FDA Dumps More Pfizer Documents: Why Were So Many Adverse Events Reported as ‘Unrelated’ to Vaccine?
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | May 17, 2022
The latest release of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine documents raises questions about how frequently adverse events experienced by clinical trial participants were reported as “unrelated” to the vaccine.
The 80,000-page document cache released May 2 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) includes an extensive set of Case Report Forms (CRFs) from Pfizer trials conducted at various locations in the U.S.
The documents also include the “third interim report” from BioNTech’s trials conducted in Germany (accompanied by a synopsis of this report and a database of adverse events from this particular set of trials).
The FDA released the documents, which pertain to the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of the vaccine, as part of a court-ordered disclosure schedule stemming from an expedited Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed in August 2021.
Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency, a group of doctors and public health professionals, submitted the FOIA request.
Adverse events during Pfizer vaccine trials in the U.S. usually reported as ‘unrelated’ to vaccination
Pfizer conducted a series of vaccine trials at various locations in the U.S., including the New York University Langone Health Center, Rochester Clinical Research and Rochester General Hospital (Rochester, New York) and the J. Lewis Research, Inc. Foothill Family Clinic (Salt Lake City, Utah).
The Pfizer documents released this month by the FDA included a series of CRFs for patients who suffered some type of adverse event during their participation in the COVID-19 vaccine trials.
As the documents reveal, despite the occurrence of a wide range of symptoms, including serious cardiovascular events, almost none were identified as being “related” to the vaccine.
Such serious yet “unrelated” adverse events included:
- Acute asthma exacerbation
- Aortic aneurysm (listed as a pre-existing condition)
- Appendicitis (requiring hospitalization)
- Atrial defibrillation
- Cardiac arrest and acute respiratory failure, requiring hospitalization, sustained by a patient who then was “lost” (could not be located for continued participation in the trial)
- Chest pain (requiring hospitalization, later listed as cardiac ischemia)
- Coronary artery occlusion (listed as both serious and life-threatening)
- Injuries sustained from a fall
- Intermittent non-cardiac chest pain (requiring hospitalization)
- Left breast cancer (listed as a pre-existing occult malignancy)
- Neuritis (peripheral nerve Injury), listed as “unrelated” to the vaccine but related to the blood draw during vaccination
- Pulmonary embolism and bilateral deep venous thrombosis
- Respiratory failure (requiring hospitalization)
- Right ureteropelvic junction obstruction (requiring hospitalization, listed as congenital)
- Small bowel obstruction, listed as “unplanned,” and a panic attack
Of the CRFs found in the documents released this month, only one adverse event is clearly specified as being related to the vaccination: a participant who suffered from psoriatic arthritis, with no prior history of the condition.
In addition, several CRFs indicated exposure during pregnancy (see here and here), or during a partner’s pregnancy (see here and here). However, the documents provided do not appear to have provided any follow-ups regarding any outcomes or potential adverse events for the participants, their partners or their newborn babies once born.
In some instances, while the CRFs claimed the adverse events suffered by patients were not related to the vaccine, their cause was unspecified, simply indicated as “other,” while in another case, a participant’s “unplanned” small bowel obstruction and panic attacks were listed as being unrelated to the vaccination despite no relevant medical history pertaining to the SAEs (severe adverse events) in question.
Did Pfizer hide critical information from regulators?
It is difficult to draw concrete conclusions about any specific case from the data provided by CRFs and vaccine trial summaries.
However, what raises eyebrows is the very large number of adverse events — often serious and often requiring the hospitalization of the patients involved — that were determined to be “unrelated” to the administration of the COVID vaccine.
Previously released Pfizer documents also included discrepancies in the recording of adverse events.
According to investigative journalist Sonia Elijah, these discrepancies include:
- Trial participants were entered into the “healthy population” but were, in actuality, far from healthy.
- SAE numbers were left blank.
- Barcodes were missing from samples collected from trial participants.
- The second vaccine dose was administered outside the three-week protocol window.
- New health problems were dismissed as “unrelated” to the vaccination.
- A remarkable number of patients with an observation period of exactly the same duration — 30 minutes, with very little variety in observation times and raising questions as to whether patients were adequately observed or were put at risk.
- Oddities pertaining to the start and end dates of SAEs – for instance, a “healthy” diabetic suffered a “serious” heart attack on October 27, 2020, but the “end” date for this SAE is listed as the very next day, even though the patient was diagnosed with pneumonia that same day.
- Impossible dating: in the aforementioned example of the patient who sustained a heart attack and pneumonia, the individual in question later died, but the date of death is indicated as the day before the patient was recorded as having gone to a “COVID ill” visit.
- Unblinded teams, who were aware of which patients received the actual vaccine or a placebo, were responsible for reviewing adverse event reports, potentially leading to pressure to downplay COVID-related events in the vaccinated, or to indicate that adverse events were related to the vaccine.
- Other adverse events were indicated as “not serious” despite extensive hospital stays, of up to at least 26 days in the case of one patient who suffered a fall which was classified as “not serious,” yet facial lacerations sustained as a result of the fall were attributed to hypotension (low blood pressure).
Many of these practices seem to appear in the trial-related documents released this month.
Medical and scientific experts who spoke to The Defender expressed similar concerns about what this month’s tranche of documents reveals, and addressed cases of “disappearing” adverse events.
Brian Hooker, chief scientific officer for Children’s Health Defense, remarked:
“I’m most concerned about ‘disappearing’ patients. One cannot conduct a valid trial and simply omit the results that they don’t like!
“With the stories about Maddie de Garay and Augusto Roux surfacing, I have to wonder how many other participants were dropped in order to hide vaccine adverse events/effects.
“If you look at the data in VAERS [Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System], COVID-19 vaccines are the most dangerous ever introduced into the population.”
Dr. Madhava Setty, a board-certified anesthesiologist and senior science editor for The Defender, said:
“The ‘unrelated’ label the investigators use to divert attention from AEs [adverse events] is a powerful point that stands on its own. We haven’t pushed back on this enough.
“Equivalently, we can say that the meager and short-lived benefit of these shots is also ‘unrelated’ using their ‘standards.’ On what grounds can they say that their product is preventing infection (which it isn’t anymore), or death (marginally)?
“They cannot have it both ways. They cannot claim a benefit through short-term outcomes while denying that side effects of any kind are related to their product.
“That’s the whole point of doing a trial. You cannot prove causation, only statistically significant correlation.”
Setty provided further context for his remarks in an April 2022 article for The Defender and in a March 2022 presentation, in which he discussed the number of these adverse events and how Pfizer swept them away (timestamp 24:00).
In Setty‘s view:
“There’s a high likelihood of malfeasance going on. [Pfizer whistleblower] Brook Jackson says the PIs [principal investigators] were unblinded. If true, it would make it very easy for the investigators to bump up the AEs in the placebo group while ignoring some of the AEs in the vaccine group.
“Pfizer claims that 0.5% of placebo recipients suffered a serious adverse event compared to 0.6% in the vaccine group. This is how these events were obscured.”
The extant body of evidence indicates Pfizer “is hiding critical information from regulators,” Setty said:
“The clincher is in the memorandum to the VRBPAC [Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee] (Table 2, efficacy populations), where they show us that five times more people in the vaccine group were pulled out of the trial than the placebo within seven days of their second shot for ‘important protocol deviations.’
“In a trial that big the chances that could have happened coincidentally is infinitesimally small (less than 1 in 100,000).
“Moreover, months later, the same thing happened in the pediatric trial (Table 12). This time, six times more children were pulled from the trial after their second dose.
“There are, of course, procedural differences when administering a placebo versus the mRNA vaccine, but why didn’t it happen after the first dose as well?
“Mathematically, that is about as close as you can get to eliminating any ‘shadow of doubt.’ With a formal allegation by a trial coordinator that states the same thing [referring to whistleblower Brook Jackson], we can be assured Pfizer is hiding critical information from regulators.”
BioNTech trials in Germany claim few adverse events ‘related’ to vaccine
The BioNTech trial in Germany tested various dosages of two COVID-19 vaccine formulas, labeled BNT162b1 and BNT162b2 — the latter granted EUA by the FDA.
The latest cache of Pfizer documents suggests a pattern, similar to the one in the U.S. trials, of not reporting adverse events as related to the vaccine.
According to the third interim report, dated March 20, 2021, among trial participants who were administered the BNT162b2 candidate vaccine granted EUA in the U.S.:
- 87% of younger participants reported solicited local reactions, and 88% reported solicited systemic reactions, with 10% reporting solicited systemic reactions of Grade 3 or higher.
- 87% of younger participants experienced “mild” solicited local reactions, and 35% experienced “moderate” solicited local reactions.
- 88% of younger participants experienced “mild” solicited systemic reactions, and 38% experienced “moderate” solicited systemic reactions. As stated in the report:
“The most frequently reported solicited systemic reactions of any severity were fatigue (n=40, 67%), followed by headache (n=32, 53%), malaise (n=24, 40%), and myalgia (n=23, 38%). The remaining symptom terms were less frequent.
“For nausea, headache, fatigue, myalgia, chills, arthralgia and malaise each symptom was assessed as severe in <10% of participants.”
- 43% of younger participants reported a total of 51 unsolicited TEAEs (treatment-emergent adverse events, referring to conditions not present prior to treatment or that worsened in intensity after treatment) within 28 days of the first or second dose, nine of which were deemed to be “related” to the vaccination. One participant in this category sustained a TEAE assessed as Grade 3 or higher, but “which was assessed as not related by the investigator.”
- TEAEs among younger participants included hypoaesthesia, lymphadenopathy, heart palpitations, external ear inflammation, blepharitis, toothache, non-cardiac chest pain, cestode infection, oral herpes, tonsillitis, neck pain, insomnia, anosmia and dysmenorrhea.
- No unsolicited treatment-emergent serious adverse events (TESAEs) or deaths were reported among younger participants, but one discontinued participation due to moderate nasopharyngitis.
- One younger participant “discontinued due to a moderate AE (nasopharyngitis).”
- 86% of older participants reported solicited local reactions, with 6% reporting solicited local reactions of Grade 3 or higher, 78% reporting “mild” solicited local reactions and 36% reporting “moderate” solicited local reactions.
- 72% of older participants reported solicited systemic reactions, with 11% of these participants sustaining solicited systemic reactions of Grade 3 or higher, 69% sustaining “mild” solicited reactions and 36% sustaining “moderate” solicited reactions.
- 33% of older participants reported a total of 20 unsolicited TEAEs, four of which were determined to be “related” to the vaccination. Among older participants, 8% reported a TESAE of Grade 3 or higher, with “one event assessed as related by the investigator.”
- One older participant was reported to have sustained a “not related TESAE” (an ankle fracture).
- TESAEs among older participants included back pain, chest pain, facial injury, increased lipase, increased amylase, muscle spasms, musculoskeletal pain, tendon pain, orthostatic intolerance, renal colic, seborrhoeic dermatitis and “painful respiration.”
Among trial participants who received the BNT162b1 candidate vaccine (not granted EUA):
- 86% of “younger participants” reported solicited (expected) localized reactions (remaining in one part of the body), with 18% reporting Grade 3 or higher solicited local reactions, 86% of younger participants reporting “mild” solicited local reactions and 54% reporting “moderate” solicited local reactions.
- 92% of younger participants reported solicited systemic reactions (spreading to other parts of the body), with 44% reporting Grade 3 or higher solicited systemic reactions, 90% reporting “mild” solicited systemic reactions and 74% experiencing “moderate” solicited systemic reactions.
The report states:
“The most frequently reported solicited systemic reactions of any severity were fatigue (n=68, 81%), headache (n=66, 79%), myalgia (n=51, 61%), malaise (n=50, 60%), and chills (n=47, 56%). The remaining symptom terms were less frequent.
“For nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, myalgia, arthralgia and fever each symptom was assessed as severe in ≤10% of participants.”
- 45% of younger participants reported a total of 83 unsolicited (unexpected) TEAEs within 28 days of receiving the first or second dose.
A total of 51 of these unsolicited TEAEs were reported as “related” to the vaccination, while 2% of participants sustained Grade 3 or higher TEAEs (four in total), “of which three events were assessed as related by the investigator.”
No unsolicited TESAEs or deaths were reported in this category.
- According to the report, among younger participants, TEAEs included:
“‘General disorders and administration site conditions’ reported by 9 participants (11%),” including influenza-like illness and injection site hematoma.
“‘Nervous system disorders’ reported by 10 participants (12%),” including presyncope, hyperaesthesia, paraesthesia, and headache.
“‘Respiratory, thoracic and mediastinal disorders’ reported by 9 participants (11%),” including cough and oropharyngeal pain.”
Other symptoms included back pain, musculoskeletal chest pain, cervicobrachial syndrome, taste disorder, sleep disorder, depression, hallucination, dysmenorrhoea, pruritus and pityriasis rosea, while one participant required the excision (removal) of a papilloma.
- One younger participant discontinued participation in the trial, “due to a moderate AE (malaise),” while another participant discontinued participation “due to dose-limiting toxicity.”
- 83% of “older participants” reported solicited local reactions, but none were reported as Grade 3 or higher, while 83% of solicited local reactions were “mild” and 42% were “moderate.”
- 92% of older participants reported solicited systemic reactions, with 28% of participants experiencing Grade 3 or higher solicited systemic reactions, 89% experiencing “mild” solicited systemic reactions, and 61% experiencing “moderate” solicited systemic reactions.
According to the report:
“The most frequently reported solicited systemic reactions of any severity were headache (n=29, 81%), fatigue (n=27, 75%), myalgia (n=18, 50%), and malaise (n=18, 50%). The remaining symptom terms were less frequent.”
- 36% of participants reported a total of 24 unsolicited TEAEs within 28 days of the first or second dose, nine of which were assessed as “related” to the vaccination.
Of the participants in this category, 11% reported TEAEs of Grade 3 or higher (four events in total), with one of these events assessed as “related” to the vaccination.
- TEAEs reported by older participants included oropharyngeal pain, nasopharyngitis, bladder dysfunction, sleep disorder, musculoskeletal pain and musculoskeletal chest pain, pollakiuria, migraine, syncope and alopecia.
- One older participant receiving the BNT162b1 candidate sustained a TESAE (syncope), and there were no deaths in this category.
Of note, none of the participants for either vaccine candidate were pregnant, which raises questions about recommending and administering the vaccine to pregnant women despite the absence of any clinical trial data.
As the documents show, a wide range of adverse effects were reported, including cardiovascular and nervous system conditions, most of which were determined to be unrelated to the vaccination itself.
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., is an independent journalist and researcher based in Athens, Greece.
© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.
Monkeypox Fears May Rescue Endangered Corporations
By Whitney Webb |
Unlimited Hangout| May 20, 2022
In recent days, concern over a global outbreak of monkeypox, a mild disease related to smallpox and chickenpox, has been hyped in the media and health ministries around the world, even prompting an emergency meeting at the World Health Organization (WHO). For some, fears have centered around monkeypox being the potential “next pandemic” after Covid-19. For others, the fear is that monkeypox will be used as the latest excuse to further advance draconian biosecurity policies and global power grabs.
Regardless of how the monkeypox situation plays out, two companies are already cashing in. As concern over monkeypox has risen, so too have the shares of Emergent Biosolutions and SIGA Technologies. Both companies essentially have monopolies in the US market, and other markets as well, on smallpox vaccines and treatments. Their main smallpox-focused products are, conveniently, also used to protect against or treat monkeypox as well. As a result, the shares of Emergent Biosolutions climbed 12% on Thursday, while those of SIGA soared 17.1%.
For these companies, the monkeypox fears are a godsend, specifically for SIGA, which produces a smallpox treatment, known by its brand name TPOXX. It is SIGA’s only product. While some outlets have noted that the rise in the valuation of SIGA Technologies has coincided with recent concerns about monkeypox, essentially no attention has been given to the fact that the company is apparently the only piece of a powerful billionaire’s empire that isn’t currently crumbling.
That billionaire, “corporate raider” Ron Perelman, has deep and controversial ties to the Clinton family and the Democratic party as well as troubling ties to Jeffery Epstein. Aside from his controlling stake in SIGA, Perelman has recently made headlines for rapidly liquidating many of his assets in a desperate bid for cash.
Similarly, Emergent Biosolutions has also been in hot water. The company, which has troubling ties to the 2001 Anthrax attacks, came under fire just under two weeks ago for engaging in a “cover up” over quality control issues relating to their production of Covid-19 vaccines. A Congressional investigation found that quality control concerns at an Emergent-run facility led to more than 400 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines being discarded. The Emergent factory in question had been shut down by the FDA in April 2021. They were allowed to reopen last August before the government terminated the contract. Given that the majority of the company’s business is tied to US government contracts, the loss of this contract, and the accompanying poor publicity, the news that its smallpox vaccine may soon be of international interest is likely seen as a godsend by the company.
Notably, this is the second time in a year that both companies have benefitted from pandemic or bioterror fears propagated by the media. Last November, speculation rose that a re-emergence of the eradicated virus that causes smallpox would soon take place. This first began with Bill Gates’ comments on the prospects of smallpox bioterrorism during a November 4th, 2021 interview and was followed by the November 16th announcement of a CDC/FBI investigation into 15 suspicious vials labeled “smallpox” at a Merck facility in Philadelphia. Now, roughly six months later, the same fears are again paying off for the same two companies.
A Killer Enterprise
Emergent Biosolutions was previously known as BioPort. The company was founded by Fuad el-Hibri, a Lebanese businessman, who leveraged his contacts with powerful US former military officials and politicians, to take control of a flailing Michigan factory. It was the only factory authorized to produce an anthrax vaccine.
The anthrax vaccine was known to have major problems even before BioPort had acquired it, and is believed by many investigators to be one of the main causes of “Gulf War” syndrome. The vaccine itself, originally developed at Fort Detrick, had little to no safety track record at the time it was administered to US troops in the First Gulf War – a problem that was never remedied. However, its chronic safety issues and its clumsy, multi-dose regimen would later prompt BioPort/Emergent Biosolutions to spend years developing a new formulation of its anthrax vaccine.
The creation of BioPort coincided with the Clinton administration’s efforts to mandate the anthrax vaccine for all members of the US Armed Forces. With control over the only source of anthrax vaccine, BioPort was poised to make a killing.
Once the company acquired the Michigan facility, it took large amounts of US government funds, ostensibly to make improvements at the site. However, the company declined to use the funds to make the necessary repairs, instead spending that money on its executives’ offices, as opposed to the vaccine factory, and millions more on bonuses for “senior management.” Pentagon auditors would later find that still millions more had gone “missing” and BioPort’s staff were unaware of the cost of producing a single dose of the vaccine. Despite the clear mismanagement and corruption, BioPort demanded to be bailed out by the Pentagon, and they were. Meanwhile, the Michigan facility lost its license after a government inspection found numerous safety issues.
However, by August 2001, BioPort stood to lose the Pentagon contracts – its only source of income. The Pentagon began preparing a report, due to be released in September 2001, that would detail a plan for letting BioPort go. Thanks to the September 11, 2001 attack on the Pentagon, that report was never released. Shortly thereafter, the 2001 anthrax attacks began.
Just months before, BioPort had contracted Battelle Memorial Institute to help rescue its flailing vaccine program. The deal gave Battelle “immediate exposure to the vaccine” and it was used in connection with the Pentagon-funded, gain-of-function anthrax program that involved both Ken Alibek and William C. Patrick III, two bioweapons experts with deep ties to the CIA. That program was housed at Battelle’s West Jefferson facility in Ohio. That facility is believed by many investigators to be the source of the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks.
The ensuing panic from the anthrax attacks led the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to intervene. They gave BioPort its license back in January 2002 despite persisting safety concerns at its vaccine production facility in Michigan. BioPort was not content to merely see its past contracts with the Pentagon restored, however, as it began lobbying heavily for new contracts for anthrax vaccines intended for American civilians, postal workers and others. They would get them, largely thanks to HHS’ then-counter-terrorism adviser and soon to be HHS’ newest Assistant Secretary — Jerome Hauer. Hauer would later join the board of BioPort, after it reformed as Emergent Biosolutions, in 2004.
Such examples of cronyism are more common than not when it comes to Emergent Biosolutions. Indeed, the company has frequently relied on individuals who spend their careers passing through the “revolving door” between the pharmaceutical industry and government, particularly those who also moonlight as bioterror alarmists. One of the main individuals critical to the company’s success over the years has been Robert Kadlec. Kadlec served as the top bioterror advisor to the Pentagon in the weeks leading up to the 2001 anthrax attacks. Months prior, he had participated in the June 2001 simulation Dark Winter, which “predicted” major aspects of the subsequent anthrax attacks. Kadlec subsequently crafted much of the legislation that would create the country’s subsequent bioterror/pandemic response policy, including BARDA and the Strategic National Stockpile.
Soon after leaving government, Robert Kadlec helped found a new company in 2012 called “East West Protection,” which develops and delivers “integrated all-hazards preparedness and response systems for communities and sovereign nations.” The company also “advises communities and countries on issues related to the threat of weapons of mass destruction and natural pandemics.”
Kadlec formed the company with W. Craig Vanderwagen, the first HHS Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (a position Kadlec had helped write into law and would later hold himself). The other co-founder of East West Protection was Fuad El-Hibri, the founder of BioPort/Emergent Biosolutions, who had just stepped down as Emergent’s CEO earlier that year.
Kadlec then became a consultant. Kadlec’s consultancy firm, RPK Consulting, netted him $451,000 in 2014 alone, where he directly advised Emergent Biosolutions as well as other pharmaceutical companies like Bavarian Nordic. Kadlec was also a consultant to military and intelligence contractors, such as the DARPA-backed firm Invincea and NSA contractor Scitor, which was recently acquired by SAIC.
Kadlec would return to government as HHS ASPR under Trump, a position which he held at the time the Covid-19 crisis began. The year prior, in 2019, Kadlec had conducted a months-long simulation focused on a global pandemic originating in China called Crimson Contagion. Once the Covid-19 crisis began in earnest, he played a major role in securing Covid-19 vaccine contracts for Emergent Biosolutions, despite his conflicts of interest, some of which he had declined to disclose upon being appointed to serve as ASPR.
Emergent Biosolutions’ pattern of corrupt behavior, beginning with its anthrax vaccine, can be seen with its recent actions as it relates to its production of Covid-19 vaccines. Per the recent Congressional report, released just days before the recent spike in concern over monkeypox began, Emergent lab workers “intentionally sought to mislead government inspectors about issues” at its Baltimore-based plant and also repeatedly “rebuffed” efforts by AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson to inspect their facilities. “Despite major red flags at its vaccine manufacturing facility, Emergent’s executives swept these problems under the rug and continued to rake in taxpayer dollars,” House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) stated upon the report’s release. Yet such “major red flags” can be found throughout the company’s entire history, for those willing to take the time to look.
Just days after the Congressional report was released, Emergent Biosolutions announced that it would acquire the exclusive worldwide rights to the “first FDA-approved Smallpox Oral Antiviral for all ages” from the company Chimerix. The drug, called TEMBEXA, is only for the treatment of smallpox, which the company refers to as “a high priority public health threat.” The press release on the company’s acquisition of TEMBEXA states that multi-million US government contracts for the product are anticipated. The FDA formally approved the drug last June.
Emergent Biosolutions also has the rights to the smallpox vaccine known as ACAM2000, which can also be used to treat monkeypox. The vaccine, originally produced by Sanofi, was acquired by the company in 2017. As a result, the company has an essential monopoly over smallpox vaccines as ACAM2000 is “the only vaccine licensed by the FDA for active immunization against smallpox disease for people determined to be at high risk of smallpox infection.”
Given their track record, it’s worth asking why Emergent Biosolutions has been working in recent months to pivot much of its business into smallpox treatments. However, there is no speculation needed when observing that the current monkeypox fears and helping rescue the company, whose shares had fallen some 26% year to date before concern over the recent monkeypox outbreak began to grow.
Whatever comes of the monkeypox situation, Emergent Biosolutions’ decades-long track record is undeniably one of corruption and cronyism.
“BioArmor” for Ron Perelman’s Flailing Business Empire
SIGA Technologies, which likens its products to “Human BioArmor”, features a quote from Bill Gates at the top of its about page. The quote reads: “[…] the next epidemic could originate on the computer screen of a terrorist intent on using genetic engineering to create a synthetic version of the smallpox virus […]” The quote is from Bill Gates’ speech to the 2017 Munich Security Conference, where he used the threat specifically of smallpox to argue that “health security” and “international security” be merged. Notably, last March, the Munich Security Conference hosted a simulation of a global pandemic caused by a “genetically engineered monkeypox virus.”
SIGA is one example of a company that seeks to find its niche in the middle of “health security” and “international security.” It specifically provides “solutions for unmet needs in the health security market that comprises medical countermeasures against chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) threats, as well as emerging infectious diseases.” The majority of contracts for CBRN medical countermeasures in the US are funded by the Pentagon. While it promotes itself as a CBRN threat-focused company, SIGA is, for now, singularly focused on smallpox.
Indeed, SIGA Technologies is only currently profitable in the event of an actual outbreak of smallpox or a related disease, or when fear of a smallpox bioterror event is high. Specifically, concern over the latter has led to the company to win government contracts to produce TPOXX for the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS). This is because TPOXX is only used to treat active smallpox or monkeypox infection, not prevent it. This means that it is only useful if smallpox, monkeypox or a related disease is actively infecting people or if there is a high risk that one of these diseases will soon infect large groups of people. TPOXX was first approved in 2018 by the FDA and was approved by the European Medicine Agency (EMA) this past January. The FDA approved an intravenous version of TPOXX just this past Thursday. Overall, SIGA has received over $1 billion from the US government to develop TPOXX.
SIGA is currently partnered with HHS’ BARDA, the Department of Defense, the CDC and the NIH. Another partner is Lonza, a European pharmaceutical manufacturing firm that is partnered with both the World Economic Forum and Moderna. SIGA’s CEO, Phillip Gomez, is an alumni of PRTM Consulting, where he would have worked closely with Robert Kadlec, as the two men overlapped as directors of the firm and both worked advising government agencies on matters of public health and biodefense.
SIGA is also notable because it is possibly the only company in the business empire of corporate raider Ron Perelman that is not attached to growing mountains of debt. Perelman is one of the notorious corporate raiders from the 1980s who conducted corporate takeovers fueled by junk bonds, particularly those connected to Michael Milken’s Drexel Burnham Lambert. Perelman’s business tactics have long been informed by his volcanic temper and his ruthlessness, with former Salomon Brothers CEO John Gutfruend once remarking that “believing Mr. Perelman has no hostile intentions is like believing the tooth fairy exists.”
Perelman is also known for being a long-time patron of the Clinton family, even though, more recently he donated to Donald Trump’s political campaigns. Perelman apparently first became interested in courting influence with the Clintons after marrying Patricia Duff in 1994. Duff was deeply connected to the Democratic Party, having worked for Democratic pollster Pat Cadell, and she had also worked for the House panel that “investigated” the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Prior to marrying Perelman, she had been married to movie mogul Michael Medavoy and had “introduced Clinton to the Hollywood establishment,” according to the Washington Post.
As Perelman’s wife, Duff styled herself a leading Democratic fundraiser, with the 1995 fund-raising dinner being emblematic of that. Also, in 1995, Perelman attended a $1,000-a-plate dinner in New York for the Clintons, where Perelman sat across from the President, as well as a state dinner for Brazil’s president at the White House.
For Perelman, his generosity to the Clinton political machine resulted in an appointment by Clinton to the board of trustees of the Kennedy Center in 1995. Other, less public gestures from the Clintons were likely, as Perelman offered much more to the First Family than he appears to have received in return. Perhaps most notable of Perelman’s favors for Bill Clinton was his offering of jobs to scandal-ridden members of his administration, Webster Hubbell and Monica Lewinsky, in the wake of their respective controversies. However, after the job offers were publicly reported, both Hubbell and Lewinsky were let go, though the offers later caught the attention of independent counsel Ken Starr. Starr never subpoenaed or investigated Perelman or the offers he had made to Hubbell or Lewinsky.
The controversial hirings had been arranged between Perelman and Clinton advisor Vernon Jordan, who sat on the board of Revlon, a Perelman-controlled company, while his wife was on the board of another Perelman-owned firm. Jordan was known as Clinton’s “conduit to the high and mighty” and had taken Clinton to the 1991 Bilderberg conference. On the decision to hire Lewinsky following the scandal, a former business associate of Perelman’s told the Washington Post that “It’s like the Mafia, it’s all done in code,” adding that “I can assure you that Ronald made the decision to give Lewinsky the job. And I can assure you he wouldn’t want to know why Jordan was asking.”
In 1995, Perelman held a Clinton fundraiser at his mansion, with guests including singer Jimmy Buffett, Miami Vice actor Don Johnson, actor Michael Douglas’ then-wife Deandra and DNC co-chair Don Fowler. Other guests included A. Paul Prosperi, a corrupt Clinton crony, and the now infamous Jeffrey Epstein. Clinton himself attended the fundraiser. According to the Palm Beach Post, guests had donated at least $100,000 to the DNC to attend the dinner with the President. This was, of course, in the lead up to the 1996 election, and the DNC would later come under heavy scrutiny due to illegal fundraising. This fundraiser was not Epstein’s only interaction with Perelman – Perelman would later be listed as a frequent dinner guest of Epstein’s in the 2003 Vanity Fair profile penned by Vicky Ward and is listed in Epstein’s black book of contacts.
For most of the 2000s, Perelman has sat atop a massive, ever-growing fortune. Yet, since 2020, Perelman has “been unloading assets ‘A lot of them. Rapidly.’” It started with sales of valuable paintings at Sotheby’s and soon extended to Perelman’s investment company MacAndrews & Forbes, which disposed of its interest in two companies that same year, including $1 billion in shares in Scientific Games. According to MoneyWeek, Perelman’s net worth dropped from $19 billion in 2018 to $4.2 billion in late 2020, “prompting speculation that he’s running out of money.” Over the course of last year, Perelman has continued to “downsize”, looking to sell off his estate in the Hamptons for $115 million, another 57-acre estate worth $180 million and two townhouses in Manhattan’s Upper East Side for $60 million.
Other assets held by Perelman’s company MacAndrews & Forbes are also drowning in debt. One of the few assets of the company that isn’t currently haemorrhaging money or struggling with debt is its shares in SIGA Technologies. Perelman’s main company, MacAndrews & Forbes, has long been one of SIGA’s biggest investors and remains its largest shareholder, controlling 33% of all shares.
Since Perelman got involved with SIGA, accusations of corruption have plagued the company. For instance, in May 2011, SIGA was given a no-bid contract worth about $433 million to develop and produce 1.7 million doses of anti-viral drug for smallpox. At the time there was no evidence the smallpox drug in question was capable of treating the disease and there was alarm among some HHS staffers that SIGA’s return on investment from the contract was “outrageous.” The contract began to be investigated over concerns that the contract had been awarded to SIGA precisely because it was controlled by Perelman, who had donated heavily to Barack Obama. At the time, CNN noted the following about Perelman’s connections to the Obama White House:
“Ronald Perelman is controlling shareholder of Siga Technologies and a longtime Democratic Party activist and fundraiser. He’s also a large contributor to Republicans, but has been a particular friend of the Obama White House.
Also on Siga’s board of directors is Andy Stern, former president of the Service Employees International Union, who has had close relations with the Obama administration and who has supported President Barack Obama’s health care initiatives.”
As a result of these concerns and the potential conflict of interest, a congressional investigation began. Days after learning that this key government contract may be in jeopardy, SIGA executives sold off large amounts of company stock at an average price of $13.46 per share, netting its Chief Executive Officer and Chief Scientific Officer at the time millions of dollars. A month later, the company announced that its contract had been downsized and shares in the company fell to under $2 by that December.
Given past “pay-to-play” accusations around Perelman’s role in the firm during the Obama administration, when President Joe Biden served as Vice President, what are we to make of the recent media hype around monkeypox? Or concerns raised last year of a bioterrorism event involving smallpox?
Perhaps it’s more important to ask other questions – why has Perelman’s role in SIGA been largely obfuscated or totally ignored by recent reporting on the company? Similarly, why has Emergent Biosolutions’ horrific track record also been excluded from recent reports, including the major complaints from Congress made against the company less than two weeks ago? It seems the fear being generated around monkeypox is not only boosting shares for these two rotten companies, it’s helping the public forget their past sins.
Whitney Webb has been a professional writer, researcher and journalist since 2016. She has written for several websites and, from 2017 to 2020, was a staff writer and senior investigative reporter for Mint Press News. She currently writes for The Last American Vagabond.
The DHS’ latest appointment to the Disinformation Board adds to its credibility problem
Michael Chertoff himself has pushed false claims about disinformation and is a prime example of how boards such as this shouldn’t exist
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | May 20, 2022
The US administration is getting further entangled in missteps, in an attempt to create a credible Disinformation Governance Board.
The latest addition to the outfit, former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff – now nominated as the board’s adviser by the same agency – is unlikely to add to the credibility or clear up “confusion” about the board’s role – given that he, too, in the past peddled misinformation, reports say.
The infamous case of the Hunter Biden laptop is at the center of it all, as more officials who have pushed the now-debunked theory that the emails retrieved from the device were not authentic but a Russian conspiracy are getting appointed to the board.
This new government body is often referred to by critics as the “Ministry of Truth” – a reference to Orwell’s “1984” where the said ministry served a purpose opposite of “truth” – its job was to falsify historical events in order to advance government propaganda.
Chertoff – along with former CIA director Leon Panetta and several others who also in the past broadcast what turned out to be false claims that the publishing of the Biden emails was “a Russian operation” are now joining the board in advisory roles.
The necessity to do something to save face shortly after this body was launched comes because of the actions of its executive director, Nina Jankowicz, who also believes that the emails coming to light were the result of “a Russian influence operation.”
Chertoff himself said in the wake of the 2020 election – ahead of which the Biden laptop story was suppressed and censored by Big Tech and Big Media – that it was the Russians who got their hands on the emails and that those saying they were recovered from Hunter Biden’s abandoned computer were “preposterous.”
Nearly two years later, however, there has been no evidence to prove otherwise. The authenticity of emails messages has been forensically verified, and the repair shop owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, said that Hunter Biden left the laptop there in 2019 and never came back.
Isaac first gave a copy of the hard drive to the FBI later that year, and then to President Trump’s associates, who forwarded the documents to the New York Post.
Clinton ordered leak of bogus ‘Russiagate’ story to press, ex-aide tells court
Samizdat | May 20, 2022
Former Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook told a federal court in Washington, DC on Friday that, in 2016, Hillary Clinton approved leaking to the media a story claiming that the Trump Organization had been in contact with Russia’s Alfa Bank. The story originated with one of Clinton’s lawyers, and is false.
Mook, who ran Clinton’s unsuccessful campaign in 2016, told the court that campaign lawyer Marc Elias approached him claiming to have proof that servers connected with Russia’s Alfa Bank exchanged data with servers belonging to the Trump Organization. He said that he had been assured that the evidence had come from “people that had expertise in this sort of matter.”
Mook said that nobody on the campaign was “totally confident” in the information, and that he asked Clinton whether he should release it to the media. “She agreed,” he said, and the information was released.
Once the claims were published by Slate, an online news source, the Clinton campaign put out a statement describing the supposed Alfa Bank server exchange as “the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow.” Then-Clinton adviser and current National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan wrote the statement, saying that the Alfa Bank allegations raise “even more troubling questions in light of Russia’s masterminding of hacking efforts … to hurt Hillary Clinton’s campaign.”
However, the allegations were false. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report into “collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russia made no mention of the server allegations, and found no evidence of “collusion” or Russian “hacking efforts” to influence the 2016 election.
Furthermore, an FBI investigation into the allegations found that there was “nothing there,” the agency’s former general counsel, James Baker, testified in the same courtroom on Thursday. Both Mook and Baker were testifying in the trial of Michael Sussmann, who first brought the Alfa Bank allegations to the FBI.
Sussman is charged with making false statements to the agency when he told Baker in 2016 that he was not working “for any client” when he approached the FBI with his allegations. However, prosecutors allege that he was working for the Clinton campaign at the time, and that he billed the campaign for his work immediately after meeting Baker.
Sussman, who has pleaded not guilty, is being prosecuted by US Department of Justice Special Counsel John Durham, who was appointed by then Attorney General William Barr in 2019 to investigate the FBI’s handling of the ‘Russiagate’ investigation before Mueller took over.
Trump has insisted since 2016 that the allegations of “collusion” against him were a politically-motivated “witch hunt.”
Pfizer Document Dump Shows Doctor With Ties to Gates Foundation Deleted Trial Participant’s Vaccine Injury
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | May 18, 2022
An 80,000-page cache of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine documents released by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) sheds light on Pfizer’s extensive vaccine trials in Argentina, including the unusually large size of the trials and the story of a trial participant whose vaccine reaction was “disappeared.”
The case of Augusto Roux in Argentina suggests that in at least one instance, a trial participant whose symptoms were determined to be connected to the COVID-19 vaccine was later listed, in official records, as having experienced adverse events that were not related to the vaccination.
Vaccine trials in Argentina also appear to have glossed over adverse events suffered by other trial participants, and the potential connection between the adverse events and the vaccine.
The FDA on May 2 released the latest cache of documents, which pertain to the Emergency Use Authorization of Pfizer’s vaccine, as part of a court-ordered disclosure schedule stemming from an expedited Freedom of Information Act request filed in August 2021.
As previously reported by The Defender, the documents included Case Report Forms from Pfizer COVID vaccine trials in the U.S., and the “third interim report” from BioNTech’s trials conducted in Germany, both of which listed adverse events sustained by participants in the U.S. and German trials.
Many of these adverse events were indicated as being “unrelated” to the vaccines — even in instances where the patients were healthy or otherwise had no prior medical history related to the injuries they sustained.
Story of ‘disappeared patient’ goes public
Several bloggers and online investigators called into question various aspects of the Argentine vaccine trials, pointing out the number of participants in the Argentine trials dwarfed that of other, typically smaller trials at other locations in different countries.
They also pointed out the large number of participants appeared to have been recruited to the trial in a remarkably short time, and questioned the connections between one of the key figures of the Argentine trial to vaccine manufacturers, Big Pharma and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The large number of trial participants in Argentina may be related to the fact that the trial appears to have been held simultaneously in 26 hospitals.
The large number of participants is revealed in another of the documents released this month, where on page 2,245, the list of randomized participants at trial site 1231 begins, while on page 4,329, the list of participants at trial site 4444 begins.
Site 1231 refers to the main trial site location and 4444 (page 24) most likely refers to the disparate hospitals participating in the trial outside the main location.
Commenting on the revelation, blogger David Healy wrote:
“About 5,800 volunteers were enrolled, half getting the active vaccine. This is almost 4 times more than the next largest centre in this trial.
“Amazingly 467 doctors were almost instantly signed up and trained as assistant investigators in the study.”
In all, 4,501 patients participated in the Argentine trials, representing 10% of all Pfizer trial participants worldwide.
Complete information about adverse events during this extensive trial in Argentina does not appear to have been released as of this writing.
However, Roux’s experience has since become public.
Roux, often referred to as the “disappeared” patient, volunteered for the trial (volunteer number 12312982) and received his first dose of the Pfizer vaccine on Aug. 21, 2020.
According to Healy, Roux “felt pain and swelling in his arm right after the injection. Later that day he had nausea, difficulty swallowing, and felt hungover.”
After a series of symptoms, Roux — during a clinical trial visit on Aug. 23, 2020 — was classified as experiencing a “toxicity grade 1 adverse effect.”
He nevertheless received his second dose on Sept. 9, 2020.
According to Healy:
“On the way home by taxi, he started feeling unwell. At 19:30, he was short of breath, had a burning pain in his chest and was extremely fatigued. He lay on his bed and fell asleep. He woke up at 21:00 with nausea and fever (38-39 C) and was unable to get out of bed due to the fatigue.
“Over the next two days, he reports a high fever (41 C) and feeling delirious.
“On September 11, he was able to get out of bed and go to the bathroom when he observed his urine to be dark (like Coca-Cola). He felt as if his heart expanded, had a sudden lack of breath and fell unconscious on the floor for approximately 3 hours.
“Once he recovered, he felt tired, was uncomfortable, had a high heart rate on minor movement, was dizzy when changing posture. He had a chest pain which radiated to his left arm and back.”
On Sept. 12, 2020, Roux was admitted to the Hospital Alemán, where he stayed for two days. It was initially believed he had COVID-19, but he tested negative for the virus. His symptoms also were found to not correspond with viral pneumonia.
After a series of X-rays, CT scans and urine tests, Roux was discharged Sept. 14, 2020, after being diagnosed with an adverse reaction — specifically, an unequivocal pericardial effusion — to the coronavirus vaccine (high probability), according to his discharge summary.
Doctor who altered Roux’s record had ties to Gates, NIH, Big Pharma
However, on Sept. 17, Dr. Fernando Polack, Pfizer’s lead investigator for the Argentine trials according to a Pfizer document released in December 2021, reported in Roux’s record that his “hospitalization was not related to the vaccine.”
Even after Roux’s discharge, his health difficulties continued. As reported by Healy:
“On November 13 [2020], he had negative IgG and IgM SARS COV-2 (QML technique), which is unusual post vaccine.
“On February 24, 2021, a liver scan showed a minor degree of abnormality. In March 2021 and February 2022, his liver enzymes remained abnormal.”
Ultimately, Roux lost 14 kilograms (30.8 pounds) in a period of three to four months, and continued to suffer from fever and bouts of breathlessness for several months afterward.
Polack, who reported Roux’s hospitalization as unrelated to the vaccination, is known for his close ties with various vaccine manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
For instance, he is listed as the lead author in a Dec. 31, 2020, New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) article on the purported efficacy of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine.
According to Healy, Polack also appears to be the founder of iTRIALS, a trial site management company, and another organization located at the same physical headquarters, the Fundación INFANT.
Healy wrote:
“When COVID struck Argentina, [Polack] and his Fundación became involved in a trial of immune plasma, taken from patients who had recovered from COVID, given to patients who had recently acquired the disease.
“In May 2020 he speculated that this would make COVID like an ordinary cold, and the Gates Foundation would offer financial support. He used high-profile press conferences to disseminate his exciting message.”
The conclusion of the study published in the NEJM following the plasma study reads:
“Funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Fundación INFANT Pandemic Fund; Dirección de Sangre y Medicina Transfusional del Ministerio de Salud number, PAEPCC19, Plataforma de Registro Informatizado de Investigaciones en Salud number, 1421, and ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT04479163.”
According to Healy, “[a] subsequent systematic review and meta-analysis failed to confirm these findings, noting ‘very serious imprecision concerns.’”
Healy pointed out that Polack, in his NEJM disclosure statement, did not indicate any conflict of interest or financial interest in the COVID-19 vaccine trials in Argentina, but:
“Polack reported grants from Novavax and personal fees from Janssen, Bavarian Nordic A/S, Pfizer, Sanofi, Regeneron, Merck, Medimmune, Vir Bio[technology], Ark Bio, Daiichi Sankyo outside the submitted work.
“At least eight of these companies are engaged in RSV vaccine research in babies and pregnant women. Fernando has mentioned a combined RSV, flu and COVID vaccine.”
And, in relation to Polack’s relationship with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Healy reported:
“[Polack] also doesn’t mention his extensive financial involvement with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This organization supports industry vaccine trials including Covid and RSV. Fernando is heavily involved through his Gates-sponsored Fundación INFANT in Buenos Aires in RSV trials and research.
“Gates sunk $82,553,834 into Novavax’s RSV vaccine ResVax which was shown to be ineffective in clinical trials in pregnant women.”
Polack’s own bio from a 2017 medical conference states “[h]is work is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Institutes of Health [NIH], the Thrasher Research Fund, the Optimus Foundation and other international organizations.”
That same year, Polack testified at an FDA Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) meeting, where he “acknowledged having financial interests in or professional relationships with some of the affected firms identified for this meeting, namely Janssen [producer of the Johnson & Johnson COVID vaccine], Novavax, and Bavarian Nordic.”
According to Dr. Joseph Mercola, Polack “also happens to be a consultant for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC),” and “a current adjunct professor at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee.”
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., is an independent journalist and researcher based in Athens, Greece.
Governments worried about Covid misinformation should start with their own lies and distortions: Indiana AG
The Daily Sceptic | May 20, 2022
Governments concerned about Covid misinformation should start with their own lies and distortions, Indiana’s Attorney General has told the U.S. Government. In a submission to the U.S. Surgeon General, who had requested information on the impact of online health misinformation during the pandemic in the United States, Todd Rokita joined with leading scientists Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Dr. Martin Kulldorff to set out nine examples of disinformation propagated by the CDC and other health organisations that have “shattered the public’s trust in science and public health and will take decades to repair”. Read their full submission below.
May 2nd 2022
Agency: Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Surgeon General
Action: Request for Information (RFI)
Subject: Impact of Health Misinformation in the Digital Information Environment in the United States Throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic
Response: COVID-19 Misinformation from Official Sources During the Pandemic
Submitting parties: Todd Rokita, Indiana Attorney General; Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Professor at Stanford University School of Medicine; and Dr. Kulldorff, Senior Research Fellow at the Brownstone Institute and former Professor at Harvard University School of Medicine.
The Office of the Surgeon General requested information on the prevalence of health misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic and the impact of such misinformation on the U.S. public health system in order to be better prepared to respond to a future public health crisis.
We agree that misinformation has been a major problem during the pandemic. The spread of inaccurate scientific information has made it difficult for the public to make the right decisions to protect themselves, their families, and their communities from COVID-19 and the collateral public health damage arising from the pandemic countermeasures. As such, the disinformation has led to great harm in the lives and livelihoods of Americans. We submit the following examples of disinformation from the CDC and other health organisations that have shattered the public’s trust in science and public health and will take decades to repair.
#1 Overcounting COVID-19: The official CDC numbers for COVID-19 deaths and hospitalisations are inaccurate. The official tallies include many people who have died with rather than from COVID-19. CDC has not distinguished deaths where COVID-19 was the primary cause of death, where COVID-19 was a contributing cause of death, or where the death was entirely unrelated to COVID-19, but they incidentally tested positive.
There are three reasons for this problem. (i) The counting of COVID-19 cases and deaths is unlike the way that public health counts the incidence and mortality caused by other diseases; physicians have been advised to fill out death certificates to privilege COVID-19 as a proximal cause, even when the medical facts suggest otherwise. (ii) The population-wide testing to identify asymptomatic individuals infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus is unprecedented in human history. (iii) Although it would have been easy, CDC has not conducted random national surveys of medical charts to determine what proportion of reported COVID-19 deaths were truly due to COVID-19. Ex-post audits of death certificates and medical records in Santa Clara County and Alameda County, California, for instance, found that in around 25% of death certificates in which COVID-19 was labelled as the primary cause of death, other causes of death were more likely. The peer-reviewed literature confirms that COVID-19 is overcounted in other developed countries. Ex post audits of death certificates should be conducted to establish an accurate death count from COVID-19.
#2 Questioning Natural Immunity: There has been consistent questioning and denying of natural immunity after COVID-19 recovery. Using seriously flawed studies, CDC falsely claimed that natural immunity is worse than vaccine acquired immunity. In October 2020, the CDC director published a “memorandum” in the Lancet, questioning natural immunity. Most critically, by mandating vaccination for people who have recovered from COVID-19, the Government, corporations, and universities de facto deny natural immunity.
For scientists, this has been the most surprising disinformation. We have known about natural immunity since the Athenian Plague in 430 BC; other coronaviruses generate natural immunity; and throughout the pandemic, we knew that the COVID-19 recovered have good natural immunity if and when they get exposed the next time. That is, six months after the start of the pandemic, we had epidemiological evidence that natural immunity lasts at least six months; a year into the pandemic, we knew that natural immunity lasted at least one year, and so on.
#3 COVID-19 Vaccines Prevent Transmission: The CDC director and other health officials falsely claimed that the COVID-19 vaccine prevents the transmission of COVID-19 to others. This was also the rationale for vaccine mandates and passports – to prevent the spread of the virus to others. At the time, we did not know, and it turned out to be wrong. When the COVID-19 vaccines were approved for emergency use, the manufacturers presented randomised controlled trials (RCTs) that showed that the vaccines reduced symptomatic disease. The trials were not designed to determine whether they could also limit transmission or prevent death, even though they could have been designed to do so. As it turned out, vaccinated individuals spread the disease to others. While it was unfortunate that the RCTs were not designed to answer the disease transmission question, it is irresponsible for public health officials to claim that they did when the RCTs did not even attempt to answer that question.
#4 School Closures Were Effective and Costless: In the United States, most schools were closed for in-person teaching for some time, and many schools were closed for over a year. This decision was based on false claims that it would protect children, teachers and the community at large. Already in the early summer of 2020, we knew this was false. Sweden was the only major Western country to keep schools open throughout spring 2020 without masks, social distancing, or testing. Among these 1.8 million children ages one to 15, there were zero COVID-19 deaths, only a few hospitalisations, and teachers did not have a higher COVID-19 risk than the average of other professions.
Moreover, while older people living with a working-age adult had a higher COVID-19 risk, there was no evidence that also living with a child increased that risk further. In a July 2020 New England Journal of Medicine article evaluating school closures, they did not mention the Swedish data and evidence, which is like evaluating a new drug without including data from the placebo comparison group. Despite clear evidence on the safety of keeping schools open, misinformation led to many schools being closed for over one year.
#5 Everyone is equally at risk of hospitalisation and death from COVID-19 infection: Though public health messaging has blunted this fact, there is more than a thousand-fold difference in the risk of hospitalisation and death for the old relative to the young. Though the risk of death is high for the old and some other vulnerable populations with severe chronic illness, the risk posed to children from COVID-19 infection is on par with the risk posed by a bad influenza season. Surveys indicate, however, that both old and young overestimate the risk of death from COVID-19 infection. This misperception about risk is harmful because it leads to demand for policies – such as school closures and lockdowns – that were themselves harmful.
#6 There was no reasonable policy alternative to lockdowns: Even from the beginning of the pandemic, the sharp age-gradient in the risk of severe disease on COVID-19 infection has provided an alternative to the lockdown-focused policies that many U.S. states adopted – focused protection of the aged and otherwise vulnerable. In October 2020, along with Prof. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University, we wrote the Great Barrington Declaration – a public petition that proposed heightened measures to protect the vulnerable and a return to near-normal life for the less vulnerable (including the opening of schools). Tens of thousands of doctors and scientists signed the Declaration in opposition to lockdowns. In the Declaration itself and in supporting documents, we offered many concrete policy suggestions for better protecting the vulnerable, including reduced staff rotations in nursing homes, free home delivery of groceries and other essentials offered to older people living in the community, paid sabbatical leave or alternative work arrangements for older workers, and many other policy options. We also invited the public health community to join in thinking creatively about other ideas to protect the vulnerable. As subsequent research has confirmed, it was clear even at the time that lockdowns could not protect the vulnerable (nearly 80% of COVID-19 deaths have occurred among the elderly in the U.S.). Meanwhile, countries like Sweden, which did not implement lockdowns, have had near-zero overall excess death over the last two years of the pandemic. Lockdowns are an aberration– a sharp deviation from traditional public health management of respiratory epidemics – and a catastrophic failure of public health policy.
#7 Mask mandates are effective in reducing the spread of viral infectious diseases: Contrary to assertions by some public health officials, mask mandates have not been effective in protecting most populations against COVID-19 risk. The SARS-CoV-2 virus spreads by aerosolisation. Unlike larger viral droplets, which are pulled by gravity to the ground shortly after emission, aerosols are tiny particles that can persist in the air for extended periods. Aerosols escape through gaps of poorly fitted masks, greatly reducing their ability to stop disease spread. Cloth masks, in particular, cannot stop aerosols, and even well-fitted N95 masks have diminished capacity to stop viral transmission when they become moist from breathing. It is thus unsurprising that the highest quality evidence available – randomised trials – conducted both before and during the pandemic find that masks are ineffective at stopping the spread of respiratory viruses in most settings when worn by untrained people.
#8 Mass testing of asymptomatic individuals and contact tracing of positive cases is effective in reducing disease spread: Mass testing of asymptomatic individuals with contact tracing and quarantining of people who test positive has failed to substantively slow the progress of the epidemic and has imposed great costs on people who were quarantined even though they posed no risk of infecting others. Three facts are crucial to understanding why this policy has failed. First, even close contacts of someone who tests positive for the SARS-Cov-2 virus are unlikely to pass the disease on. In a large meta-analysis of household contacts of asymptomatic positive cases, only 3% of people living in the same home got sick. Second, the PCR test that has been used to identify asymptomatic infections often returns a positive result for people who have dead viral fragments, are not infectious, and pose no risk of infecting others. And third, the contact tracing system becomes overwhelmed whenever cases start to rise, leading to long delays in contacting new cases. At precisely the moment when contact tracing might be needed, it cannot do its job. At the same time, quarantining people is costly – for workers without adequate sick leave, absenteeism due to contact tracing means pay cuts, lost opportunities and perhaps even an inability to feed families. For children, it means more skipped lessons and missed opportunities for academic and social growth at school, with long-run negative consequences for their future prospects. In the U.K., an official government review determined that its 37 billion pound investment in contact tracing was a waste of resources. The same is undoubtedly true in the United States.
#9 The eradication of COVID-19 is a feasible goal: Throughout the pandemic, from “two weeks to flatten the curve” and onwards, the suppression of the spread of COVID-19 has been an explicit policy goal. Implicitly, public health leaders have made the suppression of COVID-19 spread to near-zero levels the endpoint of the pandemic. However, SARS-CoV-2 has none of the characteristics of a disease that can be eradicated. First, we have no technology to reduce the spread of the disease or meaningfully alter disease dynamics. Lockdowns and social restrictions fail because only people who can afford to work from home without losing their job can comply over long periods. While we have vaccines that can help prevent hospitalisation or death resulting from COVID-19 infection, the vaccines wane in efficacy against COVID-19 infection and cannot stop transmission. Second, there are many animal hosts for SARS-CoV-2 and evidence of transmission between mammals and humans. One USDA study in late 2021 found that nearly 80% of white-tailed deer in the U.S. had evidence of COVID-19 antibodies. Dogs, cats, bats, mink and many other mammals can get COVID-19. So even if the disease were eradicated among humans, zoonotic transmission would guarantee that it would come back. Finally, eradication takes a global commitment from every country – an impossible goal since COVID-19 eradication is far from the most pressing public health problem for many developing countries.
Ex-FBI General Counsel Says Bureau Found No Evidence of Link Between Trump, Russian Bank
Samizdat – 19.05.2022
WASHINGTON – The FBI found no evidence of a covert communications channel between former US President Donald Trump and Russia’s Alfa Bank, former FBI General Counsel James Baker said in a testimony at the trial of Hillary Clinton’s lawyer Michael Sussmann, according to a Fox News report.
Sussmann told the FBI in 2016 that there was a backdoor communications channel between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, which is reportedly linked to the Russian government. Sussmann is being charged with making a false statement in connection with the meeting for allegedly lying about not working on behalf of any clients.
A probe conducted by Special Counsel John Durham alleges that Sussmann was actually working for the campaign of Hillary Clinton, as well as for tech executive Rodney Joffe.
Baker emphasized that the FBI concluded there was no substance to Sussmann’s allegations against Trump and could not confirm there was a surreptitious communications channel, the report said.
The testimony echoes that of FBI Special Agent Scott Hellman, who said on Tuesday during the trial said that the allegations against Trump were found to be untrue, the report added.
The FBI investigated allegations of Trump collusion with the Russian government in a probe run by Special Counsel Robert Mueller starting in 2017. Mueller’s investigation found no evidence of a criminal conspiracy or collusion between Trump’s presidential campaign and Russian officials.
Durham in 2019 was chosen to investigate the origins of the FBI’s probe into the Trump campaign. The investigation has resulted in indictments against Sussmann, as well as Igor Danchenko and Kevin Clinesmith.
Bill Gates and the Coordinated Campaign for Nasal Spray Vaccines
eugyppius – May 18, 2022
As we saw a few weeks ago, Bill Gates is subtly annoyed at our SARS-2 mRNA vaccines. They have to be kept cold, which makes them third-world unfriendly. They’re not very good at inducing mucosal immunity, which makes them bad at stopping infection. They require trained needle-wielding “vaccinators”*, which is an extra step that limits uptake. What would please this unelected omnipresent merchant of nuclear-grade charitable benevolence the most, is a nasal spray vaccine, like they had in the movie Contagion. Gates really liked that film. They just snorted the vaccine, and then the virus went away.
Why can’t we have vaccines like they have in the movies, Gates wants to know? Well, perhaps we can.
Two weeks after Gates made his wishes known, a curious guest essay appeared in the New York Times : The Answer to Stopping the Coronavirus May be Up Your Nose. The vaccines are great, says essay author and Yale immunobiologist Akiko Iwasaki. Only, nasal spray vaccines would be even better. Our current vaccines are bad at inducing mucosal immunity. Also, the “barrier … for a needle shot” is probably higher than the barrier for inhaling things.
Iwasaki envisions “potentially over the counter” vaccines that everyone can snort “every four to six months.” She’s also co-author of a preprint, which shows that if you get mRNA-immunised mice to inhale recombinant unadjuvanted spike protein, their mucosal immunity improves. Not for nothing, this is the same approach envisioned by the EcoHealth Alliance lunatics in their infamous PREEMPT grant proposal. There, they fantasised about “develop[ing] recombinant chimeric spike-proteins from known SARSr-CoVs … to boost immune memory in adult bats” and then spraying these proteins into caves for the bats to inhale (p.4).
It’s nice to know that the research program that set off the whole pandemic will now circle back to provide remedies against the pandemic that it caused. This is fine. This is Science.
* To my great delight, Gates actually uses this term.
UK using Cold War’s black propaganda tactics against Russia
By Lucas Leiroz | May 19, 2022
Once again, the West appears to be operating with an old Cold War mentality against Russia. Documents recently declassified by the British government reveal a series of sabotage practices used by the UK during the bipolar era whose similarities to the current relations with Russia seem evident. In fact, sabotage, fomenting hatred, spreading lies and other common tactics seem like a commonplace part of British foreign policy and the current Special Operation in Ukraine is just another target.
Recently, it was revealed that the British government ran a series of secret “black propaganda” campaigns against enemy countries during the decades of the Cold War. Not only the Soviet Union and Communist China were targets of British intelligence, but also countries in Africa, the Middle East and specific regions of Asia. The tactics included various methods of sabotage, from information warfare to the promotion of racial and terrorist tensions, always aimed at promoting the destabilization of rival nations.
Commenting on the case, expert in intelligence Rory Cormac told The Guardian during an interview: “These releases are among the most important of the past two decades (…) It’s very clear now that the UK engaged in more black propaganda than historians assume and these efforts were more systemic, ambitious and offensive. Despite official denials, [this] went far beyond merely exposing Soviet disinformation (…) The UK did not simply invent material (…), but they definitely intended to deceive audiences in order to get the message across”.
An example of how British praxis worked was the extensive and complex action operated to promote tensions between the Soviet Union and the Islamic community. In the second half of the 1960s, the Information Research Department (IRD) forged at least eleven Soviet state media documents exposing the government’s alleged “anger” at the “waste” of Soviet weapons by Egypt during the 1967 Six-Day War. Later, the same department forged documents supposedly originating from the Muslim Brotherhood accusing Moscow of sabotaging the Egyptian campaign, criticizing the quality of Soviet military material and calling the Russians “filthy-tongued atheists” who saw the Egyptians as “peasants who lived all their lives nursing reactionary Islamic superstitions”.
Last year, The Observer had already revealed that the IRD was directly responsible for the massacre of hundreds of people in Indonesia through the spread of lies in a black propaganda campaign in 1965. At the time, the department financed the preparation of pamphlets allegedly belonging to the PKI, then the largest communist party in the non-communist world, which were actually just British false flags. This encouraged anti-communist militias to promote an unprecedented massacre in the country, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of communist militants and civilians. Now, with the new declassified documents, it is possible to see that this was not an isolated episode, but a regular practice in British intelligence services.
In fact, it seems impossible to analyze this case and not correlate in some way to the current Western campaign against Russia, in which the UK seems to be very involved. In a way, it appears that despite the end of the Cold War, the bipolar mentality has never stopped working in the West. Simply, what was once aimed at the Soviet Union is now aimed at Russia.
This is precisely what political analyst Joe Quinn thinks: “The timing of this declassification of the documents is interesting insomuch as it may serve, for some, as confirmation that the West’s geopolitical war against the Soviet Union never really ended, it just continued as a war against the Russian Federation, but without the justification of fighting against Communism”.
The British media has been one of the most active in spreading anti-Russian narratives, fake news and pro-Kiev propaganda. Although most of the work is operated by the private sector, it is naive to think that there is no state incentive for pro-NATO propaganda. The British state – as well as the US and allied nations – has a very deep interest in creating a psychological warfare scenario, so there is a type of clandestine public-private cooperation between the state departments and these media agencies for their common objective to be achieved.
The special military operation in Ukraine is the main reason why Russia is attacked by Western propaganda today. From accusations of war crimes, false flags (like the tragedy in Bucha) to the absolutely unrealistic “analyses” alleging that Ukraine is “winning” the conflict, we have in all these cases examples of how the British media acts in collusion with the interests of NATO, operating old tactics of misinformation and black propaganda against London’s geopolitical enemies.
In this regard, Adriel Kasonta, a London-based foreign affairs analyst and former chairman of the International Affairs Committee of the Bow Group think tank, believes that currently the main interest of British intelligence is to have a public opinion approving the sending of weapons to Ukraine and believing it is strategic, forging data to make it appear that that Kiev is close to “winning”.
“It aims to mislead the domestic audience by convincing them that the ‘special operation’ is not going according to plan and to persuade them that sending lethal weapons to the front by NATO allies contributes to the alleged victories and successful resistance of the Ukrainian side. It is a psychological game, and nothing persuades the naturally peaceful population to support a war in a distant land [more] than the opponent’s alleged low morale and military losses”, says the analyst.
With that, it seems to be clear that there is indeed a blatant anti-Russian campaign going on which aim is to harm Moscow using old and well-known black propaganda and information war tactics. It is essential that the recently declassified documents are released so that Western public opinion is aware of the weapons used by their governments and media agencies against nations that are not aligned with NATO’s geopolitical plans.
Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.
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From the Archives
Politicians lie
By Mazin Qumsiyeh | Popular Resistance | August 18, 2013
There is no way to say this truth nicely: Politicians lie. That includes Japanese, American, Egyptian, Israeli, and Palestinian politicians! Is there something more common sense than that? Yet, so many citizens around the world believe their own politicians or wistfully acknowledge lies but think it is part of the job needed to run things. They believe even when politicians contradict themselves blatantly. This phenomenon is rather remarkable. It is a dissonance and disconnect from reality that many seem oblivious to. It is very dangerous because it can lead to accepting rationales for going to war. These can be deadly wars that lead to millions of lives lost as happened in what was called World War 1 and WW2. Even when incredible and declassified evidence abound, politicians continue to lie and old mythologies refuse to die. Here are just a few of the countless lies told to us over the past few decades… continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Burnham’s UN debut… A masterclass in British disinformation
- Iran flights continue despite US aviation sanctions
- Global Tipping Points Lead the World Into a State of Entropy
- The day-after at the White House: USA and Xi Jinping
- The Geopolitical Balance in the Red Sea: The UAE Being Displaced by New Players
- Iraqi resistance group vows to stage airport sit-ins over Iran aerial blockade
- Turkish parliament to review Saudi-Pakistan defense pact next month
- DEATH SPIKES & RISING CANCER IN OUR YOUTH EXPLAINED
- Iran offers Trump deal before US election
- Merz regime wants ‘secret police’ – opposition
- If Americans Knew
- Deconstructing Netanyahu’s pants-on-fire UN rant – Daily Update
- Trump betrayed voters with his campaign lies and prioritized a foreign country once he took office
- Netanyahu calls Israel’s war in Gaza ‘opposite of genocide’ in UN speech to near-empty hall
- Settler Kidnappings: Torture, Sexual Abuse and Terrorisation of Palestinian Abductees as Israel Deepens Annexation of West Bank
- Gaza winter nears as 162,000 tents become unusable, raising fears of humanitarian crisis
- Netanyahu says, “It’s the opposite of genocide”; UN says Gaza economy is world’s ‘most severe crisis on record’ – Daily Update
- Israel’s US-Backed Assault on Gaza Has Created the ‘World’s Most Severe Economic Crisis on Record’: UN
- ‘Protecting U.S. Citizens’… From Israel
- ‘This is where I live now, the back of a truck’: a day in the life of a grandmother in Gaza
- In UN Speech, Iran’s President Displays Pictures of Children Killed by US, Brings Attention to Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: Earth And Venus Surface Warmth Largely Explained By Convection And Lapse Rate, Not CO2 Or Radiation
- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
- Economic Masterminds: German Socialists Suggest Taxing Productivity Gains Stemming From Using AI
- The South China Sea Has Not Been Cooperating With The Climate Change Narrative
- Energy Crisis: Germany Enters Heating Season With Historically Low Gas Reserve Fill Levels
- New Study: The Antarctic Ice Sheet Gained Mass From 2020-2024 Due To Staggering Snow And Ice Accumulation
- Study: Ocean Heating Rates From Thousands Of Years Ago ‘Dwarf’ Modern Ocean Heating Rates
- Climate Extremists Target, Attack Large-Scale Power Grid Infrastructure In Germany!
- New Study: Antarctic Ice Melt Has Contributed Less Than 1 Centimeter To Sea Level Rise In The Last 30 Years
