Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

A Tale of Two Pills: Media bias in reporting Ivermectin and ensitrelvir

By Guy Gin | Making (Covid) Waves in Japan | October 21, 2022

Last month, Japanese pharma company Kowa put out a press release of the results of its 1030-person double-blind randomised control trial (RCT) of Ivermectin conducted at 54 institutions in Japan and 2 in Thailand.

Here’s how the results were reported in The Japan Times.

Not effective, you hear! I mean, look at the photo. You don’t get Ivermectin from a pharmacy; you get it from a farmer. Anyway, on to the trial.

A clinical trial was unable to prove the efficacy of the antiparasitic medicine ivermectin against coronavirus variants, according to Japanese drugmaker Kowa Co., which has indicated that it will no longer seek approval for the drug as a COVID-19 treatment.

So this means that not only has IVM not been widely used in Japan (despite what many people outside Japan think) but probably never will be. So what happened? Did the people who took the anti-vaxers’ favourite veterinary medicine all get sick?

In the trial, 1,030 patients with mild COVID-19 were orally administered the drug daily for three days and then compared to others given a placebo.

Ivermectin was found to be safe and few people given the drug developed severe symptoms, Kowa said. But both the group given the drug and the one administered a placebo saw improvements in symptoms, meaning the trial did not show the drug’s efficacy over the placebo as a COVID-19 treatment.

So the reason Kowa was “unable to prove the efficacy” wasn’t because IVM is “not effective”; it was because almost everyone in the placebo group got better quickly too. According to Kowa’s press release, “Both intervention and placebo arms showed milder symptoms around 4 days after the start of administration” and “There were no deaths and hardly any severe cases.”

Although Kowa hasn’t released the full trial details or results, the 0% mortality rate among the 500+ participants in the placebo arm suggests they were mostly at very low risk of severe disease. So the results don’t show IVM was ineffective; they show no medication was necessary for these participants to prevent symptoms worsening or for them to recover quickly.

This a not a new issue in studies on early treatments. Yale epidemiologist Harvey Risch noted the same thing in RCTs showing non-significant effects for another “controversial” drug, hydroxychloroquine.

The RCT studies proclaimed supposedly as definitively showing no benefit of HCQ use in outpatients have all involved almost entirely low-risk subjects with virtually no hospitalization or mortality events and are uninformative and irrelevant for bearing upon these risks according to HCQ use in high-risk outpatients.

When tested on larger numbers of people for mortality benefit, IVM often performs a bit better.

Next, let’s compare how the JT reported Kowa’s IVM trial press release with how Reuters reported Shionogi’s press release for its 1821-person RCT of its anti-Covid drug ensitrelvir.

Japan’s Shionogi & Co Ltd said on Wednesday its oral treatment for COVID-19 demonstrated a significant reduction in symptoms compared with a placebo in a Phase III trial in Asia.

The drug, a protease inhibitor known as ensitrelvir, met its primary endpoint in a trial conducted among predominantly vaccinated patients with mild to moderate cases of COVID-19, the company said in a statement.

A significant reduction in symptoms! So how many people were kept out of the ICU? Well, the Reuters article didn’t clarify what the main result was, so here it is from Shionogi’s press release.

the median time to resolution of the five COVID-19 symptoms [stuffy or runny nose, sore throat, cough, feeling hot or feverish, and low energy or tiredness] was significantly reduced in those treated with the low dose of ensitrelvir (the dose level submitted for approval in Japan) compared to placebo: 167.9 hours versus 192.2 hours, a statistically significant difference of 24 hours (p=0.04).

Yep, ensitrelvir cleared runny noses 1 day quicker than a placebo. So the media reporting of Shionogi’s results wasn’t dishonest, but it wasn’t exactly candid.

Similar to in Kowa’s IVM trial, no deaths were reported among the 900+ placebo recipients in Shionogi’s trial, which again suggests they were very low risk. So these results give us no idea about whether ensitrelvir will prevent the progression to severe disease in high-risk immunocompromised people, which is what actually matters.

Shionogi also reported that no serious adverse events occurred in the intervention arm. But one problem with not trialing a medication on the type of high-risk people who will actually need it is that the trial probably won’t pick up major safety signals that become clear later.

But as El Gato Malo has said, pharma doesn’t make mistakes in trial design; it makes choices.

October 24, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

The Mirage of Washington Intelligence

By Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute | October 24, 2022

“You can send a man to Congress but you can’t make him think,” quipped comedian Milton Berle in the 1950s. To update Berle for our times: You can spend $60 billion a year on intelligence agencies but you can’t make politicians read their reports. Instead, most politicians remain incorrigibly ignorant and hopelessly craven when presidents drag America into new foreign fiascos.

Congressional docility has been paving the way to war since at least the Vietnam era. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson invoked an alleged North Vietnamese attack on a U.S. destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin to ram a resolution through Congress giving LBJ unlimited authority to attack North Vietnam. LBJ had decided earlier that year to attack North Vietnam to boost his reelection campaign. The Pentagon and White House quickly recognized that the core allegations behind the Gulf of Tonkin resolution were false but exploited them to sanctify the war.

When the official story of the Gulf of Tonkin attacks begin unraveling at secret 1968 Senate hearings, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara proclaimed that it was “inconceivable that anyone even remotely familiar with our society and system of government could suspect the existence of a conspiracy” to take America to war on false pretenses. But indignation was no substitute for hard facts. Sen. Frank Church (D-ID) declared, “In a democracy you cannot expect the people, whose sons are being killed and who will be killed, to exercise their judgment if the truth is concealed from them.” The chairman of the committee, Sen. J. William Fulbright (D-AR), declared that if senators did not oppose the war at that point,  “We are just a useless appendix on the governmental structure.” But other senators blocked the release of a staff report on the lies behind the Gulf of Tonkin incident that propelled a war that was killing 400 American troops a week. Sen. Mike Mansfield (D-MT) warned, “You will give people who are not interested in facts a chance to exploit them and to magnify them out of all proportion.” The same presumption has shielded every subsequent U.S. military debacle.

Lazy, cowardly congressmen perpetually paved the way for foreign carnage. In October 2002, prior to the vote on the congressional resolution to permit President George W. Bush to do as he pleased on Iraq, the CIA delivered a 92-page classified assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction to Capitol Hill. The classified CIA report raised far more doubts about the existence of Iraqi WMDs than did the 5-page executive summary that all members of Congress received. The report was stored in two secure rooms—one each for the House and the Senate. Only six senators bothered to visit the room to look at the report, and only a “handful” of House members did the same, according to The Washington Post. Sen. John Rockefeller (D-W VA) explained that congressmen were too busy to read the report: “‘Everyone in the world wants to come to see you’ in your office, and going to the secure room is ‘not easy to do.’”

Hundreds of thousands of Americans were sent 6,000 miles away because congressmen could not be bothered to walk across the street. Congressmen acted as if going to a secured room to peruse a 92-page document was the equivalent of reading the entire 38 volume Encyclopedia Britannica by candlelight in a musty closet. Most congressmen had ample time to give speeches seconding Bush’s saber rattling, but no time to sift the purported evidence for the war. The only relevant evidence for many congressmen were the polls showing strong support of the president.

More details of the path to the Iraq War have been exposed in Sen. Patrick Leahy’s new memoir, The Road Taken. Leahy was one of the few senators who went to the classified room to read some of the confidential material on the war.  As he and his wife were out on a Sunday walk in their ritzy McLean, Virginia neighborhood in September 2002:

Two fit joggers trailed behind us. They stopped and asked what I thought of the intelligence briefings I’d been getting… I went through a requisite disclaimer that if I was in briefings and if they were classified, I could not acknowledge that they even occurred and could not talk about them if they had. They told me they understood that, but asked whether the briefers had showed me File Eight.

It was obvious from the look on my face that I had not seen such a file. They suggested I should and that I might find it interesting. Quickly thereafter I arranged to see File Eight, and it contradicted much of what I had heard from the Bush administration.

A happy ending? No, not quite.  A few days later, Leahy and his wife were out walking and the same joggers reappeared and asked what he thought of that secret file. Leahy commented, “It was the eeriest conversation I’d experienced in Washington. I felt like a senatorial version of Bob Woodward meeting Deep Throat—only in broad daylight.” The joggers then asked if Leahy “had also been shown File Twelve, using a code word… The next day, I was back in the secure room in the Capitol to read File Twelve, and it again contradicted the statements that the administration, and especially Vice President Cheney.”

The following Sunday, Leahy and his wife were walking past Robert Kennedy’s former estate when black cars with multiple antennas and darkened windows pulled up. Leahy wrote:

“A member of the presidential inner circle leaned out from the back window, greeting both myself and [his wife] Marcelle, and asked if he could talk with me… I got in the car with him while the security people got out of the car. We sat there and talked, and he said, ‘I understand you’ve seen File Eight and Twelve.’ I said I had, and I knew of course that he’d seen them. He said, ‘I also understand you’re going to vote against going to war.’ I said, ‘I am, because we all know there are no weapons of mass destruction and the reasons for going to war are just not there.’ He asked if he could talk me out of that, and I said no, and we ended the conversation. I started to get out of the car, and he said they would give me a ride home. ‘Thanks—let me tell you where I live.’”

The unnamed top Bush administration official replied: “We know where you live.” Leahy didn’t ask the dude whether he also knew all of Leahy’s computer passwords.

Leahy voted against the Bush resolution to use military force against Iraq. But Leahy waited 20 years to reveal the inside shenanigans he had seen on the road to war. And Leahy still refuses to disclose the name of the “member of the presidential inner circle” who was stalking him that morning in McLean. Podcast host Jimmy Dore scoffed that Leahy’s story was “just like a political thriller but at the end nothing happens and nothing is resolved.” Dore commented, “There’s a war anyway and he says nothing for 20 fucking years. The end. Did they even bother testing that ending with audiences?” Edward Snowden tweeted on Leahy’s story: “How could Leahy sit on classified information he knew could stop a war?”

But cover-ups are often unnecessary in Washington because few members of Congress are paying attention regardless. After four U.S. soldiers were killed in Niger in 2017, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) admitted they did not know that a thousand U.S. troops were deployed to that African nation. Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, admitted, “We don’t know exactly where we’re at in the world militarily and what we’re doing.” U.S. troops were engaged in combat in 14 foreign nations at that time, purportedly fighting terrorists. But most members of Congress probably could not list list more than 2 or 3 nations where U.S. troops are fighting.

As the U.S. government has become far more secretive in recent decades, congressional intelligence committees supposedly provide a check-and-balance for agencies hiding behind iron curtains. But “intelligence committee” is perhaps Washington’s biggest oxymoron.

Congressional intelligence committees lead the charge to kowtow to the CIA and other agencies. The Senate Intelligence Committee effectively absolved all of the Bush administration’s lies on the path to war with Iraq. When its report was released in mid-2004 (just in time to boost Bush’s re-election campaign), committee chairman Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) announced, “The committee found that the intelligence community was suffering from what we call a collective groupthink.” And since everyone was wrong, no one was at fault—especially conniving Vice President Dick Cheney. (Antiwar.com was right long before the war started). The CIA also paid no price when it was caught illegally spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation of CIA torture during the Obama administration.

And then there are the official bootlicking awards. The CIA publicly awards its Agency Seal Medal to members of Congress who boost its budget, coverup its crimes, and refrain from asking embarrassing questions. Pat Roberts got one—along with Rep. Jane Harman (D-California), Sen. John Warner (R-Virginia), and Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI)—all reliable stooges for the agency. The Founding Fathers would spin in their graves at the notion of federal agencies giving awards to congressmen who were supposed to be holding the leash on the agency. This is akin to a judge bragging about receiving a Public Service Award from a mobster who he connived to find not guilty.

There are some smart, dedicated, principled members of Congress who overcome the prevailing lethargy and bureaucratic roadblocks to learn enough to recognize the follies of proposed interventions. But those stalwart souls will probably always be outnumbered by the herd of senators and representatives far more likely to skim the latest polls than to read any official report longer than a tweet thread.

Jim Bovard is the author of Public Policy Hooligan (2012), Attention Deficit Democracy (2006), Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (1994), and 7 other books.

October 24, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

How an illusion of efficacy can be established for any treatment

Norman Fenton | October 23, 2022

In determining the efficacy of a medical intervention (such as a drug or vaccine) to stop a particular disease or virus it is typical to assume that the treatment needs time to work before a person is classified as ‘treated’. For example, a person vaccinated against a virus may be classified as ‘unvaccinated’ until 2 weeks after getting the vaccination. This simple animation with a hypothetical example shows that, with such a classification, a placebo (i.e. no effect) vaccination can be shown to be highly effective.

See also this article for more context https://www.normanfenton.com/post/mor… and note that this applies to observational studies rather than randomized controlled trials

October 24, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | | Leave a comment

Who Blew Up Nord Stream Pipelines? | A Mystery!

Matt Orfalea | October 23, 2022

October 23, 2022 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Repeal the National Childhood Vaccine Act of 1986

Good products do not need universal liability shields, but bad actors are enabled by them.

el gato malo – bad cattitude – october 22, 2022

much as been made about the possibility of schools mandating covid vaccinations for kids to be allowed to attend.

it may or may not happen. perhaps it will be treated like a flu shot. perhaps they’ll try for requirements. it’s likely to vary place to place and many states are already saying “no way” and if imposed this could cause flood of school change and really unleash the idea of vouchers and free choice and a swansong for public schools.

in the end, i’m not sure how many are crazy enough to try it and honestly, i doubt that any public school system in america could survive for long mandating this.

i doubt that this is really what the approval is about.

it’s about the liability shield and the subsidies.

and that is a thing we need to fix.

longtime gatopal™ jennifer cabrera has a simple, common sense solution:

If the predicted red wave produces a strong Republican majority in Congress, one of their first acts should be to repeal the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986. No excuses, Republicans. Liability is the only mechanism that can produce safe vaccines.

because this law is an abomination.

it creates ALL the wrong incentives and has swollen the US pediatric vaccine schedule (which used to be 3 well tested vaxxes, MMR, DTP, polio) with ineffective or marginally effective crap lacking valid risk reward and possessing meaningful side effect tails.

the case for several (HPV, flu, rota, pneumococcal) is basically non-extant.

but hey, no liability, no need to worry.

interestingly, gardasil does not appear to have this coverage hence the mass of lawsuits.

stop me if this sounds familiar:

landing in court on this is not, perhaps “the system working” as this vaccine looks to have been approved and marketed on numerous false pretenses and perhaps outright fraud. but at least the system is cleaning up its mess after the fact and discouraging such behavior in the future.

and the covid vaccines put all the others in the shade in terms of corners cut and data looking dodgy. but if we shield them and other things like them from liability, where is the disincentive to act badly? (and if you just said “because the drug companies wouldn’t lie to us!” i have some denver harbor bonds to sell you.)

you can get around this exemption by pfinding phraud, but should this really be necessary (especially when they hide the data and thus could have all sorts of little gems in it that the public had not seen)?

so how about we end this harmful “safe harbor” instead?

there is NO good consumer protection reason for this act. it’s a license for pharma to misbehave and it eliminates accountability and incentive to test properly. if you want to jab your drugs into kids, you need to own the side effects.

if you fail to predict or disclose risks, you own the ill outcomes instantly and forever.

let them decide, on that basis, how many studies to do and for how long prior to release.

i would LOVE to see what a class action jury award for fraud in a child vaccine lawsuit looks like.

this is the reason we have a tort system.

let it work.

it’s really simple:

either get voluntary informed consent risk waivers or stop mandating drugs.

mandate + no liability = disaster and “soft mandates” are just as bad.

everyone passes the buck to claim “iT wUZ nEvER a MAnDatE!” when they know full well that it functionally was.

how many times did you see this?

you mandate, you own the side effects. simple, reasonable, and incentive aligning.

this is one we can easily do.

we made this law. it has had perverse, anti-consumer effects. so let’s unmake it.

no more liability waivers.

only voluntary informed consent to risk subject to strict disclosure liability. “oh, we never tested for that!” is no longer an excuse.

i am not saying you get to sue for any bad outcome. but if the risks were not disclosed or were misstated you can. if they did not look for fear of what might be found, they own that. the onus is on them to prove safety and delineate risks and share them accurately and completely.

this encourages full, accurate reporting so people can make real, informed decisions.

it’s kind of stunning that we don’t have this.

if any public agency requires a jab, they become liable for bad outcomes.

no one gets forced and drug companies need to make a case for risk reward that will convince people and providers of healthcare.

let the market find the proper level of testing and reporting.

because healthcare is everywhere and always a cost benefit decision.

and you need free choice and sound data to make such choices well.

not exactly rocket surgery, is it?

or did you need another tour of the land of perverse incentives and regulatory capture?

October 23, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Stanford tells doctors to give false information in order to overcome vaccine hesitancy

By Steve Kirsch | October 21, 2022

I found a Stanford course used to train doctors worldwide on how to overcome vaccine hesitancy. Basically, they tell doctors to give false information. They truly believe the false narrative.

Here’s the link for the Stanford course that teaches doctors how to overcome vaccine hesitancy.

It’s a series of short YouTube videos. It’s free to watch all the videos.

Here is the outline of the cases covered:

I viewed a number of the lessons to save you the pain and agony.

Some takeaways:

  1. They don’t expect to turn people around to support the vaccine in a single session. They admit it can take many sessions.
  2. They clearly think that people who don’t take the vaccine are simply misinformed and need to be set on the right track.
  3. They recommend giving people false information (like saying the risk of myocarditis is higher for the virus than the vaccine) in order to deal with their objections. Of course, they don’t admit in the course that their advice is false.
  4. At no time should the doctor try to learn anything from the patient (like that the doctor is wrong). It’s all about getting the patient to conform to the narrative, not to discover truth. None of the interventions are designed to examine the data or find the truth or allow the patient to change the doctor’s mind. You are never supposed to do anything like look at the data!
  5. I really think they should do their therapy session on me as one of their case studies. If they can show people how they set me on the “correct path,” that would be astonishing. It would be so entertaining to watch them try to do that. People would pay money to see that. I can’t figure out where I can volunteer to do that.
  6. One of the references is to a paper on why people resisted making the HPV vaccine mandatory. I can tell you why people resisted the HPV vaccine… that vaccine is the second most dangerous vaccine in VAERS, that’s why. Only the COVID vaccines are more dangerous. It has 3 times the number of adverse events that all other vaccines combined at the time it was introduced. That’s why!

Summary

If you want insight into how “they” think about “us,” this is a good reference.

October 23, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

US Poured Millions Into Hungarian Opposition Trying to Topple PM Orban

By Evgeny Mikhaylov – Samizdat – 23.10.2022

Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova stated that Washington had fueled the movement against Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, since the US doesn’t consider the country obedient enough.

“Now, it turns out that the opposition in Budapest was also financed. The Hungarian [newspaper] Magyar Nemzet published an investigation into the funding of the liberal-left coalition of opponents of [Prime Minister] Viktor Orban by the American NGO Action for Democracy. The investigators and special services will probe all the circumstances of the attempts of foreign meddling in the political life of the country, but it is already obvious that the bill approaches millions of dollars,” Zakharova said.

According to the report, the foundation, created just before the February elections, enjoyed close ties with the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR). The report also suggested that Action for Democracy is connected to Hungarian-born billionaire George Soros, who funds Open Society Foundations, banned by Hungary several years ago.

Zakharova also reminded that the EU leadership was also discontent with Budapest’s independent stance, threatening Hungary with fines and sanctions, while calling it an “electoral autocracy” for refusing to follow orders from Brussels.

Hungary has staunchly opposed the EU sanctions against Russia. Budapest has repeatedly warned that Brussels’ decision to send military aid to Kiev amid the Russian special military op there and to impose restrictions against Moscow will result in a major economic collapse of the bloc.

The sanctions, backed by the US, Britain, and the EU, exacerbated fuel market issues, resulting in a major energy crisis across Europe, with record-high inflation and skyrocketing cost of living.

October 23, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Russophobia | , , , , | Leave a comment

Reports about Putin’s threat are false – Scholz

Samizdat | October 22, 2022

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has dismissed reports that Russian President Vladimir Putin has threatened to escalate the conflict in Ukraine.

When asked about the issue during an interview with Die Welt newspaper on Saturday, Scholz said the media had been too loose in its interpretation of official reports from Berlin on its discussions with Moscow.

“For good reasons, I don’t speak about the negotiations that I have with the Russian president. But here’s what I can say: The reports that I read about the alleged threats during these negotiations are false,” the chancellor said.

The Russian and German leaders last talked on the phone in mid-September. According to Berlin, Scholz urged Putin to find a diplomatic solution for the conflict in Ukraine based on a ceasefire and the complete withdrawal of Russian troops during their 90-minute conversation. He also “emphasized that any further Russian annexation steps would not go unanswered and would not be recognized under any circumstances.”

According to the Kremlin, Putin told Scholz about the incessant shelling of cities in Donbass by Ukraine, which had led to civilian deaths and the destruction of infrastructure. The Russian leader called it a “gross violation of humanitarian law” by Kiev.

A few weeks after that, referendums on joining Russia were held in Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions, and in the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, with the territories being officially incorporated into the Russian state in early October.

Earlier this week, Scholz told Deutschlandfunk outlet that the tone of his conversations with Putin “is always friendly, even if we have very different views on the matter.”

“I think it’s important that we have this conversation,” the chancellor said, but added that one shouldn’t “harbor any illusions” about those contacts bringing swift results.

October 22, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

Fauci forced to testify on social media censorship

Samizdat | October 22, 2022

The White House’s chief medical advisor, Anthony Fauci, and other senior officials are set to be deposed under oath as part of a lawsuit claiming the government worked alongside social media platforms to create a “massive censorship enterprise” throughout the Covid-19 outbreak.

In a Friday ruling, Judge Terry Doughty granted a joint request from the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana to compel several current and former officials to testify in the suit, among them Fauci, ex-White House press secretary Jen Psaki, Director of White House Digital Strategy Rob Flaherty, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and two high-level figures from the FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

“After finding documentation of a collusive relationship between the [Joe] Biden administration and social media companies to censor free speech, we immediately filed a motion to get these officials under oath,” Missouri AG Eric Schmitt said in a statement. “It is high time we shine a light on this censorship enterprise and force these officials to come clean to the American people, and this ruling will allow us to do just that. We’ll keep pressing for the truth.”

While the defense insisted that senior officials can only be called to testify about their actions in office under “extraordinary circumstances,” Judge Doughty said the personnel in question met that standard. He added that the two GOP-led states “have proven that Dr. Fauci has personal knowledge about the issue concerning censorship across social media as it related to Covid-19,” ordering him to cooperate with a deposition.

Requests to depose the other officials were granted on similar grounds, as the judge concluded all either held direct meetings with social media firms about the purported censorship, or had close knowledge of those discussions.

Jen Easterly, who heads up the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) was also ordered to testify. She played a “central role” in “flagging misinformation to social-media companies for censorship,” the plaintiffs argued, describing the cyber agency the “nerve center” of “the federal government’s efforts to censor social media users.” The same official was said to be involved in the DHS’ now-defunct ‘Disinformation Governance Board’ – dubbed the ‘Ministry of Truth’ by critics – which would have created a new mechanism to facilitate cooperation between the White House and social media sites.

Initially filed last May by Schmitt and  Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, the lawsuit claims the federal government encouraged online platforms to censor, delete or ban certain speech about the pandemic, including discussion of the “lab leak theory of Covid-19’s origin,” as well as questions about the effectiveness of face masks, vaccines or lockdown policies, among other issues. The two AGs have largely relied on documents obtained through subpoenas of YouTube, Twitter and Facebook’s parent firm Meta, which detail regular communications between the government and social media sites.

The White House, as well as the eight officials ordered to testify, have yet to comment on Friday’s ruling. The depositions must take place within 30 days of the order, though it remains unclear whether the defense intends to appeal the decision.

October 21, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , | Leave a comment

‘Gearing Up to Fight Biological Weapons?’ White House Launches $88 Billion National Biodefense Strategy

By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | October 20, 2022

The Biden administration on Tuesday announced a new $88 billion national biodefense strategy that outlines the government’s plans for how to respond to future pandemics, public health emergencies and biological threats.

The launch of the “National Biodefense Strategy and Implementation Plan for Countering Biological Threats, Enhancing Pandemic Preparedness, and Achieving Global Health Security” included the signing of National Security Memorandum-15 (NSM-15).

Key elements of the new strategy include the rapid production and distribution of vaccines and diagnostic tests, and enhancing global health security.

The strategy also includes a new framework for the federal government’s role during a future crisis, which places the White House at the center of any such response, coordinating the actions of multiple federal agencies.

The White House said the new strategy adopts lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic.

In an interview with The Defender, University of Illinois international law professor Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., a bioweapons expert who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, said:

“It appears that the enormous amount of money here, $88 billion over five years, when you add it on to well over, I would say, maybe $130 billion [in biodefense spending] since Sept. 11, 2001, means that they are gearing up to fight biological weapons warfare around the world.”

Boyle told The Defender that between October 2001 and October 2015, the federal government spent $100 billion “on biological warfare purposes.”

“To put that into perspective,” he said, “in constant dollars, the Manhattan Project to develop the atom bomb was $40 billion.”

Plan calls for development, distribution of new vaccines within 130 days

Biden’s new biodefense strategy includes the rapid development and deployment of new vaccines and diagnostics that it foresees in response to any future “biological threats.”

According to the White House’s plan, these “biological threats” may be “naturally occurring, accidental [or] deliberate,” “with the potential to significantly impact humans, animals (domestic and wildlife), plants, and the environment, and to negatively affect health, the economy, society, and security.”

According to STAT, the plan’s targets include:

  • Being able to test for new pathogens within 12 hours.
  • Making rapid tests available to the public within 90 days.
  • Repurposing existing drugs within 90 days.
  • Developing vaccines within 100 days.
  • Manufacturing enough of the new vaccine for the entire U.S. population within 130 days and “for the high-risk global population” within 200 days.
  • Developing new treatments within 180 days.

In justifying the new strategy, an unnamed senior Biden administration official quoted by The Hill said:

“We … know that the risk of another pandemic as bad or worse than COVID is a real threat. The new National Biodefense Strategy therefore outlines a bold vision … towards a world free of pandemics and catastrophic biological incidents.”

According to Defense One, other goals contained within the plan include “detecting the spread of pathogens before patients even begin to show symptoms like fever” and “scaling up the number of diagnostic test kits by tens of thousands within a week.”

A further element of the plan is “restoring community, the economy and the environment after a pandemic or biological incident,” The Hill reported.

The Biden administration’s plan also includes provisions for preparedness against the “accidental release of biological agents, and threats posed by terrorist groups or adversaries seeking to use biological weapons.”

Noting that COVID-19 “has highlighted that the United States and the world are vulnerable to biological threats, whether naturally occurring, accidental, or deliberate,” the plan states:

“It is a vital interest of the United States to prepare for, prevent, detect, respond to, and recover from biological threats at home and abroad.

“Therefore, countering biological threats, advancing pandemic preparedness, and achieving global health security are top national and international security priorities for the United States.

“Moving forward, the United States must fundamentally transform its capabilities to protect our Nation from biological threats and advance pandemic preparedness and health security more broadly for the world.”

According to STAT, an unnamed senior Biden administration official said Tuesday, “One of the important things that COVID has taught us is that we need to be able to move much faster to counter pandemic threats, and we also need to be prepared for completely unknown threats.”

The same official said the plan includes “moonshot” targets that are not scientifically feasible presently, but potentially could be within a decade.

According to the official, these new developments can target the 26 families of viruses that infect humans, “many of which we are far less prepared for than coronaviruses.”

Will Congress fund it?

Some questioned the plan’s price tag and the willingness of Congress to approve its funding.

One of the elements of the new strategy is its connection to a March 2022 request to Congress for $88 billion in funding over five years for “pandemic preparedness and biodefense,” a request that has thus far “stalled.”

These monies are intended, in part, “to fund new research to predict outbreaks before they become pandemics,” and “accelerate rapid testing to get ahead of where viruses are moving,” Defense One said.

Some of this money will come from the baseline funding of the federal agencies involved in this strategy, but it’s unclear whether Congress has “much of an appetite for additional public health spending,” according to STAT, which noted that “Republicans in Congress have balked at recent requests for funding the ongoing monkeypox and COVID-19 responses.”

According to the White House, the new strategy “builds on USAID’s [U.S. Agency for International Development] announcement earlier this year committing $150 million to the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations to accelerate the development of life-saving vaccines and countermeasures against biological threats.”

The White House also included the $1.4 billion in “seed funding” it provided earlier this year to the “groundbreaking new Financial Intermediary Fund for Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response at the World Bank.”

Boyle described the $88 billion in projected funding over the next five years as “a dramatic escalation” with “no justification from legitimate scientific reasons.”

He noted that since 2015, the federal government has “allocated anywhere from $5 to $6 billion per year on biological warfare purposes, which, being conservative, would mean a sum total from Sept. 11, 2001, until now, of $135-$140 billion.”

In his view, this money is being allocated “into further expanding the U.S. biological warfare industry … for the purpose of waging biological warfare,” and instead “should have been spent on the public health of the American people.”

‘You find Tony Fauci behind all of it’

Part of the price tag for the new biodefense strategy appears to be directed toward “recruiting, training and sustaining a robust, permanent cadre of health workers in all 50 states,” in the words of a senior Biden administration official quoted by Reuters.

Referring to it as a “public health army,” STAT reported that this “cadre of health workers” will include “laboratory technicians, veterinarians, and community health workers — to not only better detect emerging diseases but respond to them.”

In turn, Defense One reported that the strategy “aims to boost the number of local healthcare workers” and “traditional frontline healthcare workers,” but also, many new positions “related to research and data collection,” including “expanding the CDC’s epidemiology field officer program” and “bringing more epidemiologists to every state.”

The Biden administration also said it is “committed to helping at least 50 countries strengthen their own local capacities,” “strengthening public health workforces both in the United States and globally” and “establishing international mechanisms to bolster laboratory safety,” according to STAT.

For some, “international mechanisms” may bring to mind the recent and ongoing efforts by the World Health Organization (WHO) to establish a renewed “global pandemic treaty” — efforts in which the United States under the Biden administration has played a leading role.

As previously reported by The Defender, the Biden administration expressed broad support for a “pandemic treaty” and previously headed negotiations on this issue.

In his interview with The Defender, Boyle also drew connections between the Biden administration’s new strategy, and efforts to develop the “pandemic treaty.”

Referring to the Biden administration’s recently signed executive order on “advancing biotechnology and biomanufacturing,” Boyle remarked that it makes mention of “dual-use research of concern, and research involving potentially pandemic and other high-consequence pathogens.”

For Boyle, “dual-use research” refers to the development of both “offensive and defensive biological weapons of warfare,” noting that “when it comes to biological warfare, defense means offense.”

“If they are saying they are doing all this for defensive purposes, it’s because they are also planning offensive use of biological warfare weapons, with the defense to defend themselves in the event that adversaries respond in kind,” Boyle added.

This then connects to the “pandemic treaty,” according to Boyle, noting that Dr. Anthony Fauci has close ties to the WHO’s executive committee:

“If you recall, Trump pulled us out of the WHO. The first act Biden did was to put us back into the WHO … and he appointed Tony Fauci as the U.S. government’s representative on the WHO executive committee.

“So the same guy supporting this ‘dual research of concern’ … is also implementing, supervising this new WHO treaty.”

Biden’s strategy also “calls for international mechanisms that can help strengthen lab safety and biosecurity practices around the world,” especially in light of “questions about the risks and benefits of research into potentially dangerous viruses,” including the COVID-19 Wuhan lab-leak theory.

This may indicate that Biden is seeking to expand gain-of-function research globally. As recently reported by The Defender, facilities conducting such research — including a facility where a purportedly “more lethal” strain of the COVID-19 Omicron variant was developed — are currently being expanded in the U.S.

Gain of function refers to the “manipulation of pathogens to make them more dangerous,” in the hope of “getting ahead of a future outbreak.”

As part of the new strategy, a “policy coordination structure for biodefense among government agencies with oversight by the White House” was signed, Reuters reported.

According to The Hill, this memorandum “outlines the coordination structure for biodefense across federal agencies, directs agencies to prioritize biodefense, directs the intelligence community to track evolving threat landscapes and ensures the government is continuously reviewing and adjusting priorities.”

Boyle, an outspoken critic of gain-of-function research, said it appears such research will be an integral part of the Biden administration’s new biodefense strategy. He told The Defender :

“It’s clear in the language that they are going full steam ahead on abusing DNA, genetic engineering, gain-of-function, synthetic biology, gene splicing, CRISPR-Cas9, to develop biological warfare weapons.”

He said that the proposed WHO pandemic treaty includes language on “measures to provide oversight and report on laboratories that do work to genetically alter organisms in order to increase pathogenicity and transmissibility.”

For Boyle, “this means gain-of-function work, using and abusing DNA engineering, synthetic biology, CRISPR-Cas9. That’s in the WHO treaty.”

“It all ties up,” Boyle added. “The executive order, the biodefense strategy, the WHO treaty. You find Tony Fauci behind all of it.”

Boyle added:

“When you add all this up together, it seems to me they’re gearing up to prepare to wage offensive biological warfare and preparing for the defense, for other states to respond with biological warfare weapons.”

Plan calls for coordination across federal agencies under White House control

The administration’s new biodefense strategy will utilize more than 20 federal agencies, while “oversight for the strategy will be at the White House, under the national security advisor.”

According to a  senior Biden administration official, the new strategy “directs the U.S. intelligence community to monitor for threats and ensure the United States ‘continuously adapts to this evolving threat landscape’ by holding annual exercises,” to “prevent epidemics and biological incidents before they happen,” Reuters reported.

This may bring to mind exercises and simulations that took place just prior to the COVID-19, monkeypox and anthrax outbreaks, which appeared to predict, with remarkable similarity, what was to follow.

According to Biden’s new strategy, the heads of the relevant federal agencies “shall implement the Biodefense Strategy, as well as related strategies such as the U.S. Global Health Security Strategy, and include biodefense-related activities … within their strategic planning and budgetary processes.”

Federal agencies also will be expected to coordinate with each other and with non-federal agencies on matters pertaining to “the biodefense enterprise.”

Is new strategy a ‘moonshot,’ or ‘pie-in-the-sky’?

In addition to questions about funding, some also questioned the feasibility of the new plan.

Defense One wrote that meeting some of the “moonshot” goals of the strategy “will require scaling up data-collection efforts at research facilities around the globe,” in addition to significantly ratcheting up a host of other research-related efforts, noting that the administration “did not specify exactly what technologies they will invest in.”

According to Defense One, “new approaches to RNA research” to “ease pandemics” may need to be developed, in addition to “new forms of plant-based vaccines” that could “allow for the scaling up of vaccine production by orders of magnitude.”

An unnamed senior Biden administration official quoted by Defense One acknowledged that the “moonshots” foreseen by the plan “are not possible today, but these capabilities can be achieved and are within our reach with the right resources over the next five to 10 years.”

Hiring more health workers may also prove challenging for the Biden administration due to a shortage of nurse practitioners that is expected to grow by 2025, along with looming “shortages of other healthcare workers.”

Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”

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.

October 21, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Militarism, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

No balanced coverage of covid vaccines in legacy media, says Peter Doshi

By Maryanne Demasi, PhD | October 16, 2022

Peter Doshi, associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy and senior editor at The BMJ, has spoken out about how the mainstream media has ignored important data on covid-19 vaccines.

In a recent interview with German TV, Doshi said, “Our legacy media has not done a good job in providing balanced coverage about the vaccines.”

He said there has been “a lot of nervousness” about how to communicate vaccine harms to people and is concerned that “we’re not getting the information we need to make better choices and to have a more informed understanding of risk and benefit.”

Doshi’s concerns extended to the over-confidence of public health authorities engaged in promoting the covid-19 vaccines.

“It was very unfortunate, that from the beginning, what was presented to us by public health officials was a picture of great certainty… but the reality was that there were extremely important unknowns,” said Doshi who has written and spoken about these unknowns, highlighting that even public health officials were aware of these limitations.

“We entered a situation where essentially the stakes became too high to later present that uncertainty to people.” He added, “I think that’s what set us off on the wrong foot. Public officials should have been a lot more forthright about the gaps in our knowledge.”

A pivotal study

Doshi was part of an international group of eminent academic researchers and physicians who went back and re-analysed the safety data from the original randomised clinical trials that underpinned the FDA’s decision to authorise the mRNA vaccines in December 2020.

I reported on the pre-print study, but since then, it has been published in the peer-reviewed journal, Vaccine.

The authors focused on serious adverse events that occurred in the Moderna and Pfizer vaccine trials, events the sponsors classified as “serious” generally because they resulted in hospitalisation.

In short, their analysis showed that mRNA vaccines were associated with 1 additional serious adverse event for every 800 people vaccinated, which Doshi said is “much more common” than what we’ve traditionally observed for other vaccines where the adverse event rate is in the range of 1 to 2 per million vaccinees.

“Just to put that in some perspective, a rate like that in past years has had vaccines taken off the market. In 1976, we saw Guillain Barre Syndrome after influenza vaccines that were then withdrawn.”

The authors of the study also found the trial data showed that the increase in serious adverse events following mRNA vaccination surpassed the reduction in risk of ending up hospitalised with covid-19.

Preventing transmission

Despite public assurances that covid-19 vaccines would save lives and protect the community by preventing transmission, Doshi knew from the outset that it was never properly tested. In Oct 2020, Doshi published an article in The BMJ:

Hospital admissions and deaths from covid-19 are simply too uncommon in the population being studied for an effective vaccine to demonstrate statistically significant differences in a trial of 30 000 people. The same is true of its ability to save lives or prevent transmission: the trials are not designed to find out [emphasis added]

It was, therefore, unsurprising to Doshi that the vaccines failed to stop the spread.

“One of the big reasons is that it’s an intramuscular vaccine, and this doesn’t produce mucosal immunity.  Infections of covid, influenza and other acute respiratory infections, start in the mucosal membranes, a place where these vaccines are not particularly good, historically, at producing immunity antibodies” said Doshi.

Calling for raw data

Doshi and his colleagues have called on public health authorities and drug manufacturers to release the raw data so that we can better understand who is most at risk of a serious adverse event.

“There’s no reason to think that these risks are going away and if it’s in the low-risk population, that’s very bad news, because low-risk people have much less to potentially gain from covid vaccines, so the side effect profile in such people has to be extremely low,” said Doshi, pointing out that Denmark now recommends against routine covid-19 vaccination for people under 50.

The FDA and the vaccine manufacturers have the raw ‘patient level’ data, but they have not released it and we’re now almost 2 years into the roll out of the product.

“They should immediately be warning people about this safety signal that we found, and they should immediately be replicating our analysis — the data are indicating there’s increased risk at a level that is much higher than has previously been realised,” said Doshi.

Throughout the pandemic, we’ve been told to “trust the science” but Doshi says, “How can one recommend responsibly that these products are based on science if the data are not available?  Science is about sharing data. We’re in an era of open science, not secret science.”

Doshi and colleagues have penned an open letter to the CEOs of the vaccine companies asking for the raw data, but as yet, they have not received a reply.

See the full interview on mdr.de

October 21, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Where Are All the Vaccine Safety Reports the MHRA Promised Us, Ask Doctors and Scientists

BY WILL JONES | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | OCTOBER 19, 2022

The Health Advisory and Recovery Team (HART), an expert group of medics, clinicians, scientists and academics, has published an article reminding the U.K. drug regulator, the MHRA, that it initially set out a solid plan of how it would monitor the safety of the Covid vaccines it had approved for emergency use. It asks what happened to that plan and all the vaccine safety reports promised under it.

The article starts by setting out the ways in which the MHRA has fallen short in its duty to regulate the vaccines.

The U.K. drug regulator, the MHRA, did not carry out the toxicity, biodistribution and pharmacokinetics studies that are required of new drugs because of the political pressure to approve. However, nearly two years have passed since then and the MHRA has not set a deadline for the pharmaceutical companies to provide these data. The MHRA allowed the treatments to be presented as vaccines like any other when they are a novel class of agents, never before approved for human use despite the technology being around for decades (mostly because they have been dangerous and ineffective in previous human trials).

The trials should have remained placebo controlled and ongoing for two to five years minimum in order to establish an understanding of their safety. Authorisations were based on two months of safety data in healthy people and the MHRA allowed the pharmaceutical companies to vaccinate the placebo control group such that further safety data could not be collected.

Approvals for children were unethical when the trial data did not show evidence of a benefit from the drug to the children themselves when there was already good evidence of short term safety issues and when long term safety data was inevitably unavailable. Approving for younger children after the arrival of Omicron was even less defensible.

The MHRA failed to notice that the total mortality in the trial was higher in the vaccination group than the placebo group, showing no evidence of an overall mortality benefit, and the serious adverse reactions were much higher in the vaccination group such that one in 800 participants were hospitalised for a non-Covid condition, which far outweighed the small reduction in Covid hospitalisations.

Dame June Raine, the head of the U.K. drug regulator the MHRA, appeared to take a unilateral decision to change its role. She said “the Covid pandemic has catalysed the transformation of the regulator from a watchdog to an enabler.”

The regulator receives 86% of its funding from industry fees. In 2005, the House of Commons’ health committee expressed concerns regarding the U.K. drug regulator that pharmaceutical funding could lead the agency to “lose sight of the need to protect and promote public health above all else as it seeks to win fee income from the companies”. Do we want a regulator which sees itself as an enabler of pharmaceutical companies?

At the outset, the MHRA set out an excellent plan for safety monitoring of the Covid vaccines which was required because of the minimal safety data from trials and the planned extensive rollout. It described this as a four part system of “proactive vigilance… to rapidly detect, confirm, characterise and quantify any new risks that were not detected in clinical trials”.

The four parts were:

1. Have doctors report concerns to the Yellow Card system
2. Actively analyse GP data on a weekly basis to look for increases in any suspected condition
3. Proactively survey to follow up a sample of people after vaccination
4. Academic studies of large medical databases

The only publications from the MHRA in the last two years on safety have been the Yellow Card reports and even these do not divulge the number of people affected or the seriousness of the reports.

Where are these weekly analyses of GP data, proactive surveys of the vaccinated and academic studies of large medical databases? We’re approaching two years into the rollout – where are all these promised reports? And why is no one apart from HART and a smattering of others asking these questions?

Worth reading in full.

October 20, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »