This is the fourth instalment of Paula Jardine’s six-part investigation into the planning behind ensuring vaccine acceptance and countering vaccine ‘hesitancy’. You can read Part 1, published on Wednesday, here, Part 2, published on Thursday, here, and Part 3, published yesterday, here.
WHEN Unicef launched the Child Survival Revolution in 1983, it openly acknowledged that infectious childhood diseases in industrialised countries had ceased to be a serious threat before vaccines were introduced, thanks primarily to improvements in sanitation and nutrition.
Later, something resembling a bait and switch took place in traditionally accepted scientific thinking on this empirical observation. The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) now brands the central role played by improved sanitation and nutrition an anti-vaccination myth, and largely credits vaccines for the reduction in disease burden instead. This amounts to a misrepresentation, an untrue statement of a material fact that is being used to inflate the past performance of vaccines. It would count as unlawful mis-selling in other commercial contexts.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) says: ‘Immunisation is a global health and development success story, saving millions of lives every year.’ It puts the number of lives saved annually at between 3.5million and 5million.
Yet, perversely, universal vaccination may be masking health and mortality problems that arise from the vaccines as, by definition, there’s no control group for comparison. Igor Chudov analysed the 2021 statistics from Florida: ‘What I found is that in 2021, parents of newborns in Florida were much more “vaccine hesitant”, for reasons obvious to my readers, and therefore childhood vaccinations decreased from 93.4 per cent previously to only 79.3 per cent in 2021. During the same time, “all cause” infant mortality under one year of age in Florida also DECREASED by 8.93 per cent.’ (his emphasis)
Chudov’s findings chime with those of Australian physician Dr Archie Kalokerinos who investigated a doubling of the infant mortality rate in Aborigine communities in the 1970s on behalf of the Northern Territories government. He discovered the death rate rose after they began vaccinating malnourished Aborigine children. In some communities, every second child was injured or died.
A 2021 vaccination impact study led by Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London made the great claim that vaccine campaigns in low and middle income countries had saved a total of 23million children’s lives over the past two decades, and projected that this figure will increase to 37million by 2030. But as with any honest cost-benefit analysis, Ferguson’s estimates need to be offset against another statistic. GAVI itself acknowledges that vaccination campaigns had, until a decade ago, negligently added to the chronic infectious disease burden in the developing world: ‘In 2000, roughly 39 per cent of all healthcare-related injections administered globally were delivered with reused disposable or inadequately sterilised syringes, which resulted in an estimated 23 million people infected annually with hepatitis B, hepatitis C and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).’
It took a decade to reduce these incidental infections to near zero by using disposable syringes.
The example that is used to generate sufficient anxiety or fear is measles, a highly transmissible virus which remains a leading cause of death in parts of Africa and Asia. The CDC insists that getting the vaccine is safer than getting the disease yet provides no statistics to illustrate the relative risk.
According to the UK-based Vaccine Knowledge Project, ‘in high income regions of the world such as Western Europe, measles causes death in about 1 in 5,000 cases, but as many as 1 in 100 will die in the poorest regions of the world. Worldwide, measles is still a major cause of death, especially among children in resource-poor countries.’ One US-based website aimed at public health students and practitioners ignores the nuance, putting the risk of death from measles at 1 in 500 while selectively setting it against a one in a million chance of an allergic reaction to the MMR and ignoring the risk of all the other potential adverse reactions on the US government’s official table of measles vaccine injuries.
Internal documents at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) show that Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) ignited quite the firestorm when he contacted the agency to point out serious Covid vaccine disinformation that their top officials and vaccine scientists had signed off on.
I reported on the story last year after Massie produced audio recordings of CDC officials and scientists admitting the error to him, yet continued to publicly make the false claim: that original studies proved Covid vaccines helped people who’d already had Covid. They didn’t.
Watch the story and listen to the CDC audio recordings here.
Recently, emails obtained through a Freedom of Information request show more than a thousand pages of emails mentioning Massie and his concerns swirled around at CDC.
What did they say? Well, much of the time we don’t know because that’s hidden behind big, blue redactions.
Public info redacted by CDC regarding the agency’s Covid vaccine disinformation
We do see that before admitting the claim was wrong, CDC scientists tried to defend their false information.
CDC scientists and officials first attempt to defend the false info they were publicizing about Covid-19 vaccines
CDC scientists and officials try to defend the false info they were publicizing about Covid-19 vaccines
CDC also apparently tracks and logs CDC-related tweets by members of Congress, broken down by party affiliation.
CDC tracking tweets by members of Congress
CDC tracking tweets by members of Congress
It’s unclear why conversations between CDC officials and scientists on matters of great public health importance would be kept hidden from public view.
Nobody was held publicly accountable for the serious and potentially dangerous false information the CDC officials and scientists signed off on and publicized.
The Russian military began reporting on the extent of US military biological activities in Ukraine in March, citing seized documents and other materials on the study of a range of potentially deadly bioweapon agents, including diseases which can be spread naturally using local geography, flora and fauna, and target certain ethnic groups.
Senior Democratic Party politicians are the chief “ideologists” of America’s illegal operations in biolabs operating throughout Ukraine, and have involved major multinational biotech companies in their activities, Igor Kirillov, the head of Russia’s Radiation, Chemical, and Biological Defence Troops, has indicated.
Speaking at a briefing in Moscow on Wednesday and citing an MoD analysis of documentary evidence, the RCB Troops chief said the profits US politicians earn for the private biotech sector helps to pay for their re-election via campaign donations.
According to Kirillov, the US executive branch has also worked to create a “legislative framework to finance military biological research directly from the federal budget”, and with funds of non-government organisations underwritten by the state and controlled by the leadership of the Democratic Party, including charitable foundations affiliated with the Clinton family, the Rockerfellers, George Soros, and Hunter Biden.
Major global pharmaceutical companies have become involved in these shady “public-private” partnership schemes, including Pfizer, Moderna, Merck, and Pentagon-affiliated biotech firm Gilead, Kirillov said.
“US specialists are working [in Ukraine] on the testing of new medicines, bypassing international safety standards. As a result, Western companies seriously reduce the costs of research programmes and gain significant competitive advantages”, the officer said.
State Structures’ Involvement
Ukrainian state structures are also involved in the US-funded and organised military biological activities in their country, Kirillov said, with Kiev’s main job being “to conceal illegal activities, conduct field and clinical trials and provide the necessary biomaterial”.
In 2020, Kirillov said, an attempt was made to infect the residents of the settlement of Stepovoye in the Lugansk People’s Republic with a multi-drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis using counterfeit banknotes contaminated with the disease’s causative agent and spread among local youth.
Additionally, the RCB Troops chief said that his agency has received information detailing the Pentagon’s experiments on Ukrainian nationals at Psychiatric Hospital No. 1 in the village of Strelechie, Kharkov region, with the research targeting male patients aged 40-60 with a high stage of physical exhaustion, and overseen by a US national.
The Russian military operation in Ukraine has stopped the spread of US military activities in Ukraine, and halted these “criminal experiments” on its civilian population, Kirillov stressed.
In the case of the research taking place at the Kharkov mental hospital, Western specialists were evacuated in January 2022, and the equipment and pharmaceutical preparations involved relocated to western Ukraine, he said.
Polish specialists have also been working with Ukraine’s biolabs, Kirillov said, citing documents detailing the work of the Polish Institute of Veterinary Medicine and the US’ Battelle Memorial Institute – a Pentagon contractor – on research assessing epidemiological threats and the spread of the rabies virus in Ukraine.
“In addition, documentary evidence has been obtained about Poland’s funding of Lvov Medical University, which includes a participant in US military biological projects – the Institute of Epidemiology and Hygiene. Since 2002, this organisation has been implementing a retraining programme for specialists with experience working with dual-use materials and technologies”, the officer said.
The German military has also been involved in research in Ukraine, Kirillov said, citing documents indicating that the Bundeswehr’s Institute of Microbiology had taken some 3,500 blood serum samples from 25 Ukrainian regions back to Germany between 2016 and 2019. The officer said the Institute’s as yet unidentified interest in these biomaterials “raises questions about the goals [being] pursued” by the German Armed Forces. The complete, Ukrainian-language document can be found in RTF format here.
According to the MoD’s information, along with the Munich-based Institute of Microbiology, the Berlin-based Robert Koch Institute, the Loffler Institute in Greifswald, and the Nocht Institute of Tropical Medicine in Hamburg are also participating in biological research activities in Ukraine. The complete presentation can be downloaded here.
Mariupol Samples Partially Recovered
An RCB Troops investigation of samples from a veterinary laboratory in Mariupol has concluded that it also may have been involved in the broader US-led biological research activities, Kirillov said, pointing to the presence of pathogens uncharacteristic of veterinary diseases, such as typhoid fever, paratyphoid fever, and gas gangrene at the lab. Part of the lab’s collection of samples was destroyed on 25 February, but due to the rush, some of it has been preserved intact, and is now being analysed by Russia. To ensure safety and safe storage, Russian specialists exported 124 strains and have organised their study”, Kirillov said. The complete batch of documents can be found here.
The officer also revealed that Russian specialists have carried out work “directly in two biological laboratories in Mariupol”, and that “evidence has been obtained of the emergency destruction of documents confirming their work with the US military. A preliminary analysis of the surviving documentation indicates that Mariupol was used as a regional centre for the collection and certification of the cholera pathogen”, with the samples sent to the Centre for Public Health in Kiev, which transferred the materials on to the United States.
Kirillov stressed that the information that continues to be gathered and analysed by the Russian MoD casts doubt on assurances by US specialists that Ukraine does not have the capability to develop and produce bioweapons, and that the US itself has not “found” any evidence of biological weapons in Ukraine.
WMD Provocations Possible
The RCB Troops chief also indicated that Moscow has intelligence related to the preparation of possible provocations involving weapons of mass destruction in Ukraine to accuse the Russian military of using such arms along a “Syrian-style” scenario, in which the necessary evidence is fabricated and the “perpetrators” are appointed ahead of time.
One piece of evidence suggesting the high likelihood of such provocations taking place is Kiev’s request in a letter to European Union officials for personal protective equipment that provides protection against toxic chemicals and biological agents, Kirillov said.
The supply of organophosphate toxicity medications to Ukraine is also a concern for the Russian military, the officer noted, pointing out that in the first months of 2022, over 220,000 ampoules of atropine, as well as medicines for treatment and disinfection following a chemical attack, have been delivered to Ukraine by the United States.
Letter from Mayor of Kiev Vitaliy Klitschko to “International Charity Organizations” dated 20 March 2022 requesting a range of equipment to protect against WMD attack.
Additionally, Kirillov said, 10 more drones equipped with 30-litre containers and spraying equipment were found in the town of Kakhovka, Kherson region in late April, on top of three others with similar equipment found in the Kherson region in March.
Kirillov’s RCB Troops have spent over two months investigating and reporting on the US-sponsored military biological activities taking place at 30 separate facilities across Ukraine going back to at least 2005.
Western officials and media have largely dismissed the information provided as a “conspiracy theory”, notwithstanding Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland’s admission at a Senate hearing in March that “biological research facilities” do in fact exist in the Eastern European country and that the US was “working with” the Ukrainians to ensure that these materials “do not fall into the hands of Russian forces”. Investigations by the few Western outlets that have conducted their own research have confirmed individual details of the Russian MoD’s allegations – such as Hunter Biden’s role in securing millions of dollars in funding for a US contractor working in Ukraine.
THIS is the first of a special five-part investigation into the way in which, and why, winning ‘vaccine confidence’ became the primary goal of world health agencies, regardless of need, efficacy or risk.
Since the UK’s Covid-19 vaccine programme began in December 2020, 140million doses have been administered to 55million people, representing 73 per cent of the population.
The high level of acceptance of these vaccines, which were developed in one tenth of the normal time frame – and in the case of the mRNA vaccines using a novel technology never previously licensed for use in either humans or animals – is a remarkable testament to the level of public trust in vaccines.
It is arguably the end product of two decades of work, first by GAVI, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisations (now called The Vaccine Alliance) and recently by initiatives such as that of the London-based Vaccine Confidence Project, established to deliver the goal of universal childhood vaccination set 40 years ago by UNICEF, the United Nations children’s welfare organisation.
The Vaccine Alliance, a public-private partnership financed by vaccine manufacturers, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and national governments, aimed to give impetus to the universal vaccination campaign and to revitalise the fortunes of a stagnating market for new vaccines. The UK government is currently is largest single donor, having made a five-year pledge in 2020 of £1.65billion.
When GAVI was launched, a UNICEF employee and anthropologist, Dr Heidi Larson – who would later found the Vaccine Confidence Project – was chosen to lead its vaccine communications and advocacy work.
She later explained how the nature of the advocacy was soon to evolve away from the initial focus on client governments.
‘There was a growing epidemic of individuals and communities and even some government officials questioning and refusing vaccines,’ she said. ‘I ended up getting the nickname “Director of UNICEF’s Fire Department,” because it turned out to be a crisis management position, because people weren’t taking vaccines.
‘I saw what seemed to be a trend: The northern Nigeria boycott of the polio program made it into the international press, but it wasn’t one place, it was everywhere.
‘I didn’t have time in my day job to investigate what was going on there, because there was not a quick fix. That’s when I put together a proposal and got some seed money and founded the Vaccine Confidence Project.’
These interim measures were necessary because matching the industrialised world’s standards of sanitation, clean water, nutrition and health care to reduce the disease burden was ‘prohibitively expensive’.
An RF trustee, James P Grant, had been appointed executive director of UNICEF in 1980, operating it as a rival to the vaccine-agnostic World Health Organisation of his era.
In 1980, in an article on the eradication of smallpox, WHO director-general Dr Halfdan Mahler did not even mention vaccines. Rather, he stressed: ‘Smallpox eradication is a sign, a token, of what can be achieved in breaking out of the cycle of ill-health, disease and poverty.’
But Grant engaged in what the New York Times called ‘tireless, peripatetic proselytising’, using his UNICEF pulpit to zealously promote vaccination.
With rearguard reinforcement from the US Centres for Disease Control (CDC), by 1984 he had brought the WHO, the agency meant to provide the technical lead, on board with ‘universal’ vaccination.
Today, UNICEF is a quasi-arm of the pharmaceutical industry. Figures in its most recent Immunisation Roadmap document show it is now responsible for distributing 40 per cent of vaccines in developing countries, while its 659 staff spend more than half their time managing immunisation programmes and supply chain logistics.
In Part 2 tomorrow, I will explain how GAVI’s ten-year strategic plan, the Decade of the Vaccine, set out to eliminate vaccine scepticism.
In the U.S., an estimated 21 million American adults experienced at least one major depressive episode in 2020.1 The reported numbers for the past several years2 have consistently been highest among those aged between 18 and 25.3 However, not only is there evidence that depression is vastly overdiagnosed, but there’s also evidence showing it’s routinely mistreated.
With regard to overdiagnosis, it’s been ongoing for a long time, with one 2013 study4 finding only 38.4% of participants with clinician-identified depression actually met the DSM-4 criteria for a major depressive episode, and only 14.3% of seniors 65 and older met the criteria.
As for treatment, the vast majority are prescribed antidepressant drugs, despite the fact there’s little to no evidence to suggest they provide meaningful help, and plenty of evidence showing the harms are greater than patients are being told.
According to a 2017 study,5 1 in 6 Americans between the ages of 18 and 85 were on psychiatric drugs, most of them antidepressants, and 84.3% reported long-term use (three years or more). Out of 242 million U.S. adults, 12% were found to have filled one or more prescriptions for an antidepressant, specifically, in 2013. By 2021 in the midst of the pandemic, 1 in 4 Americans over age 18, or 50 million persons, were on prescription mental health drugs.6
According to data7 presented by a watchdog group in 2014, hundreds of thousands of toddlers are also being medicated with powerful psychiatric drugs, raising serious ethical questions, along with questions about the future mental and physical health of these children.
And, a study published in The BMJ in 20138 found that “In utero exposure to both SSRIs and non-selective monoamine reuptake inhibitors (tricyclic antidepressants) was associated with an increased risk of autism spectrum disorders, particularly without intellectual disability” in the offspring.
Studies are also shedding much needed light on the addictive nature of many antidepressants, and demonstrate that the benefits of these drugs have been overblown while their side effects — including suicidal ideation — and have been downplayed and ignored for decades, placing patients at unnecessary risk.
The Chemical Imbalance Myth
One researcher responsible for raising awareness about these important mental health issues is professor Peter C. Gøtzsche, a Danish physician-researcher and outspoken critic of the drug industry (as his book, “Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare,”9 suggests).
Gøtzsche helped found the Cochrane Collaboration in 1993 and later launched the Nordic Cochrane Centre. In 2018, he was expelled by the Cochrane governing board following the publication of a scathing critique of a Cochrane review of the HPV in which he and his coauthors pointed out several methodological flaws and conflicts of interest.
Over the past several years, Gøtzsche has published a number of scientific papers on antidepressants and media articles and a book discussing the findings. In a June 28, 2019 article,10 Gøtzsche addresses “the harmful myth” about chemical imbalances — a debunked hypothesis that continues to drive the use of antidepressants to this day. He writes, in part:11
“Psychiatrists routinely tell their patients that they are ill because they have a chemical imbalance in the brain and they will receive a drug that fixes this …
Last summer, one of my researchers and I collected information about depression from 39 popular websites in 10 countries, and we found that 29 (74%) websites attributed depression to a chemical imbalance or claimed that antidepressants could fix or correct that imbalance …
It has never been possible to show that common mental disorders start with a chemical imbalance in the brain. The studies that have claimed this are all unreliable.12
A difference in dopamine levels, for example, between patients with schizophrenia and healthy people cannot tell us anything about what started the psychosis … [I]f a lion attacks us, we get terribly frightened and produce stress hormones, but this does not prove that it was the stress hormones that made us scared.
People with psychoses have often suffered traumatic experiences in the past, so we should see these traumas as contributing causal factors and not reduce suffering to some biochemical imbalance that, if it exists at all, is more likely to be the result of the psychosis rather than its cause.13
The myth about chemical imbalance is very harmful. It makes people believe there is something seriously wrong with them, and sometimes they are even told that it is hereditary.
The result of this is that patients continue to take harmful drugs, year after year, perhaps even for the entirety of their lives. They fear what would happen if they stopped, particularly when the psychiatrists have told them that their situation is like patients with diabetes needing insulin.”
Real Cause of Depression Is Typically Ignored
According to Gøtzsche, there is no known mental health issue that is caused by an imbalance of brain chemicals. In many cases, the true cause is unknown, but “very often, it is a response to unhealthy living conditions,” he writes.14
He also cites the book,15 “Anxiety — The Inside Story: How Biological Psychiatry Got It Wrong,” written by Dr. Niall McLaren, in which the author shows that anxiety is a major factor in and trigger of most psychiatric disorders.
“A psychiatrist I respect highly, who only uses psychiatric drugs in rare cases … has said that most people are depressed because they live depressing lives,” Gøtzsche writes.
“No drug can help them live better lives. It has never been shown in placebo-controlled trials that a psychiatric drug can improve people’s lives — e.g., help them return to work, improve their social relationships or performance at school, or prevent crime and delinquency. The drugs worsen people’s lives, at least in the long run.16“
Gøtzsche rightfully points out that antipsychotic drugs create chemical imbalances; they don’t fix them. As a group, they’re also somewhat misnamed, as they do not address psychotic states. Rather, they are tranquilizers, rendering the patient passive. However, calming the patient down does not actually help them heal the underlying trauma that, in many cases, is what triggered the psychosis in the first place.
As noted in one 2012 meta-analysis17 of studies looking at childhood trauma — including sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional/psychological abuse, neglect, parental death and bullying — and subsequent risk of psychosis:
“There were significant associations between adversity and psychosis across all research designs … Patients with psychosis were 2.72 times more likely to have been exposed to childhood adversity than controls … The estimated population attributable risk was 33% (16%-47%). These findings indicate that childhood adversity is strongly associated with increased risk for psychosis.”
Economy of Influence in Psychiatry
A related article,18 written by investigative journalist Robert Whitaker in 2017, addresses the “economy of influence” driving the use of antidepressant drugs in psychiatric treatment — and the “social injury” that results. As noted by Whitaker, mental disorders were initially categorized according to a disease model in 1980 by the American Psychiatric Association.
“We’re all familiar with the second ‘economy of influence’ that has exerted a corrupting influence on psychiatry — pharmaceutical money — but I believe the guild influence is really the bigger problem,” he writes.
Whitaker details the corruption within the APA in his book “Psychiatry Under the Influence,” one facet of which is “the false story told to the public about drugs that fixed chemical imbalances in the brain.” Other forms of corrupt behavior include:
The biased designs of clinical trials to achieve a predetermined result
Spinning results to support preconceived conclusions
Hiding poor long-term outcomes
Expanding diagnostic categories for the purpose of commercial gain
Creating clinical trial guidelines that promote drug use
In his article, Whitaker goes on to dissect a 2017 review19 published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, which Whitaker claims “defends the profession’s current protocols for prescribing antipsychotics, which includes their regular long-term use.”
As Whitaker points out, there’s ample evidence showing antipsychotic drugs worsen outcomes over the long term in those diagnosed with psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia.
The review in question, led by American psychiatrist Dr. Jeffrey A. Lieberman, was aimed at answering persistent questions raised by the mounting of such evidence. Alas, their conclusions dismissed concerns that the current drug paradigm might be doing more harm than good.
“In a subsequent press release and a video for a Medscape commentary, Lieberman has touted it as proving that antipsychotics provide a great benefit, psychiatry’s protocols are just fine, and that the critics are ‘nefarious’ individuals intent on doing harm,” Whitaker writes.20
The Scientific Bias of Psychiatric Treatment
Five of the eight researchers listed on the review have financial ties to drug companies, three are speakers for multiple drug companies and all eight are psychiatrists, “and thus there is a ‘guild’ interest present in this review, given that they are investigating whether one of their treatments is harmful over the long-term,” Whitaker notes.21
Not surprisingly, the review ignored studies showing negative effects, including studies showing antipsychotics have a detrimental effect on brain volume. What’s more, while withdrawal studies support the use of antipsychotics as maintenance therapy over the long term, these studies do not address how the drugs affect patients’ long-term health.
“They simply reveal that once a person has stabilized on the medication, going abruptly off the drug is likely to lead to relapse,” Whitaker writes.22 “The focus on long-term outcomes, at least as presented by critics, provides evidence that psychiatry should adopt a selective-use protocol.
If first-episode patients are not immediately put on antipsychotics, there is a significant percentage that will recover, and this ‘spontaneous recovery’ puts them onto a good long-term course. As for patients treated with the medications, the goal would be to minimize long-term use, as there is evidence that antipsychotics, on the whole, worsen long-term outcomes.”
Vast Majority of Psychotic Patients Are Harmed, Not Helped
In his deconstruction of Lieberman’s review, Whitaker details how biased thinking influenced the review’s conclusions. It’s a rather long article, but well worth reading through if you want to understand how a scientific review can be skewed to accord with a preconceived view.
Details I want to highlight, however, include findings relating to the number needed to treat (NNT) and the percentage of patients harmed by the routine use of antipsychotic drugs as a first-line treatment.
As noted by Whitaker, while placebo-controlled studies reveal the effectiveness of a drug compared to an inert substance, they do not effectively reveal the ratio of benefit versus harm among the patient population. NNT refers to the number of patients that have to take the drug in order to get one positive response.
A meta-analysis cited in Lieberman’s review had an NNT of 6, meaning that six patients must take the drug in order for one to benefit from the treatment. The remaining five patients — 83% — are potentially harmed by the treatment. As noted by Whitaker:23
“The point … is this: reviewers seeking to promote their drug treatment as effective will look solely at whether it produces a superior response to placebo. This leads to a one-size-fits-all protocol.
Reviewers that want to assess the benefit-harm effect of the treatment on all patients will look at NNT numbers. In this instance, the NNT calculations argue for selective use of the drugs …”
Antidepressants Are Not Beneficial in the Long Term
While typically not as destructive as antipsychotics, antidepressants also leave a trail of destruction in their wake. A systematic review24 by Gøtzsche published in 2019 found studies assessing harm from selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) fail to provide a clear and accurate picture of the harms, and therefore “cannot be used to investigate persistent harms of antidepressants.”
In this review, Gøtzsche and colleagues sought to assess “harms of SSRIs … that persist after end of drug intake.” The primary outcomes included mortality, functional outcomes, quality of life and core psychiatric events. In all, 22 papers on 12 SSRI trials were included. Gøtzsche found several distinct problems with these trials. For starters, only two of the 12 trials had a drop-out rate below 20%.
Gøtzsche and his team also note that “Outcome reporting was less thorough during follow-up than for the intervention period and only two trials maintained the blind during follow-up.” Importantly, though, all of the 22 papers came to the conclusion that “the drugs were not beneficial in the long term.”
Another important finding was that all trials either “reported harms outcomes selectively or did not report any,” and “Only two trials reported on any of our primary outcomes (school attendance and number of heavy drinking days).”
A few years later, in April 2022, a study using data from the United States’ Medical Expenditures Panel Survey for patients who had depression found, “The real-world effect of using antidepressant medications does not continue to improve patients” health-related quality of life (HRQoL) over time.25
Antidepressants Are More Addictive Than Admitted
In a June 4, 2019, article,26 “The Depression Pill Epidemic,” Gøtzsche writes that antidepressant drugs:
“… do not have relevant effects on depression; they increase the risk of suicide and violence; and they make it more difficult for patients to live normal lives.27 They should therefore be avoided.
We have been fooled by the drug industry, corrupt doctors on industry payroll, and by our drug regulators.28 Surely, many patients and doctors believe the pills are helpful, but they cannot know this, because people tend to become much better with time even if they are not treated.29
This is why we need placebo-controlled trials to find out what the drugs do to people. Unfortunately, virtually all trials are flawed, exaggerate the benefits of the drugs, and underestimate their harms.”30
Addictive Nature of Antidepressants Skews Results
In his article,31 Gøtzsche reviews several of the strategies used in antidepressant drug trials to exaggerate benefits and underestimate the harms. One little-known truth that helps skew study results in the drug’s favor is the fact that antidepressants tend to be far more addictive than officially admitted. He explains how this conveniently hides the skewing of results as follows:32
“Virtually all patients in the trials are already on a drug similar to the one being tested against placebo. Therefore, as the drugs are addictive, some of the patients will get abstinence symptoms … when randomized to placebo …
These abstinence symptoms are very similar to those patients experience when they try to stop benzodiazepines. It is no wonder that new drugs outperform the placebo in patients who have experienced harm as a result of cold turkey effects.
To find out how long patients need to continue taking drugs, so-called maintenance (withdrawal) studies have been carried out, but such studies also are compromised by cold turkey effects. Leading psychiatrists don’t understand this, or they pretend they don’t.
Most interpret the maintenance studies of depression pills to mean that these drugs are very effective at preventing new episodes of depression and that patients should therefore continue taking the drugs for years or even for life.”
Scientific Literature Supports Reality of User Complaints
Over the years, several studies on the dependence and withdrawal reactions associated with SSRIs and other psychiatric drugs have been published, including the following:
•In a 2011 paper33 in the journal Addiction, Gøtzsche and his team looked at the difference between dependence and withdrawal reactions by comparing benzodiazepines and SSRIs. Benzodiazepines are known to cause dependence, while SSRIs are said to not be addictive.
Despite such claims, Gøtzsche’s team found that “discontinuation symptoms were described with similar terms for benzodiazepines and SSRIs and were very similar for 37 of 42 identified symptoms described as withdrawal reactions,” which led them to conclude that:
“Withdrawal reactions to selective serotonin re‐uptake inhibitors appear to be similar to those for benzodiazepines; referring to these reactions as part of a dependence syndrome in the case of benzodiazepines, but not selective serotonin re‐uptake inhibitors, does not seem rational.”
•Two years later, in 2013, Gøtzsche’s team published a paper34 in the International Journal of Risk & Safety in Medicine, in which they analyzed “communications from drug agencies about benzodiazepine and SSRI withdrawal reactions over time.”
By searching the websites of drug agencies in Europe, the U.S., U.K. and Denmark, they found that it took years before drug regulators finally acknowledged the reality of benzodiazepine dependence and SSRI withdrawal reactions and began informing prescribers and patients about these risks.
A significant part of the problem, they found, is that drug agencies rely on spontaneous reporting of adverse effects, which “leads to underestimation and delayed information about the problems.”
In conclusion, they state that “Given the experience with the benzodiazepines, we believe the regulatory bodies should have required studies from the manufacturers that could have elucidated the dependence potential of the SSRIs before marketing authorization was granted.”
•A 2019 paper35 in the Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences journal notes “It took almost two decades after the SSRIs entered the market for the first systematic review to be published.” It also points out that reviews claiming withdrawal effects to be mild, brief in duration and rare “was at odds with the sparse but growing evidence base.”
In reality, “What the scientific literature reveals is in close agreement with the thousands of service user testimonies available online in large forums. It suggests that withdrawal reactions are quite common, that they may last from a few weeks to several months or even longer, and that they are often severe.”
Antidepressants Increase Your Risk of Suicide and Violence
In his June 2019 article,36 Gøtzsche also stresses the fact that antidepressants can be lethal. In one of his studies,37 published in 2016, he found antidepressants “double the occurrence of events that can lead to suicide and violence in healthy adult volunteers.”
Other research38 has shown they “increase aggression in children and adolescents by a factor of 2 to 3 — an important finding considering the many school shootings where the killers were on depression pills,” Gøtzsche writes.
In middle-aged women with stress urinary incontinence, the selective serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor (SNRI) duloxetine, which is also used to treat incontinence, has been shown to double the risk of a psychotic episode and increase the risk of violence and suicide four to five times,39 leading the authors to conclude that harms outweighed the benefits.
“I have described the dirty tricks and scientific dishonesty involved when drug companies and leading psychiatrists try convincing us that these drugs protect against suicide and other forms of violence,”40 Gøtzsche writes.41 “Even the FDA was forced to give in when it admitted in 2007, at least indirectly, that depression pills can cause suicide and madness at any age.
There is no doubt that the massive use of depression pills is harmful. In all countries where this relationship has been examined, the sharp rise in disability pensions due to psychiatric disorders has coincided with the rise of psychiatric drug usage, and depression pills are those which are used the most by far. This is not what one would expect if the drugs were helpful.”
Drugmaker Lied About Paxil’s Suicide Risk
In 2017, Wendy Dolin was awarded $3 million by a jury in a lawsuit against GlaxoSmithKline, the maker of Paxil. Dolin’s husband committed suicide six days after taking his first dose of a Paxil generic, and evidence brought forth in the case convincingly showed his suicide was the result of the drug, not emotional stress or mental illness.42
The legal team behind that victory, Baum Hedlund Aristei Goldman, also represented other victims of Paxil-induced violence and death. At the time, attorney R. Brent Wisner said:43
“The Dolin verdict sent a clear message to GSK and other drug manufacturers that hiding data and manipulating science will not be tolerated … If you create a drug and know that it poses serious risks, regardless of whether consumers use the brand name or generic version of that drug, you have a duty to warn.”
GSK’s own clinical placebo-controlled trials actually revealed subjects on Paxil had nearly nine times the risk of attempting or committing suicide than the placebo group. To gain drug approval, GSK misrepresented this shocking data, falsely reporting a higher number of suicide attempts in the placebo group and deleting some of the suicide attempts in the drug group.
An internal GSK analysis of its suicide data also showed that “patients taking Paxil were nearly seven times more likely to attempt suicide than those on placebo,” Baum Hedlund Aristei Goldman reports, adding:44
“Jurors in the Dolin trial also heard from psychiatrist David Healy, one of the world’s foremost experts on Paxil and drugs in its class … Healy told the jurors that Paxil and drugs like it can create in some people a state of extreme ’emotional turmoil’ and intense inner restlessness known as akathisia …
‘People have described it like a state worse than death. Death will be a blessed relief. I want to jump out of my skin,’ Dr. Healy said. Healthy volunteer studies have found that akathisia can happen even to people with no psychiatric condition who take the drug …
Another Paxil side effect known to increase the risk of suicide is emotional blunting … apathy or emotional indifference … [E]motional blunting, combined with akathisia, can lead to a mental state in which an individual has thoughts of harming themselves or others, but is ‘numbed’ to the consequences of their actions. Drugs in the Paxil class can also cause someone to ‘go psychotic, become delirious,’ Dr. Healy explained.”
Hundreds of Thousands of Toddlers on Psychiatric Drugs
Considering the many serious psychological and physical risks associated with psychiatric drugs, it’s shocking to learn that hundreds of thousands of American toddlers are on them. In 2014, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a mental health watchdog group, highlighted data showing that in 2013:45
274,000 babies aged 1 and younger were given psychiatric drugs — Of these, 249,699 were on anti-anxiety meds like Xanax; 26,406 were on antidepressants such as Prozac or Paxil, 1,422 were on ADHD drugs such as Ritalin and Adderall, and 654 were on antipsychotics such as Risperdal and Zyprexa
In the toddler category (2- to 3-year-olds), 318,997 were on anti-anxiety drugs, 46,102 were on antidepressants, 10,000 were prescribed ADHD drugs and 3,760 were on antipsychotics
Among children aged 5 and younger, 1,080,168 were on psychiatric drugs
These are shocking figures that challenge logic. How and why are so many children, babies even, on addictive and dangerously mind-altering medications? Considering these statistics are 6 years old, chances are they’re even higher today. Just what will happen to all of these youngsters as they grow up? As mentioned in the article:46
“When it comes to the psychiatric drugs used to treat ADHD, these are referred to as ‘kiddie cocaine’ for a reason. Ritalin (methylphenidate), Adderall (amphetamine) and Concerta are all considered by the federal government as Schedule II drugs — the most addictive.
ADHD drugs also have serious side effects such as agitation, mania, aggressive or hostile behavior, seizures, hallucinations, and even sudden death, according to the National Institutes of Health …
As far as antipsychotics, antianxiety drugs and antidepressants, the FDA and international drug regulatory agencies cite side effects including, but not limited to, psychosis, mania, suicidal ideation, heart attack, stroke, diabetes, and even sudden death.”
Children Increasingly Prescribed Psych Drugs Off-Label
Making matters even worse, recent research shows the number of children being prescribed medication off-label is also on the rise. An example offered by StudyFinds.org,47 which reported the findings, is “a doctor recommending antidepressant medication for ADHD symptoms.”
The study,48 published in the journal Pediatrics, looked at trends in off-label drug prescriptions made for children under the age of 18 by office-based physicians between 2006 and 2015. Findings revealed:
“Physicians ordered ≥1 off-label systemic drug at 18.5% of visits, usually (74.6%) because of unapproved conditions. Off-label ordering was most common proportionally in neonates (83%) and in absolute terms among adolescents (322 orders out of 1000 visits).
Off-label ordering was associated with female sex, subspecialists, polypharmacy, and chronic conditions. Rates and reasons for off-label orders varied considerably by age. Relative and absolute rates of off-label orders rose over time. Among common classes, off-label orders for antihistamines and several psychotropics increased over time …
US office-based physicians have ordered systemic drugs off label for children at increasing rates, most often for unapproved conditions, despite recent efforts to increase evidence and drug approvals for children.”
The researchers were taken aback by the findings, and expressed serious concern over this trend. While legal, many of the drugs prescribed off-label have not been properly tested to ensure safety and efficacy for young children and adolescents.
As noted by senior author Daniel Horton, assistant professor of pediatrics and pediatric rheumatologist at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, “We don’t always understand how off-label medications will affect children, who don’t always respond to medications as adults do. They may not respond as desired to these drugs and could experience harmful effects.”
In 2020 mental health experts and reviewers were still at-odds over prescribing these drugs for children, yet hesitant to call a stop to it:49
“Antidepressants are prescribed for the treatment of a number of psychiatric disorders in children and adolescents, however there is still controversy about whether they should be used in this population …
Treatment decisions should be tailored to patients on an individual basis, so we recommend clinicians, patients and policy makers to refer to the evidence provided in the present meta-review and make decisions about the use of antidepressants in children and adolescents taking into account a number of clinical and personal variables.”
Educate Yourself About the Risks
If you, your child or another family member is on a psychiatric drug, I urge you to educate yourself about the true risks and to consider switching to safer alternatives. When it comes to children, I cannot fathom a situation in which a toddler would need a psychiatric drug and I find it shocking that there are so many doctors out there that, based on a subjective evaluation, would deem a psychiatric drug necessary.
During an appearance on CNN, FDA chief Dr. Robert Califf asserted that the leading cause of death in the United States is online “misinformation.”
Yes, really.
Califf spoke about his remarks during an interview with CNN’s Pamela Brown, which were originally made at a health conference in Texas last month when he said online misinformation was “now our leading cause of death.”
After admitting that there was “no way to quantify this,” before mentioning heart disease and cancer (actual killers), Califf went on to bolster the claim anyway.
Claiming that there has been “an erosion of life expectancy,” Califf went on to say that Americans were living an average of 5 years shorter than people in other high income countries.
Califf said that anti-virals and vaccinations meant “almost no one in this country should be dying from COVID,” before going on to explain that there was also a “reduction in life expectancy from common diseases like heart disease.”
“But somehow … the reliable, truthful messages are not getting across,” he said, adding, “And it’s being washed down by a lot of misinformation, which is leading people to make bad choices that are unfortunate for their health.”
The FDA chief did not explain how ‘online misinformation’ was causing more deaths from heart disease, but went ahead and made the claim anyway without being challenged by the host.
As we have exhaustively highlighted, “online misinformation” is indistinguishable from information the regime doesn’t like.
As we previously noted, the woman picked to head up the Department of Homeland Security’s ‘Ministry of Truth’ said free speech makes her “shudder” while also promoting the lie that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation.
Nina Jankowicz also ludicrously cited Christopher Steele as an expert on disinformation. Steele was the author of the infamous Clinton campaign-funded Trump ‘peegate’ dossier’ that turned out to be an actual product of disinformation.
The contrived moral panic over “misinformation” has become more pronounced following Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, with CNN guests recently complaining about how it might impact their monopoly on controlling “the channels of communications.”
This past week marked the 27th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. As the worst terrorist act committed on U.S. soil at the time, we all know the reported facts of the horrific event well: a 27-year-old Desert Storm-vet, Timothy McVeigh, acting with minimal help from Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier, detonated a 7,000-pound fertilizer bomb from a parked Ryder truck outside the federal Alfred P. Murrah building, killing 168 people, 19 of them children.
Two years later, in 1997, McVeigh was convicted of “Using a weapon of mass destruction resulting in death,” among other federal charges. For a time, he was held on the same cell block as the Unabomber and WTC-bomber Ramzi Yousef (who tried to convert him to Islam), before being put to death by lethal injection in 2001.
There is much we still don’t know about the case, however. Thanks to years of heroic work by people like Salt Lake City-based attorney Jesse Trentadue, writer and researcher J.M. Berger, and independent investigative reporter Wendy S. Painting, the American public is slowly learning more and more key (and disturbing) facts about the case. Facts involving the FBI’s possible incitement of McVeigh and the subsequent cover-up of these facts by Newsweek magazine.
FBI incitement is more topical than ever, of course. Reports of the FBI being involved in Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer’s kidnapping plot and of FBI agents and assets being involved in the January 6th events has collapsed whatever level of trust the public had with federal law enforcement, not to mention the mainstream media whose related coverage rarely digs deeper than the government’s official line.
What other crimes have been committed or conspiracies planned, the public wonders, where the initial momentum was actually created the FBI? How much have FBI infiltrators pushed constitutionally protected “heated talk” into the unlawful planning and execution of deadly crimes? To what extent has the FBI been, as the saying goes, arsonists posing as firefighters? These are especially important questions when it comes to the OKC bombing.
Operation PATCON
As most know, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies have conducted surveillance and infiltration operations against right-wing groups for decades. Chief among them being the “Patriotic Conspiracy” or “PATCON” operation. Despite its official ending in late 1993 (although some say it was carried forward in some form), PATCON only became public in 2007 thanks to a public records request.
Partly citing internal FBI documents, Painting in her explosive 2016 book about PATCON and McVeigh, describes how the former’s secret operatives and paid informers “were given license to engage in provocateur activities and instructed to make known their willingness to commit violence and advocate for the violent overthrow of the U.S. government.”1 She quotes one informer who went public about the operation, John Matthews, saying he realized that although initially told “the objective was to infiltrate and monitor,” he would later come to understand that its real objective was to “to infiltrate and incite.”2 This, says Matthews, included providing “the ideas, detailed instructions, and even live C4 explosives and automatic weapons to targeted individuals as a way of entrapping them into terrorist plots, so the FBI could capitalize on foiled and actualized plots.”3 According to Trentadue, through PATCON, the FBI was actually trying to sow a full-on rebellion.
While the FBI has indeed infiltrated hard-left and Islamic groups in the past, the extent and complete failure of the FBI’s overreach when it comes to right-wing groups (which diversely included pro-gun, ultra-libertarian, survivalist, and white racist or advocacy groups) makes this area especially alarming. For instance, there was just one minor conviction over stolen military night-vision goggles that was ever made through PATCON, and it relied on army, not FBI, intelligence. As Oklahoma City journalist J.D. Cashsaid about PATCON and certain precursor programs of the 1980s, “there isn’t a neo-Nazi or racist group in the country that isn’t operationally controlled by the FBI.” This seems to concur with what a former young Aryan Nation-member told Painting for her book4:
It was well known that at any Aryan Nation event, in a crowd of 300 people, there’d be at least 30 undercover federal agents in attendance to monitor us, and another third of the crowd were informants… It was rampant, just like cops at a Grateful Dead show trying to sell people LSD.
One of those assets was Vietnam War veteran John Matthews. Up until 1986, the government had been supporting U.S. civilian groups conducting operations in Nicaragua for anti-communist contra forces; a cause which Matthews chose to serve. When such efforts turned into a political scandal, however, the government broke-off ties with these groups and refused to help its members. This included people like Matthews’ fellow soldier Tom Posey who would later be indicted on weapons-smuggling charges.5 While he beat the rap, Posey felt cheated and shifted his efforts to anti-U.S. government organizing. When he revealed plans to break into a federal armory, however, Matthews contacted the FBI, establishing a relationship with law enforcement that led him to infiltrate over 20 militia, libertarian, gun-rights, and racist groups over a 20-year period.
Matthews, who has long been suffering from an Agent-Orange-related cancer, is key to what understanding we have about PATCON’s connection to the OKC bombing. In the early nineties, Matthews was assigned to attend a PATCON-infiltrated, militia-training camp in Texas. While there, he met Timothy McVeigh. After the bombing and when McVeigh was arrested, Matthews immediately recognized him and called his FBI handler, Don Jarrett, to tell him this was the same man he saw at the Texas training camp. Jarrett assured Matthews they knew this already and told him to “forget about it.”
In interviews with Painting, Matthews says he was disturbed by this for a few reasons, a major one being, she paraphrases, that “if they were watching McVeigh and friends back then, they had likely continued watching them throughout the bombing plot.”6 “I felt Don knew more about this,” he said elsewhere.
What other items he knew may have been what came out later in Trentadue’s public records suit against the FBI. Dozens of witnesses to the bombing had apparently reported to police and the FBI they had seen someone in the passenger side of McVeigh’s truck while parked outside the Murrah building. Other witnesses reported seeing McVeigh with several people at his motel the night before, including someone sitting at some point behind the wheel of the truck—And Nichols himself (who was in Kansas when the bombing took place) told journalists in 2007 that FBI provocateurs had lent their support to McVeigh’s plans.7
Also disturbingly, using a fertilizer truck to blow up a federal building had been an idea Matthews had actually heard a few times before, including from suspected FBI infiltrators. For instance, he had heard it raised by two militia members he met who later became part of a busted plot to rob a bank, but who never got arrested, let alone jailed for it.
All of this would seem to point to the OKC bombing being something like 2010’s Operation Fast and Furious, in which the FBI intentionally put guns into the hands of criminals, but failed to close the loop leading to a border agent being killed by a Mexican cartel. Was OKC a similar ‘gunwalking case gone awry’? Only one, far, far deadlier? Someone who McVeigh contacted two weeks before the bombing, Andy Strassmeir, later told a journalist it is possible the FBI was “going to arrest McVeigh at the site with the bomb in hand, but he didn’t come at the right time.” “[M]aybe he changed the time”, he said, “you never know with people who are so unreliable.”8
Newsweek’s Complicity
In 2011, wishing to tell his story before he died, Matthews was put in touch with former Associated Press-writer and then-editor of Newsweek, John Solomon. At the time, Newsweek was still foremost in the U.S. media field, coming in second in circulation only to Time magazine. It was an important and respected news source. Over months, Solomon and article-author Ross Schneiderman worked with Matthews and other sources, including former FBI officials, to confirm everything he told them about the murky workings of PATCON, including the unanswered questions about its operatives’ possible involvement in the OKC bombing.
Enter Newsweek managing editor, Tina Brown. Above the heads of Solomon and Schneiderman, Brown (who left in 2013 and has been blamed for the periodical’s collapse) took what may have been a Pulitzer-worthy piece of journalism and cut away virtually all detail that could directly or indirectly impugn the government for the fallout of its PATCON operations. In the process, she reduced the original 7,000-word draft (found here) down to a mere 4,000 words (found here). As the since-defunct Examinerdetailed at the time, all of the aforementioned suspicions Matthews aired about the FBI’s hand in the OKC bombing were cut.
Brown’s puzzling decision had real consequences for Matthews. As Painting recounts in her book, the dying Matthews had taken a lot of risk by coming forward. He was now Newsweek’s cover story, but for reasons that had been omitted. Now, he was still a target but “for no good reason and he regretted coming forward.”9
More broadly, by keeping such information away from the public, Brown was confirming the existence of a state-media axis in America. While examples of such direct state-interventions into our otherwise free media system are rare (although certainly plentiful enough), media analysts like Noam Chomsky have long posited that, yes, news outlets do profit off the circulation of their stories and are thus incentivized to objectively report on events potentially embarrassing to the powerful elite. But, the big media houses still need government access and wish to maintain good relations with major power centers; hence, their occasional compliance with direct government demands—One might add the promise of future political jobs as an incentive for compliance or, in cases such as this where right-wing groups were clearly being mistreated, plain old liberal media bias (consider, for instance, the fairly wide–reporting on the FBI’s infiltration of Islamic extremist groups).
It seems without a doubt that the FBI did get to Brown. At the time Matthews approached Newsweek, Attorney General Eric Holder’s Operation Fast and Furious-debacle was still in the news. How could the Obama Administration handle yet another and far bigger scandal involving the FBI helping dangerous people do harm against innocent Americans?
More Alarming Questions about FBI Conduct
Elsewhere, the FBI has demonstrated a serious interest in keeping any questions about the OKC bombing firmly under wraps. When Matthews was slated to testify in Trentadue’s 2014 public records case over the release of Murrah building surveillance footage, his fear of retaliation led to the judge allowing him to testify at a secret location by video—Trentadue thought what Matthews had witnessed while a PATCON operative would help provide a motive for what had become the FBI’s ongoing, unlawful refusal to provide the footage under public records law.
And despite the judge’s precautions, Matthews’s testimony still never took place. At the last minute, Matthews was supposedly threatened with having his VA medical benefits cut off and told to “stand down” by Jarrett and another FBI agent, Adam Quirk. Such a rank case of witness tampering, in fact, led to the judge ordering the FBI to reveal what exactly they had communicated to Matthews; an investigation that has been strangely ongoing since 2015.
At the heart of Trentadue’s marathon public records case certainly has the FBI worried. Someone who did manage to testify early on in the case was an Oklahoma police officer and first responder to the OKC bombing. He told the court he witnessed the FBI actually stop the beginning of the recovery process while victims were still under piles of rubble in order to remove a surveillance camera from the Murrah building. Some believe the camera would have recorded anyone else besides McVeigh who left the truck after it was parked and, in fact, did so.
Finally, there’s the questions about the FBI’s conduct vis-à-vis Trentadue himself. Why Trentadue got involved with the OKC case is because six weeks after the bombing, his brother Kenneth, another war vet, was taken into custody after a traffic incident triggered a parole violation relating to a minor event from years previous. Soon after, he was found hanging in a cell of a federal detention center.
Photos released to Trentadue following a subsequent lawsuit against the federal Bureau of Prisons, however, showed his brother’s throat having been cut and his body covered in bruises—authorities had apparently tried to cover his wounds with make-up before releasing it to Kenneth’s family. The theory behind his death is, having shared a close resemblance with someone called Richard Guthrie, a white supremacist who the FBI thought had information about the OKC bombing, Kenneth was mistaken as Guthrie and taken in by the FBI for interrogation. McVeigh himself called and advised Trentadue of this, telling him he heard that the FBI had indeed mistaken Kenneth for Guthrie and that his death was the result of a botched interrogation session.
Adding to suspicions, the DOJ formed a special team to handle media inquiries and the Trentadue family’s immediate requests for information. It apparently obstructed and delayed the Trentadue’s right to know what happened to Kenneth in every way it could, even when it came to releasing his corpse. Who happened to be the head of this operation (dubbed internally as “the Trentadue Mission”)?10 Then-Deputy Attorney General, Eric Holder.
Finally, there are the other related and mysterious deaths. After Guthrie himself was arrested, he told the LA Times he had “a couple grand juries to talk to” about what really happened with the OKC bombing, and was also later found hanging in his cell.11
And later in 1999, a supposed inmate and witness to Kenneth’s murder, Alden Gillis Baker, threatened to come forward about what he saw. He too was later found hanging in his cell.12
Conclusion
The details surrounding the OKC bombing show it to have all the elements of a “perfect,” post-war American tragedy: Vietnam vets disrespected by the liberal-media class and tossed aside by a government they loyally served; an unhinged federal bureaucracy using its sprawling resources to violate the civil rights of poor and ignored Americans; and, a state-liberal media-axis willing to cover up for government when the “cause” was right.
And consider the following. Even if we ignore the aforementioned evidence about the FBI’s hand in the OKC bombing, remember that the twin motivations for McVeigh’s crimes were Waco and Ruby Ridge—McVeigh chose April 19 as his bombing date because it was the same day as the Waco massacre two years previous. Matthews has actually expressed the view that both massacres had PATCON fingerprints all over them. That’s certainly the case with Ruby Ridge. There, a federal agent/infiltrator pushed former Green Beret Randy Weaver into selling him an illegal sawed-off shotgun. This led to his attempted arrest and an eventual standoff, which then led to the shooting deaths of his 14-year-son by federal marshals and his unarmed wife (baby in hand) by an FBI sniper.
In public and in private correspondence, McVeigh tore into the federal government over these events, expressing fear of a state that was at war with its own citizens. Without federal law enforcement acting so heinously in these events, it’s likely McVeigh would not have carried out the crime that he did.
Further, these rank FBI abuses ironically pushed “right-wing terror groups” to become the threat we were warned about all along. As the original Newsweek article rightly said about Ruby Ridge, the FBI’s conduct “quickly galvanized the radical right like never before” with talks between “various white supremacists, Neo-Nazis and anti-government groups… about joining forces… quickly turn[ing] to action.”
And as Painting writes, even more absurd perhaps, Ruby Ridge was used by federal law enforcement as a justification for increased PATCON resources and investigatory powers.13
So, we have FBI abuses leading to organized rage and resistance, which is then given even more momentum by FBI infiltration and incitement. And with the help of a media sphere that refuses to do its job, all of this works to amp up yet more fear, anxiety and division among the public. It’s a spinning wheel which loyal, patriotic Americans never asked for and certainly want off of.
While we should certainly hope these allegations can be explained away, it’s high-time the OKC victims and the American people generally get the transparency they deserve about what really happened that fateful day.
Ukraine told troops besieged by Russian forces in Mariupol that help was on its way, while making no actual attempts to end the blockade of the city, the commander of the country’s 36th Naval Infantry Brigade has told RT.
Colonel Vladimir Baranyuk and his unit were tasked with guarding the northern outskirts of Mariupol, a strategic port city in the southeast of Ukraine, amid the Russian military operation in the country.
He was even awarded the Hero of Ukraine honor for his “courage and effective actions in repelling enemy attacks,” with Kiev asserting that the colonel and the other defenders of Mariupol would never surrender.
But as the Russian forces kept gaining ground, Baranyuk ended up surrendering peacefully after being captured during a failed attempt to flee the city.
He was apprehended hiding in the fields together with a number of his men a few kilometers north of Mariupol.
The commander of the marines now says the Ukrainian government lied to him and his troops in order to keep them fighting.
“Kiev told us to hold on, [saying] that the units that will lift the blockade are coming, they’ll soon be here,” Baranyuk told RT.
The promise was made despite President Volodymyr Zelensky’s adviser, Alexey Arestovich, openly acknowledging in interviews that Kiev “won’t be able to save” its forces in Mariupol.
“We were promised certain help. Naturally, this help didn’t arrive. And this pushed us to come out,” the colonel said, explaining his decision to flee.
It was “painful” for the troops when they realized that they had been left for dead, but “everybody, including myself, understood it,” Baranyuk added.
Mariupol has seen the heaviest fighting during the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The city, which suffered immense destruction, is now almost entirely controlled by Russian forces, with the Azovstal steel plant remaining the last pocket of Ukrainian resistance.
Kiev’s servicemen and nationalist fighters of the notorious Azov Battalion, who are holed up at the massive site, had been given numerous opportunities to lay down their arms by Russia, but rejected all of them. Moscow has said that those inside the plant want to surrender, but cannot do so due to Kiev’s reluctance to give the relevant order.
This story is about the proposed new World Health Organization pandemic treaty that can potentially eradicate the national sovereignty as we know it. It is also about the banality of evil and the impact of our individual daily choices on the future generations and the history of the world.
What’s the Deal With the World Health Organization Pandemic Treaty?
In December 2021, the World Health Organization announced their plan to develop a new pandemic treaty “strengthening” international cooperation during future pandemics. What does it mean in practical terms? The language of the announcement was vague, so we need to interpret it in context. Here’s from the horse’s mouth: (December 2021):
“In a consensus decision aimed at protecting the world from future infectious diseases crises, the World Health Assembly today agreed to kickstart a global process to draft and negotiate a convention, agreement or other international instrument under the Constitution of the World Health Organization to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.
Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General, said the decision by the World Health Assembly was historic in nature, vital in its mission, and represented a once-in-a-generation opportunity to strengthen the global health architecture to protect and promote the well-being of all people.”
“In a consensus decision aimed at protecting the world from future infectious diseases crises, in December 2021 the World Health Assembly agreed to kickstart a global process by establishing an intergovernmental negotiating body (INB) to draft and negotiate a convention, agreement or other international instrument under the Constitution of the World Health Organization to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness and response …
As part of this historic decision, the World Health Assembly requested the Director-General to hold public hearings, in line with standard WHO practice, to support the work of the INB. Per the INB’s timeline, the first round of those hearings has been set for 12-13 April 2022, with a second round set for 16-17 June. This information on the modalities for the first round of hearings is also expected to apply to the second round as well.”
Lies, Lies, Lies
Let’s start with the issue of distorted language. In an honest world with no dark agendas, no Fourth Industrial Revolution, and no upside-down language, their treaty could sound like a beautiful idea. Like, what can possibly be wrong with benevolently guided, meaningful international cooperation during a time of crisis? A beautiful fairy tale, no?
Sadly, not a fairy tale at all but more like a horror movie because we are living in a world of shameless lying and upside-down language — and the words no longer mean what they are supposed to mean.
To deceive us, the bureaucrats are trying to create a feeling in our minds that they getting together to protect us, like a benevolent council of wise indigenous grandmothers — while in reality, it’s more like they are aiming to trap us, being a gang of greedy and ruthless wolves in sheep’s clothes that they are.
“Health” doesn’t mean actual health but rather the promotion of any product or interference that is desirable to the shareholders and the CEOs of pharmaceutical and technology companies.
Just like Fauci recently equated himself with science, the corporate mouthpieces equate whatever they want to sell or impose on us with “health,” and then say they are protecting our “health” while in fact, they are merely protecting their pockets.
We are living in a world where our leaders (translation: our fellow human being who have no intrinsic upper hand on us but who have gotten ahead on the basis of being extremely power-hungry) are taking full advantage of the fact that in order to do destructive things with the least resistance, then can call them “useful things that are good for the people,” and get away with it for some time. That’s the trick!
And besides, if the past two years are any indication, “international cooperation” means in practice that all WEF-affiliated leaders go ahead and throw their people under the bus in unison, to the sound of uniform messaging in the media.
“International cooperation” means that all countries do the same destructive thing, resulting in unnecessary human death and suffering, a disruption of social structures and the world economy, all to clear the way for their favorite “new normal.” That’s some international cooperation!
Public Hearings
Given the self-proclaimed historical nature of this treaty, the World Health Organization dedicated the whole two days to the first round of the public hearings (and they didn’t advertise it much). The first round took place in April 2022. The second round will be held in June of this year.
Dr. Tess Lawrie wrote a very moving article about the WHO pandemic treaty and the video comment submission by the World Council for Health.
Here are Dr. Lawrie’s comments on the proposed treaty, after she had a chance to participate in a call with the WHO (as well as UNAIDS, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, the UN Environment Programme, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) as a part of the submission process.
• Calls for ‘human security centric’ not just ‘health security centric’. Apparently, they don’t just want to control your body but every aspect of your life.
• Fast approval of emergency diagnostics – and unified regulatory registration for diagnostics. In other words, more control.
• Equitable access to vaccines and ‘a mechanism to hold violators accountable’. So if a nation concludes a vaccine is not safe – as has happened in this last pandemic – the WHO would have the power to override that and jab their population anyway.
• Vaccines should be developed within 100 days. This is absurd. Safe drugs take ten years to be adequately tested and declared safe. There are more than 3.5 million people on the WHO database who have been harmed by Covid vaccines and this may be the tip of the iceberg.
I agree that these bullet points sound like it’s about control, so no surprise that it comes with more censorship!
More Censorship
While the public comments were open, the #StopTheTreaty campaign by the World Council for Health, where Dr. Tess Lawrie is on the Steering Committee, was the talk of the town in the “freedom community.” But if you searched for it on Google, you wouldn’t know anything about it! Here’s what I wrote just a few hours after the comment period ended:
“If you search for the phrase “WHO pandemic treaty” on DuckDuckGo, #StopTheTreaty comes up among the top results. On Google though no such thing exists. If you actually search for the phrase “stop the treaty,” on DuckDuckGo #StoopTheTreaty is the number one result. Google, on the other hand, tells you everything you ever wanted to know about the 1919 Treaty of Versailles!)”
For the World Health Organization, It’s Not the First Rodeo
It is curious that it’s not the first time that the WHO is trying serve the pharmaceutical industry and various industry shareholders using “pandemic preparedness” as a legal tool.
For example, in 2009, they announced an influenza pandemic (H1N1) that activated vaccine purchasing agreements and forced participating countries to large batches of doses that they didn’t need. The rushed release of a subpar medical product led to a “narcolepsy fiasco,” among other things.
According to the report by the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly:
“The Parliamentary Assembly is alarmed about the way in which the H1N1 influenza pandemic has been handled, not only by the World Health Organization (WHO), but also by the competent health authorities at the level of the European Union and at national level.
It is particularly troubled by some of the consequences of decisions taken and advice given leading to distortion of priorities of public health services across Europe, waste of large sums of public money, and also unjustified scares and fears about health risks faced by the European public at large.
The Assembly notes that grave shortcomings have been identified regarding the transparency of decision-making processes relating to the pandemic which have generated concerns about the possible influence of the pharmaceutical industry on some of the major decisions relating to the pandemic.
The Assembly fears that this lack of transparency and accountability will result in a plummet in confidence in the advice given by major public health institutions. This may prove disastrous in the case of the next disease of pandemic scope – which may turn out to be much more severe than the H1N1 pandemic …
The rapporteur considers that some of the outcomes of the pandemic, as illustrated in this report, have been dramatic: distortion of priorities of public health services all over Europe, waste of huge sums of public money, provocation of unjustified fear amongst Europeans, creation of health risks through vaccines and medications which might not have been sufficiently tested before being authorised in fast-track procedures, are all examples of these outcomes.”
Even Forbeswrote in 2010 that “from the beginning the World Health Organization’s actions have ranged from the dubious to the flagrantly incompetent.” A poignant quote:
“The WHO’s dubious decisions demonstrate that its officials are too rigid or too incompetent (or both) to make needed adjustments in the pandemic warning system — deficiencies we have come to expect from an organization that is scientifically challenged, self-important and unaccountable.
The WHO may be able to perform and report worldwide surveillance — i.e., count numbers of cases and fatalities — but its policy role should be drastically limited.
U.N. bureaucrats pose as authorities on all manner of products, public policy and human activities, from desertification and biodiversity to the regulation of chemicals, uses of the ocean and the testing of genetically engineered plants.
However, the U.N.’s regulatory policies, requirements and standards often defy scientific consensus and common sense. Its officials are no friends of commerce, public health or environmental protection. The result is a more precarious, more dangerous and less resilient world. When it comes to pestilence, the U.N. may be the greatest plague of all.”
What’s a Pandemic, Anyway?
It’s noteworthy that just before the WHO declared a pandemic, they changed the definition of the word. From the British Medical Journal:
“WHO for years had defined pandemics as outbreaks causing “enormous numbers of deaths and illness” but in early May 2009 it removed this phrase — describing a measure of severity — from the definition.
Key scientists advising the World Health Organization on planning for an influenza pandemic had done paid work for pharmaceutical firms that stood to gain from the guidance they were preparing. These conflicts of interest have never been publicly disclosed by WHO, and WHO has dismissed inquiries into its handling of the A/H1N1 pandemic as ‘conspiracy theories.’
A joint investigation by the BMJ and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has uncovered evidence that raises troubling questions about how WHO managed conflicts of interest among the scientists who advised its pandemic planning, and about the transparency of the science underlying its advice to governments.
Was it appropriate for WHO to take advice from experts who had declarable financial and research ties with pharmaceutical companies producing antivirals and influenza vaccines?”
Boasting About the Tricks
In 2019, Marc Van Ranst, Belgian Flu Commissioner, gave a talk at the ESWI/Chatham House Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Stakeholders Conference. At around 13 minutes in, he boasted about how he “misused the fact that that the top, top football … soccer clubs in Belgium inappropriately and against all agreements vaccinated … they made their soccer players priority people.” The audience responded with laughter.
In order to understand the corruption inside the WHO, one may want to watch a pre-pandemic documentary called “Trust WHO,” produced by Lilian Franck. Among other things, it looks into various conflicts of interest as well as the examples of how the organization has been influenced by the tobacco industry and the nuclear industry.
The United Nations Has Been Hijacked
Last year, I interviewed Mary Otto-Chang, a former United Nations employee, who talked about the hijacking of the UN and the 2019 agreement between the UN and the World Economic Forum that the Fourth Industrial Revolution as a cooperation goal.
So what we are looking at is using the authority of the UN as supposedly a just and wonderful international organization that protects the people for the commercial and philosophical goals of the richest people of the world. What an intricate lie!
Banality of Evil
Most horrible things that people do to each other don’t come out of nowhere. There is usually a “warm-up” period during which evil actions are trivialized, and people’s senses are “re-trained.”
Sometimes, using upside-down language, people’s senses are re-trained to the extent of swapping out the meanings completely, where war becomes peace, and murder becomes compassion. It takes time to dehumanize entire demographics — based on a particular ethnicity, or religion, or health status, or any other arbitrary affiliation.
For example, in early Nazi Germany, there was a campaign to kill mentally disabled children, (and also do inhumane experiments on them), and the parents were often told that their children were being taken away for better care. The parents didn’t know that their children were being murdered — but the nurses who killed the disabled knew exactly what they were doing, but perhaps some of them believed that they were performing acts of mercy!
There is a powerful, must-see documentary about it, called, “The Killing Nurses of the Third Reich.” I wrote about it last year:
“The only thing that was needed for the nurses to make the transition to the horror zone was to decide that the poor suffering imbeciles had no agency. As soon as in their minds, the nurses stripped the disabled children and the mentally ill adults of their human agency and turned them into creatures akin to suffering pets, killing them became virtuous. The nurses held the disabled babies lovingly, and then killed them.”
Our Choices Matter
Something that I have been thinking about a lot over the course of my life is how our choices have long-term consequences: for ourselves, for the people around us, and even for the history of the world!
For example, to come back to the topic of pandemic preparedness, much of what happened in the U.S. in 2020 was made possible thanks to Bush’s 2005 decision to redo the pandemic preparedness plan. Who paid any attention to it back in 2005? Who could imagine that it would have such a profound impact on our lives? Nobody, probably, except for the people who planned it. And yet here we are …
Or another example. When people accept censorship against the groups that they don’t relate to, they often don’t think that the censors are coming for them next — and yet more often than not, that is exactly what happens.
Or sometimes, a choice that we make at a very young age comes back to us years later, and whatever we tried to escape stares us straight in the face, and we have to deal with it anyway.
Which is to say, courage and trying to do the right thing are not only praise-worthy, they are also very practical, especially during challenging times.
There is most certainly no formula, and no universal prescription for a time like this but it’s important to see the scammers in high chairs for who they are (including when they talk about pandemic preparedness treaties “for our own good”), and to see through them without being afraid. When we stand together, with love in our hearts, we are strong.
About the Author
To find more of Tessa Lena’s work, be sure to check out her bio, Tessa Fights Robots.
This paper, published in the “peer-reviewed” Canadian Medical Association Journal, quite simply represents an amoral, unethical and utterly transparent attempt to use pseudoscientific modelling to fabricate a false narrative. The apparent objective seems to be sowing divisions in society by marginalising and vilifying the unvaccinated.
The paper describes a “study” which is nothing of the sort. It actually describes a model which the authors have constructed. This is an unnecessarily complex model — and suspiciously so. The model itself has been very expertly taken apart by Jessica Rose here and Drs Rancourt and Hickey for the Ontario Civil Liberties Association here.
The authors appear to have tested their model to death to find the optimal combination of inputs which results in the “narrative” they wish to promote.
The logical flaws in this approach have been brilliantly analysed by Dr Byram Bridle, including a critique of the assumptions made for the various input parameters. Among the more egregious examples are:
(1) the model assumes 80% effectiveness against infection for the Covid injections vs omicron, whereas real-world data suggests zero — at best.
(2) the model assumes very little pre-pandemic immunity present within the community (they assume just 20% when for some time the evidence has suggested much higher levels, especially against severe illness).
(3) the model assumes no waning of efficacy at all over time, a claim not even made by the most ardent promoters of the covid vaccines.
Many news outlets — including Forbes— appear to have been taken in by this sham science and are reporting it as a bone fide “study” with no critical analysis whatsoever, this being their key message:
“The findings counter the common argument that the decision to get vaccinated is a personal one, the researchers said, as the unvaccinated are ”likely to affect the health and safety of vaccinated people in a manner disproportionate to the fraction of unvaccinated people in the population.”
One commentator on Twitter acerbically — though rather accurately — summed up the Forbes article thus:
It is quite clear that the model and the entire article has been constructed to push a political agenda, namely to neutralise the growing realisation by the population that the story they were told in relation to the Covid 19 injections is entirely false. Contrary to the authorities’ official narrative, in the context of Omicron the injections don’t reduce infections or transmission, and actually probably even increase them. Far from being a selfish act, it was in fact entirely rational — and beneficial to one’s fellow man — to decline the injection.
To use Dr Bridle’s words, the paper is actually “Fiction Disguised as Science to Promote Hatred”.
We support and join the many voices calling for this paper to be retracted.
Postscript: When Denis Rancourt, one of the authors of the Ontario Civil Liberties Association’s statement, tweeted the essence of their complaint with it, the paper’s author — David Fisman — didn’t respond by way of any form of scientific justification — he threatened legal action.
Virologists pushed back on the possibility of tighter regulation of viruses tweaked in the lab to be more lethal at a public meeting Wednesday.
An enhanced pandemic potential pathogen is a virus or microbe that has gained increased transmissibility — capacity to spread from person to person and reverberate throughout a population — or virulence — capacity to cause serious disease.
Experiments that are reasonably anticipated to generate deadlier pathogens are supposed to receive heightened oversight from the Department of Health and Human Services under what is nicknamed the HHS “P3CO,” short for the pandemic potential pathogen committee.
Though established just a few years ago, critics say the committee’s work is hidden from public view, suffers from glaring loopholes and needs a reboot. Work that contributes to vaccine development or results from viral surveillance efforts in nature is exempted from this extra layer of review, for example.
Speculation by some in the U.S. intelligence community that SARS-CoV-2 may have seeped out of a lab at the pandemic’s epicenter may have prompted a public meeting to consider whether current policies are adequate. Reporting irregularities by a nonprofit partner of the lab involved in gain-of-function research on coronaviruses and funded by the National Institutes of Health called EcoHealth Alliance has also led many to conclude the P3CO needs to apply to more research projects and be more accountable to the public.
One million Americans have died of COVID-19. A review by the U.S. intelligence community last summer about whether the novel coronavirus spilled over from an animal or spilled out of a lab was inconclusive.
The Office of Science and Technology Policy and NIH cohosted the meeting Wednesday.
White House COVID-19 testing czar Tom Inglesby was harshly critical of the existing framework. His top recommendation: Scientists should be required to explain in detail the goals of undertaking such research in the first place, and why less perilous methods could not reach the same goal.
“There must be an extraordinary and public justification,” he said. “I do think there are experiments we shouldn’t do.”
But lobbying groups representing virologists and other life scientists pushed back.
“The systems of review should not be a solution looking for a problem,” said Felicia Goodrum, president of the American Society for Virology.
Goodrum said regulation risks “tying two hands behind our backs” when it comes to modeling pandemic risks.
Goodrum added that the inherently unpredictable nature of manipulating viruses means that it’s unwieldy to determine whether or not an experiment will make a virus more dangerous, so the regulations should be lax.
“We must be careful about dichotomizing research as simply either ‘risky’ or not because it is not possible to absolutely predict the biology of a virus with the committee,” she said.
But Gregory Koblentz, director of the biodefense graduate program at George Mason University, said that an EcoHealth Alliance grant that funded research that made coronaviruses more deadly by swapping their spike proteins is emblematic of lapses in oversight at NIH.
The research was not regulated as gain-of-function work, but NIH did add language to the grant requiring extra reporting if the viral engineering led to viruses that were 10 times more pathogenic. (The chimeric viruses proved to be much more pathogenic than even that threshold, but EcoHealth Alliance did not report it.) That language amounts to a “tacit admission” that NIH reasonably anticipated the work was gain of function, Koblentz said.
Stefano Bertuzzi, CEO of the American Society for Microbiology, conceded that labs should report more often to Congress and that scientists could do a better job allaying public concerns, but stated that the framework is otherwise sufficient.
Bertuzzi signaled he is concerned that Congress could step in.
Labs taking steps toward greater transparency “helps guard against well intended but sometimes overly prescriptive legislative approaches that could undermine the important work that needs to take place.”
Gigi Gronvall, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said that the “breathless hyping of risks” overshadows strong existing biosafety measures, such as U.S. efforts to train maximum containment labs abroad.
Asked which risks have been misunderstood, Gronvall said that “there is a lot of gray” and that the proper expertise is needed to interpret gain-of-function experiments, but did not go into further detail.
Indeed, some experts called for decreased transparency for controversial research. Colorado State University Biosafety Rebecca Moritz called for limiting the scope of public records requests. U.S. Right to Know has submitted a public information request for records about the university’s research on bat coronaviruses in collaboration with EcoHealth Alliance, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
The documents raise questions about the contagion risks, for example, of shipping of bats and rats infected with dangerous pathogens.
Kanta Subbarao, director of the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on Influenza, disputed the idea that research that contributes to vaccine development or results from surveillance should be included in the framework.
Many representatives of the life science and biodefense fields emphasized weighing any regulation against lost opportunities for science. But members of the public who participated in the meeting were much more skeptical of the value of certain gain-of-function work.
Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute, said that the public should not be surprised by controversial gain-of-function experiments for the first time in scientific papers, long after the research has been approved and completed.
Chan called for controversial experiments to be published on preprint servers and the genomes of novel viruses to be deposited into publicly available databases within a year of discovery.
She also called for greater transparency from private “virus hunting” organizations and middlemen between the NIH and labs, an apparent allusion to the EcoHealth Alliance and the Global Virome Project.
Kevin Esvelt, a biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said creating novel viruses in the lab, combined with the ease of synthesizing viruses from a genome sequence, poses a national security threat.
“More Americans have died of COVID than would perish if a Russian Topol SS-25 thermonuclear warhead were to be detonated in the center of Washington, DC,” said Esvelt. “Pandemic viruses can be more lethal than thermonuclear weapons. That makes them a proliferation concern.”
The growing political feud between Russia and the West has spurred the activation of specialized propaganda and intelligence units. With regards to the Ukraine crisis, experts say one of the most active parties has been the United Kingdom, which in recent years has stepped up its efforts to demonise Russia by waging a full-scale propaganda war.
As an RT analysis has shown, Britain’s “HMG Russia Unit,” an interdepartmental government organization created several years ago, has acted as a front for soft influence operations against Moscow with the assistance of international consulting organizations.
Up until now, the activities of the operation had not been publicly visible. However, last month publications containing its employees’ personal information appeared in a number of Russian Telegram channels. It is alleged that the email addresses included in these posts belong to employees of the HMG Russia Unit who are also connected to various other UK government departments, including the Cabinet Office, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, military intelligence, MI5, and the Ministry of Defence, as well as American curators attached to the group.
Prioritized Propaganda
To begin with, let’s explain how a group specifically targeting Russia appeared within the British government, what its purpose is, and what it does.
“The government has long recognized the presence of a sustained and significant threat from Russia to the UK and its allies, including both conventional military capabilities and disinformation, illegal financial transactions, influence operations, and cyber-attacks,” said a report submitted to parliament by the Office of the British Prime Minister in 2020.
For the British government, Russia has become “one of the main priorities from the point of view of national security,” it adds.
“This is why in 2017 the Government implemented the NSC-endorsed (National Security Council — editor) Russia Strategy, and in 2017 established the cross-Government Russia Unit which brings together the UK’s diplomatic, intelligence and military capabilities to maximum effect,” the report goes on to say.
According to the British government’s own reports, the HMG Russia Unit, which was formally attached to the UK Foreign Office, was primarily tasked with coordinating information and propaganda campaigns aimed against Russia. This can be traced from data released by the British government and, in particular, from a large-scale program financed by the UK Conflict, Stability and Security Fund (CSSF) that was carried out by the Foreign Office up until 2021 to develop media resources, including in Russian, and so-called “counter disinformation.”
The program notes that the United Kingdom is working with a number of partners to improve the quality of public and independent media resources, including Russian-speaking ones, so they can “support social cohesion, uphold universal values and provide communities in countries across Eastern Europe with access to reliable information.”
The forms of support vary. They include, for example, mentoring by British media staff, consultations on creating broadcast networks, financing of joint productions, and support for regional media projects in Russian.
“In the coming year we will be investing over £8m in supporting public service and independent media. This will include projects in the Baltic States and Ukraine, as well as regional initiatives,” according to a document published by the UK government.
Contract for Demonization
However, the HMG Russia Unit’s efforts are not limited to coordinating propaganda efforts. From data on the UK government’s public procurement portal, it can be seen that it has served as a customer for the Green Finance initiative – a British-Russian project aimed at promoting sustainable financing for developing institutional ties between Moscow and London in the environmental and economic spheres. The final date for fulfilling the contract is March 31, 2022.
“Funds in the amount of £987,600 were received by the well-known consulting company PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC).”
If we analyze the UK government’s funding allocations targeting Russia, it turns out that in addition to PwC, Moody’s Analytics (a Moody’s subsidiary) received funds through a specialized non-profit entity named UK Research and Innovation as part of a contract to track companies and individuals that have been sanctioned over the Ukraine conflict. The relevant restrictions are noted on a portal for the placement of UK government contracts.
The involvement of private international consulting companies in promoting the UK agenda with respect to Russia, as well as the post-Soviet space, logically correlates with the HMG Russia Unit’s involvement in large-scale projects to demonize Russia’s image.
In this regard, there is a noteworthy letter dated February 7, 2019, addressed to the British investigative journalist Till Bruckner, who had requested data on the activities of the Integrity Initiative from the British Foreign Office. It states that in 2017-2018, £296,500 was earmarked to finance the project, and an additional £1.961 million in 2019.
A response to the journalist’s request was received from the HMG Russia Unit. The Integrity Initiative has been flagged as one of Britain’s main programs responsible for spreading anti-Russia fakes and waging a propaganda war against Moscow. At the same time, as RT noted back in 2018, the Anonymous hackers’ collective published internal documents from the Integrity Initiative that revealed the mechanisms British media networks employ in their subversive work aimed at Russia.
‘Fake’ Trendsetters
British influence networks initially set a certain standard for the West’s anti-Russian template, Alexey Martynov, a political scientist who heads the Institute of Newly Established States, said in an interview with RT.
“The British are trendsetters, in a sense. The now popular buzzword ‘fake news’, the formation of false narratives, the management of media streams – all this was born in their heads,” says the political scientist. “Goebbels studied with British military propagandists. What they are doing is military propaganda.”
The academic noted that using private consulting companies and rating agencies as tools to influence Russia was a ‘soft power’ tactic traditionally employed by specialized British agencies.
“Any rating agency is created as a tool for manipulating media flows, and other business dimensions grow out of this. They also have access to domestic statistics that are not available to the public,” the political scientist said. “These mechanisms have been tested since the 1990s, when all data was opened to foreign ‘partners’. Then these mechanisms were created – it is important to have a high ranking with rating agencies, otherwise you won’t receive loans.”
The UK continues to ramp up its sanctions against Russia. In May it announced another package of restrictive measures, adding more individuals and legal entities from Russia to the list and planning to ban imports of russian oil. In April, London also banned the import of Russian silver, caviar, and wood products.
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
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