnetic fields (EMFs) emitted by certain cell phones damaged neurons in the brains of rats.”
- A four-year study performed by Reflex, with funding from the European Union, in 2004 found that “radio waves from cell phones damage DNA and other cells in the body and that the damage extended to the next generation of cells.”
The lawsuit adds, “mutated cells are considered a possible cause of cancer,” and that the radiation levels tested in the study were within the range used by most cellphones at that time. The study ultimately “advised people to use landlines, rather than cell phones, whenever possible.”
- A 2005 study “reported using a cell phone in rural areas might lead to the development of brain tumors.” As cellphone towers are more sparsely placed in rural locations, cellular devices tend to use higher wattage in order to achieve reception of a mobile signal.
- A 2009 meta-analysis of 465 scholarly studies involving the relationship between cellphone radiation and cancer, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, “demonstrated a significant positive association between cell phone use and cancer” and “established the association increased with long-term cell phone use.”
- A hearing held by the U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations and the Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education and Related Agencies in 2009 featured testimony from an investigator involved in the Interphone Study that was also published in the American Journal of Epidemiology.
According to the expert, there was “an elevated risk of salivary gland tumors was seen among people who used cell phones for more than 10 years, especially when the phone was usually held on the same side of the head where the tumor was found, and when use was relatively heavy.”
- In 2011, the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) “declared the RF radiation emitted from cell phones to be ‘possibly carcinogenic to humans.’”
Also according to the lawsuit, in the period since the IARC’s 2011 declaration, “more than 1,000 additional scientific studies have been published in peer-reviewed literature further supporting the causal link between cell phone radiation, brain tumors and health effects.”
The lawsuit states that “several experts have analyzed this new information and concluded cell phone radiation should be classified as a ‘probable human carcinogen.’”
Some of these subsequent studies include:
- A 2015 study out of Jacobs University in Germany, finding (and replicating the results of a 2010 German study) that “weak cell phone signals can promote the growth of tumors in mice,” at “radiation levels that do not cause heating and are well below current safety standards.”
- A 2016 study by the U.S. National Toxicology Program, finding that “male rats exposed to cell phone radiation developed higher rates of cancer” and also “caused DNA breaks in the male rats’ brains.”
Remarking on these studies and on the type of testing performed by the telecommunications industry with regard to radiation produced by cellular phones, Lundy told The Defender :
“We know that, for instance, the cellphone industry, the cellphones are supposed to pass a standard called SAR — Specific Absorption Rate. They did these [tests] on mannequins.
“There’s nothing wrong with the standard. But the way they test it to comply with the standard was wrong. And they used 6’2” male mannequins to determine whether or not these phones were passing SAR, and that’s so unrealistic.
“And they’ve got instructions telling people, don’t hold [mobile devices] firm against you, hold it 5/8 of an inch away from your head. Well, nobody knows that they weren’t doing that in their mannequin testing.”
However, according to Lundy and to the lawsuit, the telecommunications industry tacitly began to address these concerns beginning in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Lundy told The Defender that “the fact that they, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as they started making patent applications to change the design of their phones, started to move the antennas because they had a problem,” is indicative of this shift, adding:
“And we know enough to know that the London [insurance] market quit writing coverage for the wireless industry in the early 2000s, so they know something and are seeing something that we haven’t seen.”
The Louisiana lawsuit cites 13 examples of the telecommunication industry’s moves to quietly reduce RF exposure from mobile devices, dating back as early as 1991.
Lundy noted that, in the D.C. case, expert witnesses from Europe, including epidemiologists and cell biologists from countries such as Austria, Greece and Slovakia, were initially the most willing to come forward with testimony, adding, however, that “American scientists are now on board.”
Lundy: ‘The truth is going to come out’
Lundy said he’s frustrated with the legal proceedings’ slow pace:
“It’s just disappointing that the scales of justice turn so slowly. And you know, sometimes that’s the case. There’s no justice.
“But the truth is going to come out. It’s coming out now. I mean, sometimes [it] doesn’t always come out in the timing that we want it to come out, but it will come out.”
Lundy cited the long history of lawsuits involving the tobacco industry as an example of this, saying:
“The cigarette industry never lost a case for 30 or so years. But when [tobacco industry whistleblower] Dr. Jeffrey Wigand disclosed the fact that they were manipulating nicotine to addict 13-year-olds, I mean, the whole climate shifted.”
According to Lundy, truthful information regarding children’s health, in relation to the use of cellular phones, is of particular importance:
Lundy told The Defender :
“There’s other countries … that have barred the use of cellphones for kids that aren’t 16 years of age yet … we know that the skull is not fully developed until they’re 25. So we’re talking about children having radiation going into their brain very young.
“So it’s about information. It’s about warning. It’s about telling people the truth. It’s not about money over that.”
Overall, for Lundy, the broader significance of the D.C. and Louisiana cases and their outcome concerns “educating people.”
He said:
“The significance is going to educate the world. It’s going to educate people that at these radiation frequencies from these devices … they increase the risk.
“We just want to be informed. How can we be a free nation and exercise our freedom when we’re not told the truth? And I’m not trying to be political, but that’s just a fact. We’ve got a world of misinformation and it’s motivated by greed.”
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., is an independent journalist and researcher based in Athens, Greece.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
September 24, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular |
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The damage that lockdowns would cause was far too well known, uneven, and catastrophic to assume their chief instigators must have had good intentions.
In the United States, some 2,000,000 people—over 1% of adult men—currently reside in prisons and jails. In America’s poorest cities, crime and law enforcement are intertwined with life to such a degree that many children grow up more familiar with the justice system than the education system. For kids who grow up in these circumstances, getting through school while staying out of jail is a feat worth celebrating.
Some of this is, of course, necessary to maintain a peaceful society in a country as open and unequal as the United States. But the American political-prison-industrial complex is also riddled with perverse incentives. As Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch put it: “We live in a world in which everything has been criminalized. And some professors have even opined that there’s not an American alive who hasn’t committed a felony under some state law.” We’ve even developed an Orwellian lexicon for this system; the term “crime of moral turpitude” is a tacit admission that America’s statutes are riddled with crimes that do not actually involve “moral turpitude”—it’s puzzling why these should be considered crimes at all.
Worse yet, an estimated 5% of convicts are actually innocent. That means there are currently some 100,000 Americans in prisons and jails who didn’t even commit the crimes for which they were charged. The sad truth is that just living in one of America’s poorest neighborhoods comes with some risk of incarceration; the more people around who are convicted, the greater the odds of becoming an innocent convict oneself. Juries do their best, but they’re beset by the usual human biases. Judges know all too well that verdicts often come down to such irrelevant factors as the defendant’s charisma, physical attractiveness, or even what the jury had for breakfast that morning.
Mass incarceration is one sad byproduct of inequality and community deterioration in the 21st century. But an even worse byproduct of that inequality is an entire caste of western elites who’ve begun to manipulate the system to exempt themselves and their supporters from the rule of law to a degree not seen since the rise of the fascist regimes of the 1930s. And in no instance has this been made more clear than in the promulgation of Covid lockdowns into policy in early 2020.
Lockdowns, or the shutting of businesses and community spaces with the force of law, were unprecedented in the western world prior to Xi Jinping’s lockdown of Wuhan and weren’t part of any democratic country’s pandemic plan; rather, these pandemic plans suggested only voluntary social distancing measures. While lockdowns bore some facial resemblance to the voluntary social distancing measures contemplated in pandemic plans, this similarity was no coincidence, as the concept of “social distancing” in its origin was lifted by the US CDC straight from the Chinese Communist Party policy of “lockdown” as imposed during SARS in 2003. Further, some leading federal officials have disclosed that at the time they recommended temporary social distancing measures for Covid, they did so with the intent that state governors would enforce them as indefinite forced lockdowns.
As former UN Assistant Secretary-General Ramesh Thakur has documented in scrupulous detail, the harms that lockdowns would cause were all well-known and reported at the time they were first adopted as policy in early 2020. These included accurate estimates of mass deaths due to delayed medical operations, a mental health crisis, drug overdoses, an economic recession, global poverty, hunger, and starvation.
Yet regardless, for reasons we’re still only beginning to understand, some key scientists, health officials, national security officials, media entities, international organizations, billionaires and influencers advocated the broad imposition of these unprecedented, devastating policies from the earliest possible date, ostensibly to stop or slow the coronavirus as the CCP claims to have done in Wuhan, while censoring any contrary opinions, spinning a false illusion of consensus amongst an unknowing public. A report later revealed that military leaders saw this as a unique opportunity to test propaganda techniques on the public, shaping and “exploiting” information to bolster government messages about the virus. Dissenting scientists were silenced. Psyops teams deployed fear campaigns on their own people in a scorched-earth campaign to drive consent for lockdowns.
These early advocates of lockdowns inverted the definitions of key public health principles in sophisticated, Orwellian fashion. While the lockdowns they advocated were deliberately intended to overturn existing public health practices, they instructed the public to “follow the science,” leading the public to believe that their policies were grounded in established scientific practice. They used the rhetoric of equity and vulnerability to advocate policies that disproportionately harmed the most vulnerable and increased existing economic divides. They then retroactively cited the broad public support for lockdowns that had been sown by their own propaganda as justification for their propaganda in support of those lockdowns.
Ultimately, these lockdowns failed to meaningfully slow the spread of the coronavirus and killed tens of thousands of young people in every country in which they were tried. We now know the virus had already begun spreading undetected all over the world by fall 2019 at the latest and had an infection fatality rate under 0.2%.
However, the lockdowns caused the public to believe that the virus was hundreds of times deadlier than it really was. Simultaneously, the World Health Organization issued global PCR testing guidance—using tests later confirmed by the New York Times to have a false positive rate over 85%—pursuant to which millions of cases were soon discovered in every country. Additionally, the WHO issued new guidance on the use of mechanical ventilators to member nations; over 97% of those over age 65 who received mechanical ventilation in accordance with this guidance were killed.
Terrified by this surge of deaths and the psychological terror campaigns deployed by governments on their own people, populations across the western world proceeded to impose an ever-darker swathe of illiberal mandates including forced masking and digital vaccine passes for everyday activities. Young children, who were at virtually no risk from the virus, lost years of primary education in the worst education crisis since the end of the Second World War. An indefinite state of legal emergency was imposed which continues to this day. The global fight for human rights and the end of poverty was set back decades.
Over $3 trillion in wealth was transferred from the world’s poorest to a tiny number of billionaires and their supporters, predominantly in China and in the tech and pharmaceutical industries. Several key early lockdown proponents indicated that they saw Covid as an opportunity to “entrench a new idea of the left … reconstructing a cultural hegemony on a new basis.” Authoritarian regimes grew more autocratic, and democratic governments took on authoritarian characteristics.
Worst of all, a norm was grafted onto western democracy that the fundamental rights to movement, work, association, bodily autonomy, and free expression, for which our forebears fought so tirelessly, can be suddenly and indefinitely suspended, without precedent, analysis, or logic, based on nothing but vague promises that doing so will “save lives” — rendering them all but moot.
Meanwhile, the lockdowns and mandates led to the deaths of over 170,000 Americans and proportionate numbers in countries that imposed them across the western world. By 2021, lockdowns had killed over 228,000 children in South Asia. Studies of excess deaths indicate that lockdowns led to several million deaths in India and proportionate numbers in other developing nations.
A million here, a million there, pretty soon you’re talking real atrocities.
These numbers do not even begin to count the total damage that will ultimately ensue due to the economic devastation of lockdowns, which we will continue to witness for many years to come. Many early lockdown proponents may never be among the 2,000,000 Americans currently residing in jails and prisons, but we can be sure that thousands more would-be innocent children will one day be added to the prison rolls as a result of the economic destruction their policies unleashed.
Ladies and gentlemen, this case ultimately comes down to whether, unlike the other 2,000,000 Americans currently in state custody, we can be sure that by virtue of their socioeconomic position and the panic over a virus which panic they deliberately stoked with their own policies, this handful of key early lockdown proponents acted in good faith when they convinced the world to adopt these unprecedented, catastrophic policies based on the belief that China eliminated the virus from an entire country by shutting down one city for two months—so sure that the question demands no further inquiry. I leave that for you to decide.
September 23, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19, Human rights |
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Two weeks ago, we reported that EUROMOMO (the European mortality monitoring site) data showed an excess of 800 deaths for 2022 in children aged 0 to 14.
An eagle-eyed subscriber alerted us to a strange phenomenon: in the latest report (week 36), 355 excess deaths have seemingly disappeared. Note the numerical change on the vertical axis in the graphs below.
This is what it looked like two weeks ago – just above 800 (see here)
We emailed EUROMOMO asking to explain what happened in the two most recent reporting weeks to cause the “disappearance”.
The answer was, “as you can read in our weekly bulletin and on the webpage for “Graphs and maps”, Spain did not participate in the EuroMOMO output in week 36, due to an adjustment process related with mortality data source”.
We can rest easy then (well, sort of): 355 child excess deaths took place in Spain over a 1-2 week period, and the non-reporting accounted for the dramatic fall in excess mortality. Moreover, such a notable fall caused the readjustment of the Y axis on the graph (note from 800 to 400).
The Spanish government should investigate matters urgently. Or maybe, EUROMOMO data managers should look carefully at what they publish. We are puzzled over how many excess deaths in Europe occur in children. In the meantime, we’ll keep digging.
September 23, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | COVID-19 Vaccine, EUROMOMO |
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After months of investigation that identified networks of reviewers and editors manipulating the peer review process, Hindawi plans to retract 511 papers across 16 journals, Retraction Watch has learned.
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