FBI informants played key role in plot to kidnap Michigan governor, government accused of entrapment
RT | July 21, 2021
Several of the men accused of planning to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer say they were entrapped by the FBI, with government documents suggesting that at least 12 undercover informants played major roles in the scheme.
A lengthy investigation by BuzzFeed News – published on Tuesday and based on court filings, text and audio transcripts, and more than two dozen interviews with sources close to the case – claimed that the 12 informants and undercover agents “played a far larger role” in the kidnapping plot than was previously known.
“Working in secret, they did more than just passively observe and report on the actions of the suspects. Instead, they had a hand in nearly every aspect of the alleged plot, starting with its inception,” the outlet reported, noting that the scope of their involvement “raises questions as to whether there would have even been a conspiracy without them.”
So far, one of the 14 suspects in the case has formally accused the government of entrapment, saying the FBI actively drove the plot forward and helped to assemble its key planners, while lawyers for two others say they plan to raise similar claims in the future.
All but one of the 14 defendants – six of whom were slapped with federal counts, while eight others were charged under Michigan’s terrorism laws – have pleaded not guilty, insisting there was no serious plan to kidnap Whitmer. One defense attorney deemed the plot “big talk” between “crackpots” and “military wannabes.”
In the FBI’s original criminal complaint issued on October 6, 2020, the bureau acknowledged that it “relied on information provided by Confidential Human Sources (CHS) and Undercover Employees (UCE) over several months,” saying that, while all the informants were not present with the plotters at all times, “at least one … was usually present during the group meetings.”
The bureau mentioned only four undercover sources, however, including two actual agents, in its initial complaint – far fewer than the 12 ultimately revealed in later filings. The FBI also did not disclose the full extent of their involvement in the plot, though did note that some informants were paid for their work.
One of them, named as ‘CHS-2’ in the complaint, was paid at least $14,800, which the FBI says included “reporting and expenses,” while a source labeled ‘CHS-1’ was paid $8,600. It did not specify a reason for that payment.
Though not included in the initial affidavit, it was later revealed that another informant, identified only as ‘Dan’ in government documents, was paid around $6,000 for “reimbursement for expenses” and another $24,000 for his “services” as a source. The bureau also purchased him a new car, deeming it a “witness protection expense.”
An Iraq War veteran, ‘Dan’ would become so deeply involved with the group of alleged kidnappers that he eventually rose to be its “second-in-command,” according to BuzzFeed. For around six months, he collected hundreds of hours of recordings of the group using a wire, encouraging suspects to collaborate with one another and “prodding” the ringleader to “advance his plan.” At times, he even paid to transport group members to meetings, as did another Wisconsin-based informant.
Last week, an attorney for one defendant filed a motion citing texts from an FBI agent to ‘Dan,’ saying they showed the bureau directed him to recruit specific people into the kidnapping conspiracy. The lawyer is now requesting all messages exchanged between the two, suggesting they could bolster an entrapment defense.
The group also arranged plans to purchase bomb-making materials from an undercover agent, as the FBI affidavit notes that four suspects planned to “meet with a UCE on October 7, 2020, to make payment on explosives and exchange tactical gear.” They were arrested before that meeting could happen, and the full extent of the agent’s involvement in the plot remains unclear.
While the US Department of Justice declined BuzzFeed’s requests for comment, the Michigan attorney general’s office downplayed the defendants’ claims, saying they were “not indisputable facts,” and that officials would “counter and correct these issues in court.”
The alleged plotters were arrested in October 2020, with many held without bail ever since. Authorities claim the group began preparing for the kidnapping in June of last year after months of discussions online, in which members frequently criticized Whitmer’s policies, namely Michigan’s draconian Covid-19 lockdowns. The group was said to have held several military-style training sessions and gathered thousands of dollars in weapons and gear for Whitmer’s abduction.
Though the government is likely to challenge the entrapment allegations, the FBI has come under fire for its questionable use of confidential informants in the past, particularly in cases linked to terrorism. In one high-profile case that culminated in 2012, members of another Michigan militia group accused of planning to kill a police officer were acquitted after the defense successfully argued the conspiracy was instigated by embedded FBI informants.
British journalists could face jail for publishing leak stories that embarrass the government
Chilling new proposals
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim the Net | July 20, 2021
As if there needed to be yet another threat to free speech in the UK, British journalists could face 14-year prison sentences for publishing stories embarrassing the government, under proposed reforms to the Official Secrets Act. According to the government, the new proposals will crack down on foreign spies but many fear it could even be used domestically.
The UK government, through the Home Office, has proposed reforms to the 1989 Official Secrets Act, to account for changes technology and the internet has enabled in the sharing of leaked data.
But critics have noted that with the proposed changes local journalists are not protected if charged under the new laws.
Critics further noted that if the new proposals were currently law, the journalists who revealed that former Health Secretary Matt Hancock broke his own COVID rules while having an affair with his aide would have been charged. The leak was newsworthy and the story broke through leaked CCTV footage.
Last week, the Information Commissioner’s Office came under fire when it emerged that it searched two homes while investigating how the CCTV footage leaked to The Sun, the news outlet that first broke Matt Hancock’s affair story.
Among the groups criticizing the new proposals is the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), which noted that the new law would treat whistleblowers and those who publish leaked content the same way foreign spies are treated.
A spokesperson for the organization said:
“Existing legislation distinguishes provisions and penalties between those who leak or whistleblow, those who receive leaked information, and foreign spies.
“The government proposes to eliminate or blur these distinctions. The government also wants to increase the maximum penalties that journalists might suffer for receiving leaked material from two to 14 years…
“The NUJ has long argued that where whistleblowers believe that they have acted in the public interest, they should be able to make this case in court, and if a jury agrees with them, be protected.”
But according to the Home Office:
“Since the passage of the Act in 1989, there have been unprecedented developments in communications technology (including data storage and rapid data transfer tools) which in our view, means that unauthorized disclosures are now capable of causing far more serious damage than would have been possible previously.
“As a result, we do not consider that there is necessarily a distinction in severity between espionage and the most serious unauthorized disclosures, in the same way that there was in 1989.
“Although there are differences in the mechanics of and motivations behind espionage and unauthorized disclosure offenses, there are cases where an unauthorized disclosure may be as or more serious, in terms of intent and/or damage.
“For example, documents made available online can now be accessed and utilized by a wide range of hostile actors simultaneously, whereas espionage will often only be to the benefit of a single state or actor.
“In severe cases, the unauthorized disclosure of the identities of agents working for the UK intelligence community, for example, could directly lead to imminent and serious threat to life.”
The Law Commission and the human rights organizations that helped draft the new proposals insist there should be a “public interest defense” in the amendment to protect journalists who receive leaked content.
However, the Home Office argues that such a provision would “undermine our efforts to prevent damaging unauthorized disclosures, which would not be in the public interest.”
A Home Office spokesman said:
“Freedom of press is an integral part of the UK’s democratic processes and the government is committed to protecting the rights and values that we hold so dear.
“It is wrong to claim the proposals will put journalists at risk of being treated like spies and they will, rightly, remain free to hold the government to account.
“We will introduce new legislation so security services and law enforcement agencies can tackle evolving state threats and protect sensitive data.
“However, this will be balanced to protect press freedom and the ability for whistleblowers to hold organizations to account when there are serious allegations of wrongdoing.”
Biden Doubles Down on Voters
Fraud in 2020 election is only a preview of what is coming
BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • JULY 20, 2021
President Joe Biden has now declared that the United States is facing an existential crisis comparable to what it experienced during the Civil War, a struggle that will produce a truly democratic form of government with universal franchise or which will result in the denial of basic rights to many citizens. And he is quite willing to address the issue employing a maximum of emotion and fear mongering unmitigated by a minimum of reasonable suasion, saying “We’re facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War. That’s not hyperbole. Since the Civil War — the Confederates back then never breached the Capitol as insurrectionists did on January the 6th. I’m not saying this to alarm you. I’m saying this because you should be alarmed.”
Of course, what may have occurred on January 6th has nothing to do with the issue currently in play, which is voting rights, though it is only one aspect of what is essentially a revolution sponsored by the Democratic Party to reorder the American political system in such a fashion as to guarantee its dominance for decades to come. Other steps will include greatly increased immigration, a war on so-called domestic terrorists and decriminalizing or choosing not to prosecute many felonies committed by party constituencies.
The voting rights legislation currently before Congress includes the interestingly named For the People Act and its successor the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, both of which would seek to restore certain unconstitutional aspects of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Most important, they would eliminate the ability of the states to pass legislation that creates conditions on registering and voting. The text of the John Lewis Act now before Congress refers to these steps as “discriminatory laws, needless barriers, and partisan dirty tricks.”
At the heart of the push by the Democrats is the creation of a uniform national electoral system which will essentially make it much easier for people to vote, permitting block voting, ballot harvesting and both registration and voting itself by mail. If passed, the new legislation will compel each state to adopt “automatic and same-day voter registration, voting rights for felons, no-excuse absentee balloting, mandatory early voting, and taxpayer funding for political campaigns.”
The key objections to the new voting procedure being promoted by Biden are several, largely related to its lack of any requirement for potential voters to provide information or show documentation confirming citizenship and residency or even one’s identity. The Democrats are denouncing their Republican opponents who are raising these issues as guilty of “voter suppression.” If the Democrats win the debate, it will be possible for anyone to vote in elections without having any human contact whatsoever using the mail-in ballots which are potentially susceptible to large scale fraud.
Another problem with the Biden program to nationalize voting procedures is that the there are four amendments to the United States Constitution that make it clear that it is left to the states to determine the modalities of voting. That means that even if the new voting act passes through Congress and is signed by the president there still would certainly be challenges based on its unconstitutionality. While Blue states will presumably go along with the guidance from Washington, those states still leaning Red will undoubtedly resist any nationalization of voting procedures.
It is not as if the current voting system is fraud-resistant. All too often it is not, which is why state legislatures in Georgia, Texas and several other Republican controlled states have passed new voting laws that actually require in many cases one’s physical presence to vote as well as production of documentation or information confirming citizenship and residency. They also include the purging of electoral rolls of voters who have died or moved. The new laws come as close as is reasonably possible to creating a system where voting security and integrity will be greatly enhanced, but the fact is that the Democrats are not at all interested in reducing criminal voting. They are interested in creating a permissive environment where all their presumed supporters will be able to vote without having to make any effort to do so or even be compelled to demonstrate who they really are and that they are citizens.
Prior to the recent national election, I examined the procedures to register and vote in my home state of Virginia and determined that one could both register and vote without any human contact at all. The registration process can be accomplished by filling out an online form, which is linked here. Note particularly the following: the form requires one to check the box indicating US citizenship. It then asks for name and address as well as social security number, date of birth and whether one has a criminal record or is otherwise disqualified to vote. You then have to sign and date the document and mail it off. Within ten days, you should receive a voter’s registration card for Virginia which you can present if you vote in person, though even that is not required.
It is important to realize that no documents have to actually be presented to support the application, which means that all the information can be false. You can even opt out of providing a social security number by checking the box indicating that you have never been issued one, even though the form indicates that you must have one to be registered, and you can also submit a temporary address by claiming you are “homeless.” Even date of birth information is useless as the form does not ask where you were born, which is how birth records are filed by state and local governments. Ultimately, it is only the social security number that validates the document and that is what also appears on the Voter’s ID Card, but even that can be false or completely fabricated, as many illegal immigrant workers in the US have discovered.
Prior to the November election my wife and I received unsolicited four mail-in ballots, all of which were sent to us anonymously. I examined the ballots carefully and noted that they bore no serial numbers or other forms of validation that could conceivably be used to limit the potential for fraud. In a state like Virginia, the actual mail-in ballot only requires your signature and that of a witness, who can be anyone. That is also true in six other states. Thirty-one states require only your own signature on the ballot while just three states require that the document be notarized, a good safeguard since it requires the voter to actually produce some documentation and identification. Seven states require your additional signature on the ballot envelope and two states require that a photocopy of the voter ID accompany the ballot. Some of these procedures may have been changed since the November allegation but it appears that only the handful of Republican states that are in the process of passing new voting laws are taking the problem seriously. In other words, the safeguards in the system continue at this time to vary from state to state but in most cases, fraud would be relatively easy if one is using mail-in voting. In fact, former President Jimmy Carter’s headed a bipartisan commission in 2005 that concluded that mail-in ballots constitute the “largest source of potential voter fraud” of any voting system.
Joe Biden is of course right about a crisis developing comparable to the Civil War, but what he is choosing to ignore is that his White House is carelessly feeding into what has become a growing chorus of dissent. He and his colleagues in Congress are deliberately and with malice pushing an agenda that, if successful, will lead to something like one party rule in the United States. Combine that with impending legislation and executive action to pursue “domestic extremists,” whom the Administration has also defined as “white supremacists,” it is not hard to imagine what kind of trouble is brewing.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org
Covid vaccines: We’ve been misled from the very start
By Neville Hodgkinson | The Conservative Woman | July 20, 2021
IT IS truly amazing how self-deceiving a profession that sets out to help and heal sick people can be when it comes to acknowledging that the cure is sometimes worse than the illness. Evidence is mounting that just such a state of denial is manifesting in the mass rollout of the Covid vaccine.
Decades ago, I examined evidence for the effectiveness of flu vaccine and found that it rested entirely within studies showing an increase in antibodies to the circulating virus, but that this did not translate into less illness.
A group of GPs who were uneasy about the impact of the vaccine on old and frail people set up a trial of their own in which they found that those who had the jab had no less flu, but more non-specific illness, in the ensuing year compared with a group of similar frailty who were not inoculated.
Similarly, doctors at two boarding schools who conducted trials among their own pupils dropped the vaccine after finding it was of no benefit.
It would be almost impossible to do similar studies today because the NHS mounts such a relentless campaign every winter to have everyone vaccinated. It is in effect the marketing arm for the flu vaccine manufacturers, of which GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi and AstraZeneca are leading players, making billions from the jabs.
The UK-based Cochrane research network, however, has been constantly evaluating global studies on the effectiveness of flu vaccinations since 1999. Put together, the data from dozens of well-conducted studies covering more than 80,000 participants fails to prove a reduction in deaths from flu or flu-like illnesses, and shows that vaccinations could even increase the number of hospitalisations.
Germany’s renowned Robert Koch Institute has found clear evidence that for the over-60s, in the 2017/18 and 2018/19 flu seasons, vaccination increased the risk of flu instead of protecting against it.
The fact that despite the scientific evidence, illusions still continue about such a commonly used vaccine bodes ill for hopes that governments and their advisers will listen to the evidence with regard to Covid-19.
The mantra that the jab is ‘safe and effective’ is becoming a sick joke. There is now massive evidence of harm and mounting evidence that it does not work anything like as well as hoped.
The harm is there for all to see. As of mid-June, UK regulators received 276,867 adverse events reports, including 1,332 deaths; in the US, there were more than 6,000 deaths, and 400,000 events serious enough to be reported; and in the European Union, some 1,500,000 injuries and 15,000 deaths.
Claims that these reports are unconfirmed as cause-and-effect related are countered by the argument ‘Where is the proof that they are not?’ Under-reporting is known to be common, and many of the injuries occurred within hours or days of the victim receiving the jab. There has never been a vaccine with anything like this measure of recorded harm.
Government agencies assert that thousands of lives have been saved by the vaccination drives. But wherever the claims are examined carefully, as opposed to being passed on by doctors and journalists who accepted them uncritically and are now desperately hoping they are true, the evidence is found to be increasingly thin.
As Dr Will Jones noted in the newly launched Daily Sceptic (formerly Lockdown Sceptics), latest data from the ZOE app, the world’s largest ongoing study of Covid-19, shows that as of July 12, infections in the vaccinated (at least one dose) in the UK now outnumber those in the unvaccinated for the first time, as the former continue to surge while the latter plummet.
What does Germany’s Robert Koch Institute, which seems more independent-minded than leaders of the UK’s state-run NHS, tell us about the Covid vaccine?
It published a 74-page paper last January in which the effectiveness in the age group 75 and over was said to be ‘subject to a high degree of uncertainty’ and no longer statistically significant. What’s more, the quality of the data across all age groups, based on proof of prevention of serious illness, was ‘very low’.
Reporting these findings, the German magazine Multipolar said it was scandalous that they are not mentioned in their government’s information services, and that the big media remain silent on the topic.
In truth, we have been misled about the vaccine from the start. Repeatedly publicised claims of 95 per cent ‘efficacy’ do not mean you are 95 per cent protected against Covid if you have the jab.
They are based on studies such as Pfizer’s in which 40,000 participants in different countries were divided into two groups, one of which received the vaccine and the other a placebo. There were no deaths in either group, so the trial told us nothing about risk of death. But 162 of the placebo group were designated Covid cases, compared with only eight among those vaccinated. The diagnosis was on the basis of the participants having one or more symptoms of the disease, confirmed through a lab test.
Eight compared with 162 gives what is called a relative risk reduction (RRR) of 95 per cent. It is a self-contained figure that has only a marginal bearing on the experience of the trial participants generally.
What we rarely hear about is what is known as the absolute risk, that is, the percentage of cases reported in each group of 20,000. For the vaccinated individuals, their chances of becoming a case were 0.04 per cent, and for the placebo group, 0.75 per cent. That represents an absolute risk reduction (ARR) of 0.71 per cent (0.75 per cent minus 0.04 per cent) which does not sound like much to write home about. Even that was probably an exaggeration, because side-effects in the vaccinated group would have been obvious to observers, making them less likely to report them as cases.
It gets even worse. One of the criteria of a ‘case’ in the trials was that it should be contracted not earlier than seven days after the second jab. That helped keep the number down enormously – to only eight – in the vaccinated group. This is because so many vaccine recipients have Covid-like symptoms in the first few days after the jab.
A subsequent analysis, hidden away in a report by the US Food and Drug Administration, found that when Covid-like symptoms reported in those first few days were included, there were 407 cases among the vaccinated compared with only 287 in the placebo group, an entirely different risk-benefit picture and one consistent with many studies showing an increase in death rates among the elderly immediately after the jab.
All of this means we should not be surprised to find that ‘a disturbing trend’ has appeared among the most vaccinated nations in the world, as TrialSite News reports. In Gibraltar, Malta, Seychelles, UAE and the Isle of Man, Covid cases are considerably up, including deaths in some of these nations, despite ‘overwhelming’ percentages of their populations being vaccinated.
Israel, too, with 81 per cent of its adult population fully vaccinated and cases that went right down to a handful a day, is now seeing a surge in new infections, of which an estimated 40-50 per cent are in vaccinated individuals.
Is this because of a new variant of the virus, against which the existing vaccines don’t work? Will it mean subjecting ourselves to booster shots, with the accompanying risks, every few months? Or is it because there is ultimately going to be no escaping actual infection with the virus?
We just do not know.
There is one light in the darkness. Several studies have shown that once an individual has had the infection, even if only mildly, their immune system develops lasting protection against the toxic spike protein encoded by the genetically engineered virus.
Do drug trials underestimate side effects?
By Dr Sebastian Rushworth | July 19, 2021
One commonly used trick in drug trials is to exclude any group that might make the drug look worse, such as those that are more likely to experience side effects. A good recent example of this is the covid vaccine trials, which largely excluded people with auto-immune diseases (more likely to develop an auto-immune disease after vaccination), people with allergies (more likely to have an allergic reaction to the vaccine), and, of course, the elderly (less likely to develop immunity after getting the vaccine, and more likely to become seriously sick from it).
These three groups are all frequently excluded from trials, and the exclusion is particularly galling when it comes to the elderly, because they are a big segment of the population, and they are also usually the most likely to end up actually using the drugs being tested.
When drug companies have gotten a drug approved, and move on to market the drug, they will studiously avoid mentioning the fact that large segments of the population were excluded from the trials. When drug reps show their flashy powerpoints to gatherings of doctors, say for a new drug to lower blood pressure, they will always present impressive looking graphs of benefit, and they will of course point out how safe their drug was shown to be in the trials. Not once will they mention that the groups of patients the doctors will primarily be prescribing the drug to weren’t even included in the trials.
The doctors will then happily go off and prescribe the drug to multi-morbid 90 year olds, which might explain why prescription drugs are now the third leading cause of death in the western world.
The manipulation of who is included in trials is probably one of the main reasons why findings of side effects always end up being much higher in reality than in clinical trials. It might explain, for example, why muscle pain is a massively common side effect of statins in the real world, while being vanishingly rare in the statin trials (as Dr. Malcolm Kendrick has written about in detail).
A study recently published in the Lancet Healthy Longevity sought to estimate the extent to which drug trials underestimate side effects. It was funded by the UK Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust. The study chose as its particular focus people being treated for high blood pressure with a certain class of blood pressure lowering drugs known as RAAS blockers (which includes all drugs with names ending in -pril and all drugs with names ending in -sartan). The advantage with looking at this particular class of drugs is that there are a ton of trials. Every major pharmaceutical company has its own RAAS-blocker. It should therefore be possible to draw relatively broad conclusions about the results – whatever they show, they apply to the entire pharmaceutical industry, not just to a few specific companies. It’s also reasonable to think that the results apply to other classes of drugs too – there’s no reason to think trials of RAAS-blockers have been done differently than trials of other drug classes.
What the study sought to do more specifically was compare the rate of serious adverse events in clinical trials of RAAS-blockers with the rate observed in the real world. A serious adverse event is any event that is potentially life threatening or that results in death, hospitalization or lasting disability. If a trial has been designed in such a way that it is representative of reality, then the rate of serious adverse events in the trial should largely mirror that seen in the real world.
110 trials of RAAS-blockers were identified by the researchers. Of these, 11 were specifically designed to look at older people (i.e. didn’t recruit anyone under the age of 60). The data on serious adverse events from these 110 trials was extracted and compared to real world data on deaths and hospitalizations taken from a UK government funded database of 55,000 people living in Wales, who were being treated with RAAS-blockers. Deaths and hospitalizations are not exactly the same thing as serious adverse events (which as mentioned above also include “life threatening events”, and could for example include someone who is treated in an emergency department after a fall but not admitted to the hospital), but they’re close enough to allow a reasonable comparison.
So, what were the results?
Let’s begin with comparing the trials of older people with the “standard” trials. The relative rate of serious adverse events in the trials of older people was 76% higher than the rate in the standard trials. This shows the importance of including elderly people in drug trials – they are much more likely to experience adverse events of all kinds (including those actually caused by the drug being tested), and excluding them will therefore likely underestimate side effects.
Considering that many of the drugs in common use show marginal benefits at best (statins have, for example, only been shown to prolong life by a few days on average), this is important information. Why? Because a drug that is beneficial, on balance, to a fifty year old, who has a fully functioning kidney and liver, and is therefore unlikely to suffer side effects, could easily be harmful, on balance, to an 80 year old.
That’s why drug studies done on younger people should not be used to guide treatment of older people. No shock there. Everyone already knows that we shouldn’t be extrapolating results from one group to another (even though it happens all the time, as we’ve seen most recently with the covid vaccine trials).
Next we come to the more important, and perhaps more shocking finding.
The real world patients were between 300% and 400% more likely to experience a serious event than the participants in the trials! That is in spite of the fact that the trials, as mentioned above, were using a broader definition of what constituted a serious event. If the trials were representative of reality, then they should have a higher rate of events than is seen in the real world data. Instead they have a rate that is several times lower!
Interestingly, the trials of older people were just as far from the real world results as the trials of younger people. Clearly, doing trials on the elderly is not enough on its own to produce trials that are representative of reality. What’s happening here exactly?
There are three possible explanations, as far as I can see. The first explanation is that the trials are representative of reality, but that the Welsh die and are hospitalized at a rate that is several times higher than people in the countries where the studies were conducted. Many of the trials were conducted in the US, not in Wales. But Wales has a higher life expectancy than the United States, so that seems unlikely. I think we can discount that explanation.
The second explanation is that the trials are unrepresentative in so many different ways that just correcting the age issue doesn’t make a noticeable difference. That’s probably part of the explanation. The average age even in the trials of “older people” was 73, which isn’t very old from my perspective. And those 73 year olds included in the trials were probably at the healthier end of the spectrum.
The third, more sinister explanation, is that the pharmaceutical companies are hiding serious adverse events… But wait a minute, the trials are randomized and blinded, so the people running the drug trials have no way of knowing if someone experiencing a possible side effect is in the treatment group or the placebo group, right?
Yes, that’s right, so the easiest solution, if you want to avoid finding nasty side effects, is to not report them, regardless of which treatment group the participant is in. That will cut down on total adverse events in both groups, which will make any difference between the groups that does exist smaller in absolute terms, and also less likely to reach the level of statistical significance. Voila – the treatment group and the placebo group end up having similar rates of side effects, and the drug company can conclude that the drug is completely safe.
Is that what’s happened here? Are the pharmaceutical companies hiding adverse events? Well, it’s very strange that the real world data shows a rate of serious adverse events that is several times higher than is found in the trials. It’s hard to see how that massive difference could be explained in any other way.
So, how big a problem is this?
Big. Very big. It should shake the very foundations of evidence based medicine. If the drug trials and the real world data show such wildly different rates of adverse events, then it really begs the question how much we can trust the trials at all. It would be perfectly reasonable in this situation to say that all “evidence” produced by pharmaceutical companies is so suspect that it should be dismissed out of hand, and that only independently funded trials should be used as a basis for medical treatment decisions.
The problem with that is that it would mean saying goodbye to most of the trials that form the basis of modern medical treatment, and there is not much to replace them with. This issue could be solved over the longer term through large tax payer funded investments in new independent trials. But there’s no quick fix.
The problem is most acute when it comes to the many drugs in common use that only show marginal benefits, such as statins. If the rate of side effects is actually 300% to 400% higher than seen in the trials, then the harms of these drugs could easily outweigh the benefits. In other words, the cost-benefit calculation could shift entirely for many of the most commonly used drugs.
Ok, let’s wrap this up. What can we conclude?
Drug trials do no accurately represent rates of adverse events. It is likely that the true rate of side effects is often many times higher than that seen in drug trials.
The WHO Declares all PCR Tests at High CT to be Potentially 100% False Positives
By Judy Wilyman PhD | Vaccine Decisions | July 13, 2021
In December 2020 the WHO declared that any result from a RT-PCR test that was amplified at a high cycle threshold (CT) e.g. above 35 CT is potentially 100% false positive. This leads us to question all the reported ‘cases’ of COVID19 disease in Australia in 2020. This is because Australia has reported that it uses this PCR test at a CT of 40-45 and most of the reported ‘cases’ were people without symptoms.
The question now is ‘What cycle threshold is the Australian government using in 2021?’ Has it been reduced at the same time as the vaccine was introduced to give the appearance that the vaccine has caused a decline in the cases of this disease?
The WHO says that in 2021 a manual readjustment of the PCR positivity threshold must be done to account for background noise in specimens with high cycle thresholds.
There is no transparency in the use of this test that is now allowing government’s globally to claim that healthy people, without disease symptoms, are an asymptomatic case of disease. This also enables the government to claim that healthy people are a risk to society. This is criminal and this PCR test is not a diagnostic tool for any disease.
Many doctors and scientists are stating this and they are being ignored and censored. Here is the inventor of the test, Kary Mullis, also stating ‘it is not a diagnostic test‘. It should never be used when symptoms are not also present.
Traditionally doctors were taught to diagnose disease on a collection of symptoms and the PCR test was sometimes a supportive, but not a diagnostic, tool. This has all changed in 2020 to be able to claim that healthy people are now the cause of these diseases and this has been achieved without having to provide any supportive evidence for this claim.
In addition, it is these ‘cases’ that have been used by the government to enact the emergency powers. Yet the definition of a pandemic that is based on an increase in ‘cases’ of a disease has not been validated by the scientific community. It is not a scientific definition if it has not been validated by the community of scientists – not just elite individuals.
The case-tracing of healthy people with QR codes is fraudulent and it is enabling more ‘cases’ of disease to be obtained and more people to be locked up and falsely declared a ‘case’ of disease. This is industry-pseudoscience and it has all come about because the WHO allowed a small group of individuals, with financial conflicts of interest with industry, to adopt an unscientific definition of a ‘global pandemic’.
This makes the use of the emergency powers invalid and all the directives that have been enacted to control this non-pandemic of a flu-like illness. Please read the full article describing the unscientific definition of a pandemic that has been used by governments and also watch the interview with Elizabeth Hart on Asia Pacific Today. This interview describes the full extent of the Australian government’s conflicts of interest in promoting an untested drug in the population. She also describes the complicity of the mainstream media and research institutions in this fabricated and well planned ‘pandemic’ event.
This crime against the population has also been perpetuated by governments deliberately suppressing the treatments for respiratory viruses that are known to be beneficial. Here is Craig Kelly presenting his evidence of this suppression in an empty Australian parliament. This picture illustrates the type of ‘democracy’ that we have in Australia today. The people’s voice is not being heard by our government.
In this video, Dr. David Martin explains to the International Criminal Court that there was nothing novel about the 2019 coronavirus. This is because it had been patented between 2008 – 2017 under gain of function research carried out in the US and in Wuhan, China. In addition, the fact that it was a mutated coronavirus means that humans would be expected to have some previous immunity to this virus because these are a family of common respiratory viruses that cause the common cold.
It is now clear that this is a ‘pandemic’ in name only. This is why there is no evidence of enormous numbers of deaths and illness in the community. The WHO could not have declared this to be a ‘global pandemic’ in 2020, if the definition of a pandemic had not been changed in 2009.
The ‘cases’ of disease that the media is presenting are healthy people who have had a PCR test but have no symptoms. It is these cases in healthy people that are being used to close borders and quarantine healthy people. This is a media campaign using statistics out of context to encourage the community to accept the governments new regulations that restrict our fundamental rights and freedoms, ultimately harming our health and wellbeing.
Infections in the Vaccinated Overtake Those in the Unvaccinated For the First Time – But the Graph is Removed From the ZOE App Report
By Will Jones • Lockdown Sceptics • July 17, 2021
Health Secretary Sajid Javid has tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, despite being vaccinated – and he is far from alone. The latest ZOE data shows that, as of July 12th, infections in the vaccinated (with at least one dose) in the U.K. now outnumber those in the unvaccinated for the first time, as the former continue to surge while the latter plummet (see above). (Note that 68% of the population has had at least one vaccine dose, so there are still at this stage disproportionately more new infections in the unvaccinated, though on current trends that may soon change.)
At what point will the Government accept that these vaccines have limited efficacy in preventing infection and transmission, and thus the whole rationale of being vaccinated to protect others – vaccine passports, compulsory vaccination, and so on – is suspect?
The above graph was in yesterday’s report, so I downloaded today’s report (you can get it by signing up to the app and reporting your symptoms) to get the new update. I was dismayed to find the graph was gone. At the bottom, a note explains:
Removed incidence graph by vaccination status from the report as there are very few unvaccinated users in the infection survey, the Confidence Intervals are very wide and the trend for unvaccinated people is no longer representative.
Which I would say is very convenient, just as infections in the vaccinated became the majority. Perhaps ZOE should try to recruit some more unvaccinated people for its survey, so it can continue to report on this as well as have a control group for its vaccine data? That would seem the scientific thing to do, rather than just stop reporting it because it is suddenly “no longer representative”.
It’s doubly odd because Tim Spector, lead scientist on the ZOE app, made the decline among the unvaccinated a feature of his video this week. So the realisation that the trend is “no longer representative” appears to have been rather sudden, even invalidating the contents of a ZOE ‘data release‘ two days earlier.
It seems we will never know how the story ends, which is a shame and a missed opportunity for ZOE.
ZOE data continues to suggest the current Covid surge is peaking and possibly even beginning to decline in the U.K., at least outside England (see above). Yet this is at odds with the daily Covid reports from the Government, which show continued growth.
UK positive tests by date reported (HMG)
Why the discrepancy? Is it because the Government figures include all the lateral flow tests that schoolchildren are taking as they isolate? 839,100 children – 11.2% of the total pupil population, more than one in 10 – were absent from state schools for Covid-related reasons on July 8th. All of them will have been tested and this will be picking up asymptomatic or mild infections that would usually not be noticed. ZOE data is symptom based, with a confirmatory PCR test, so would not be affected by surges in lateral flow testing among schoolchildren picking up asymptomatic infections.
Whatever the explanation, one to watch.
The Guardian plumbs new depths: its resident ‘Russiagate’ fanatics claim that Putin got Trump elected
By Paul Robinson | RT | July 16, 2021
From 2016 to 2020, a single story with two elements dominated the American headlines: Russiagate. The first part of the narrative was the claim that the Russian government had used a range of tools, including disinformation, to ensure Trump clinched his country’s highest office. The second was that Trump had knowingly colluded with Moscow to achieve this goal.
After endless repetition, these claims became something close to sacred ‘truths’ for some people. And yet, as we now know, the whole thing began with a falsehood, or more accurately a single document containing a whole series of falsehoods.
This was the infamous ‘Steele dossier’, assembled by former British intelligence office Christopher Steele, as part of a strategy by the Democratic Party to dig up dirt to blacken Trump’s reputation.
The dossier contained a number of inflammatory stories about Trump’s relationship with Russia. It also claimed its information came from sources close to the upper echelons of the Kremlin. This was untrue. As we now know, the information was hearsay, collected second- or third-hand by someone who didn’t even live in Russia. In short, it was a near total fabrication.
Unfortunately, Russiagate induced many journalists to abandon any effort at critical thinking and to treat all anti-Russian allegations with a distinct credulity. Particularly prominent among them was Luke Harding of The Guardian, who even published a book entitled ‘Collusion’, laying out the case against the Russians and Trump. Its logic was often rather bizarre. For instance, Harding’s “evidence” that an associate of an associate of Trump was a Russian spy was that he used emojis in an email.
I kid you not. You use emojis, you’re a Russian spy. It gives one a sense of the quality of Harding’s argument.
Indeed, Harding has what the British call ‘form.’ In another instance, he claimed Trump’s one-time campaign manager, Paul Manafort, along with unnamed “Russians”, had met WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Unfortunately, the story turned out to be untrue. It was never retracted.
In short, there are reasons why some might want to treat what Harding says with a generous pinch of salt.
All of which is necessary background for his latest article in The Guardian, which details confidential documents he claims to have seen, allegedly showing “that Vladimir Putin personally authorized a secret spy operation to support a ‘mentally unstable’ Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election.” The piece is co-authored by two other reliably anti-Russian Guardian hacks, Dan Sabbagh and Julian Borger.
The documents in question are supposedly records of a meeting of Russia’s National Security Council, which is said to have concluded that Trump’s election was desirable, as it would “lead to the destabilization of the US’s sociopolitical system.” To this end, the meeting purportedly resolved to “use all possible force to facilitate his election,” including introducing “‘media viruses’ into American public life, which would … alter mass consciousness.”
Unfortunately, Harding fails to provide full copies of the documents in question, limiting himself to a single extract. Nor does he say where he got the papers. The only corroborating evidence is that “The Guardian has shown the documents to independent experts who say that they appear to be genuine.” Of course, many “independent experts” also believed in the Steele dossier, the Hitler diaries, the Zinoviev letter, and many other dubious or entirely fabricated documents. An appeal to anonymous “experts” isn’t particularly useful.
Indeed, there are some reasons to treat the story with a degree of scepticism.
First, the documents are like the perfect, solid-gold-plated proof that Russiagate storytellers have been seeking for years. The story is a little bit too good to be true.
Second, if these papers are indeed real, either somebody in the Kremlin has decided to leak the most top secret of top-secret documents, or British intelligence has a spy there and has then fed the information to Harding, risking exposing him or herself.
Both options are out of keeping with the past. Leaks from Putin’s team are very rare, to the point of being almost non-existent, and, as far as we know, neither the British, nor indeed any Western intelligence agency, has ever had a spy in the heart of the Kremlin. One can’t rule it out, but one has to have one’s doubts.
Third, the alleged motivation for backing Trump outlined in the documents smacks of what people in the West now retroactively think happened, rather than what would have likely been in the mind of Russian officials at the time.
In 2016, the primary reason why the Kremlin might have wanted Trump elected was a perception that he was not as hostile to Russia as his rival Hillary Clinton. Indeed, he had stated in speeches that he favored better relations with Moscow. But this isn’t mentioned in Harding’s documents. Instead, the focus is on “destabilizing” the United States by stirring up trouble through the election of a mentally unstable president.
These are not ideas that anybody in authority in the Kremlin has ever publicly expressed. Instead, they are ideas that gradually became dogma among conspiracy theorists between 2016 and 2020. In other words, the documents read like what Western Russiagate theorists imagine is what the Russians think, rather than what they really do think.
And fourth, it turns out that the short excerpt published with Harding’s article has a number of linguistic and grammatical errors, giving rise to speculation that it was written by a non-native speaker of Russian and then translated. Of course, this is far from firm proof of forgery – it could be that Kremlin notetakers just don’t write very well. But it’s food for thought.
One common method of rating intelligence is an alpha-numerical system in which the letters measure the reliability of the source (from A, ‘Reliable’, to E, ‘Unreliable’, and F, ‘Reliability Unknown’), and the numbers measure the reliability of the information (from 1, ‘Confirmed from other sources’, to 5, ‘Improbable’, and 6, ‘Validity of the information cannot be determined’). In this case, one would probably have to rank Harding’s story as D6. The reliability of the source – Harding – is open to doubt, and the validity of the information cannot be confirmed.
This doesn’t mean the documents are fakes. D6 doesn’t mean false. But, at the same time, it’s not exactly A1 either – you need to treat the information in question with extreme caution.
Maybe the Russian National Security Council did indeed plot to put Trump in the White House. Or maybe not. We’re not in a position to tell. Either way, but you shouldn’t take The Guardian’s word for it.
Paul Robinson, a professor at the University of Ottawa. He writes about Russian and Soviet history, military history, and military ethics, and is author of the Irrussianality blog http://t.me/irrussian
Non-Matching Ballot Totals, Duplicate Votes & Cyber Problems Cast Doubt on 2020 Election Results
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 17.07.2021
Republican lawmakers and non-partisan activists in Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania are continuing to push for election integrity. This week a number of discrepancies have been found by independent auditors in Arizona and Georgia, raising new questions about the outcome of the 2020 election.
The alleged 2020 election fraud saga is far from being over in Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania despite President Joe Biden and the US mainstream media decrying the “big lie” and downplaying vote irregularity claims.
Arizona
On 13 July, Senate President Karen Fann announced that vote counts do not match in the Maricopa County 2020 election audit. The announcement was followed by hearings in the Arizona Senate which were held on 15 July. Doug Logan, CEO of Cyber Ninjas, the leading group of independent auditors, provided a preliminary overview of discrepancies found during the recount.
According to Logan, auditors could not find records concerning tens of thousands of mail-in ballots in Maricopa County: “We have 74,000 [mail-in ballots] that came back from individuals where we don’t have a clear indication that they were ever sent out to them,” he underscored.
The auditor further revealed that approximately 18,000 people voted but were removed from voter rolls “soon after the election”; there were 11,326 people who were not on the voter rolls on 7 November 2020, but appeared on the rolls on 4 December 2020; and there were 3,981 people who voted after registering after 15 October 2020.
CEO of CyFIR Ben Cotton, one of the subcontractors taking part in the recount, said that the analysis of the election management system and network exposed “severe cybersecurity problems.” The reported discrepancies have triggered concerns among the state GOP, given that President Joe Biden won Arizona by a razor-thin margin of 10,000 votes, or 0.3 percentage points.
Responding to the latest discoveries, Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Jack Sellers blasted the auditors as “incompetent”. “What we heard today represents an alternate reality that has veered out of control since the November General Election”, Sellers stated.
To clear up the issues, the audit team requested more items to complete their review, including ballot envelope images, router images, splunk logs, hard drives that contain information about the 2020 election, as well details on Maricopa County’s policies and procedures. However, the state’s Democratic Party and the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors vocally opposed providing any material to whom they called “uncertified auditors”. The county officials have yet to provide the state Senate with previously subpoenaed items including routers or router images.
Former President Donald Trump has called the recent Arizona Senate hearings on the Maricopa County election audit “devastating news to the radical left Democrats”, suggesting that “there was no victory” for then-presidential candidate Joe Biden in the state.
© PHOTO : YOUTUBE / DONALD J. TRUMP
Screenshot from the video allegedly showing election staffers in Fulton County, Atlanta, Georgia, staying behind and pulling out boxes of extra ballots
Georgia
New discrepancies have also been found in Fulton County, where most of Atlanta is located. A nonpartisan election integrity nonprofit called Voters Organised for Trusted Election Results in Georgia (VoterGA) reported on Wednesday that at least 36 batches of mail-in ballots containing 4,255 votes were redundantly reported in the Fulton County audit results for the 3 November election. This includes 3,400 extra votes for then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, 865 extra votes for Donald Trump and 43 extra votes for Jo Jorgenson.
The election integrity activists also believe that seven audit tally sheets were “falsified to contain fabricated vote totals”. Thus, for example, a batch containing 59 ballot images for Biden and 42 for Trump was reported as 100 for the Democratic candidate and zero for the ex-president, according to Voters GA. In addition to that, it turned out that nearly 200 ballots were scanned two times before a recount.
The group is conducting an examination of digital ballot images following a months-long lawsuit filed last year. VoterGA particularly sought clearance to inspect all 147,000 absentee ballots cast in Fulton County last November, citing concerns about potential election fraud. Last fall, Joe Biden won the state by a thin margin of 12,670 votes.
Following the disclosure, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger called upon the Fulton County to fire Richard Barron, its elections director, and Ralph Jones, the county’s voter registration chief.
However, the secretary of state has also come under criticism from some of his Republican Party peers who insist that he and Governor of Georgia Brian Kemp should resign because they had apparently known about the irregularities but concealed them from the public.
Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania, which was won by Joe Biden by a margin of 80,555 votes, has also become a new battleground for the GOP effort to review the 2020 elections results.
In June, a delegation of Pennsylvania Republican lawmakers visited the Arizona audit and signalled that they are interested in launching a similar recount effort. The initiative is being led by Pennsylvania state GOP Senator Doug Mastriano, who chairs the Senate Intergovernmental Operations Committee and is regarded as a potential future gubernatorial candidate.
On 7 July, Mastriano announced that he had sent letters to Philadelphia, York, and Tioga counties, asking them to turn over election materials by 31 July.
“The case for a forensic investigation of the 2020 general election is evident to any unbiased observer,” Mastriano wrote in an official statement. “This was the first election in Pennsylvania with ‘mass’ mail-in voting. In 2020, there were 2.7 million ballots cast by mail and absentee compared to about 263,000 absentee ballots cast in 2016. Many of these ballots were counted at offsite locations with little outside observation or oversight. Furthermore, mail ballots without signature verification were permitted to be counted across the Commonwealth.”
According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, the materials requested by Mastriano include ballots, voting machines, vote counting equipment, mail-in
However, it was reported on 15 July that Tioga County Commissioners would not provide access to their ballots and election equipment after receiving a directive from the Pennsylvania Department of State to withstand Mastriano’s effort and to not allow third parties to conduct a forensic audit of the 2020 election results. On 16 July, York County also refused to take part in the recount citing the legality of Mastriano’s request, the legality of his demand, the cost to the county and their lack of staff to complete the project. They also raised concerns over possible decertification of their election equipment by the Department of State.
The state’s GOP issued a statement denouncing the Department of State’s directives as “an attack on the General Assembly’s power to review, investigate, and legislate in matters within its legislative authority, which includes Pennsylvania’s election system.”
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Who Runs Our World?
Netanyahu addresses US Congress
By Richard Hugus | January 4, 2019
Our world is run by oligarchs, the holders of vast wealth from monopolies in banking, resource extraction, manufacturing, and technology. Oligarchs have such power that most of the world doesn’t even know of their influence over our lives. Their overall agenda is global power — a world government, run by them — to be achieved through planned steps of social engineering. The oligarchs remain in the background and have heads of state and entire governments acting in their service. Presidents and prime ministers are their puppets. Bureaucrats and politicians are their factotums.
Who are politicians? Politicians are people who work for the powerful while pretending to represent the people who voted for them. This double-dealing involves a lot of lying, so successful politicians must be good at it. It’s not an easy job to make the insane agenda of the powerful seem reasonable. Politicians can’t reveal this agenda because it almost always goes against the interests of their constituents, so they become adept at sophistry, mystification, and the appearance of authority. For example, wars for Israel have been part of the agenda of the powerful for years. Since 2001, wars for Israel have been sold as “the war on terror” and lots of lies had to be made up as to why the war on terror was a real thing. The visible faces promoting the war on terror were neoconservatives in the US, almost all of whom were advocates for Israel, or Zionists. Zionists are not the only members of the oligarchy, but they seem to be its lead actors. ... continue
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