SPOOKS, RUSSIA, AND DISINFORMATION
By Paul Robinson | IRRUSIANALITY | January 20, 2022
Jeremy Morris has an interesting post on his Postsocialism blog about the malicious role played by Western intelligence services in shaping narratives of Russia. I’m somewhat sceptical about his thesis – or at least the extent of the phenomenon he describes – but as if by chance, today I also came across a story that kind of backs him up.
Morris complains of two “elephants in the room,” who together distort our understanding of Russia. The first is the “clear leveraging of latent public sympathy abroad for the Russian regime by our friends at the English-language offices of RT.” I guess that would be me.
The second is “academic and think-tank contacts with the security services in the West.” Given my former involvement in the intelligence world, and the fact that I’ve taught courses at the University of Ottawa with members of the Canadian security and intelligence services, I guess that would be me too.
Double elephant!
I imagine that Morris thinks that elephant number one distorts things in favour of Russia, and elephant number two distorts them against. That must make me some sort of push-me-pull-you doing both at once. Perhaps that explains why I always end up occupying the middle ground!
Anyway, I digress, because this isn’t meant to be about me. Back to the point.
“If you underestimate the hidden motives of those that comment on Russia – from both elephants, then you are guilty of the ‘fallacy of insufficient cynicism’,” writes Morris. I must confess myself guilty as charged. I can be pretty cynical, but I don’t think that everybody has “hidden motives.” People who write what one might call “pro-Russian” articles for RT aren’t doing it for the money or because the FSB has got some dirt on them any more than people writing Russophobic stuff for think tanks are doing it because they’re taking orders from the FBI, MI5, or CSIS. People tend to believe what they’re doing.
In any case, I worry less about spooks and more about the military industrial complex and its funding of think tanks and the like, all of which work together to inflate threats, keep us in a state of fear, and justify increased defence spending and aggressive foreign policies. But even there, the think tankers etc believe in what they’re doing. The problem is that believers get funded whereas non-believers don’t. I don’t think “hidden motives” are the issue.
That said, Morris has a point, in that security and intelligence services do maintain contacts with chosen favourites and feed them information that they hope will further their chosen narrative. The story I came across today illustrates how this works quite well.
A while back, I mentioned a law case in the UK involving Guardian journalist Carol Cadwalladr and British businessman Arron Banks. Banks is suing Cadwalladr for libel for having claimed that the Russian government offered him money for use in the Brexit referendum campaign, and that he lied about his relationship with the Russians. The case is now before the court, and Cadwalladr’s defence is becoming clear.
The Guardian journalist isn’t claiming that what she said about Banks was true, merely that given the evidence she had at the time she had good reason to believe that it was in the public interest for her to report it. So what was this evidence, and where did she get it from? This is where it becomes interesting. For as the Guardian reports,
In her written evidence statement, she [Cadwalladr] said she had obtained two intelligence files from an organisation contracted to undertake work countering Russian disinformation in Europe on behalf of a government agency, one file of which raised concerns about Banks’s Russian wife.
In other words, British intelligence fed the information to her via another source.
The accusation that Banks took Russian money to fund Brexit received widespread coverage. It was even repeated in a parliamentary report. Yet no evidence to support the claim has ever been produced, and as we have seen, Cadwalladr isn’t trying to say that it was true. In short, it was disinformation. And yet, what prompted it was in part documents leaked by British intelligence to a third party “contracted to undertake work countering Russian disinformation” and then in turn given by that organization to Ms Cadwalladr.
Doesn’t that strike you as a bit iffy?
In the first place, the story reinforces what I have said several times before, namely that the “disinformation industry” set up to “counter Russian disinformation” is itself a major source of disinformation. And second, it reveals an excessively cosy relationship between the media – supposedly an independent guardian of the truth that holds the state to account – and state organizations, including secret intelligence.
Personally, I find it more than a little disturbing.
Maybe Mr Morris is right after all!
Was Peter Daszak Working For The Central Intelligence Agency?
An EcoHealth Alliance whistleblower steps forward
Dr. Shi Zhengli, Dr. Peter Daszak, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology
Kanekoa TheGreat | January 18, 2022
“We found other coronaviruses in bats, a whole host of them, some of them looked very similar to SARS. So we sequenced the spike protein: the protein that attaches to cells. Then we… Well, I didn’t do this work, but my colleagues in China did the work. You create pseudo particles, you insert the spike proteins from those viruses, see if they bind to human cells. At each step of this, you move closer and closer to this virus could really become pathogenic in people. You end up with a small number of viruses that really do look like killers.”
This statement was said by EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak at a 2016 forum discussing “emerging infectious diseases and the next pandemic”. Daszak, who received more than $118 million in grants and contracts from federal agencies, including $53 million from USAID, $42 million from DOD, and $15 million from HHS, appeared to boast about the manipulation of “killer” SARS-like coronaviruses carried out by his “colleagues in China” at the now infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology.
According to investigative research done by independent-journalist Sam Husseini and The Intercept, much of the money awarded to EcoHealth Alliance did not focus on health or ecology, but rather on biowarfare, bioterrorism, and other dangerous uses of deadly pathogens.
EcoHealth Alliance received the majority of its funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), a State Department subsidiary that serves as a frequent cover for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Their second largest source of funding was from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), which is a branch of the Department of Defense (DOD) which states it is tasked to “counter and deter weapons of mass destruction and improvised threat networks.”
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has a long history of acting as a contract vehicle for various CIA covert activities. With an annual budget of over $27 billion and operations in over 100 countries, one former USAID director, John Gilligan, once admitted it was “infiltrated from top to bottom with CIA people.” Gilligan explained that “the idea was to plant operatives in every kind of activity we had overseas; government, volunteer, religious, every kind.”
In 2013, a US cable published by WikiLeaks outlined the U.S. strategy to undermine Venezuela’s government through USAID by “penetrating Chavez’s political base”, “dividing Chavismo”, and “isolating Chavez internationally.” In 2014, the Associated Press disclosed that USAID contracted out a project to develop a rival to Twitter in order to foment a rebellion in Cuba.
From 2009 to 2019, USAID partnered with EcoHealth Alliance on their PREDICT program which identified over 1,200 new viruses, including over 160 coronavirus strains; trained roughly 5,000 people around the world to identify new diseases; and improved or developed 60 research laboratories.
What better way for the CIA to collect intelligence on the world’s biological warfare capabilities?
Source: The Intercept
Dr. Andrew Huff received his Ph.D. in Environmental Health specializing in emerging diseases before becoming an Associate Vice President at EcoHealth Alliance, where he developed novel methods of bio-surveillance, data analytics, and visualization for disease detection.
On January 12, 2022, Dr. Andrew Huff issued a public statement (on Twitter) in which he claimed, Peter Daszak, the President of EcoHealth Alliance, told him that he was working for the CIA.
Dr. Andrew Huff’s full statement below:
Source: Dr. Andrew Huff
Dr. Huff continued, “… I wouldn’t be surprised if the CIA / IC community orchestrated the COVID coverup acting as an intermediary between Fauci, Collins, Daszak, Baric, and many others. At best, it was the biggest criminal conspiracy in US history by bureaucrats or political appointees.”
What exactly did they cover-up?
Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance—financed by USAID, DOD, and other U.S. Government agencies—partnered with Dr. Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina and Dr. Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology to conduct gain-of-function research on bat-borne coronaviruses.
Baric successfully created a “chimeric” coronavirus in 2015. There is a well-documented scientific paper trail that details how Dr. Baric and Dr. Zhengli continued to collaborate on gain-of-function research together to create what went on to be a potential precursor to the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Francis Collins, and Dr. Peter Daszak, who were proponents of this type of international collaboration on gain-of-function research were heavily incentivized to cover up the possibility of a lab origin because they previously had funneled U.S. taxpayer money to the Chinese lab.
At the start of 2020, there was a lot of chatter about where the virus SARS-CoV-2 actually originated from. Two papers published in March 2020—one in Nature Medicine and one in The Lancet—controlled the direction of the dialogue on the origin of the virus.
Both papers were repeatedly cited by Fauci, Collins, Daszak, the corporate media, and big tech as evidence to shut down and even censor any discussion of the possibility that the virus originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Only later through redacted emails released by FOIA did we learn that Fauci, Collins, and Daszak were intimately involved in crafting the two papers which dismissed the lab origin hypotheses as “conspiracy theory.”
In February 2020, Daszak told University of North Carolina coronavirus researcher Dr. Ralph Baric that they should not sign the statement condemning the lab-leak theory so that it seems more independent and credible. “You, me and him should not sign this statement, so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn’t work in a counterproductive way,” Daszak wrote.
More unredacted emails have revealed that while these scientists held the private belief that the lab release was the most likely scenario, they still worked to seed the natural origin narrative for the public through the papers published in Nature Medicine and The Lancet.
In April 2020, Daszak opposed the public release of Covid-19-related virus sequence data that has been gathered from China, as part of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) PREDICT program because he said it would bring “very unwelcome attention” to the aforementioned “PREDICT and USAID” programs.
Source: U.S. Right To Know FOIA
In September 2020, scientists were outraged when Daszak was chosen to lead the World Health Organization task force examining the possibility that Covid-19 leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Despite many clear attempts to cut off a legitimate scientific inquiry into the Wuhan lab origin hypothesis, the theory continued to persist predominantly due to the fact that the Chinese government was unable to provide a single shred of evidence in support of the natural origin theory.
In May 2021, the narrative turned when, Nicholas Wade, a former science reporter at the New York Times published his seminal column outlining the case for the Covid lab-leak theory.
For SARS1, an intermediary host species was identified within four months of the epidemic’s outbreak and the host of MERS was identified within nine months. Yet some 15 months after the SARS2 outbreak began, and a presumably intensive search, Chinese researchers had failed to find either the original bat population, or the intermediate species to which SARS2 might have jumped, or any serological evidence of a natural origin.
Every step of the way, Fauci, Collins, and Daszak have done everything in their power to obfuscate, mislead, and misinform the world about the possibility of SARS-CoV-2 originating at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
If Dr. Andrew Huff is telling the truth, Fauci, Collins, and Daszak are not covering up the lab origin only for themselves, but also for the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, and the U.S. Government.
True or false? Reuters “fact check” of the Denmark study showing negative VE
By Steve Kirsch | January 20, 2022
Reuters did a “fact check” of the negative Vaccine Efficacy (VE) in the Denmark study and the study author used a hand waving argument to conclude the negative VE is due to a bias. What do you think?
I wrote earlier about the Denmark study showing that vaccine efficacy against Omicron goes negative after 90 days:
There is a Reuters “fact check” that says that the author claimed that the vaccines are fine and that the negative vaccine efficacy reported in the paper was simply due to a “bias.”
Oh really???
Here’s why I think the Reuters “fact check” is garbage
First of all, a hand waving argument supported by no data whatsoever claiming bias is not convincing to me.
Furthermore, I think the Denmark paper was accurate for these 3 reasons:
- we see negative VE consistently in MANY other studies.
- VE continues to go negative in that study consistent over time… how can they explain that?
- if it was behavior differences between vaxed and unvaxed that accounts for the bias, then how come people who got Moderna behave DIFFERENTLY than people who got Pfizer?!?
I am not alone in suggesting the authors claim “there must be a bias” as needed to fit the narrative
One of the commenters on the original paper wrote something very similar to what I wrote:
So assume the results you like (high VE for recent vaccination) are causal, but hand wave confounders at results you don’t like (negative VE for distant vaccination)? Science?
I couldn’t have said it any better myself. This was my reaction too when I read the paper.
What do you think?
So who got it right? Me or Reuters?
Fallen Icon: Sir David Attenborough and the Walrus Deception
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | January 19, 2022
In 2019 Netflix in conjunction with WWF broadcast Frozen Worlds, an episode in the Our Planet series and narrated by David Attenborough. The scenes it showed shocked and horrified viewers around the world.
After a brief introduction about the recent loss of Arctic summer sea ice and the ‘inevitable’ devastation this will cause for Arctic animals, it shifts to a series of amazing shots of tens of thousands of walrus, crowded cheek-by-jowl on a beach in Siberia.
The camera pans out to a rocky cliff, which several walrus are attempting to climb. Then suddenly, one after another, the walrus are shown falling off the cliff to their deaths on the rocky shore below.The scenes are shown in slow motion and repeated in order to maximise the shock effect.
As the scenes unfold, Attenborough coolly informs viewers that the walrus would not normally be there, but out on the sea ice instead. But because of man-made global warming, the poor walrus have been forced onto land in crowded conditions, where they will inevitably suffer and die.
But was it all as simple as Attenborough portrayed?
A number of suspicions were immediately evident. Far from these beach haulouts being unusual, walrus in fact regularly use these beaches every year, in order to rest and feed while waiting for the sea ice to move south in autumn.
Walrus also invariably crowd together in these situations, both for warmth and protection from polar bears. Indeed, far from walrus being threatened by climate change, their populations have been growing in recent years, explaining why so many were hauled out that day.
And what made those walrus try to climb the cliff?
Dr Susan Crockford is a professional zoologist, who has specialised in Arctic mammals for many years, particularly polar bears and walrus. She immediately smelled a rat.
Her newly released book, Fallen Icon, tells the story of how she uncovered exactly what went on that day on the Siberian beach. Her detective work reveals how it was polar bears stalking them that forced the walrus up that cliff; how this is a common hunting tactic and how the bears then fed off the carcasses down below.
She uncovers evidence that WWF already knew about this hunting tactic at that particular location, and that was precisely why this beach was chosen for the film.
She goes on to describe how retreating sea ice actually increases the food supply for walrus and how their populations are both healthy and increasing.
And how Attenborough used this horrifying imagery to jump-start a three year campaign against human-caused global warming that included ten documentaries laden with groundless climate emergency messaging, much of it aimed at the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world. Attenborough’s relentless climate activism included a utopian vision of global changes for society eerily similar to the one proposed by the World Economic Forum.
It is hard to disagree with Crockford’s conclusions:
The public’s trust in science and medicine now appears to be at an all-time low. People who had been blind to the abuse of science rampant in the climate change narrative have had their eyes opened by the pandemic response. These things cannot be unseen.
In a worrying trend, traditional scientists struggle to be heard or have their concerns and criticisms published, both for climate change and Covid-19 related issues. Research that features testable hypotheses and reproducible studies seem to be rare birds while predictive modelling projects gobble up grant funds as well as the media attention.
Is science as we used to know it already dead? If so, how much of a role has Attenborough played in this progression? Over the last three years, he has used weaponized science presented to a trusting public in a most egregious manner.
My ultimate goal in writing this book is not to denigrate Sir David but to correct the misinformation he has deliberately or unwittingly promoted in his documentaries and public statements.
I am a traditional scientist standing up for science as it is meant to be – without activism and without politicization – because its loss to society will be incalculable.
Over the years but especially since 2018, Attenborough has shown that he lets others do his serious thinking for him and has often placed his trust where it was ill-advised, as he has done with the WWF. By that I mean he has relied on others to present information to him in an easily digestible manner rather than delving into the literature himself.
And having spent a lifetime taking this easy way out, when he decided he wanted his legacy to be something more substantial than ‘a good storyteller’, he seemed to take on the role of spokesman for others with ideological political agendas.
It appears to me that when he agreed to present the gruesome falling walrus film footage in Our Planet as evidence of climate change, Attenborough compromised his principles to achieve a specific end result. Such noble cause corruption is common in the conservation world but it was new for Attenborough.
I am convinced that what Attenborough has done with the falling walrus episode will be remembered long after he’s dead but not for the reasons he intended. It will go down as another ‘own goal’ for the climate change movement and judged as the moment Attenborough fell from grace as a trusted British icon.
Susan Crockford’s book is now available on Amazon here:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0991796691
Susan Crockford adds:
As I point out in my new book, Fallen Icon, David Attenborough devised a three year campaign on the falsehood that hundreds of Russian walrus died falling off a cliff due to climate change because he also desired what the World Economic Forum (WEF), meeting online this week, say they want: immediate and drastic changes, supposedly to mitigate an invisible ‘climate emergency’ and other societal ills.
Despite the fact that walrus and polar bears are thriving in the Arctic, this fabricated ’emergency’ seems to be the reason that its new chairman plans to make the G7 into a ‘climate club’.
Pfizer-backed CDC Foundation partnered with Facebook to fund social media tactics to increase “vaccine uptake”
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | January 19, 2022
The Pfizer-sponsored CDC Foundation has teamed up with Big Tech and Big Pharma giants Facebook and Merck, among others, in order to promote Covid vaccines.
The pressure group calls itself the Alliance for Advancing Health Online and some details about its purpose and organization are revealed in an email sent to the White House and obtained and shared by the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN).
Other than the CDC Foundation, Facebook’s partners are the World Health Organization, the World Bank, the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, Sabin Vaccine Institute, the Bay Area Global Health Alliance, and the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
During the fiscal years 2014 through 2018, the CDC Foundation reportedly received $79.6 million from companies Pfizer, Biogen, Merck, and others. Pfizer continues to be listed as a current donor.
ICAN noted that it emerges from the email – sent by Facebook’s US Public Policy head Payton Iheme – that the purpose of the initiative is to use social media and platforms “to build confidence in and drive uptake of vaccines.”
ICAN is a network whose mission is to promote putting authority over health choices in the hands of people whom these decisions affect, and parse out true medical information from that tainted by financial interest and advertising, which, they say, leads to “medical coercion” rather than tangible understanding of issues.
Now the group is suggesting there is conflict in the CDC Foundation forming an alliance to drive home the message of the need to get vaccinated as a matter of public health concern – when those selling the vaccines are members of that alliance. This is particularly pertinent as Facebook has been censoring some criticism of Pfizer vaccines.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is the US public health agency, but it is a handy technicality in this and similar instances that the CDC Foundation has been set up as a private nonprofit incorporated in Georgia, established by Congress through the Public Health Service Act.
Facebook and Merck are throwing in $40 million each to start off the operation, and the money will go towards research into “advancing public understanding of how social media and behavioral sciences can be leveraged to improve the health of communities around the world.”
The first grants will be given to researchers and organizations who are exploring ways of using social media and digital platforms to build confidence in and drive uptake of vaccines, the email said.
Facebook’s representative also wrote that the corporation and its partners in the alliance are looking to expand their work.
New data on vaccine efficacy from scotland and more evidence on bayesian datacrime…
… and more bad news for “the experts”
el gato malo – bad cattitude – january 19, 2022
it’s becoming a bit like beating a dead horse to keep highlighting more and more data that shows the failure of the vaccines to act as promised, but this one highlights something else i was discussing recently and provides a tangible example of the math and definitional manipulation that’s going on.
so let’s take a quick spin:
(all data from HERE)
first, cases:
as is becoming endlessly apparent and replicable, “unvaxxed” is outperforming every other category.
vaccines are not stopping spread, they are most likely (subject to the limitations of non randomized society scale data) accelerating it.
this becomes readily apparent when we calculate risk ratios. (incidence of group divided by incidence in unvaxxed control, so any number >1 = more risk)
risk in the double vaxxed is well over twice as high as in the unvaxxed. boosters seem to help, but still cannot get you back to baseline and i want to emphasize the word “seem” here because i think this data is misleading and is vastly overstating booster efficacy and likely making double vaxxed look worse than it is. (more in a minute)
we can also look at hospitalization:
what’s most interesting here is that it seems like there was some vaccine efficacy against hospitalization but that it inverted as 2022 began.
we can see the risk ratio on 2 doses rise sharply from 0.76 (24% VE) to 1.39 (-39% VE). this is an 82% jump in risk ratio and it was durable into the following week. i have emphasized this in red.
boosters seem effective (but there’s that word again) but even this seeming efficacy is rapidly dropping and risk ratio is up from 0.15 in week 3 dec to 0.38 in week 2 jan, a 150% change.
i see 2 likely explanations here and they are not mutually exclusive:
- this is omicron, the OAS/vaccine (Original Antigenic Sin) evading variant showing up and taking over. as it does, vaccine efficacy drops like a rock because you are antigenically imprinted for the wrong spike proteins. what had been a help becomes actual harm because a bad response is worse for you than making one up on the fly and omicron is the optimized output of selection by leaky vaccine for vaccine evasion and superspread. we’re now into OAS territory, just as certain gatos told you we would be…
- this is bad math and bad definitions being used to hide properties of these vaccines and shift risk. defining as “3 doses” only those 2 weeks after their 3rd jab is bayesian datacrime, especially when the jab itself is known to cause ~2 weeks of immunosuppression and higher risk. the jab itself generates a high risk cohort but then attributes that risk to the cohort before it. it’s like blaming getting hit by a car crossing the street on having stayed on the sidewalk, and the effects can be gigantic. you can hide ANYTHING in that. it’s bad definitions leading to bad math and it’s been widespread practice since pfizer ginned it up to slant their trials.
you can get a full walk through on this issue and the various forms in which is can manifest here:
the examples linked about lay it out clearly: you can make a zero efficacy vaxx look like it works and this works even better if it causes a rise in risk in the 2 week period you lump into the prior group.
thus, boosters make “full vaxxed” look bad. fully vaxxed made unvaxxed look bad. so much of what has been claimed to be vaccine efficacy is just a mathematic rig job from poorly chosen definitions and there is simply no way that that was an accident.
pfizer does not make mistakes like that or like vaxxing the whole control group right when vaxx fade started to get bad. they make choices and those choices have been aided and abetted by regulators and public health agencies.
they all signed off on and adopted these misleading definitions and have been providing information and making policy based upon them.
i’m willing to believe that the CDC was too inept to spot this. it’s sad, but it’s plausible.
but the NIH should have seen it and the FDA not only should have spotted it instantly but should have disallowed a trial using such a shady tactic. it’s pure manipulation.
they both let it go because they were both involved. NIH licensed the IP for the vaccine payload to moderna. former FDA head gottlieb stepped down mid-term to join the pfizer board of directors.
this is what full blown regulatory capture looks like… Full article
UK government hires ad agency to convince the public they don’t need privacy
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | January 17, 2022
The UK is stepping up its “war on encryption,” reports are saying, and like in any good old war, propaganda comes first to “prepare the ground.” And a new campaign is expected to launch as early as this month.
In this case, they call it publicity, with the Home Office being behind the effort whose goal is to sway public opinion in favor of undermining the privacy of the very members of that public – using their own money from public funds, to the tune of over half a million pounds.
Meanwhile the “hired gun” is ad agency M&C Saatchi. The Rolling Stone said it had a chance to review documents thanks to a Freedom of Information request, and that what it discovered were “some shockingly manipulative tactics.”
The main target seems to be Facebook’s Messenger app, specifically, the giant company’s move to better encrypt communications of its users. The government’s narrative is old – “think of the children” – the way many politicians try to push through policies of deeper and broader restrictions that eventually end up hurting everybody.
But the UK government appears to want to wrap that “classic” message in some new advertising glitz – as it launches what the Rolling Stone calls “a publicity blitz” to undermine privacy of people’s chats.
“We have engaged M&C Saatchi to bring together the many organizations who share our concerns about the impact end-to-end encryption would have on our ability to keep children safe,” said a statement from the Home Office.
The advertising agency has reportedly gone with visualizing end-to-end encryption – which safeguards people’s security and privacy online and keeps bad actors out – as something sinister and dark. The report says that this is done by putting two actors, an adult and a child, both appearing to be on their phones, in a glass box installed in a public space, which gradually becomes black.
The idea here is that allowing law enforcement near unfettered access to people’s communications would represent the clear glass, while encryption dims it until the goings on inside the box become invisible.
The documents, a presentation to get non-profits on side, also contains a slide saying that since “most of the public” is ignorant about end-to-end encryption they can be easily swayed, while the recommendation is not to allow the campaign to turn into “a privacy vs safety debate.”
But that’s exactly what it is, advocates suggest.
“The Home Office’s scaremongering campaign is as disingenuous as it is dangerous. Without strong encryption, children are more vulnerable online than ever. Encryption protects personal safety and national security… what the government is proposing puts everyone at risk,” said Robin Wilton, a director with the Internet Society.
What did they know and when did they know it?
By Neville Hodgkinson | TCW Defending Freedom | January 17, 2022
WHEN the public awakens to the great betrayal of both health and science surrounding the handling of Covid, it will be important not to let anger run riot. After all, the mistakes have taken place on a global scale, even leading a nation such as Australia, which we previously thought of as civilised and sensible, to behave like a despotic banana republic both towards its own citizens and in ill-treating unvaccinated tennis players wanting to enter the country.
But that doesn’t mean we should hold back in our efforts to understand and deal with this disastrous aberration in human consciousness, whose dire consequences have been spelled out comprehensively by public health specialist Dr Alan Mordue.
One root of the global nature of the crisis, now more and more coming to light, is the extraordinary power wielded by a tiny group of scientists to dictate World Health Organisation (WHO) policy, from which the rest of the world took its lead.
Email disclosures show not only a deliberate plot to hide the laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2, making it out to have jumped naturally from bats into humans, but how a WHO inquiry was rigged to reach the same conclusion.
This issue has immense implications. If the virus really did make a random ‘jump’ across species, we could be at risk of similar future events. Pleas to provide billions in public funds for research and development of more drugs and vaccines could be justified to help prepare for such threats to global health security.
Uncertainty arising from such a freak of nature would also justifiably have been used to argue for at least temporary measures of draconian control, to protect health services until the true threat could be assessed.
If on the other hand the virus was a laboratory escapee resulting from ‘gain-of function’ research by American and Chinese scientists – now as good as proven – would governments and the public have been so ready to trust the scientists with even more money and power? Or ‘trust the science’, as the Prime Minister kept telling us?
Jeremy Farrar, boss of the UK’s Wellcome Trust, wrote to US health chiefs Francis Collins and Tony Fauci on February 5, 2020 – almost two years ago, just after WHO had declared Covid a global health emergency – to explain how the WHO inquiry would be staffed to support the animal origin theory.
A few days earlier, Farrar had emailed Fauci and Patrick Vallance, the UK Government’s chief scientific adviser, copying in six others including Paul Schreier, Wellcome’s chief operating officer, about a teleconference called to discuss the virus’s provenance. His email said: ‘Information and discussion is shared in total confidence and not to be shared until agreement on next steps.’
That followed a late-night warning by immunologist Kristian Anderson of the Scripps research Institute in California that the virus had features which might make it look as if it had been genetically engineered in a laboratory. Anderson sent that email to Fauci on the evening of January 31, the day WHO announced an emergency, copying in only one other person – Jeremy Farrar.
As I reported last week, despite knowing a laboratory origin was likely, the group was anxious not to weaken confidence in science by allowing that possibility to reach the public. Dr Francis Collins, director of the US National Institutes of Health at the time, told Farrar: ‘I share your view that a swift convening of experts in a confidence-inspiring framework is needed or the voicers of conspiracy will quickly dominate, doing great potential harm to science and international harmony.’
So to protect the good name of science, the group chose a strategy that was the opposite of scientific, in that it suppressed rather than encouraged open investigation and rational discussion of evidence.
But did the motives run deeper than that?
Robert Kennedy Jr, an American lawyer and environmental activist, made the case in a recent book that a web of corruption has been polluting medical science internationally for decades, fuelled by massive misuse of public funds. As director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Fauci dispenses more than $6billion a year in taxpayer funds for research, and Kennedy says he uses this to ruin, advance or reward the careers and institutions of thousands of doctors and scientists.
As part of what Kennedy calls a ‘vaccines cartel’, Fauci also partners Bill Gates, who uses tax-deductible dollars to fund research from which the investment arm of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gains massively – including a big stake in Pfizer.
Gates has huge influence over WHO as its second-biggest funder after the US administration. That influence also extends into the heart of the British medical and scientific establishment. It includes working closely with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), the British pharmaceutical giant, for which Vallance was previously a top executive.
The Gates foundation has also given more than $250million to media companies around the world, most of whom have given unquestioning support to the Covid vaccine rollout and discriminatory, fear-inducing policies aimed at encouraging its take-up, despite its experimental nature.
Media beneficiaries in the UK include the BBC, Guardian and Financial Times. Incredibly, the UK’s Medicine & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), which approved the Covid jabs – even for children – has also received several million pounds.
A similar strategy to Gates’s has enriched and empowered Farrar’s Wellcome Trust, which distributes £1billion annually for global health research. It has an investment portfolio of nearly £30billion, growing at about 12 per cent per annum over the past decade.
Farrar was a senior member of Sage, the UK Government’s advisory body on Covid, until last October, and is a founding member of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, which gave $1billion to help Covid vaccine development.
The Wellcome Trust’s website claims to offer ‘a collection of quick and simple resources on how Covid-19 vaccines work, how we know they’re safe, and how they can be distributed to everyone around the world’.
In March last year, the British Medical Journal reported that the trust stood to gain financially from the pandemic through its investments, raising questions about transparency and accountability. A trust spokesman disputed this, saying they ‘would never make decisions or advise others about the pandemic response for a reason other than public health’.
But according to Mordue, a retired consultant in public health medicine, the public’s health has suffered immensely from the policies the UK pursued. He mourns the lack of relevant expertise among government and media spokesmen; the ‘inadequate and inaccurate’ case definition; the false ‘worst-case’ scenarios produced by modellers; the failure to protect the most vulnerable; the lack of cost-benefit analysis that would have kept society, the education system and the economy functioning while protecting the most vulnerable; and the failure to follow the principle ‘first do no harm’ in the mass rollout of an experimental vaccine. He also deplores the way a Sage sub-group deliberately sought to heighten fear and alarm as a means of driving compliance with Covid measures.
‘What has happened amounts to a betrayal of the specialty of public health and all the principles and values it used to stand for, and a betrayal of the health of the population,’ he writes.
‘What mystifies me is why my former colleagues and the UK professional body charged with developing and maintaining standards in the public health specialty, namely the Faculty of Public Health, have been so quiet through the whole of this pandemic.’
Vallance’s involvement in those crucial early decisions on how SARS-CoV-2 was to be handled, with their subsequent impact on public health decisions globally, raises questions about his fitness to continue in such a vital role as chief scientific officer for the UK.
He was revealed by the Telegraph back in in 2020 to have a £600,000 shareholding in GSK, having already cashed in more than £5million worth of shares received during his tenure at GSK as president of research and development. Claims of a conflict of interest, because of GSK’s own Covid drug and vaccine research and development, were denied by Matt Hancock, Health Secretary at the time.
Leaving aside his financial interest and affiliation to Big Pharma, it was his duty to offer rigorously objective scientific advice to the Government at a time of such crisis. Did that happen? That’s a central question that the forthcoming public inquiry into the pandemic, announced last month, will need to answer.
Vaccine judge whose mind ‘was already made up’
By Sally Beck | TCW Defending Freedom | January 17, 2022
PARENTS of children in the 12-17 age group want government officials to release real-time safety data for Covid vaccines. One mother is so concerned about the possibility that her three children could suffer serious adverse events that she asked the High Court on their behalf to force full public disclosure.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) admit they hold the figures but have not revealed them publicly, so last Thursday parent EF, who cannot be named for legal reasons, put her concerns to Mr Justice Jonathan Swift and asked him to direct the ONS to release the data. Her request was denied.
She said: ‘I’m not surprised. I feel as though the judge had already made up his mind.’
To those of us in court, it certainly felt as though he had and that no one dared question Health Secretary Sajid Javid’s decisions.
Television and radio presenter Beverley Turner, who helped raise over £100,000 to fund the action and who has been vilified for asking questions about the vaccine’s safety, was also there. She said: ‘It felt that the judge had already decided the outcome. He was hostile to the plaintiffs and convivial to the defendants.
‘All we’re doing is fighting for transparency and for that, we got a hostile response.’
It is known that Pfizer and Moderna’s mRNA Covid vaccines can cause the inflammatory heart conditions myocarditis and pericarditis, mostly in young males, while the Oxford/AstraZeneca can cause blood clots and strokes. We do not know to what extent, and whether children have died or been permanently disabled as the result of a Covid vaccination.
EF’s children AB and CD applied to the courts last September to halt the vaccine rollout for 12-17-year-olds and asked for a judicial review. They say they need the ONS figures to support an appeal as the application was denied.
Their mother, who is their ‘litigation friend’ EF said: ‘The court was told that only two children without diagnosed underlying conditions have died of Covid so far. Clearly Covid is not a problem for young people but the vaccine may be. All we want is honest disclosure of the figures so that parents can make an informed decision. None of us are anti-vaccine but we are concerned by the lack of safety data for Covid jabs.
‘We know the mRNA vaccines are experimental and that they are being offered under emergency use. We also know that the trials do not officially finish until 2023.
‘Many parents do not want their children to be guinea pigs.’
After reviewing the evidence, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) recommended against vaccinating 12-15-year-olds, but were overridden by the UK’s four chief medical officers.
Up to December 22, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), who assess the safety of new drugs, had received 2,546 reports of adverse events, likely to be 10 per cent of the true total, for under 18s via their Yellow Card self-reporting scheme, but give details only about heart inflammation.
A statement said: ‘As of November 17, 2021, there have been 432 reports of myocarditis and 332 reports of pericarditis following the use of the Pfizer vaccine. There have been 101 reports of myocarditis and 57 reports of pericarditis following the use of the Moderna vaccine. This is a recognised potential risk with the Covid-19 Pfizer/BioNTech Vaccine and Covid-19 Vaccine Moderna and the MHRA is closely monitoring these events.’
We know that 2.9million children have received first doses of Pfizer and 20,550 have had first doses of Moderna, while 11,600 children have received first doses of Oxford/AstraZeneca’s vaccine (though it is no longer recommended for the under 40s because that age group is more susceptible to potentially fatal blood clots). Nearly a million under 18s have received second shots.
The action was brought by solicitor Stephen Jackson of the firm Jackson Osborne and argued by barrister Francis Hoar, who endured constant interruption from Mr Justic Swift. He presented evidence to the court from consultant pathologist Dr Clare Craig.
Dr Craig said that available ONS figures relating to the number of deaths in the 15-19-year-old age group showed ‘a trend of excess non-Covid deaths in boys of that age which exceeded deaths for previous years.’
From May 1 2021 to December 30 2021, 402 male deaths were recorded, 34.6 per cent above the five-year average between 2015 and 2019. The number for females for the same period was 163, a decrease compared with the five-year average of 175.
Barrister Heather Emmerson, representing the ONS, who did not incur the wrath of Mr Justice Swift, said: ‘We do not accept a significant increase in deaths of boys compared with previous years. This is because it is statistically difficult to calculate a mean mortality rate.’
She did however accept ‘that there is a marginal increase in mortality for that period, but the figures should be treated with caution. The differences are sufficiently small that they could be caused by a delay in the registration of the death.’
Health statistician for the ONS Dr Vahé Nafilyan said in a statement that they had only 62 per cent of the data requested as 38 per cent of deaths had yet to be registered. Potentially, the mortality margin could increase by as much as 38 per cent or decrease by the same amount or somewhere in between.
An inquest is required when a coroner believes a death was due to something other than natural causes. The death cannot be registered until the coroner has reviewed the post-mortem and other evidence and has decided the cause. There is a 12-month delay for inquests currently.
Ms Emmerson said she was not confident that if the ONS released the available data the recipients would interpret it correctly – a statement the plaintiffs found patronising. ‘We have to be extremely careful about this data and the conclusions that may be drawn,’ she told the court.
She was also concerned that although data would be anonymous with no names, dates of birth or regions released, the children’s identities could be discovered, citing newspaper reports of sudden child deaths which could be linked to the data.
Mr Justice Swift said: ‘Correlation does not equal causation and the ONS information is not necessary to decide that claim.’
None of this helps parents who are also concerned that by asking reasonable questions they are being labelled as antivax. Mother of three Bev Turner said: ‘I’d never heard the term before 2021.
‘All parents want is the latest safety data that is simply not available so we do not know if the vaccines could cause neurological problems, fertility issues or other physiological problems.’
Parent EF, who has two girls aged 13 and 16 eligible for vaccination, and a son aged seven, currently too young to receive the jab, says that because of this uncertainty her children are anxious about receiving it.
‘None of them want to take the vaccine,’ she said, ‘and one of them has a friend who fainted immediately after receiving the vaccine and was then off school for two weeks. We don’t know any details other than that, but she was clearly unwell otherwise she would have been at school.
‘We have no information. They can’t tell us if the jabs cause cancer or blindness and until we know, how can we make a properly informed decision?’
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From the Archives
The Balfour Declaration – A Century of Jewish Power
By Gilad Atzmon | May 17, 2017
This year, Palestinians and their supporters mark the 100th anniversary of The Balfour Declaration, a written statement from the United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, to Walter Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, in favour of the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine.
For Palestinians, The Balfour Declaration was the beginning of their plight: a century of ethnic cleansing at the hands of European newcomers who claim Palestine as their historic home. Yet, for some reason, supporters of the Palestinians are desperate to suppress discussion of the motivation for the Balfour Declaration – how and why did it come about? … continue
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- New Study: Chile’s Relative Sea Level Was 3.2 Meters Higher Than Today During The Mid-Holocene
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