The indictment by Special Counsel John Durham of Igor Danchenko for lying to the FBI demonstrates conclusively the Steele dossier was wholly untrue. Clinton paid for the dossier to be created and Clinton people supplied the fodder. Steele, working with journalists, pushed the dossier into the hands of the FBI to try to derail the Trump campaign. When that failed, the dossier was used to attack the elected president of the United States. The whole thing was the actual and moral equivalent of a Cold War op where someone was targeted by the FBI with fake photos of them in bed with a prostitute.
Start with a quick review of what Durham uncovered about the most destructive political assassination since Kennedy.
Christopher Steele, paid by the Clinton campaign (after Clinton’s denial, it took a year for congressional investigators to uncover the dossier was commissioned by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, working for the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign, paid through the Perkins-Coie law firm) did no investigative work. Instead, his reputation as a former British intelligence officer was purchased to validate a dossier of lies and then to traffic those lies to the FBI and journalists.
Durham’s investigation confirms one of Steele’s key “sources” is the now-arrested Danchenko, a Russian émigré living in the U.S. Steele was introduced to the Russian by Fiona Hill, then of the Brookings Institute (Hill would go on to play a key role in the Ukraine impeachment scam.) Danchenko completely made up most of what he told Steele about Trump-Russian collusion. What he did not make up himself he was spoon fed by Charles Dolan, a long-time Clinton hack and campaign regular. Ironically, Dolan had close ties not only to the Clintons but to the Russians as well; he and the public relations firm where he worked represented the Russian government and were registered as foreign agents for Russia. Dolan is credited with, among other things, making up the pee tape episode. Dolan also fed bogus info to Olga Galkina, another Russian who passed the information to Danchenko for inclusion in the dossier. Galkina noted in e-mails she was expecting Dolan to get her a job in the Hillary administration. Steele, a life-long Russia and intelligence expert, never questioned or verified anything he was told.
In short: Clinton pays for the dossier, Steele fills it with lies fed to him by a Clinton PR stooge through Russian cutouts, and the FBI swallowed the whole story. There never was a Russiagate. The only campaign which colluded with Russia was Clinton’s. And Democrats, knowing this, actually had the guts to claim it was Trump who obstructed justice.
That the dossier was a sham was evident to anyone who ever read a decent spy novel. It was a textbook information op and The American Conservative, without any access to the documents Durham now has, saw through it years ago, as did many other non-MSM outlets. See here (2/5/2018). Here (2/15/2018). Here (6/15/2018.) Here (3/25/2019.) Here (12/11/2019) and more. What was obvious from the publicly available information was, well, obvious to everyone but the FBI.
The dossier was the flimsy excuse the FBI used to justify a full-on investigation unprecedented in a democracy into the Trump campaign. That included electronic surveillance (obtained by the FBI lying directly to the FISA court and presenting Steele’s lies as corroborating evidence,) the use of undercover operatives, false flag ops with foreign diplomats and case officers, and prosecution threats over minor procedural acts designed to legally torture low level Trump staffers (Carter Page, who the FBI knew was a CIA source, and George Papadopoulos) into “flipping” on the candidate.
Page in particular was a nobody with nothing, but the FBI needed him. Agents “believed at the time they approached the decision point on a second FISA renewal that, based upon the evidence already collected, Carter Page was a distraction in the investigation, not a key player in the Trump campaign, and was not critical to the overarching investigation.” They renewed the warrants anyway, three times, due to their value under the “two hop” rule. The FBI can extend surveillance two hops from its target, so if Carter Page called Michael Flynn who called Trump, all of those calls are legally open to monitoring. Page was a handy little bug used for a fishing expedition.
What’s left is only to answer was the FBI really that inept that they could not see a textbook op run against them or that the FBI knew early on they had been handed a pile of rubbish but needed some sort of legal cover for their own operation, spying on Trump, and thus decided to look the other way at the obvious shortcomings of Steele’s work.
“The fact pattern that John Durham is methodically establishing shows what James Comey and Andrew McCabe likely knew from day one the Steele dossier was politically-driven nonsense created at the behest of the Clinton campaign,” said Kevin Brock, the FBI’s former intelligence chief. “And yet they knowingly ran with its false information to obtain legal process against an American citizen. They defrauded not just a federal court, they defrauded the FBI and the American people.”
The 2019 Horowitz Report, a look into the FBI’s conduct by the Justice Department Inspector General, made clear the FBI knew the dossier was bunk and purposefully lied to the FISA court in claiming instead the dossier was backed up by investigative news reports, which themselves were secretly based on the dossier. The FBI knew Steele, who was on their payroll as a paid informant, had created a classic intel officer’s information loop, secretly becoming his own corroborating source, and gleefully looked the other way because it supported their goals.
How bad was it? At no point in handling info accusing the sitting president of being a Russian agent, what would have been the most significant political event in American history, did the FBI seriously ask themselves “So exactly where did this information come from, specific sources and methods please, and how could those sources have known it?” Were all the polygraphs broken? The FBI learned Danchenko was Steele’s primary source in 2017, via the Carter Page tap, and moved ahead anyway.
From the FBI’s perspective, turning a blind eye was not even that risky a gambit. They were so certain they would succeed (FBI agents and illicit lovers Peter Strzok and Lisa Page exchanged texts saying “Page: “Trump’s not ever going to become president, right? Strzok: No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.”) and Hillary would ascend to the Oval Office that they felt they would have top cover for their evil. After Trump won and the FBI’s coup planners shifted to impeachment, they held on to their top cover as James Comey presented himself as the man on the cross, aided by a MSM which cared only about a) ending Donald Trump and b) cranking up their ratings with dollops of the dossier’s innuendo. A mass media that bought lies about nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and then promised “never again” did it again.
If a genie granted me a wish, I would want a conversation with Robert Mueller under some sort of truth spell. Did Mueller “miss” all the lies in his lengthy investigation, hoping to protect his beloved FBI? Or did he see himself as a reluctant white knight, having realized during his investigation the real crime committed was coup planning by the FBI and thinking that by ignoring their actions but clearing Trump he would bring the whole affair to its least worst conclusion?
I suspect Mueller realized he had been handed a coup-in-progress to either abet (by indicting Trump on demonstrably false information) or bury. He could not bring himself to destroy his beloved FBI. But the former Marine could also not bring himself to become the Colin Powell of his generation, squandering his hard won reputation to validate something he knew was not true. Mueller split the difference, and kept silent on the FBI and left Trump to his own fates.
This is the third indictment by Durham. Danchenko’s indictment, Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann’s, and FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith’s depict criminal efforts to get Trump. The arrest of Danchenko makes clear Durham knows the whole story. What will he do with it? Will he walk his indictments up the ladder ever-closer to Hillary? Will he proceed sideways, leaving Hillary but moving deeper into the FBI? Maybe see if Fiona Hill connects the failed Russiagate coup she played a pivotal role in with the failed Ukrainegate impeachment she played a pivotal role in? Or will he use the stage of Congressional hearings as a way to bypass Joe Biden’s Justice Department and throw the real decision making back to the voters?
History will record this chapter of America’s story as one of its more sordid affairs. Only time however will tell if the greater tale is one of how close we came to ending our democracy via an intelligence agency coup, or whether Russiagate was just a nascent practice run by the FBI, on a longer road which leads to our demise a president or two later. For those who belittled the idea of the Deep State, this is what it looks like exposed, all pink and naked.
The United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been accused of involvement in drug trafficking. Books and investigations on the subject that have received general notice include works by the historian Alfred McCoy, professor Dale Scott, journalists Gary Webb and Alexander Cockburn, and writer Larry Collins. These claims have led to investigations by the United States government, including hearings and reports by the United States House of Representatives, Senate, Department of Justice, and the CIA’s Office of the Inspector General. U.S. Government Officials said in 1990 the supposed Anti-Drug Unit at the CIA. “accidentally” shipped a ton of cocaine into the US from Venezuela as part of an effort to infiltrate and gather evidence on drug gangs. The cocaine was then sold on the streets of America. As expected, no criminal charges were brought, although CIA officer Mark McFarlin resigned and one officer was disciplined. The CIA issued a statement on the incident saying there was “poor judgment and management on the part of several CIA officers”. We are meant to believe that it all ends there. But this story is much bigger and more wide-ranging than even the issue of drugs on the streets on America and the targeting of black communities with the new deadly drug known as crack.
According to a PBS Frontline investigation, DEA field agent Hector Berrellez said, “I believe that elements working for the CIA were involved in bringing drugs into the country.”
“I know specifically that some of the CIA contract workers, meaning some of the pilots, in fact were bringing drugs into the U.S. and landing some of these drugs in government air bases. And I know so because I was told by some of these pilots that in fact they had done that,” he added.
The impact on poor communities in large cities like Los Angeles, New York, Detroit, Chicago and others was nothing short of devastating.
Interestingly, the CIA’s criminal operation plot also tracks back to Mena Intermountain Municipal Airport where narcotics, weapons, and ammunition were smuggled in both directions – with weapons to the Contras in Nicaragua, and drugs back into the United States. This connects these events directly to Oliver North and former US President Bill Clinton. The recent Hollywood film depiction of some of these events, American Made, is a dramatisation of the story of Barry Seal, a pilot working for both Medellín Cartel and US intelligence, who ran his operations out of Mena, Arkansas.
According to the Kerry Committee report, “it is clear that individuals who provided support for the Contras were involved in drug trafficking, the supply network of the Contras was used by drug trafficking organizations, and elements of the Contras themselves knowingly received financial and material assistance from drug traffickers.”
In 1996, Gary Webb wrote a series of articles which appeared in the San Jose Mercury News, investigating a number of aspects of this illicit trade, including Nicaraguans linked to the CIA-backed Contras who had smuggled cocaine into the U.S. which was then distributed as crack cocaine into Los Angeles and funnelled profits to the Contras. His articles exposed how the CIA helped facilitate cocaine transactions and the large shipments of drugs into the U.S. by the Contra personnel, and how the US intelligence agency directly aided drug dealers to raise funds for the Contras. Webb went on to publish a book based on his article series, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion, which was later made into a film in 2014 called Kill the Messenger. In 1989, the United States invaded Panama as part of Operation Just Cause, which involved 25,000 American troops. General Manuel Noriega, who ruled Panama at the time (and who was later outed as a CIA informant), had been giving military assistance to Contra terrorist groups in Nicaragua – ordered by the US, which, in exchange, allowed him to continue his own drug-trafficking activities and money laundering which US authorities were fully aware of since the 1960s.
The rest, as they say, is history.
The following video montage forms the historic media record on this issue – providing a visual summary of these events including interviews with Gary Webb and other journalists, as well as clips from Congressional and Senate Hearings on the matter, and which clearly shows how and why the Establishment went to such great lengths to cover-up the state-sponsored criminal enterprise.
Seroxat is one of the world’s biggest selling and most successful antidepressants.
But this Panorama investigation discovers the drug may have a darker side – the programme reports that people can get hooked on it, suffering serious withdrawal symptoms when they try to come off it.
For some it can lead to self harm and even suicide. But little warning of these possible side effects accompanies the drug.
These are accusations that the drug’s maker GlaxoSmithKline denies.
The programme follows one Seroxat user and charts her nine month struggle to wean herself off it.
Panorama also spoke to Dr David Healy, an expert on the drug who has had access to confidential Seroxat studies in the GlaxoSmithKline archives.
When I initially read “The Politics of Genocide” [2010] by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson I was easily able to assimilate their critique of the brazen misapplication of the term “genocide” to events in Bosnia (Srebrenica) and Kosovo, since I was familiar with those issues and had worked at the Hague Tribunal, the place where the propaganda was ultimately reformatted to resemble authoritative, quasi-judicial court verdicts. But like most members of the general public, I thought that those authors’ deconstruction of the Rwandan conflict was exaggerated and tendentious because I knew practically nothing about it, aside from the steady stream of horror stories that were fed to news consumers in the 1990s (the authors fittingly called it “enduring lies” in a related volume). To paraphrase Neville Chamberlain, Rwanda was literally a “quarrel in a far-away country, between people of whom we know nothing,” and that made it quite easy to fool all of us. In retrospect, the Rwandan pattern should have raised red flags for adhering too closely to the Bosnian script. But viewed in a factual vacuum and without any particular local expertise, the torrent of Rwandan genocidal allegations appeared largely credible and indisputable. Exactly as the “Srebrenica genocide” narrative must appear to most superficially informed members of the public.
It is only with the publication of Herman and Peterson’s meticulously researched and persuasively argued book that critical questions about Rwanda began to arise. The authors argued that the label “genocide,” far from being merely descriptive or following the legal criteria set by the UN convention, was in fact highly politicised and generally used by governments, journalists, and academics to brand as evil those nations and political movements that in one way or another interfered with the imperial designs of the global West. Two sets of rules govern the application of the term “genocide.” It is seldom used when the perpetrators are U.S. allies (or even the United States itself), while it is applied almost indiscriminately when murders are committed or are alleged to have been committed by enemies of the global West and its business or political interests. After removing media blinkers to study more closely the factual background of the Rwandan affair and applying Herman and Peterson’s analytical framework, events there came into focus and the received narrative about Rwanda was no longer making sense.
A recent reminiscence by Phil Taylor and John Philpot on Global Research about the judicial lynching of Rwandan Colonel Théoneste Bagasora, who recently passed away in prison after enduring many years of incarceration for his alleged role in genocidal killings, recalled not just the sordid impact of propaganda in misshaping public perceptions of important contemporary political issues. More importantly, it highlighted the squalid part played by “gekaufte Justiz,” as Udo Ulfkotte would undoubtedly have called it if he were alive to write a book on this subject today, in seemingly confirming and reinforcing propaganda’s toxic lies.
Taylor and Philpot demonstrate that Bagasora was railroaded by the ICTR, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which sits in Arusha, Tanzania, where he and scores of other Rwandan officials were tried. ICTR is the somewhat lesser-known but equally pernicious mirror image of the more infamous ICTY, or the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.
Attorney Christopher Black, with hands-on experience in both the Hague and Arusha, is unequivocal: “Bagasora was framed up. Not guilty of anything, but this is true of every one of the accused at the Rwanda Tribunal. They were all framed up.”
Black describes the technology of judicial lynching: “The prosecution targeted selected people to try to paint a picture of a government, so a few officers, politicians, party people, administrators, any Hutu intellectuals, etc. were indicted. They concocted stories and charges, all in the name of propaganda to justify the war the West conducted against Rwanda to overthrow its government.
“In 2007 thirty-seven of the [Rwanda] accused sent a letter to the UN declaring that they were political prisoners of the UN. Just think of that, the UN holding political prisoners. And it is a fact that they were.”
Black continues: “At the time I tried to get some of the accused at the ICTY [the Hague Tribunal] to join this action, but received no replies from anyone. The lawyers at the ICTY were sweetheart lawyers for the most part, except in the case of Milosevic.”
Referring to the structure of the pseudo-judicial twins, ICTR and ICTY, Black says that they are “identical in the way they chose people to target, the way they concocted evidence and arranged witnesses, in the way they tried to ensure that only weak lawyers were allowed to defend the accused (a constant battle at the ICTR), and in their control by NATO personnel at every level and in every department. They had the same prosecutor in charge of both [Carla Del Ponte], judges that went back and forth between the two, the same appeal chamber, etc. etc. Hans Köchler’s book about the two tribunals, “Global Justice or Global Revenge”, describes it best. He showed how the judges were all finally approved by the U.S.” Hence, one supposes, the indicative note in the blurb to Köchler’s book, that “the author’s main intention is to reflect upon the legal and philosophical foundations of international criminal law in the context of politics.”
“The two ad hoc tribunals were (and still are in the “Mechanism”) entirely show tribunals created to run show trials to frame up scapegoats for the crimes of the NATO countries involved,” Black concludes with understandable bitterness in his private communication with this author.
Going back to the Herman and Peterson analysis, both “tribunals” have been essential tools in perpetuating crude propaganda fabrications, that otherwise would probably have remained ephemeral, about the Bosnia and Rwanda conflicts by repackaging them in deceptive judicial wrapping. These sorry excuses for “international courts” are not merely a disservice to jurisprudence, to which they have inflicted incalculable damage, whose full scope will become apparent only with the passage of time. Inexcusably, they are guilty also of an appalling distortion of the historical record, arguably an even more grievous offence that may take much longer to rectify.
The FDA has asked a federal judge to make the public wait until the year 2076 to disclose all of the data and information it relied upon to license Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine. That is not a typo. It wants 55 years to produce this information to the public.
With that promise in mind, in August and immediately following approval of the vaccine, more than 30 academics, professors, and scientists from this country’s most prestigious universities requested the data and information submitted to the FDA by Pfizer to license its COVID-19 vaccine.
The FDA’s response? It produced nothing. So, in September, my firm filed a lawsuit against the FDA on behalf of this group to demand this information. To date, almost three months after it licensed Pfizer’s vaccine, the FDA still has not released a single page. Not one.
Instead, two days ago, the FDA asked a federal judge to give it until 2076 to fully produce this information. The FDA asked the judge to let it produce the 329,000+ pages of documents Pfizer provided to the FDA to license its vaccine at the rate of 500 pages per month, which means its production would not be completed earlier than 2076. The FDA’s promise of transparency is, to put it mildly, a pile of illusions.
It took the FDA precisely 108 days from when Pfizer started producing the records for licensure (on May 7, 2021) to when the FDA licensed the Pfizer vaccine (on August 23, 2021). Taking the FDA at its word, it conducted an intense, robust, thorough, and complete review and analysis of those documents in order to assure that the Pfizer vaccine was safe and effective for licensure. While it can conduct that intense review of Pfizer’s documents in 108 days, it now asks for over 20,000 days to make these documents available to the public.
So, let’s get this straight. The federal government shields Pfizer from liability. Gives it billions of dollars. Makes Americans take its product. But won’t let you see the data supporting its product’s safety and efficacy. Who does the government work for?
The lesson yet again is that civil and individual rights should never be contingent upon a medical procedure. Everyone who wants to get vaccinated and boosted should be free to do so. But nobody should be coerced by the government to partake in any medical procedure. Certainly not one where the government wants to hide the full information relied upon for its licensure until the year 2076!
With President Biden’s order granting the CIA’s request for continued secrecy of its 60-year-old records retailing to the JFK assassination — on grounds of protecting “national security” — the question naturally arises: Why doesn’t the the CIA simply sneak into the National Archives and just destroy its records and be done with it?
By now, it should be obvious to everyone, including the CIA’s assets in the mainstream press, that the CIA’s remaining secret records contain incriminating evidence pointing toward a national-security state regime-change operation against President Kennedy, just as Oliver Stone posited in his movie JFK in 1991. The notion that the release of 60-year-old records will endanger “national security,” no matter what definition is placed on that meaningless, nebulous term, is patently ludicrous on its face.
Mind you, I’m not advocating that the CIA do this, of course. I believe those long-secret records should have been disclosed to the American people six decades ago. I’m just asking a question and wondering why the CIA doesn’t do what it has done in the past to prevent the American people from seeing its dark-side activities.
Yes, I know that doing this would be violating the JFK Records Act of 1992. But we all know that nothing would happen to the CIA if it broke the law and destroyed those records. Nobody would get indicted. No one would even lose his job. No one would even get a slap on the wrist. After all, this is the CIA we are talking about.
When the CIA intentionally destroyed its videotapes of its brutal torture sessions with suspected terrorists, nothing happened to the CIA. When the CIA intentionally destroyed its MKULTRA records of its drug experiments on unsuspecting American citizens, again nothing happened.
Moreover, consider what the Secret Service did after the JFK Records Act was enacted. That sordid story is recounted in Douglas Horne’s watershed 5-volume book Inside the Assassination Records Review Board.
The JFK Records Act mandated that all federal agencies disclose their assassination-related records to the public. To enforce the law, Congress called into existence The Assassination Records Review Board.
After the law was enacted, a letter was sent to the Secret Service and other federal agencies specifically directing them to not destroy any assassination-related records. The Secret Service received the letter and understood the directive.
Nonetheless, the Secret Service intentionally destroyed critically important secret information relating to the assassination.
No one got indicted for what was obviously a knowing, intentional, and deliberate violation of the law. No one got cited for contempt. No one got fired. The Secret Service got away with it. The American people never got to see those secret assassination-related records.
The Secret Service’s intentional destruction of those records looked especially bad in the context of the Secret Service’s actions prior to and immediately after the assassination.
First, it didn’t seal the windows or the roof of the Texas School Book Depository or other high-rise buildings overlooking Dealey Plaza, where President Kennedy was assassinated,
Second, it prevented agents from stationing themselves on the side and back of the presidential limousine during the motorcade.
Third, it ensured that the motorcycle cops stayed behind the limousine rather than on its sides.
Fourth, the custom was to have the official press corps car in front of the presidential limousine so that the professional photographers could easily take pictures and film during the motorcade. This time, the Secret Service placed the press corps car several cars behind the limousine, which ensured that there were few professional photographers capturing the assassination in photographs or film.
Fifth, when the first shot rang out, the Secret Service agent who was driving the presidential limousine — William Greer — failed to floor the accelerator and immediately escape from the area before a second shot could hit the president.
Sixth, the Secret Service agent in the passenger seat — Roy Kellerman — sat there like a bump on the log after the first shot rang out, even though his duty was to immediately jump in the back seat and cover the president with his own body. That’s what Secret Service agent Clint Hill was trying to do when he ran from his car toward the president’s car.
Seventh, as I detail in my book The Kennedy Autopsy, Kellerman was actually the person who first launched the scheme for a fraudulent autopsy that was conducted later that day at the military’s medical facility at Bethesda National Naval Medical Facility. When Dr. Earl Rose, the Dallas County Medical Examiner, announced his intention to conduct an autopsy on the president’s body in accordance with Texas state criminal law, Kellerman, who was carrying a submachine gun, declared that no such autopsy would be permitted. Stating that he was operating on orders. Kellerman and his team of Secret Service agents, who were themselves brandishing their own guns, forced their way out of Parkland with the president’s body in a very heavy ornate casket. Kellerman and his team then delivered the body to new President Lyndon Johnson. Later that day, Johnson delivered the president’s body to the military, which then conducted a top-secret, classified fraudulent autopsy on Kennedy’s body.
Kennedy’s body was secretly sneaked into the Bethesda morgue in a cheap shipping casket at 6:35 p.m., which was almost 1 1/2 hours before the official entry time of 8 p.m.As I also detailed in The Kennedy Autopsy, Secret Service agents Kellerman and Greer participated in the secret reintroduction of Kennedy’s body into the expensive, heavy ornate Dallas casket, which was then brought into the morgue at the official entry time of 8 p.m.
What was in those top-secret Secret Service records that the Secret Service intentionally destroyed after being specifically told not to destroy them?
I don’t know, but my hunch is that there was a good reason why the Secret Service felt the need to destroy them.
There is obviously a good reason why the CIA doesn’t want its 60-year-old records disclosed to the American people, and I have no doubts that it has nothing to do with protecting “national security.” Which causes me to wonder why the CIA doesn’t do what the Secret Service did and just be done with the entire controversy.
Radio New Zealand has recently criticized a Facebook live conversation between former National MP Matt King and epidemiologist Dr Simon Thornley. While people should undertake their own research, we provide some comments related to the media’s critique. The evidence related to covid-19 policy continues to change and be updated.
In the interview, Professor Rod Jackson made several claims, decrying Thornley personally during the interview. Let’s examine them in turn.
“There is no trial evidence that ivermectin [an anti-parasitic drug used as early treatment for covid-19 in some parts of the world] works in people with Covid – it doesn’t exist.”
Trials do exist. In fact a meta-analysis or summary study of six such trials exist. The pooled effect of these trials is a 79% decline in all-cause mortality (95% confidence interval: 89% to 58%). These trials are from Iraq, Iran, Bangladesh, Egypt, Turkey and India, places less reticent about its use. But they are trials, and the reduction in all-cause mortality is stark, an endpoint which is generally considered clinically important and free of error and bias. Another trial points to effective treatment, such as from vitamin D supplementation, which reduced intensive care admissions to 1/50 (2%) in the treated from 13/26 (50%) in the untreated in Spanish covid-19 patients.
We’re not advocating ivermectin at all. But we are prepared to look at the evidence. The fact that Jackson didn’t know there were trials invalidates his point.
“Professor Jackson also said claiming Covid-19 was no worse than the flu was nonsense”.
In the interview, Thornley claimed the infection fatality rate of covid-19 was as bad as a ‘severe flu’. A summary study of many countries indicates that the average global infection fatality rate of covid-19 is 0.15% or 1/667 people.
The fatality rate for H1N1 influenza is variable, but this figure from covid-19 is well within the range of estimates presented from a similar summary study.
The comparison between covid-19 and flu is therefore fair and accurate. Jackson’s claim is misinformation.
We should note that many fatality studies take the definition of a covid-19 death at face value but it does not mean the individual died exclusively from the virus. This was exemplified by the counting a recent covid-19 death in a man who was actually shot and killed, yet tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 during the autopsy. This was defended by the Ministry of Health, as it conformed with World Health Organization policy.
We are able to test the accuracy of Jackson’s claimed fatality risk. In May 2020, Jackson admonished Sweden for its lax approach. He said the fatality rate of covid-19 was 1/100 people infected, so predicted 56,000 deaths from covid-19 in the country, assuming 60% of the population would be infected. To date, there have been about 15,000 covid-19 deaths, with an age distribution similar to that of background deaths (figure). In fact, by all accounts, Sweden has fared through the epidemic particularly well compared to other European countries.
Figure. Deaths with covid-19 in Sweden, by age at November 3, 2021. Source: statistica.com
“This is a severe disease and we have a evidence-based treatment [the vaccine] where there is definitive evidence that it reduces the risk of severe disease and death by 95 percent, in that order.”
This is an extraordinary claim for several reasons. First, the original Pfizer trial reported about the same number of overall deaths in the treated and the untreated groups (14 in the treated and 13 in the untreated). In the six-month trial results, only three covid-19 deaths occurred, one in the treated and two in the untreated group. This is not consistent with Jackson’s assertion of a 95% reduction in risk of severe disease and death.
Given the numbers of deaths in the original trial, it is possible to work out whether the trial would have picked up a 95% reduction as Jackson claims. The trial would have been expected to have only one death in the treated group, and would have detected a difference more than expected by chance with 96% certainty.
There is observational evidence from Sweden of reduced covid-19 hospitalisations and deaths (not from all-causes), however, the vaccine effect diminished to zero for all three outcomes eight months after the date that the vaccine was administered.
To compound the confusion about the effect of the vaccine, the original Pfizer trial now is marred by whistle-blowers who have given the British Medical Journal evidence of fraud occurring during its conduct. Sixteen Swedish doctors have now called for the injection to be suspended as a result of these revelations.
Both Jackson and RNZ use extensive use of ad hominem attacks, which are considered an invalid, and lowest, form of argument.
Examples include:
“anti-vax”
“discredited academic”
“And we have someone who is questioning that evidence, who doesn’t know what they’re talking about, talking to an epidemiologist who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
“outlier in his field”.
The purveyors and writers of such ‘argument’ appear to have no embarrassment at the anti-intellectualism and inhumanity of their conduct.
We’ll stick to the contest of ideas by again considering Jackson’s accuracy. Back in August 2020, Jackson and his colleagues claimed that elimination was still the best strategy for New Zealand to tackle covid-19. That article has not dated well, yet the personalised tirade and arguments are familiar.
“He [Thornley] is the only dissenter in the epidemiological community,”
“It’s not like this is a discussion like a boxing match with two equal partners. What you’ve got is every experienced epidemiologist in the country supporting the Government’s elimination approach.”
“We are all advising the Government, and we speak with one voice. And you have got a junior epidemiologist who is presenting a different case.”
Jackson has made increasingly inaccurate claims during the pandemic, claiming, unchallenged that one in five infected people will be hospitalised after infection with covid-19. No media have ever fact checked this.
New Zealand’s own government data shows Jackson overestimated by at least a factor of ten, since the proportion of cases (rather than infections) hospitalised is 2% (table).
Table. Counts of cases of covid-19 in New Zealand (16 November 2021).
Count
%
Self-isolation
2058
56%
Isolation Complete
969
26%
Managed Isolation
396
11%
Hospital
73
2%
Other
198
5%
As sailing great Russell Coutts has recently pointed out, it is questionable how “media entities can maintain objectivity when they have accepted a government grant that is conditional on them promoting certain government policies”.
It is prudent to check all sources of information, not only those who dare to question the what is coming from the Beehive.
On July 28, Pfizer and its partner BioNTech posted a six-month data update from their key Covid vaccine clinical trial, the one that led regulators worldwide to okay the shot.
At a time when questions about vaccine effectiveness were rising, the report received worldwide attention. Pfizer said the vaccine’s efficacy remained relatively strong, at 84 percent after six months.
It also reported 15 of the roughly 22,000 people who received the vaccine in the trial had died, compared to 14 of the 22,000 people who received placebo (a saline shot that didn’t contain the vaccine).
These were not just Covid deaths. In fact, they were mostly not from Covid. Only three of the people in the trial died of Covid-related illnesses – one who received the vaccine, and two who who received the saline shot. The other deaths were from other illnesses and diseases, mostly cardiovascular.
Researchers call this datapoint “all-cause mortality.” Pfizer barely mentioned it, stuffing the details of the deaths in an appendix to the report.
But all-cause mortality is arguably the MOST important measure for any drug or vaccine – especially one meant to be given prophylactically to large numbers of healthy people, as vaccines are.
Although the researchers released their update in July, the data was already more than four months old. They had stopped collecting information about deaths as of March 13, the “data cut-off.”
But even at the time, their figures were somewhat troubling.
In their initial safety report to the FDA, which contained data through November 2020, the researchers had said four placebo recipients and two vaccine recipients died, one after the first dose and one after the second. The July update reversed that trend. Between November 2020 and March 2021, 13 vaccine recipients died, compared to only 10 placebo subjects.
Further, nine vaccine recipients had died from cardiovascular events such as heart attacks or strokes, compared to six placebo recipients who died of those causes. The imbalance was small but notable, considering that regulators worldwide had found that the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines were linked to heart inflammation in young men.
(I reported accurately on this study on Twitter on July 29, and the next day Twitter suspended me for a week for doing so, the fourth of my five defamatory “strikes” for Covid “misinformation.”)
At best, the results suggested that the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine – now pushed on nearly a billion people worldwide at a cost of tens of billions of dollars and ruinous and worsening civil liberties restrictions – did nothing to reduce overall deaths.
Worse, Pfizer and BioNTech had vaccinated almost all the placebo recipients in the trial shortly after the Food and Drug Administration okayed the vaccine for emergency use on Dec. 11, 2020.
As a result, they had destroyed our best chance to compare the long-term health of a large number of vaccine recipients with a scientifically balanced group of people who had not received the drug. The July 28 report appeared to be the last clean safety data update we would ever have.
But now the FDA has given us one more.
On November 8, the agency released its “Summary Basis for Regulatory Action,” a 30-page note explaining why on August 23 it granted full approval to Pfizer’s vaccine, replacing the emergency authorization from December 2020.
And buried on page 23 of the report is this stunning sentence:
From Dose 1 through the March 13, 2021 data cutoff date, there were a total of 38 deaths, 21 in the COMIRNATY [vaccine] group and 17 in the placebo group.
Pfizer said publicly in July it had found 15 deaths among vaccine recipients by mid-March. But it told the FDA there were 21 – at the same data cutoff end date, March 13.
21.
Not 15.
The placebo figure in the trial was also wrong. Pfizer had 17 deaths among placebo recipients, not 14. Nine extra deaths overall, six among vaccine recipients.
Could the discrepancy result from some odd data lag? Maybe, but the FDA briefing book also contains the number of Covid cases that Pfizer found in vaccine recipients in the trial. Those figures are EXACTLY the same as those Pfizer posted publicly in July.
Yet the death counts were different.
Pfizer somehow miscounted – or publicly misreported, or both – the number of deaths in one of the most important clinical trials in the history of medicine.
And the FDA’s figures paint a notably more worrisome picture of the vaccine than the public July numbers. Though the absolute numbers are small, overall deaths were 24 percent higher among vaccine recipients.
The update also shows that 19 vaccine recipients died between November and March, compared to 13 placebo recipients – a difference of almost 50 percent.
Were the extra deaths cardiac-related? It is impossible to know. The FDA did not report any additional details of the deaths, saying only that none “were considered related to vaccination.”
But with tens of thousands of post-vaccine deaths now reported in the United States and Europe – and overall non-Covid death rates now running well above normal in many countries – a fresh look at that vague reassurance cannot happen soon enough.
Alex Berenson is a former New York Times reporter and the author of 13 novels, two non-fiction books and the Unreported Truths booklets.
Children’s Health Defense’s board chair and lead counsel Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s highly anticipated book, “The Real Anthony Fauci,” is available today in bookstores throughout the U.S. and Canada.
The New York Times bestselling author’s latest work details how Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates and their cohorts used their control of media outlets, scientific journals, key government and quasi-governmental agencies, and influential scientists and physicians to flood the public with fearful propaganda about COVID-19 virulence and pathogenesis, and to muzzle debate and ruthlessly censor dissent.
As people the world over are questioning the origins of the COVID crisis, news continues to emerge about U.S. taxpayers’ funding of gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China. Some U.S. Senators including Rand Paul are calling for Fauci’s resignation while U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace is leading a bipartisan effort to investigate his agency’s treatment of beagle puppies during experiments that the group of lawmakers calls “cruel.”
“The Real Anthony Fauci” exposes a side of Dr. Fauci that has thus far been shielded from the public by the ongoing media blackout of any information that counters the Pharma/government narrative.
“The research I conducted for this book exposes how Fauci’s gargantuan yearly disbursements allow him to dictate the subject, content and outcome of scientific health research across the globe,” said Kennedy.
“These annual disbursements also allow Fauci to exercise dictatorial control over the army of ‘knowledge and innovation’ leaders who populate the ‘independent’ federal panels that approve and mandate drugs and vaccines — including the committees that allowed the Emergency Use Authorization of COVID-19 vaccines.”
Invented and weaponized a parade of fraudulently concocted global pandemics, including bird flu (2005), swine flu (2009) and Zika (2015-2016), in order to sell novel vaccines, enrich their Pharma partners and increase the power of public health technocrats and Gates’ entourage of international agencies.
Made a series of prescient predictions about the imminent COVID-19 pandemic — almost to the day. Their precision soothsaying further awed a fawning, credulous and scientifically illiterate media that treats Gates and Fauci as religious deities, insulates them from public criticism and vilifies their doubters as heretics and “conspiracy theorists.” Adulatory mainstream media abetted Fauci’s conspiracy to cover up COVID’s origins at the Wuhan lab.
Teamed with government technocrats, military and intelligence planners, and health officials from the U.S., Europe and China to stage sophisticated pandemic “simulations” and “Germ Games.” Exercises like these, encouraged by the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board, laid the groundwork for imposition of global totalitarianism, including compulsory masking, lockdowns, mass propaganda and censorship, with the ultimate goal of mandating the coercive vaccination of 7 billion humans.
Practiced, in each of their “simulations,” psychological warfare techniques to create chaos, stoke fear, shatter economies, destroy public morale and quash individual self-expression — and then impose autocratic governance.
Kennedy discussed “The Real Anthony Fauci” at length Monday with Tucker Carlson on FOX Nation. Portions of that interview were featured last night on Tucker Carlson Tonight.
“Fauci’s COVID policies also spawned new insidious authoritarianism — and propelled America down a slippery slope toward a grim future as a dark totalitarian security and surveillance state,” said Kennedy.
To justify its interventionist actions in the Middle East, the United States, following the now cliched example, actively uses its alleged commitment to fighting against terrorism, focusing on countering such well-known terrorist formations as Al Qaeda and ISIS. The same goes for the actions of the USA in Afghanistan. However, Washington didn’t take any accountability before the rest of the world about the results of this fight against terrorists in Afghanistan during its 20 years of abysmal military intervention.
At the same time, the Russian presidential envoy to Afghanistan Zamir Kabulov and foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova mentioned several times that Russia has sufficient facts backing the claims about the USA’s cooperation with the ISIS militants in the northern part of Afghanistan. In particular, since 2017, unmarked helicopter flights have been recorded within areas of ISIS militant activity, not without the explicit knowledge of US and NATO forces in their area of responsibility, especially in northern Afghanistan… According to Afghan sources, these aircraft have been used to deliver manpower, weapons, and ammunition to ISIS militants. Moreover, there were recorded instances of surgical strikes by the US Air Force not against terrorists, but positions of radical Taliban fighters engaged in combat against ISIS.
After the termination of the US military intervention in Afghanistan in August this year under the pressure of the international public and Americans themselves, certain American politico-military circles, clearly dissatisfied with this step, started to spin the propaganda campaign about the allegedly intensified in recent months “danger of ISIS activity in Afghanistan” through their lackey media. With the apparent hope of triggering a new international armed aggression in Afghanistan, again under “US patronage.”
Thus, on September 28 this year, General Mark A. Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, announced the supposedly obvious danger of strengthening of Al-Qaeda and ISIS positions in Afghanistan: “And we must remember that the Taliban was and remains a terrorist organization, and they still have not broken ties with al-Qaeda. I have no illusions about who we are dealing with.” “A reconstituted al-Qaeda or Daesh/ISIS with aspirations to attack the US is a very real possibility,” General continued.
The allegedly growing threat of ISIS in Afghanistan has recently been actively picked up by the American media, handy to the current military and political elite. In particular, recently The New York Times began to scare the world with stories that, since the Taliban came to power, ISIS militants in Afghanistan have intensified, their terrorist attacks are exhausting the new government and raising fears among Western powers of a potential revival of the group. During his speech in Congress, US Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl admitted that the ability of Afghan authorities to combat the Islamists “has yet to be determined.” However, he did not say anything about who and when will determine the results of 20 years of fighting them by the United States itself.
The New York Times acknowledged that, after its disgraceful flight from Afghanistan in August, Washington had lost reliable access to intelligence. Limited drone flights now provide only partial information given the distance they need to travel to reach Afghanistan, and its established network of informants has been destroyed.
However, the real reason behind Washington’s new propaganda wave regarding the allegedly heightened threat of ISIS from Afghanistan becomes apparent in one of the final paragraphs of the article published by this newspaper. It states that the Taliban “refuse to cooperate with the United States in fighting ISIS by fighting the war on their terms.”
As for the organization of today’s fight against ISIS, Dr. Bashir, head of the Taliban’s intelligence services, has directly pointed out that such work is constantly being done, and his men have adopted the methods of this fight from their predecessors. Moreover, they even rely on Western equipment to intercept messages and radio communications. He insists, however, that the Taliban have something the past government and the Americans did not have: widespread local support that can alert authorities to attacks and militant positions, something that has always been hard to detect in the past.
As for some Western propagandists who attempt to use the thesis about the alleged merger of the Taliban with ISIS terrorists at the instigation of Washington, keep in mind that ISIS does not have such a strong influence in Afghanistan as the Taliban, and they are seen as antagonists in the country. The fact is that ISIS relies on Salafi ideology, while most Afghans identify themselves with the Hanafi school of fiqh. Therefore, the organization is a foreign body in the structure of Afghan society, which undoubtedly limits its growth of influence and popularity in the country.
As you know, ISIS announced the formation of the group in Iraq in 2014. Then came the ISIS affiliate in Pakistan. As for Afghanistan, a branch of ISIS emerged here in January 2015 under the Islamic State – Khorasan Province, which later the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan joined with. In 2015, several regional media reports revealed that the National Directorate of Security (NDS), under complete US control, had helped ISIS gain a foothold in Nangarhar province. There have also been reports that some leaders of the Afghan branch of ISIS, including Sheikh Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost (a former Guantanamo Bay detainee!), traveled in Afghan intelligence vehicles and lived in guesthouses belonging to Afghan intelligence agencies. Therefore, some analysts accuse US intelligence services of involvement in creating and strengthening ISIS in Afghanistan.
At a certain point, the Taliban viewed ISIS as temporary “allies” fighting against US intervention within Afghanistan. However, after ISIS demanded that Taliban leaders swear allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, clashes broke out between the Taliban and ISIS, especially in Nangarhar province. Notably, after such clashes broke out, government helicopters rescued ISIS fighters besieged by the Taliban in some areas, such as Jawzjan province. In particular, Afghan army helicopters supported by US forces evacuated ISIS fighters and their families and housed them in guesthouses in Sheberghan, Jawzjan province, belonging to Afghan intelligence. Afghan intelligence agencies implicitly acknowledged this.
The estimated number of ISIS fighters in Afghanistan is 5,000. A UN report released in mid-July said the number of ISIS fighters in Afghanistan ranges from 500 to 1,500. Currently, ISIS does not possess heavy weapons, guns, and tanks, even though such equipment was abandoned in large numbers by the US army after fleeing Afghanistan, and has no centers, headquarters, or open fronts on Afghan soil. In these circumstances, ISIS can gain a foothold in Afghanistan only if some foreign patrons support it with people, arms, and money to use this organization to weaken the Taliban’s power and turn Afghanistan into a new breeding ground for terrorism. And here, one cannot rule out such actions precisely on the part of the United States and its Western allies. For example, Washington has done it before by supporting al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in its confrontation with the Soviet Union.
In a sense, former Afghan army and Afghan intelligence officers trained in the United States, who had already joined ISIS in Afghanistan in August after the US fled Afghanistan, could be used by the United States to manipulate ISIS. Their numbers, as admitted by The Wall Street Journal, “are still relatively small, but they are growing, according to those who know these people, and also according to Afghan and Taliban intelligence agencies.”
Today, the Taliban control the entire country and view ISIS as a foreign group to be fought and wholly expelled from Afghanistan. As for the restraints the Taliban has towards carrying out joint counter-terrorist actions against ISIS, confirmed by the Taliban on October 11 at the meeting with the Americans in Doha, one cannot rule out that it was Washington’s former ties with ISIS that could lie behind such a position of the current rulers of Afghanistan.
It was the ultimate corporate criminal operation, and its legacy continues to this day. In this brief documentary, you will see how the Enron story has led to the energy price crisis we are seeing today. At the time, over $60 billion was being scammed away from the public, making it the biggest fraud in history back then. Although the company was shut down, the dodgy system of financializing our power grids and exposing the market to rapacious speculators by creating exotic instruments like energy derivatives continues to this day – and is one of the reasons for the rapid increase in our gas and electric bills over the years. That’s right: most people are completely unaware that we are still paying into a system which continually gouges regular working and middle class people – a system that was designed by the crooks at Enron.
Lawsuits accusing top US universities of harboring antisemitism all originate from one source: a corporate law firm that fielded the pro-settler ex-US ambassador to Israel, and which was registered as a foreign agent of an Israeli principal as recently as 2021.
The firm now represents professional Israel lobby activists posing as victimized “Jewish students” and seeking to crush the free speech rights of Palestine solidarity activists. … continue
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