It appears that some time last month the EPA provided a major update of what it calls its “climate change indicators.” The EPA’s web page for this is headed “Climate Change Indicators in the United States,” with the sub-heading “Climate Change Is Happening Now.” The update is an initiative of the Biden administration, now eager to invest a few trillion dollars of your money in new “green” infrastructure, after several years in which the Trump EPA paid no attention to keeping these data up to date. The New York Times reports on the big update on today’s front page, under the headline “Climate Change Is getting Worse, E.P.A. Says. Just Look Around.”
The basic technique here is to propagandize you with every sort of essentially irrelevant anecdotal information, while diverting your attention away from the only indicator of “climate change” that actually counts, which is temperature. After all, if temperatures aren’t going up, it isn’t “global warming.” Here, we have some 54 supposed climate “indicators” — everything from rain to drought to ice to sea level — out of which the things relating to actual temperature are only a handful, and then are buried deep in the midst of all the others, probably in the hope that you will miss them. And moreover, the temperature data are then grossly misrepresented in what has to be an intentional effort at deception.
But let’s start with the official line from the new Biden EPA.
The Earth’s climate is changing. Temperatures are rising, snow and rainfall patterns are shifting, and more extreme climate events – like heavy rainstorms and record high temperatures – are already happening. Many of these observed changes are linked to the rising levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, caused by human activities.
The Times then picks up on the theme by its headline calling for you to “just look around” to determine that “climate change” is happening. The idea is that you can determine that there is “climate change” by observing ice on ponds, or something, without having to bother with those complicated thermometers, let alone sophisticated satellite measurements:
Wildfires are bigger, and starting earlier in the year. Heat waves are more frequent. Seas are warmer, and flooding is more common. The air is getting hotter. Even ragweed pollen season is beginning sooner. . . . [EPA’s indicators] map everything from Lyme disease, which is growing more prevalent in some states as a warming climate expands the regions where deer ticks can survive, to the growing drought in the Southwest that threatens the availability of drinking water, increases the likelihood of wildfires but also reduces the ability to generate electricity from hydropower.
So how about the temperature guys? As you can see, the Times does throw in a couple of references to “heat waves” and “hotter air” in the midst of all the stuff about flooding, ragweed pollen, ticks, and whatever else. What’s missing is any citation or link to any source to support the assertion about actual temperatures. But over at the EPA page, under the heading “U.S. and Global Temperature,” we find the following graph, which is said to have been updated to April 2021:
That appears rather scary! Everything looks like it is going up sharply with passing time. Check out especially the green line, which is identified as the “lower troposphere [temperatures] (measured by satellite) of UAH.” The green line ends with a steep uptick, leaving it with the latest data point just below a record reached in 2016, and a full 2 deg F above the 1901-2000 average.
Oh, but here is the actual lower troposphere temperature record from UAH, available at the website of Roy Spencer, who is the guy who compiles the UAH record:
There are a few differences in the presentation that require a little interpretation, like the EPA graph is in deg F and has anomalies from a 1901-2000 mean, while the UAH graph is in deg C and shows anomalies from a 1991-2020 mean. But still, it leaps out that the green line on EPA’s web page, said to be the UAH record, ends with a sharp uptick and with the last point a full 2 deg F above the mean line; while this record, from UAH itself, ends with a sharp downtick and the last point actually below the mean line. Although EPA explicitly says on its web page that it updated the information in April 2021, this downtick in the UAH record began in January 2020 — a year and 4 plus months ago — and reflects a decline in lower troposphere temperatures of some 0.65 deg C, which is almost 1.2 deg F.
In other words, well more than half of the seemingly scary increase in temperature since 1901 shown in the EPA graph has just gone away in the last 16 months. So the Biden EPA, not wanting to complicate the official story of “climate change is happening now,” simply truncated the data in its graph at January 2020 to shut out the last year plus of big temperature declines. There is no way to characterize the EPA graph as other than intentionally deceptive.
I guess it’s OK because it’s in the noble cause of convincing the American people to allow the government to spend a few trillion dollars on windmills and electric car charging stations for the rich.
Awareness of ivermectin’s efficacy and its adoption by physicians worldwide to successfully treat COVID-19 have grown exponentially over the past several months. Oddly, however, even as the clinical trials data and successful ivermectin treatment experiences continue to mount, so too have the criticisms and outright recommendations against the use of ivermectin by the vast majority, though not all, of public health agencies (PHA), concentrated largely in North America and Europe.
The Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) and other ivermectin researchers have repeatedly offered expert analyses to respectfully correct and rebut the PHA recommendations, based on our deep study and rapidly accumulated expertise “in the field” on the use of ivermectin to treat COVID-19. These rebuttals were publicized and provided to international media for the education of providers and patients across the world. Our most recent response to the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and others recommendation against use can be found on the FLCCC website here.
In February 2021, the British Ivermectin Recommendation Development (BIRD), an international meeting of physicians, researchers, specialists, and patients, followed a guideline development process consistent with the WHO standard. It reached a consensus recommendation that ivermectin, a verifiably safe and widely available oral medicine, be immediately deployed early and globally. The BIRD group’s recommendation rested in part on numerous, well-documented studies reporting that ivermectin use reduces the risk of contracting COVID-19 by over 90% and mortality by 68% to 91%.
A similar conclusion has also been reached by an increasing number of expert groups from the United Kingdom (UK),Italy, Spain, United States (US), and a group from Japan headed by the Nobel Prize-winning discoverer of Ivermectin, Professor Satoshi Omura. Focused rebuttals that are backed by voluminous research and data have been shared with PHAs over the past months. These include the WHO and many individual members of its guideline development group (GDG), the FDA, and the NIH. However, these PHAs continue to ignore or disingenuously manipulate the data to reach unsupportable recommendations against ivermectin treatment. We are forced to publicly expose what we believe can only be described as a “disinformation” campaign astonishingly waged with full cooperation of those authorities whose mission is to maintain the integrity of scientific research and protect public health.
The following accounting and analysis of the WHO ivermectin panel’s highly irregular and inexplicable analysis of the ivermectin evidence supports but one rational explanation: the GDG Panel had a predetermined, nonscientific objective, which is to recommend against ivermectin. This is despite the overwhelming evidence by respected experts calling for its immediate use to stem the pandemic. Additionally, there appears to be a wider effort to employ what are commonly described as “disinformation tactics” in an attempt to counter or suppress any criticism of the irregular activity of the WHO panel.
The WHO Ivermectin Guideline Conflicts with the NIH Recommendation
The FLCCC Alliance is a nonprofit, humanitarian organization made up of renowned, highly published, world-expert clinician-researchers whose sole mission over the past year has been to develop and disseminate the most effective treatment protocols for COVID-19. In the past six months, much of this effort has been centered on disseminating knowledge of our identification of significant randomized, observational, and epidemiologic studies consistently demonstrating the powerful efficacy of ivermectin in the prevention and treatment of COVID-19. Our manuscript detailing the depth and breadth of this evidence passed a rigorous peer review by senior scientists at the U.S Food and Drug Administration and Defense Threat Reduction Agency. Recently published, our study concludes that, based on the totality of the evidence of efficacy and safety, ivermectin should be immediately deployed to prevent and treat COVID-19 worldwide.
The first “red flag” is the conflict between the March 31, 2021, WHO Ivermectin Panel’s “against” recommendation and the NIH’s earlier recommendation from February 12th of a more supportive neutral recommendation based on a lower amount of supportive evidence of ivermectin’s efficacy at that time.
Two flawed lines of analysis by the WHO appear to account for this inconsistent result:
The WHO arbitrarily and severely limited the extent and diversity of study designs considered (e.g., retrospective observational controlled trials (OCT), prospective OCTs, epidemiological, quasi-randomized, randomized, placebo-controlled, etc.).
The WHO mischaracterized the overall quality of the trial data to undermine the included studies.
The Severely Limited Extent and Diversity of Ivermectin Data Considered by the WHO’s Ivermectin Panel
The WHO Ivermectin Panel arbitrarily included only a narrow selection of the available medical studies that their research team had been instructed to collect when formulating their recommendation, with virtually no explanation why they excluded such a voluminous amount of supportive medical evidence. This was made obvious at the outset due to the following:
No pre-established protocol for data exclusion was published, which is a clear departure from standard practice in guideline development.
The exclusions departed from the WHO’s own original search protocol it required of Unitaid’s ivermectin research, which collected a much wider array of randomized controlled trials (RCT).
Key Ivermectin Trial Data Excluded from Analysis
The WHO excluded all “quasi-randomized” RCTs from consideration (two excluded trials with over 200 patients that reported reductions in mortality).
The WHO excluded all RCTs where ivermectin was compared to or given with other medications. Two such trials with over 750 patients reported reductions in mortality.
The WHO excluded from consideration 7 of the 23 available ivermectin RCT results. Such irregularities skewed the proper assessment of important outcomes in at least the following ways:
Mortality Assessment
WHO Review: Excluded multiple RCTs such that only 31 total trials deaths occurred; despite this artificially meager sample, an estimate of up to a 91% reduction in the risk of death was found.[1]
Compared to the BIRD Review: Included 13 RCTs with 107 deaths observed and found a 2.5% mortality with ivermectin vs. 8.9% in controls; estimated reduction in risk of death=68%; highly statistically significant, (p=.007).
Assessment of Impacts on Viral Clearance
WHO Review: 6 RCTs, 625 patients. The Panel avoided mention of the important finding of a strong dose-response in regard to this outcome.
This action in (i) is indefensible given that their Unitaid research team found that among 13 RCTs, 10 of the 13 reported statistically significant reductions in time to viral clearance, with larger reductions with multiday dosing than single-day, consistent with a profound dose-response relationship.[2]
Adverse Effects
WHO: Only included 3 RCTs studying this outcome. Although no statistical significance was found, the slight imbalance in this limited sample allowed the panel to repeatedly document concerns for “harm” with ivermectin treatment.
Compare (a) to the WHO’s prior safety analysis in their 2018 Application for Inclusion of Ivermectin onto Essential Medicines List for Indication of Scabies:
“Over one billion doses have been given in large-scale prevention programs.”
“Adverse events associated with ivermectin treatment. are primarily minor and transient.”[3]
The WHO excluded all RCTs studying the prevention of COVID-19 with ivermectin, without supporting rationale. Three RCTs including almost 800 patients found an over 90% reduction in the risk of infection when ivermectin is taken preventively.[4]
The WHO excluded observational controlled trials (OCT), with 14 studies of ivermectin. These included thousands of patients, including those employing propensity matching, a technique shown to lead to similar accuracy as RCTs.
One large, propensity-matched OCT from the US found that ivermectin treatment was associated with a large decrease in mortality.
A summary analysis of the combined data from the 14 available ivermectin OCTs found a large and statistically significant decrease in mortality.
The WHO excluded numerous published and posted epidemiologic studies, despite requesting and receiving a presentation of the results from one leading epidemiologic research team. These studies found:
In numerous cities and regions with population-wide ivermectin distribution campaigns, large decreases in both excess deaths and COVID-19 case fatality rates were measured immediately following the campaigns.
Countries with pre-existing ivermectin prophylaxis campaigns against parasites demonstrate significantly lower COVID-19 case counts and deaths compared to neighboring countries without such campaigns.
Assessment of the Quality of the Evidence Base by WHO Guideline Group
The numerous above actions minimizing the extent of the evidence base were then compounded by the below efforts to minimize the quality of the evidence base:
The WHO mischaracterized the overall quality of the included trials as “low” to “very low,” conflicting with numerous independent expert research group findings:
An international expert guideline group independently reviewed the BIRD proceeding and instead found the overall quality of trials to be “moderate.”
The WHO’s own Unitaid systematic review team currently grade the overall quality as “moderate.”
The WHO graded the largest trial it included to support a negative assessment of ivermectin’s mortality impacts as “low risk of bias.” A large number of expert reviewers have graded that same trial as “high risk of bias,” detailed in an open letter signed by over 100 independent physicians.
We must emphasize this critical fact: If the WHO had more accurately assessed the quality of evidence as “moderate certainty,” consistent with the multiple independent research teams above, ivermectin would instead become the standard of care worldwide, similar to what occurred after the dexamethasone evidence finding decreased mortality was graded as moderate quality, which then led to its immediate global adoption in the treatment of moderate to severe COVID-19 in July of 2020.[5]
Further, The WHO’s own guideline protocol stipulates that quality assessments should beupgraded when there is the following:
a large magnitude of effect (despite their data estimating a survival benefit of 81%, the low number of studies and events included allowed them to dismiss this finding as “very low certainty”) or;
evidence of a dose-response relationship. The WHO shockingly omits the well-publicized reports by their Unitaid research team of a powerful dose-response relationship with viral clearance.
In sum, the WHO’s recommendation that “ivermectin not be used outside clinical trials” is based entirely upon:
the dismissal of large amounts of trial data;
the inaccurate downgrading of evidence quality; and
the deliberate omission of a dose-response relationship with viral clearance.
Consequently, these actions formed the basis of their ability to avoid a recommendation for immediate global use.
Even more surprising is that based on their “very low certainty” finding, the panel goes on to “infer” that “most patients would be reluctant to use a medication for which the evidence left high uncertainty regarding effects on outcomes they consider important.”
This statement is insupportable in light of the above actions. No patient could ever rationally consent to a trial in which they were acutely ill and would be subject to the possibility of receiving a placebo, once informed of: the large amount of relevant and positive trials that the WHO removed from consideration, their avoidance of reporting a large dose-response relationship, and their widely contradicted “very low certainty” grading of large mortality benefits. Such a trial would result in a historic ethical research violation, causing both a widespread loss of life and a resultant loss of trust in PHAs and research institutions for decades to come.
The many methods employed by the WHO to distort the evidence base and arrive at a non-recommendation are made even more suspicious and questionable by the following:
The WHO GDG did not hold a vote on the use of ivermectin. This highly irregular decision was purportedly based on the Ivermectin Panel’s “consensus on evidence certainty.”
Unitaid Sponsors allegedly inserted multiple limitations and weakened the conclusions in the preprint, systematic review manuscript by the Unitaid research team, which has recently led to formal charges of scientific misconduct.
BIRD: Approved ivermectin in March, 2021, for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19 based on 21 RCTs and 2,741 patients.
Conclusion
As expert clinician-researchers in society, we are firmly committed to ensuring that public health policy decisions derive from scientific data. Disturbingly, after extensive analysis of the recent WHO ivermectin guideline recommendation, we could not arrive at a credible scientific rationale to explain the numerous irregular, arbitrary, and inconsistent behaviors documented above. Further, after consultation with numerous physicians, guideline reviewers, legal experts, and veteran PHA scientists, we identified two major socio-political-economic forces that serve as the main barrier influences preventing ivermectin’s incorporation into public health policy in major parts of the world. They are:
1) the modern structure and function of what we will describe as “Big Science” and;
2) the presence of an active “Political-Economic Disinformation Campaign.”
“Big Science”
Also known as “Big RCT Fundamentalism,” Big Science reflects a dramatic shift in the practice of modern evidence-based medicine (EBM). Beginning before COVID, it has since rapidly evolved into the current system that more tightly meshes the entities of “Big Pharma,” “Big PHA’s/Academic Health Centers” (AMC), “Big Journals,” “Big Media,” and “Big Social Media” into the public health system’s efforts at guiding patient care, research and policy.
The structure and function of “Big Science” in COVID-19 is most simply represented as follows:
Only arbitrarily defined, “large, well-designed” RCTs (Big RCT), generally conducted on North American or European shores, can “prove” the efficacy of a medicine.
Only Big Pharma/Big PHA/AMCs have the resources/infrastructure to conduct Big-RCTs. (Many equate Big PHA/AMC with Big Pharma, given the funding source of the former.)
Only Big RCTs by Big Pharma or Big PHA/AMC can publish study findings in high-impact, high-income country medical journals (Big Journals).
Only medicines supported by Big Journal publications are deemed to have “sufficient evidence” and “proven efficacy” to then be recommended by Big PHAs.
Only medicines recommended by Big PHAs are covered by “Big Media” or escape censorship on “Big Social Media.”
Conversely, repurposed, off-patient medications such as ivermectin do not attract Big PHA or Big Pharma sponsors to conduct the mandatory Big RCT. Given this structural handicap, many effective medicines including ivermectin are consequently incapable of ever meeting Big PHA standards for approval in such a system. In the case of ivermectin, it is then considered, first by Big PHAs, then throughout Big Media and Big Social media, to be “unproven” given it lacks “sufficient evidence” and is thus heavily censored from public discussion and awareness. Mentions of ivermectin on Big Social Media led to the removal of a popular Facebook group (“Ivermectin MD Team” with over 10,000 followers). Additionally, all YouTube videos mentioning ivermectin in treatment of Covid-19 were removed or demonetized, as well as Twitter pages locked. Further, in Big Media, even the most credentialed independent and expert groups who recommend ivermectin based on a large body of irrefutable evidence are labeled as “controversial” and purveyors of “medical misinformation.”
A health system structured to function in this manner is clearly vulnerable to and overly influenced by entities with financial interests. Further, in Covid, such systems have evolved into rigidly operating via top-down edicts and widespread censoring. This allows little ability for emerging scientific developments not funded by Big Pharma to be disseminated from within the system or through media or social media until years later when, and if, a Big RCT is completed. This barrier has presented as an enduring horror throughout the pandemic given the widespread loss of life caused by the systematic withholding of numerous rapidly identified, safe and effective, repurposed medicines for fear of using “unproven therapies” without “sufficient evidence” for use. Alternatively, and for the first time in many physicians’ careers, those who seek to treat their patients with such therapies, based on their professional interpretation of the existing evidence are restricted by their employers issuing edicts “from above.” They are then forced to follow protocols that rely predominantly on pharmaceutically engineered therapeutics.
It must be recognized that distinct from “regulatory” agencies such as the FDA, whose system often relies upon the primary importance of a “Big RCT,” stronger foundations used by PHAs are available. One of the long-standing tenets of modern evidence-based medicine is that the highest form of medical evidence is a “systematic review and meta-analysis” of RCTs and not a sole Big RCT. Disturbingly, not one of the Big PHAs mention this established principle or their long-standing reliance on such evidence-based practices for issuing recommendations. In the case of ivermectin, they willfully ignore the multiple published expert meta-analyses of ivermectin RCTs, including almost two dozen trials and thousands of patients, reporting consistent reductions in mortality, time to clinical recovery, and time to viral clearance.
These improvements are found consistently and repeatedly, no matter the RCT design, size, or quality, and from varied centers and countries throughout the world. All studies were done without any identified conflict of interest with the vast majority of double-blind, single-blind, quasi-randomized, open-label, standard of care comparison, combination therapy comparisons, etc., reporting benefits. Satoshi Omura, Nobel Prize-winning discoverer of ivermectin, wrote in his team’s recent review paper that “the probability of this judgement on ivermectin’s superior clinical performance being false is estimated to be 1 in 4 trillion.” This supports our public warnings against further “placebo-controlled trials” given the near absolute certainty of harm to research subjects included in a placebo Big RCT.
Conversely, despite sitting atop the highest form of medical evidence, many non-regulatory Big PHAs around the world cry out for a Big RCT. This is while avoiding the issuance of even one of the several “weaker” recommendation options available to them in the setting of a low-cost, widely available medicine with an unparalleled safety profile and a constantly surging humanitarian crisis, even in the interim. Insufficient evidence, unproven — these are comments from WHO, NIH, Europe’s EMA, South Africa’s SAPHRA, France’s ANSM, United Kingdom’s MHRA, and Australia’s TGA.
Most disturbing to contemplate is our estimation that if the use of penicillin in bacterial infection were to have been tested in these same numbers and types of trials in the 1940s, the graphical display of benefits would look nearly identical to those found with ivermectin. Further, the U.S Cures Act of 2016, “specifically designed to accelerate and bring new innovations and advances faster and more efficiently to the patients who need them” emphasized the importance of using various forms of “real-world evidence” data to aid in regulatory decision-making. We can find no evidence of an organized effort to examine the more than 14, often large OCTs that show evidence of the substantial beneficial use of ivermectin. Further, no PHA has cited the numerous convincing epidemiological analyses that find rapidly falling case fatality rates following ivermectin distribution campaigns.
With the lack of a credible explanation for the absence of even a weak recommendation for ivermectin in the setting of widespread increased death rates from COVID-19, numerous citizens have speculated that this can only be explained by the presence of an active disinformation campaign by entities with nonscientific and largely financial objectives dependant on the non-recognition of ivermectin’s efficacy. We explore the near certainty of this occurring below.
Active Political-Economic “Disinformation” Campaign
“Disinformation” campaigns, best described in the article, “The Disinformation Playbook,” are initiated when independent science interferes with or opposes the interests of corporations or policymakers. Although thankfully rare, in certain cases these entities will actively seek to manipulate science and distort the truth about scientific findings that imperil their profit or policy objectives. First developed by the tobacco industry decades ago, these deceptive tactics include the following;
The Fake: Conduct counterfeit science and try to pass it off as legitimate research.
The Blitz: Harass scientists speaking out with results inconvenient for industry.
The Diversion: Manufacture uncertainty about science where little or none exists.
The Screen: Buy credibility through alliances with academia/professional societies.
The Fix: Manipulate government processes to influence policy inappropriately.
Numerous examples of the above disinformation tactics by corporations and policymakers, particularly within the pharmaceutical industry, have been documented:
Georgia Pacific publishing “fake science” on the dangers of asbestos (The Fake)
Most worrisome is that ivermectin appears to be up against one of the largest financial and global policy oppositions in modern history, including but not limited to:
Numerous Big Pharma companies and sovereign nations selling billions of vaccine doses.
Scale of market for vaccines now exponentially increasing due to the developing market for “booster shots” against rapidly appearing variants.
Concerns of numerous Big Pharma and Big PHA’s that if ivermectin is approved as effective treatment for COVID-19, EUAs for all vaccines would be revoked.
Disinformation: EMA erroneously claims effective concentrations are unattainable.
Numerous Big Pharma/Big PHA concerns that ivermectin’s potential as an alternative to vaccines may increase vaccine hesitancy and disrupt mass vaccination rollouts.
Opponents include large philanthropic sponsors with global vaccination goals.
Disinformation: WHO Panel does not review ivermectin prevention trials.
Numerous Big Pharma company investments in novel, engineered therapies (i.e., oral antivirals by Merck and Pfizer and Gilead) directly compete with ivermectin.
Disinformation: Merck places a post on their website, without scientific supporting evidence or named scientist authors that: “No evidence of either a mechanism of action, clinical efficacy or safety in COVID-19 exists.”
Big Pharma company’s (Astra-Zeneca) investment into a long-acting antibody product for prevention and treatment of COVID-19, which competes with ivermectin.
Big Pharma’s Remdesivir demand would rapidly decline once hospitalizations were to decrease after ivermectin approval.
Based on the lack of a rational explanation for the above actions by WHO, Merck, FDA, and Unitaid, we conclude that they result from an active disinformation campaign, executed both through the PHA’s, media and the WHO Guideline group recommendations. As highly published researchers, we find the allegations of scientific misconduct in the writing of the WHO/United research team’s meta-analysis manuscript to be deeply disturbing. It clearly represents a disinformation tactic with an intent to distort and diminish the reporting of a large magnitude benefit on mortality among many hundreds of patients. Further, Merck’s demonstrably and blatantly false statements against ivermectin deserve no further discussion. It is yet another entry into the disturbing historical record of actions committed by a Big Pharma entity with the primary intent of protecting profit at the expense of the welfare of global citizens.
For These Compelling and Irrefutable Reasons, The FLCCC Makes a Call to Action
This call to action is no longer just to health authorities, but to citizens everywhere to fight back against these disinformation tactics. We find the advice of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) to be an excellent guide to action in this regard:
Global Citizens
Share the playbook with your social media networks when you see new examples like those outlined above.
Set the record straight. When you see someone spreading disinformation on a topic, counter it. There are millions around the world who either have studied the data or have experience with the potent efficacy of ivermectin in COVID-19. It is important to correct false assertions.
Consider divesting your retirement funds and other investments from companies engaging in disinformation.
If a governmental or NGO scientist, report actions that diminish their role in policymaking.
Media
Avoid false equivalencies that distort scientific consensus.
Correct the record when scientific information is misrepresented, particularly by Big PHA/Big Pharma.
Report abuses of science in government.
As an expert group of ivermectin researchers, we are unsure of what else to offer in order to correct or counteract this misrepresentation of an important drug. Our belief is that, of the above actions, the most effective counter to the disinformation campaign would be that a whistleblower become active from within WHO, the FDA, the NIH, Merck, or Unitaid. This moment in history demands a man or woman with the courage and conviction to step forward. Urgently.
In both the interests of humanity and to motivate and inspire such a citizen of the world, we leave you with the words of Albert Einstein: “The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them and do nothing.”
[1]Special emphasis must be placed on this decision; selecting only trials where very few deaths occurred.
(n.b., the number of events observed within trials is a primary criterion for judging the “certainty of evidence”). This action provides almost the entire basis for the panel’s assessment of a “very low certainty of evidence.” It is in effect, a “smoking gun,” one of the many actions above demonstrating that the primary objective of the Panel was to recommend against use of ivermectin. [2]This omission is the second most important action allowing the panel to find a “very low certainty of evidence,” given that, per WHO protocol, if a dose-response relationship is found, the certainty of evidence must be upgraded. [3]Special emphasis must be placed on the harm of excluding trials data supporting ivermectin in the prevention of COVID-19. If the preventive efficacy of ivermectin were to be known or accepted, this would allow deployment in regions without vaccines.
[4]British Ivermectin Recommendation Development (BIRD) panel (2021). The BIRD Recommendation on the Use of Ivermectin for COVID-19. Full report. https://tinyurl.com/u27ea3y
[5]The FLCCC Alliance recommended, as well as gave U.S. Senate testimony in support of, the use of corticosteroids in COVID-19 months before this announcement, during the prolonged period when all PHAs recommended against its use
Sincerely,
The Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance
Pierre Kory, MD
Keith Berkowitz, MD
Paul E. Marik, MD
Fred Wagshul, MD
Umberto Meduri, MD
Scott Mitchell, MBChB
Joseph Varon, MD
Eivind Vinjevoll, MD
Jose Iglesias, DO
A Whitehall source directly linked to the Covid Response has said that the UK Government have already structured a detailed plan designed to neutralise each stage of lockdown easing, including the compliance of media outlets to help spread fear.
The Whitehall source has said that he has been “increasingly concerned” with how the Government are behaving, and that their “relationship with the truth” is now not even on nodding terms. The latest plan will involve a series of ‘crisis’ around drug supply; mutant strains; and third waves, specifically choreographed to condition the public for further lockdowns and vaccine passports.
The plan, that according to the source is designed to take us to September 27th 2021 is to be released in stages over the summer months and, according to the Whitehall source, is already ‘well underway’.
On March the 8th, the first milestone of the roadmap was implemented, with school children finally returning to class. The following day Chris Whitty gave a pre-written speech to the Commons that said schools reopening would cause another surge in the virus and ended it with “Let me be clear, many, many more people will die before this is over” the soundbite obligingly repeated on every news outlet, with BBC news having it on-loop all day.
On March the 29th, the second milestone of the roadmap was implemented. The Government said – “The evidence shows that it is safer for people to meet outdoors rather than indoors,”. This is why from the 29th March, when most schools start to break up for the Easter holidays, outdoor gatherings (including in private gardens) of either 6 people (the Rule of 6) or 2 households will also be allowed, making it easier for friends and families to meet outside.
The next day (March 30th) the AstraZeneca Vaccine was again stopped due to blood clots fears, despite the medicine’s regulator clearing it only the previous week. Whilst Boris Johnson repeated what he’d said the previous week that the mutated virus on the continent would inevitably “wash up on our shores”.
On April 19th, the third milestone saw pub gardens, and non-essential shops reopen. Followed immediately by news of a second vaccine being halted for fear it was causing blood clots and the discovery of the South African mutation said to be able to avoid them anyway.
The next milestone is due on May 17th with the Government relaxing social contact rules further and the opening of indoor venues. This will be followed by a story that the mutation is ‘more deadly than first thought’ and that young people are now also vulnerable to it, accompanied by the result of the vaccine passport trials have shown that they have a ‘positive effect on virus reduction’.
The final milestone is due on June 21st where ALL restrictions were promised to be lifted. This will not be allowed to happen. Vaccine passports / Track and Trace will be mandatory, as will masks and social distancing. The entire week of the 21st will be taken up by a third wave, which will suddenly be ‘rampant’, and this will be attributed to a new variant which they will declare is more deadly than the previous strains of Covid allegedly doing the rounds. This will be accompanied with yet more issues with vaccine supplies. Authorities will declare that one of the vaccines is effective against the deadlier strain, but a ‘problem’ with its manufacture will emerge.
The Whitehall source went on to say –
“All the measures are aimed at two things, vaccine passports and lockdowns starting next winter,
“The ultimate goal is to have the public, back in their box.
“Note that Boris is now talking down vaccine’s and bigging-up lockdowns, that wasn’t a mistake, that was all part of the plan”.
The plan also includes an ad campaign like the one seen at Christmas, the message this time will be that the pandemic isn’t over and vaccine passports are the ‘solution’.
Seeing through the COVID-19 spin is a challenge even for those who have been writing and talking for years about the need to limit Big Pharma’s influence on health policy and law. Perhaps the greatest change I have seen in vaccine regulation, policymaking and law over the past four decades has been the development of public-private business partnerships between Big Pharma and the government.1 2 3 4 5 That seismic change has affected how new vaccines are developed, licensed and regulated and is influencing what we see happening today.6 7
Since the coronavirus pandemic was declared by government officials in early 2020, lawmakers have been persuaded to build the entire global pandemic response around a single experimental biological product.8 9 10 That single product is generating billions of dollars in profits for liability free drug companies and their partners.11 12 The COVID-19 spin is reaching dizzying new heights every day,13 14 with fundamental facts about the experimental product’s risks and failures getting lost in the hard sell.
At dinner time, if you turn on any major television network in the U.S., you will see that the evening news has turned into one long COVID vaccine commercial infused with a heavy dose of fear mongering. Before the pandemic declaration, we had learned to ignore prescription drug advertising in-between getting news of the day. Now newscasters and TV docs are Pharma’s new COVID “vaccine” sales reps and the only way to get away from the 24/7 sales pitch is to turn off the TV.
Billions of Dollars Paid to TV Networks for DTC Pharma Ads
We should not be surprised. The U.S. and New Zealand are the only two countries in the world that allow direct to consumer pharmaceutical product advertising.15 16 17 In this country. Big Pharma pays US television networks five billion dollars per year to push use of drugs and vaccines.18
Taking a page out of Big Tobacco’s old book and upping the ante, Big Pharma has become a business partner of government.19 The COVID business deal is perhaps the single biggest one in the history of public health programs.20 21 22
Already wealthy drug companies were given at least nine billion dollars from the. government to develop experimental COVID vaccines in record breaking time,23 shaving five to 10 years off the normal vaccine development, testing and licensing process.24 25 But that wasn’t enough. Congress also handed companies a liability shield from lawsuits whenever the product government paid them to produce fails to work as advertised or a person is hurt by using it.26
If you or a loved one dies or is permanently injured by an experimental or soon-to-be FDA licensed COVID vaccine, you cannot sue the drug company who made it, even if there is evidence the company could have made it less reactive or more effective.
Big Pharma Pays Big Tech Billions of Dollars for Ads, Censorship Campaigns
If you are searching for relief from the hype by turning off the TV and turning on your computer, you will be disappointed. The COVID vaccine ad campaign is in high gear online, especially on social media platforms. The Thought Police hired by Big Tech to censor information that does not conform with pre-approved pandemic narratives are making sure you do not have an opportunity to carefully weigh the vaccine’s benefits and risks.27 28 29
Rational thinking on the World Wide Web is no longer tolerated and neither is freedom of speech. The Internet has become a drug company stockholder’s dream and a consumer’s worst nightmare.
Big Pharma and its business partners have paid a lot of money to Big Tech to eliminate freedom of thought and speech online. Right now the weapon of choice is a social media censorship campaign to de-platform dissenters, including reputable charitable organizations like the National Vaccine Information Center publishing well referenced information.30 31 32 The Internet Thought Police are especially upset when anyone talks about reports of serious vaccine complications and deaths, but reports about COVID-19 disease complications and deaths are allowed without restrictions.33
As COVID social distancing regulations have kept more people at home and on their electronic devices, the healthcare and pharma industry has poured more money into direct to consumer digital ads.34 In 2020, drug and vaccine manufacturers funneled about 10 billion dollars into digital advertising that we view on our computers, tablets and cell phones.35 36
How much of Big Tech’s decision to ghost dissenters from search engine results and de-platform social media accounts is influenced by an infusion of direct to consumer advertising dollars from Big Pharma?37
American Taxpayer Pays for COVID-19 Vaccine Ads
This year, the American taxpayer is also paying for TV and digital advertising to promote the use of the COVID-19 vaccine.38 On April 1, 2021, the government announced a three billion dollar COVID vaccine ad campaign39 to get make sure that every American gets vaccinated, a national ad campaign that is using community and religious leaders, as well as celebrities,40 41 to reach into every community to boost vaccine uptake in stores,42 sports arenas,43 schools44 and churches.45
Right now, Pfizer and Moderna, the two U.S. corporations manufacturing experimental messenger RNA (mRNA) COVID-19 vaccines are leading beneficiaries of the free advertising paid for by tax dollars. The first to secure an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) from the FDA, Moderna counts the federal National Institutes for Health as a business partner,46 while Pfizer partnered with the German company BioNTech.47 Together, Moderna and Pfizer have captured market share and, by the end of 2020, Pfizer had achieved a 180 percent increase in revenue48 49 and Moderna had scored an eye watering 3,900 percent increase. 50 51
So what has the COVID vaccine advertising blitz done so far, other than convincing half of all adults to get at least one dose of the vaccine by mid-April 2021?52
The most notable achievement of the COVID vaccine campaign has been to keep everyone in a constant state of fear and confusion about what is true and what is false.53 There are so many misunderstandings and false impressions out there about the biological product manufactured by Moderna and Pfizer, a product that most people call a vaccine and other call a therapeutic drug but I call a cell disrupter biological.
No Long Term Safety Studies of Experimental mRNA Vaccines
Whatever you want to call it, the experimental mRNA technology that Moderna and Pfizer employed to create the product has not yet been licensed by the FDA to prevent infections in humans. 54 It is a genetic engineering technology that radically departs from the production methods used for two centuries to make live attenuated and inactivated viral and bacterial vaccines.55 It is an experimental technology that injects synthetic RNA directly into cells and, in effect, attempts to turn the human body into a vaccine manufacturing machine.56 57
There are no long-term studies58 evaluating the range of effects at the cellular and molecular level on the biological and genetic integrity of humans who receive the product. Nobody knows if it will, over time, negatively affect normal immune function and cause autoimmune and other chronic inflammatory conditions in the body,59 60 61 or provoke enhanced disease in vaccinated persons encountering mutated versions of the coronavirus in the future.62
Myth: Pfizer and Moderna mRNA Vaccines Have Been Proven to Prevent Infection and Transmission of SARS-CoV-2
What are the two biggest myths that have been generated by the advertising campaign being conducted with Pharma and taxpayer dollars?
The first big myth is that if you get two doses of the mRNA COVID vaccine, you will get artificial immunity and cannot be asymptomatically or symptomatically infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus and you will not be able to infect others who come in physical contact with you: you dutifully got vaccinated and now you are immune.63 That is a normal assumption because that is what vaccines are supposed to do, but it is a false assumption.
The Emergency Use Authorization the FDA gave to Pfizer and Moderna was not granted based on scientific evidence that the product prevented infection and transmission of SARS-Cov-2.64 65 In fact, the FDA directed manufacturers in the summer of 2020 to make a product that had at least a 50 percent efficacy rate in either preventing or reducing severity of COVID-19 disease.66
The companies chose to apply for an EUA based on nine months of clinical trial data that the product prevents people from developing severe symptoms of COVID-19 disease 67 and reduces the likelihood they will have serious complications leading to hospitalization and death – not that it prevents infection and transmission. There is a difference.
TAKE HOME FACT: COVID-19 vaccines were not designed and have not yet been proven to prevent infection and transmission of the new coronavirus in the majority of recipients. Apparently, that is why public health officials are telling vaccinated people they have to continue wearing masks and social distancing just like unvaccinated people.68 69
Myth: It is “Good” to Feel Bad After mRNA Covid-19 Shots Because It Means the Vaccine is “Working”
The second big myth being perpetuated by COVID spin is that when you have strong reactions to a COVID-19 shot, it is “good” because it means the vaccine is “working.”70 71
The companies and public health officials admit that the mRNA vaccines are reactive and that the majority of people, especially younger people, who get vaccinated will experience reactions strong enough to require a day or two of recovery and even time off work.72 73 But there is not one credible scientific study published in the medical literature demonstrating that high fevers, chills, headache, joint and muscle aching, disabling fatigue and other symptoms are “good” for the body and indicate the body is successfully producing artificial immunity.
In fact, strong reactions to pharmaceutical products like drugs and vaccines are usually something to be concerned about and a reason to exercise caution, especially with repeat doses. 74 75 76
More concerning are the 68,000 adverse event reports following COVID-19 vaccinations, including over 2600 deaths, 77 that have been reported as of April 8, 2021 to the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) created under the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act.78 79 80 81 More than 70 percent of the reaction reports occurred in people between 17 and 65 years old. And that may be just the tip of the iceberg because one government funded study found that less than one percent of vaccine reactions are ever reported to the vaccine reaction reporting system82 created under the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act.
Although Pfizer, Moderna and the government admit that messenger RNA COVID vaccines can cause a lot of reaction symptoms like fever, body pain and disabling fatigue,83 84 85 they adamantly deny that the shots cause sudden death86 87 88 or blood clots89 90 91 92 and bleeding disorders like immune thrombocytopenic purpura,93 cardiac and respiratory arrest,94 95 and other very serious health problems.96
Where is the biological mechanism science that proves it is only a coincidence when people suddenly die within minutes, 97 days or weeks of being given a COVID shot98 and that none of the tens of thousands of bad health outcomes being reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System are causally related?99
Where is science backing up the claim that feeling so bad you can’t get out of bed or go to work after getting vaccinated is “good” because being in pain is evidence that the product is effective?
TAKE HOME FACT: COVID-19 shots cause reactions in the majority of people.100 101 There is no scientific evidence that having strong reactions to a drug or biological means that the product is effective.102
Government health officials have said that COVID-19 vaccines will be approved for use in children of any age by early 2022.103 With the majority of adults suffering very strong COVID vaccine reactions, especially younger adults,104 105 why are there plans to give the messenger RNA cell disrupter biological to infants and young children when the CDC says the majority of chilren with COVID-19 disease either have mild symptoms or no symptoms at all? 106
The enormous sums of money that Big Pharma and government is spending on television and digital ad campaigns to make sure that every child and adult in America gets a COVID-19 vaccine is creating false impressions and assumptions. When public policy precedes the science and aggressive advertising campaign blur the lines between facts and myths, truth gets lost in the spin and nobody is safe.
Go to NVIC.org and learn more about SARS-Cov-2 and the biological product being referred to as the COVID-19 vaccine on our new coronavirus information pages.
Go to NVICAdvocacy.org, where you can learn how to help defend informed consent rights in your state so you can make voluntary decisions about vaccination for yourself and your minor children.
References
1 Fisher BL. Here Comes the 21st Century Cures Act: Say Goodbye to Vaccine Safety Science. NVIC Newsletter July 21, 2015.
2 Ramsey L, Friedman LF. The government agency in charge of approving drugs gets a surprising amount of money from the companies that make them. Business Insider Aug. 17, 2016.
3 Fisher BL. End Pharma Liability Shield Endangering Public Health and Human Rights. NVIC Newsletter Nov. 8, 2016.
4 The Vaccine Reaction. Drug Companies Pay FDA and NIH to Fast Track and Market Vaccines. Sept 28, 2018.
6 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Public–private partnership responses to COVID-19 and future pandemics: Proceedings of a workshop—in brief. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press 2020.
7 U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). COVID-19: Federal Efforts to Accelerate Vaccine and Therapeutic Development But More Transparency Needed on Emergency Use Authorization. Nov. 17, 2020.
8 National Institutes of Health. NIH clinical trial of investigational vaccine for COVID-19 begins. NIH Press Release Mar. 16, 2020.
9 Lurie N, Saville M et al. Developing Covid-19 Vaccines at Pandemic Speed. NEJM Mar. 31, 2020
10 Fisher BL. COVID-19 Meltdown and Pharma’s Big Money Win. NVIC Newsletter Apr. 1, 2020.
11 Kollewe J. From Pfizer to Moderna: Who’s making billions from Covid-19 vaccines? The Guardian Mar. 6, 2021.
12 Egan M. Pfizer and Moderna could score $32 billion in Covid-19 vaccine sales – in 2021 alone. CNN Dec. 11, 2020.
13 Megan Garnett Coyle. Ad Tech Leaders Unite to Measure the Ad Council & COVID Collaborative’s COVID-19 Vaccine Education Initiative – the Largest PSA Campaign in US History. Businesswire Mar. 30. 2021.
History
14 Medical Xpress. US launches major COVI vaccination ad campaign. Apr. 1, 2021.
15 Lee B. How is Consumer Drug Advertising Regulated in the United States? June 17, 2019.
16 Harvard Health Publishing. Do not get sold on drug advertising. February 2017.
17 Rapaport L. U.S. health care industry spends $30 billion a year on marketing. Reuters Jan. 8, 2019.
18 Kanski A. Nielsen: Pfizer tops list of biggest pharma advertisers in 2018. Medical Marketing & Media Apr. 2, 2019.
19 Johnson B. Up in Smoke: Documents from the Annals of Tobacco Marketing. Ad Age Mar. 29, 2010.
20 Meyer R. Profiteering off a Covid vaccine. World of DTC Marketing Mar. 25, 2021.
21 Kollewe J. From Pfizer to Moderna: Who’s making billions from Covid-19 vaccines? The Guardian Mar. 6, 2021.
22 Dunleavy BP. Pfizer CEO says need for third dose of COVID-19 vaccine ‘likely.’ UPI Apr. 16, 2021.
23 Weintraub EW. Federal spending on COVID-19 vaccine candidates tops $9 billion, spread among 7 companies. USA Today Aug. 10, 2020.
24 The College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Vaccine Development, Testing and Regulation. The History of Vaccines Jan. 17, 2018.
25 Broom D. 5 charts that tell the story of vaccines today. World Economic Forum June 2, 2020.
26 Fisher BL, Parpia R. 2005 PREP Act and 1986 Act Shield Vaccine Manufacturer’s from Liability. The Vaccine Reaction Aug. 10, 2020.
27 Fisher BL. The New Internet Police Protecting You from Freedom of Thought and Speech. NVIC Newsletter Dec. 3, 2018.
28 Caceres M. When Even the New York Times Doesn’t Pass Facebook Muster. The Vaccine Reaction Dec. 28, 2020.
29 Mercola J. New Thought Police NewsGuard Is Owned by Big Pharma. Jan. 24, 2020.
30 Fisher BL. Vaccination and Censorship: The Truth Will Set Us Free. NVIC Newsletter Jan. 26, 2021.
31 O’Neill J. White House working with social media giants to silence anti-vaxxers. New York Post Feb. 19, 2021.
32 Attkisson S. CENSORED: The National Vaccine Information Center. Mar. 8, 2021.
33 Presson J. Questions linger about COVID-19 vaccine. The Mountaineer Feb. 12, 2021.
34 Droesch B. US Healthcare and Pharma Is Among the Fastest-Growing Digital Ad Spenders. EMarketer Oct. 9, 2020.
35 Droesch B. US Healthcare and Pharma Is Among the Fastest-Growing Digital Ad Spenders. EMarketer Oct. 9, 2020.
36 Silk B. Why Digital Is the Future for Pharma Advertising. Ethoseo Oct. 15, 2019.
37 Robbins R. Get ready for more drug ads: Facebook is making a bid for pharma dollars. STAT News Nov. 1, 2016.
38 Holmes K, Kaufman E. HHS begins national vaccine ad campaign with You Tube ads. CNN Dec. 4, 2020.
39 DHHS. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Launches Nationwide Network of Trusted Voices to Encourage Vaccination in Next Phase of Public Education Campaign. HHS Press Office Apr. 1, 2021.
40 Facher L. The White House is set to unveil a wide-reaching billion-dollar campaign aimed at convincing every American to get vaccinated. STAT News Mar. 15, 2021.
41 Associated Press. Celebrities Make a Stand for COVID-19 Vaccines on TV Special. Voice of America Apr. 16, 2021.
43 Hoffman DC. Mass COVID-19 Vaccination Site Set to Open at PPG Paints Arena. KDKA2 Mar. 15, 2021.
44 Archie A. This Indiana school district is helping high schoolers get a COBID-19 vaccine before prom. Louisville Courier Journal Apr. 13, 2021.
45 AdventHealth News. AdventHealth Partners with Churches to Provide COVID-19 Vaccines. Apr. 20, 2021.
46 Collins FS. Statement from NIH and BARDA on the FDA Emergency Use Authorization of the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine. NIAID Dec. 18, 2020.
47 Pfizer Inc. Pfizer and BioNTech Announce Further Details on Collaboration to Accelerate Global GOVIC-19 Vaccine Development. Businesswire Apr. 9, 2020.
48 Macrotrends. Pfizer Revenue 2006-2020. January 2021.
49 NASDAQ. Pfizer sees about $15 billion in 2021 sales from COVID-19 vaccine. Feb. 2, 2021.
50 NASDAQ. Moderna Earnings Date, Estimates & History. MarketBeat Apr. 16, 2021.
51 CBS News. Moderna forecasts $18.4 billion in COVID-19 vaccine sales. Feb. 28, 2021.
52 Yen H, Mattise J. Half of US adults have received at least one COVID-19 shot. Associated Press Apr. 18, 2021.
53 Syal A. Is It Safe to Visit Grandparents After Getting COVID Vaccine? NBC Feb. 14, 2021.
54 Pfizer Inc. The Facts About Pfizer and BioNTech’s COVID-19 Vaccine. Jan 6, 2021.
55 Banks MA. What Are mRNA Vaccines, and Could They Work Against COVID-19? Smithsonian Magazine Nov. 16, 2020.
56 Trafton A. Explained: Why RNA vaccines for Covid-19 raced to the front of the pack. MIT News Office Dec. 11, 2020.
57 Langreth R, Krege N. Moderna Wants to Transform the Body Into a Vaccine-Making Machine. Bloomberg News Aug. 11, 2020.
58 Harris R. Long-Term Studies of COVID-19 Vaccines Hurt by Placebo Recipients Getting Immunized. NPR Feb. 19, 2021.
59 Pardi N, Hogan MJ et al. mRNA vaccines – a new era in vaccinology. Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 2018; 17: 261-279.
60 Jaffe-Hoffman M. Could mRNA COVID-19 vaccines be dangerous in the long- term? Jerusalem Post Nov. 17, 2020.
61 Odell J. Messenger RNA (nRNA) SARS Coronavirus ‘Vaccines’ and their Potential Autoimmunity Part 2. Bioregulatory Medicine Institute Feb. 24, 2021.
62 Arvin AM, Fink K et al. A perspective on potent antibody-dependent enhancement of SARA-Cov-2. Nature 2020; 584: 352-363.
63 Healthline. How Long Does Immunity Last After COVID-19?: How vaccine-induced immunity after receiving immunization works. Feb. 24, 2021.
66 Heidt A. FDA to Require 50 Percent Efficacy for COVID-19 Vaccines. The Scientist July 1, 2020.
67 Crist C. Early Vaccines Will Prevent Symptoms, Not Virus. WebMD Oct. 28, 2020.
68 Syal A. Is It Safe to Visit Grandparents After Getting COVID Vaccine? NBC Feb. 14, 2021.
69 Rouan R. Fact Check: CDC recommends masks in most cases even after COVID-19 vaccines. USA Today Apr. 22, 2021.
70 Crow S. The CDC Says These 3 Side Effects Mean Your Vaccine Is Working. Yahoo Feb. 15, 2021.
71 Finberg R. No, vaccine side effects don’t tell you how well your immune system will protect you from COVID-19. Yahoo News Apr. 19, 2021.
72 Hendler C. Severe Reactions to COVID-19 Vaccine Close Schools in Michigan, Ohio and New York. The Vaccine Reaction Mar. 8, 2021.
73 Farber M. Is the COVID-19 vaccine effective if you don’t have a reaction to it? Fox News Feb. 9, 2021.
74 Bircher AJ. Symptoms and danger signs in acute drug hypersensitivity. Toxicology 2005; 209(2): 201-207.
75 Davidovici BB, Wolf R. The challenge of drug-rechallenge: Facts and controversies. Clin Dermatol 2010; 281(3): 249-253.
76 GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals. Highlights of Prescribing Information for INFANRIX – diphtheria and tetanus toxoids and acellular pertussis vaccine adsorbed suspension: Contraindications, Warnings and Precautions. Nov. 20, 2019.
77 MedAlerts. Search the VAERS Database.
78 FDA. VAERS Overview. Mar. 29, 2019.
79 CDC. Vaccine Safety: Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
80 LaVigne P. The Story Behind MedAlerts. NVIC Newsletter Aug. 20, 2013.
81 The College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Vaccine Injury Compensation Programs: National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA)/National Childhood Vaccine Injury Program (NCVIP). The History of Vaccines Jan. 17, 2018.
82 Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Inc. Electronic System for Public Health Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. AHRQ 2011.
83 The Vaccine Reaction. Moderna’s COVID-19 Vaccine Provokes COVID-Like Symptoms in Phase 3 Trial. Oct. 19, 2020.
84 Fisher BL. Over 3,000 “Health Impact Events” After COVID-19 mRNA Vaccinations. The Vaccine Reaction Dec. 22, 2020.
85 Gale J. COVID-19 vaccine side effects hit some recipients hard; that’s not all bad. Here’s what to do about them. Seattle Times Mar. 11, 2021.
86 Sforza T. Health care worker dies after second dose of COVID vaccine, investigation underway. Orange County Register Feb. 4, 2021.
87 Percy N. Kaiser says Pfizer vaccine likely not cause of Calfornia woman’s death. Mercury News Feb. 15, 2021
88 Brown E. Fact Check: Have 966 People Died After Receiving the COVID vaccine? Newsweek Mar. 8, 2021.
89 Goldstein S. Blood clots prevalent with Pfizer and Moderna Vaccine as with Astra Zeneca’s study. Dow Jones/Market Watch Apr. 16, 2021.
90 Ma A. Schuster-Bruce C. Johnson & Johnson asked other drugmakers to help it study blood-clot risks, and Moderna and Pfizer decline, report says. Business Insider Apr. 16, 2021.
91 Scribner H. Recent vaccine news should improve further confidence, doctor says. Deseret News Apr. 15, 2021.
92 Beusekom MV. Study: COVID much more likely than vaccines to cause blood clot. CIDRAP Apr. 15, 2021.
93 Fisher BL. Miami Obstetrician Develops Bleeding Disorder, Dies After Getting COVID-19 Vaccine. The Vaccine Reaction Jan. 11, 2021.
94 Israel National News. Mexican doctor hospitalized after receiving COVID-19 vaccine. Jan. 2, 2021.
95 Microsoft News. 72-year old man sent to ICU following COVID-19 vaccination; MOH confirms cardiac arrest wasn’t caused by vaccine. Feb. 19, 2021.
96 Fisher BL. Healthy Mom, 39, in Utah Dies of Organ Failure Days After Moderna COVID Vaccination. The Vaccine Reaction Mar. 15. 2021.
97 The Vaccine Reaction. Woman Dies Immediately After Getting COVID-9 Vaccine in Virginia. Feb. 21, 2021.
98 Haglage A. No evidence COVID-19 vaccines cause death epidemiologists say: ‘Coincidences are going to happen.’ Yahoo Feb. 4, 2021.
99 Rouan R. Fact check: CDC data on adverse effects of vaccine cannot determine cause. USA Today Apr. 8, 2021.
100 CDC. Local Reactions, Systemic Reactions, Adverse Events and Serious Adverse Events: Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine. Dec. 13, 2020.
101 FDA. Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine. Dec. 18, 2020.
102 Finberg R. No, vaccine side effects don’t tell you how well your immune system will protect you from COVID-19. Yahoo News Apr. 19, 2021.
103 Thomas N. Fauci expects almost all children to be eligible for Covid-19 vaccines by first quarter 2022 at the latest. CNN Apr 18, 2021.
104 Koweek M. Younger adults are having harsher Covid vaccine side effects. WHIO TV Mar. 5, 2021.
105 Bendix A. Why you can expect more severe vaccine side effects if you’re younger or a woman. Business Insider Apr. 6, 2021.
106 CDC. COVID-19 in Children and Teens: What You Need to Know. Mar. 17, 2021.
At base, the markets are a con game where the rich and powerful employ a raft of confidence men to lure suckers into the latest mania. In this game, the suckers are the general public who are left holding the bag as the market bubble bursts while the smart money swoops in to buy up the leftover assets at pennies on the dollar. In this week’s edition of The Corbett Report, James Corbett pulls back the curtain on the Wall Street casino and reveals how the house always wins the rigged games.
For those with limited bandwidth, CLICK HERE to download a smaller, lower file size version of this episode.
For those interested in audio quality, CLICK HERE for the highest-quality version of this episode (WARNING: very large download).
TRANSCRIPT
In December of 2020, video game retailer GameStop reported an operating loss of $63 million in the previous quarter on the back of an 11% reduction in the store base. The story—just one of dozens of such reports flooding the financial newswires—meant little to the general public and went largely unnoticed.
Two groups did show an interest in the news, however: the Wall Street vultures who see every faltering company as an easy source of money in the futures markets and a small band of retail investors who saw the potential for the floundering gaming franchise to turn things around.
Within a matter of weeks, these two groups would clash in one of the most spectacular stock market face offs in recent memory. Even the White House got drawn into the saga.
REPORTER: I was concerned about the stock market activity we’re seeing around GameStop and now with some other stocks as well, including the subsidiary or whatever—the company that was . . . Blockbuster?—and have there been any conversations with the SEC about how to proceed?
JEN PSAKI: Well, I’m also happy to repeat that we have the first female treasury secretary and a team that’s surrounding her and often questions about market we’ll send to them. But our team is of course—our economic team, including Secretary Yellen and others—are monitoring the situation.
The human drama in the story made it easily recognizable as a David vs. Goliath narrative. Here was a ragtag band of mom-and-pop—or, in this case, millennial—investors going up against the hudge fund billionaires. And, just as it seemed they may actually have an effect, the full power of the financial and political system seemed to swoop in to suppress them.
But the “revelation” that retail investors are fighting a rigged game against the Wall Street hedge fund behemoths is hardly a revelation at all. In fact, it is merely the latest example in a long series of events showing that the stock market was never meant to bring riches and fortune to the average investor.
Instead, when the story is told in its full context, there is only one obvious conclusion to be drawn:
The stock market is often portrayed in the financial media as a magical crystal ball that can not only tell us about what is happening in the economy, but predict geopolitical events, forecast elections, or even reveal to us the inner workings of the minds of men.
BECKY QUICK: Alright, so polls are one way of trying to figure out who’s going to win. Watching the markets are another. They’re pretty good at predicting elections sometimes, too.
LESLIE PICKER: Valuations on a price-to-earnings basis are below post-crisis averages leading some to believe that decent fundamentals could—emphasis on could—jumpstart the shares higher.
DOMINIC CHU: You’re telling me you don’t have a crystal ball . . .
PICKER: I don’t.
CHU: . . . And I don’t blame you.
PICKER: I don’t. But even I did I couldn’t say it here.
KRISTINA HOOPER: Well, we could very well see some gains, some pullbacks, more gains. Certainly animal spirits are alive and well, but I would argue it’s a very different spirit animal than last year. Since the start of February our spirit animal is probably the chihuahua.
But this is a lie. In reality, the markets are driven not by underlying economic fundamentals, as the public is asked to believe, but by the actions of the central banks.
This is not even a controversial point.
In 2014, the Bank for International Settlements warned that central banks were causing “elevated” asset prices.
A report from the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum that same year warned that “Central banks around the world, including in Europe, are buying increasing volumes of equities” and “The same authorities that are responsible for maintaining financial stability are often the owners of the large funds that have the potential to cause problems.”
And in 2016—in the midst of the historic bull run that has seen the Dow Jones and S&P indexes reach all-time record high after all-time record high—economist Brian Barnier published a report documenting that between the beginning of the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing program in 2008 and the 1st quarter of 2015, the Fed was directly responsible for 93% of equity value growth in the US.
This modern era of central bank-dominated markets, however, is only the latest version of a game that is as old as the markets themselves. At base it’s a con game where the rich and powerful employ a raft of confidence men to lure suckers into the latest market mania. In this game, the “suckers” are the general public who are left holding the bag as the market bubble bursts while the “smart money” swoops in to buy up the leftover assets at pennies on the dollar.
The game was being played as far back as 1814 when a uniformed man posing as the aide-de-camp of Lord Cathcart landed in Dover spreading the false rumour that Napoleon had been killed by a detachment of Cossacks. When the rumours reached London later that day, three men dressed up as French officers in white Bourbon cockades were parading across Blackfriars bridge proclaiming the end of the Napoleonic empire and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. By the time the British government officially dispelled the rumour later that afternoon, an elaborate fraud had already played out in the London stock markets. The rumour had kicked off a buying frenzy and the perpetrators of what is now known as The Great Fraud of Cowley—the ones who had started the rumours and hired the actors to help spread them—had already sold 1.1 million pounds worth of government stock into the market peak.
Another bit of market manipulation centering around Napoleon’s military fortunes played out again the next year, in 1815. Nathan Rothschild of the infamous Rothschild banking dynasty used the smuggling network that he and his brothers had built to funnel gold and silver to Wellington’s army to get news of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo back to London 24 hours before the official word reached the British government. Although a fancified version of the story involving homing pigeons and Nathan’s acting abilities at the stock exchange are easily dismissed as anti-Semitic slurs by the mainstream press, even the official Rothschild Archive treatment of the incident admits that Nathan Rothschild did receive early warning of Wellington’s victory and he did profit from that foreknowledge in the stock market. Historian Niall Ferguson has written on the subject in detail in his authorized biography of the Rothschilds and even the BBC published a story in 1998 outlining how the conspiracy functioned and how the brothers communicated in secret by writing their letters in the Judendeutsch script they had learned in their childhood in the Frankfurt Jewish ghetto.
The stock market con game isn’t just an historical relic, though. Those with advance knowledge of world events continue to profit from their insider information, sometimes in the most macabre way imaginable.
ANTONIO MORA: What many Wall Street analysts believe is that the terrorists made bets that a number of stocks would see their prices fall. They did so by buying what they call ‘puts.’ If you bet right the rewards can be huge. The risks are also huge unless you know something bad is going to happen to the company you’re betting against.
DYLAN RATIGAN: This could very well be insider trading at the worst, most horrific, most evil use you’ve ever seen in your entire life.
In the wake of 9/11, researchers began to uncover a money trail that proved those with advance knowledge of the attack had indeed used their insider information to profit from the events of that day.
In addition to the Securities and Exchange Commission in the United States, the governments of Italy, Germany, Belgium and other countries began their own investigations into a series of trades betting against companies that were hurt by 9/11—like Boeing, Merrill Lynch, United Airlines, Munich Re and others—and betting on companies that profited from the attacks—including a six-fold increase in call options on the stock of defense contractor Raytheon on September 10, 2001.
In subsequent years, not one, not two, but three separate, peer-reviewed papers concluded that the unusual trading in the weeks prior to 9/11 were “consistent with insiders anticipating the 9/11 attacks.” But incredibly, the SEC investigation into this money trail was abruptly terminated and the records of that investigation were subsequently destroyed.
Why? Because, as researchers like Kevin Ryan, Michael Ruppert and others later discovered, the trail led them to the doorstep not of Al Qaeda, but well-connected American businessmen and intelligence officials.
MICHAEL C. RUPPERT: So right after the attacks of 9/11 the name Buzzy Krongard surfaced. It was instant research that revealed that Buzzy Krongard had been allegedly recruited by CIA Director George Tenet to become the Executive Director at CIA, which is the number three position, right before the attacks.
And Alex Brown was one of the many subsidiaries of Deutsche Bank, one of the primary vehicles or instruments that handled all of these criminal trades by people who obviously knew that the attacks were going to take place, where, how and involving specific airlines.
KEVIN RYAN: I came across this document that had been released: a memorandum for the record of the 9/11 Commission. It was prepared by a staff member of the 9/11 Commission. His name is Douglas Greenberg and he reviewed simply the FBI’s meetings on their communications related to this. This document identified a couple of companies that were flagged by the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) and one of them—this was September 21st just ten days after the attacks—one of these companies that was flagged was called Stratesec. And this is a very interesting company because it’s a security company that had contracts for the World Trade Center and Dulles Airport where one of the planes took off on 9/11, as well as United Airlines, which owned two of the other three planes. So this security company, Stratesec, was a very central player in in the events of 9/11, you could say, because they ran security for these different areas in the years leading up to 9/11.
So for them this company stopped to be flagged by the SEC was very compelling and when I looked at this document—prepared by the 9/11 Commission which wasn’t released until 2007—I noticed that the names had been redacted of the stock traders, but I could make out who they were. In particular, one of them was a director of the company Stratesec. He was also a director of a company in Oklahoma, an aviation company. He was also a director of a Washington, DC-based financial organization. With just that information you could tell very clearly that this man was Wirt Dexter Walker. He was the Chief Executive Officer of Stratesec and also a director there. His wife, Sally Walker, was also named in the flagging by the SEC. So I began looking into that.
JEREMY ROTHE-KUSHEL: …the last thing I want to leave you with is the National Reconnaissance Office was running a drill of a plane crashing into their building and you know they’re staffed by DoD and CIA…
ROBERT BAER: I know the guy that went into his broker in San Diego and said “Cash me out, it’s going down tomorrow.”
JEREMY ROTHE KUSHEL: Really?
ROBERT BAER: Yeah.
STEWART HOWE: That tells us something.
ROBERT BAER: What?
STEWART HOWE: That tells us something.
ROBERT BAER: Well, his brother worked at the White House.
Horrific as these instances of insider trading are, an even deeper layer of the story lies in the fact that these trades—unlike the high-profile show trials of Martha Stewart and other stories-of-the-week—never result in prosecutions. The protection afforded the 9/11 inside traders speaks to an even deeper layer of the problem: the use of the markets to line the pockets of insiders and their political cronies is not a bug in the system, but a feature. In fact, the entire system has been designed to be manipulable, ensuring that the little guys never have a chance against the billionaire bankers and hedge funds.
A clue to this story goes back to the most well-known event in stock market history: the Great Crash of 1929. Even there, in the midst of one of the most devastating financial collapses in human history, there was money to be made by insiders who knew what was coming.
One such insider was Albert Henry Wiggin, Chairman of the Chase National Bank and the man who had been instrumental in attracting the Rockefeller family to begin their century-long involvement in Chase. When the market began plummeting on Black Thursday 1929, Wiggin and his fellow banking associates were lauded as heroes for their actions to restore order to the market, which culminated in New York Stock Exchange Vice President Richard Whitney stepping out on the floor of the Exchange and making a great commotion by yelling out orders for key stocks at above-market prices.
Wiggin knew he was covered no matter what happened. Shortly before the Crash, he shorted shares in his own bank by borrowing shares from various brokers at prices he anticipated would fall, at which time he would buy the shares in the market at lower prices and return them to the brokers, making money on the difference. When the Dow stood at 359 on September 23, 1929 (the market had topped out twenty days earlier at 381), he placed what would be a hugely profitable bet that Chase’s stock would fall.
[. . .]
Before shorting those shares, Wiggin executed another profitable and shady strategy, using his bank’s funds to plump the shares up. He placed $200 million of his depositors’ money into trusts that speculated in Chase stock, thus participating in the very pool operations that artificially boosted its price during the run-up to the Crash. He pocketed $10.4 million from these trades, including $4 million from shorting the shares he drove up (after he drove them up) during the two-week period preceding the Crash. His justification for selling his own shares while Chase Securities was pushing customers to buy them was that the price was “ridiculously high.” He had, in effect, bet against all the other Chase shareholders who had trusted in his hype about the firm.
Another person who profited greatly from the financial crash was Joseph P. Kennedy, father of future president John F. Kennedy. The famous story, likely apocryphal but parroted by NPR, The Washington Post, PBS and any number of mainstream outlets, is that Kennedy, a savvy stock trader, knew the market was overheated when a random shoeshine boy gave him stock tips.
If this story is to be believed, Joe’s random interaction with a shoeshine boy in 1929 was one of the most profitable conversations of his life. Not only did Kennedy sell off most of his stock holdings shortly before the crash, he aggressively shorted the markets, meaning that while most of America—and much of the world—was plunged into one of the deepest and most prolonged financial crises in the history of the country, the Kennedy family flourished. In 1977, eight years after Joe’s death, the New York Timesestimated the family fortune to be somewhere between $300 and $500 million.
There are more than enough reasons to doubt that it was actually a brief chat with a shoeshine boy that led to Kennedy’s remarkable good fortune, however. The patriarch of the Kennedy dynasty had a reputation as an unscrupulous businessman, including the persistent allegations that he made his fortune in bootlegging during the Prohibition era. And so it was a shock to the nation when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed Kennedy to head the newly created Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934.
Even the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Historical Society struggles to explain the choice. “Kennedy had profited handsomely from financial manipulation,” their website frankly admits, “but he understood keenly the need to balance the interests of the people with the imperatives of the financial markets.” For his part, when asked why he had tapped a well-known scoundrel like Kennedy to head such an agency, President Roosevelt is said to have replied: “Takes one to catch one.”
That the SEC, the “independent federal agency” tasked with regulating the markets, should have an admitted market manipulator as its first chair should not be surprising when the agency’s track record is examined. Time and again, the SEC has not just allowed market manipulation to take place, but actively facilitated it.
When the largest Ponzi scheme in market history, Bernie Madoff’s unbelievable $64.8 billion investment fraud scam, came to a crashing halt with his arrest in December of 2008, attention turned to the SEC. How could the agency, which had investigated Madoff’s investment firm multiple times, not have halted the scam earlier?
A subsequent Inspector General report made the scope of this “failure” even more unbelievable, finding that “between June 1992 and December 2008 when Madoff confessed, the SEC received six substantive complaints that raised significant red flags concerning Madoff’s hedge fund operations and should have led to questions about whether Madoff was actually engaged in trading.” After excoriating the agency for its incompetence time and again over the course of two decades of failed opportunities, the report concludes:
As the foregoing demonstrates, despite numerous credible and detailed complaints, the SEC never properly examined or investigated Madofi’s trading and never took the necessary, but basic, steps to determine if Madoff was operating a Ponzi scheme. Had these efforts been made with appropriate follow-up at any time beginning in June of 1992 until December 2008, the SEC could have uncovered the Ponzi scheme well before Madoff confessed.
HARRY MARKOPOLOS: I gift wrapped and delivered the largest Ponzi scheme in history to them and somehow they couldn’t be bothered to conduct a thorough and proper investigation because they were too busy on matters of higher priority. If a $50 billion Ponzi scheme doesn’t make the SEC’s priority list, then I want to know who sets their priorities.
Similarly, when Enron shook the markets in 2001 by declaring the then-largest bankruptcy in history after its systemic accounting fraud was exposed, the question of the SEC’s role in the scandal arose. Why had the agency not caught on to the scam? A subsequent Senate Committee report excoriated the commission, noting that the “watchdog” had only opened one (unrelated) investigation into Enron in the past decade, that it repeatedly missed warning signs of corporate misconduct, that it granted the company unusual leeway in using mark-to-market accounting for its transactions and did not even seek to validate the models employed by the energy giant. In the end, the committee concluded that the entire affair represented a “systemic and catastrophic failure” of the SEC.
But the SEC did not use the lessons learned in these “systemic and catastrophic failures” to stop such fraud from taking place in the future. In fact, the Commission responded to these “failures” not by stringently cracking down on these scams, but by helping to facilitate new kinds of untraceable accounting trickery.
In the wake of the signal “failures” of SEC and other regulators to prevent the scandalous accounting fraud and subsequent catastrophic failures of Enron, Worldcom and Tyco, the US Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a federal law intended to “protect investors by improving the accuracy and reliability of corporate disclosures made pursuant to the securities laws, and for other purposes.” The nature of those “other purposes” soon became apparent as the devil emerged from the details of the software that promised to streamline the Sarbanes-Oxley compliance process for companies operating in the new regulatory environment.
One of these software solutions was EmailXtender, an email archiving program designed to help companies comply with Sarbanes-Oxley reporting requirements. The program was supposed to create a permanent record of emails so that auditors would be able to access all communications in the future, but, according to Richard Grove, who was working as a software salesman selling the program to prospective corporate clients, the program actually provided companies with a way to permanently and untraceably delete those records.
RICHARD GROVE: So a few weeks later in August of 2003 I was at a client called the NASD— which later changed its name so it’s now called the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority—and the NASD was looking at our product and they wanted to use it internally. And one of the guys across the table says to me, “Hey, wait a minute. This product has a back door! Because right here where you’re supposed to take this information and put it on the write-once-read-many storage, which is a type of permanent storage,” he said, “There’s this jar file and you can delete the jar file and then there’s no evidence of that transaction whatsoever.”
So he was showing me across a table that there’s a loophole, there’s a back door in a software that allows nefarious transactions to go on and subsequently they didn’t buy the software they’re like, “This is bullshit, this isn’t worth the money. This is not what it’s supposed to be and you should do something about that.” Now, I had management from my side in the meeting so I went to my managers afterwards and I’m like, “What’s this all about and why what’s going on with this?” and I was told not to talk about it.
Concerned with the possibility for mass financial fraud that was being enabled by this software, Grove took his concerns to the SEC. But instead of acting on this information to launch an investigation into the company and the software, the SEC not only dismissed Grove’s warning, but went out and bought that very software for their own use.
RICHARD GROVE: Right now the SEC reports to the President. So at the end of the day when the SEC was telling me they’re not interested, they’re telling me they’re not interested because I’m tying the Bush administration in with billionaire Richard Egan and his company that’s helping these companies do this. Of course they don’t want to sponsor that getting out to the public.
I filed a lawsuit, I represented myself in court against a multi-billion dollar international corporation and after three years—and after proving my case in court, including the fact that the SEC acted with complicity to protect the perpetrators—my case was dismissed on a technicality. Recognizing that the events I proved in court actually happened but were conveniently “outside the statute of limitations for the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.”
And once I understood the purpose of Sarbanes-Oxley regulations was to keep these companies from deleting files and that the back door in the software allow these companies to delete files— and more importantly the fact that someone outside of the company that’s not even associated with the company but has access to that software could launder money or steal money or just delete money from corporations and switch financial records all around without anyone, any investigator, any auditor being able to audit that—those things I thought were interesting. But when the SEC, after I told them, bought the software with the back door in it and started to use it for itself then I knew that the SEC was not there to regulate like I thought it was. They were also, “Hey, we can find a benefit from this back door in a software. We can delete files now. Now we’re above the law!”
But of all the various schemes for manipulating the markets, none have been quite so brazen as the Plunge Protection Team.
Formally known as the “Working Group on Financial Markets,” the Plunge Protection Team, or PPT, was born in the wake of another stock market crash: Black Monday of October 1987. Far from a “conspiracy theory” or “internet rumour,” the formation of the group was announced in the pages of the Federal Register on March 22, 1988, which contained, on page 9421, the text of Executive Order 12631, a seemingly mundane announcement signed by President Reagan on March 18, 1988.
The order, citing “the major issues raised by the numerous studies on the events in the financial markets surrounding October 19, 1987,” goes on to establish a working group of the treasury secretary, the Fed chair, the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). It empowers the group to “consult, as appropriate, with representatives of the various exchanges, clearinghouses, self-regulatory bodies, and with major market participants to determine private sector solutions wherever possible” and to report back to the president.
Hidden behind this innocuous-sounding rhetoric is an organization that has been at work for the last three decades, quietly but documentably intervening to prop up the markets whenever they start plunging—or even sagging.
The name “Plunge Protection Team” comes from a Washington Post article that ran under that headline in February 1997. In that piece, staff writer Brett D. Fromson revealed how the Working Group on Financial Markets (like “defense planners in the Cold War period”) war-game various market cataclysms and their response to them. One scenario Fromson described involves a large sell-off on a Monday morning after a week of tanking markets.
“The chairman of the New York Stock Exchange has called the White House chief of staff and asked permission to close the world’s most important stock market. [. . .] In the Oval Office, the president confers with the members of his Working Group on Financial Markets—the secretary of the treasury and the chairmen of the Federal Reserve Board, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The officials conclude that a presidential order to close the NYSE would only add to the market’s panic, so they decide to ride out the storm. The Working Group struggles to keep financial markets open so that trading can continue. By the closing bell, a modest rally is underway.”
The article acknowledged that each of the Plunge Protection Team’s constituent agencies (the treasury, the Fed, the SEC and the CFTC) have a “confidential plan” on file to deal with a market meltdown. But aside from trivial details (the SEC’s plan is called the “red book,” for example, after the color of the document’s cover) nothing of substance is revealed. How, exactly, do the agencies plan to “keep financial markets open so that trading can continue”?
A major clue to the PPT manipulation puzzle came in the form of a 1989 Wall Street Journal op-ed by Robert Heller, who was at the time exiting a three-year stint as Federal Reserve System governor. Entitled “Have Fed Support Stock Market, Too,” Heller’s op-ed argued that the so-called “circuit breakers” set up after the Black Monday 1987 scare were not sufficient to prevent another recurrence of panic. “Instead,” he opined, “an appropriate institution should be charged with the job of preventing chaos in the market: the Federal Reserve.” In Heller’s vision, the Fed could prevent a market rout by stepping in to purchase stock futures contracts during sell-offs.
Rather than regarding Heller’s piece as a mere op-ed offering a proposal for something the Fed could do in the future, however, some reporters—like John Crudele, the man who drew attention to Heller’s “proposal” in the first place—have suggested that the Wall Street Journal piece was in fact a trial balloon, preparing the public for the eventual revelation that the Fed was already intervening in the markets.
If Heller’s op-ed was a trial balloon, the full truth was finally revealed to the public in the wake of “the day that changed everything.” After all, if the PPT was ever going to intervene to prop up the markets, the pandemonium of 9/11 and the ensuing market sell-off presented them with the perfect opportunity to do so.
And so it was that George Stephanopolous appeared on ABC’s Good Morning America on September 17, 2001, to blithely announce to the American public that their markets were a sham:
GEORGE STEPHANOPOLOUS: What I wanted to talk about for a few minutes is the various efforts that are going on in public and behind the scenes by the Fed and other government officials to guard against a free-fall in the markets. [. . .] The Fed in 1989 created what is called the ‘Plunge Protection Team’—which is the Federal Reserve, big major banks, representatives of the New York Stock Exchange and the other exchanges—and they have been meeting informally so far. And they have a kind of an informal agreement among major banks to come in and start to buy stock if there appears to be a problem. They have in the past acted more formally . . . I don’t know if you remember, but in 1998, there was a crisis called the Long-Term Capital Crisis. It was a major currency trader, and there was a global currency crisis. And they, with the guidance of the Fed, all of the banks got together when it started to collapse and propped up the currency markets. And they have plans in place to consider [doing] that [again] if the markets start to fall.
And, just like when it was calmly admitted in 2016 that the “record bull run” since 2008 had been a Federal Reserve-created mirage, the public was flat-out told in 2001 that the Fed would coordinate with the banks to interfere in the markets as needed. And in both cases, these revelations were promptly memory-holed and ignored in all future reporting of the market’s gyrations.
So what do the manipulations of the Plunge Protection Team actually look like?
On Monday, February 5, 2018, things were playing out on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange much like the “nightmare scenario” painted in the 1997 Washington Post article by Fromson. After a 666-point decline the previous Friday, the Dow Jones was down a further 1,600 points on the day, as big a decline as the index had ever seen. . . . And then, miraculously, late in the afternoon “[s]omeone arbitrarily and aggressively started buying stocks and halved the loss.”
As John Crudele, the journalist that has been covering the PPT and its machinations for decades now, observed at the time:
Nobody has ever proven that the Fed and its friends actually protect Wall Street against plunges. It is, you might say, the Loch Ness monster of the financial world — people get glimpses of something but never see a clear picture.
That’s what happened during the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008. Telephone records I obtained showed numerous calls between then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and contacts on Wall Street on days when the stock market was tanking and the decline needed to be stopped.
The action in stocks on those days looked a lot like what happened on Monday, when the Dow was down nearly 1,600 points and was suddenly jerked back to a smaller loss.
For decades now, a similar scene has played out on days of dramatic market plunges. After an initial sell off, a late afternoon rally by a mystery buyer would reassure the markets and claw back the loss. Sometimes, the manipulation was so obvious it left literal straight lines in the charts. But still, no official word ever came from the Plunge Protection Team itself.
. . . until December 2018, that is. Ten months after Crudele called out the PPT’s actions to prop up the Dow Jones after its 1600 point plunge, then-Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin openly announced that he was calling on the Plunge Protection Team to “assure normal market operations” during a December stock slide that was on track to be the worst December in the US markets since 1930. As Forbes put it in their headline about the move: “Mnuchin Calls Plunge Protection Team; Stocks Soar One Day Later.” In the article, Forbes writer Adam Sarhan noted of the events following Mnuchin’s open call to the PPT:
“The market was closed on Tuesday for Christmas but stocks soared 1,000 points (the largest gain since the last bear market during the financial crisis) on Wednesday. Literally, the first day after that call was made. I can’t make this up.”
With a gift for understatement, Sarhan concludes that: “One important lesson investors can learn from the market action over the past decade is that the government plays a very important role.”
From crooked regulators to outright manipulation, from “failed” investigations to insider trading windfalls, the markets have been one big con job on the American public, and the people of the world, since their inception. In fact, there are many more examples of fraud, deception and manipulation that could be documented.
There is, for example, the testimony of Bill Murphy to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission during a hearing on suppression of precious metal prices.
BART CHILTON: But can you give the Commission some specific evidence, some specific examples of how you think that’s occurring, when you think that’s occurring?
BILL MURPHY: Yes I can and I had 11 years worth of evidence that all hangs together here. But somebody came to my attention two days ago of a whistleblower nature that we’re going to handle hand to the press afterwards and we think it’s very important for the American public and this hearing to have this information.
On March 23rd, 2010, GATA Director Adrian Douglas was contacted by a whistleblower by the name of Andrew Maguire. Mr. McGuire, formerly of Goldman Sachs, is a metal trader in London. He has been told first hand by traders working for JPMorgan Chase, that JPM manipulates the precious metals markets and they brag how they make money doing so.
In November 2009, he contacted the CFTC Enforcement Division to report this criminal activity. He described in detail the way JPM signals to the markets its intentions to take down the precious metals. Traders recognize these signals and make money shorting the metals alongside JPM. Maguire explained how there are routine market manipulations at the time of option expiry, non-farm payroll data releases, and COMEX contract rollover, as well as ad-hoc events.
On February 3 he gave two days’ advance warning by email to Eliud Ramirez, a senior investigator for the CFTC’s Enforcement Division, that the precious metals would be attacked upon the release of the non-farm payroll data on February 5. Then on February 5, as it played out exactly as predicted, further e-mails were sent to Ramirez while the manipulation was in progress.
It would not be possible to predict such a market move unless the market was manipulated.
In an email on that day, Mr. Maguire wrote: “It is common knowledge here in London amongst the metals traders that it is JPM’s intent to flush out and cover as many shorts as possible prior to any discussion in March about position limits. I feel sorry for all those not in the loop. A serious amount of money was made and lost today and in my opinion as a result of the CFTC [allowing] by your own definition an illegal concentrated and manipulative position to continue.”
Or there was the 2010 Flash Crash, the harrowing 35-minute window from 2:32 PM to 3:07 PM on May 6, 2010, when the Dow plunged nearly 1,000 points . . . and then gained most of it back. The incredible and unprecedented swing left traders and financial talking heads completely stymied, but after five years of relentless investigation, the Department of Justice presented the man that they framed as the arch-mastermind that set off the most alarming collapse-and-recovery in the history of the markets: a day trader living in his parent’s house in Hounslow.
NARRATOR: 15 minutes of chaos that shook the world’s biggest markets.
NEWS ANCHOR: What the heck is going on down there?
REPORTER: I don’t know. There is fear. This is capitulation, really.
LIAM VAUGHN: On May 6th, 2010, without warning, the U.S. stock market and futures markets just crashed.
REPORTER: It can’t be there. That is not a real price.
ANCHOR: The flash crash, which wiped a trillion dollars off the value of American companies in five minutes. . . .
LIAM VAUGHN: To look at a price chart, it looked like a kind of runaway elephant.
ANCHOR: It took authorities five years, guys, to track down this lone British trader, allegedly involved in a 2010 flash crash.
REPORTER: Navinder Singh Sarao, dubbed the hound of Hounslow, has been accused of manipulating the market.
REPORTER: U.S. regulators claim he made about $40 Million
Despite the fact that multipleprofessors, mainstream newspapers and even a former rogue trader himself all testified to the impossibility that the incredible rollercoaster of the Flash Crash was really caused by the “spoofing” antics of a lone trader, the story was effectively shelved and the underlying issue of the algorithmically-driven High Frequency Trading—which involves bots performing large numbers of orders in fractions of a second and requires traders to pay millions of dollars to co-locate their servers with the exchanges’ computers to give them a head start on their competitors that is measured in milliseconds—was never addressed.
Or there was the insider trading scandal of 2020, when multiple senators were probed for insider trading after being briefed by the senate’s health and foreign affairs committees about the likely effects of the coronavirus scare in the US.
JESSICA SMITH: Yeah, Adam, several senators are facing criticism this morning after reports that they sold stock after being briefed about the coronavirus. But before the market started tanking, four senators are said to have made trades. But two in particular are facing a lot of criticism.
The first is Senator Richard Burr. ProPublica reports on February 13th he sold between $628,000 to $1.7 million dollars worth of stock in 33 separate transactions. He is the chairman of the Senate Intel committee and he was getting daily briefings about the coronavirus at that time according to Reuters. So there are a lot of questions about why he made those trades.
In fact, there are many, many such examples of market rigging, insider trading and manipulation of stock and commodity prices for the benefit of the bankers and their political allies that could be detailed, not just in the US markets, but in markets around the world. But such an exhaustive list would be, by this point, unnecessary. The markets are rigged, and that rigging is pervasive and systemic.
So it should come as no surprise that the GameStop pandemonium began when it was observed that another common method of market manipulation was taking place on GameStop’s stock: naked shorting.
Naked shorting involves traders taking advantages of loopholes and discrepancies in paper and electronic trading systems to short shares that don’t even exist. In this case, hedge funds, convinced that the flailing gaming retailer was going to go the way of BlockBuster Video and seeing the December 2020 reports of operating losses, began aggressively shorting the stock. By the time the “wallstreetbets” community on reddit discovered the naked shorting operation, the hedge funds were already 140% short on shares of GameStop, meaning that 40% more stock was being sold short than even existed.
This led to the massive short squeeze in January, with redditors and other retail investors buying up shares in GameStop and running up the stock price, forcing the hedge funds to buy up stock to cover their shorts and exposing them to billions of dollars in losses.
But that was only the beginning of the revelations of market rigging in the GameStop saga. The remarkable squeeze was brought to an abrupt halt when Robinhood—the electronic trading platform that burst on the scene in 2014 promising to “democratize the stock market” with its zero-commission trading app—stopped trading on GameStop and other wallstreetbets-driven trades like AMC Entertainment, BlackBerry and Nokia. The official explanation for the trading halt—that Robinhood had to suspend trading in the stocks until it could increase its collateral with the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation—merely underlines the point that the average mom-and-pop investor will continue to be thwarted from trading while the massive hedge funds and market makers with direct access to the markets will always be able to cover their positions in the event of any popular, “democratic” market activity.
This point was further underlined when yet another aspect of the retail investing scam was revealed: payment for order flow, or PFOF, in which hedge funds pay retail brokerages for access to their customers’ trades. With this information, hedge funds can not only buy orders before they are processed and flip the trade back to the market, pocketing the spread between the buy and sell price, but they can front run orders, effectively cutting in front of the brokerages’ clients to buy hot stocks before the retail investors. As it turns out, Robinhood made nearly $700 million selling their clients’ trade data to the big hedge funds in 2020 alone.
Nor was it a surprise when it was learned that Biden’s Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, was paid over $800,000 in speaking fees by Citadel LLC which operates both Citadel—a hedge fund that provided a $2 billion emergency backstop for GameStop short seller Melvin Capital—and Citadel Securities—”a market maker that handles about 40% of U.S. retail stock order flow, including from brokerages like free-trading app Robinhood.” When asked whether Yellen would recuse herself from advising the president on the GameStop situation, White House press secretary Jen Psaki responded that she wouldn’t, saying that Yellen was an expert and that she deserved the money.
REPORTER: . . . And I had a follow-up on the markets and everything that’s happening with GameStop. You did mention, I believe yesterday, that the treasury secretary is monitoring the situation and she’s, kind of, on top of it. There have been some kind of concerns about her previous engagements with Citadel and speaking fees that she has received from Citadel. Are there any plans to have her recuse herself from advising the President on GameStop and the whole Robinhood situation?
PSAKI: Well, just to be clear, what I said was that we have—the treasury secretary is now confirmed. Obviously, we have a broad economic team. The SEC put out a statement yesterday that I referred to. But I don’t think I have anything more for you on it, other than to say, separate from the GameStop issue, the secretary of treasury is one of the world-renowned experts on markets, on the economy. It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone she was paid to give her perspective and advice before she came into office.
The entire affair grew even more absurd when internet researchers discovered that Jen Psaki’s relative, Jeff Psaki, himself worked for Citadel. The “fact checkers” at Newsweek were quick to rule the story as false, however, not because Psaki’s relative did not in fact work for Citadel, but because “a source close to Jeff” told Newsweek that “Jen and Jeff Psaki are distant second cousins but have no relationship.”
Whatever further twists and turns the GameStop saga takes, the conclusion is foregone: the “little people” may be able to get one past the goalkeepers of the manipulated markets here and there, but those deviations from the standard will always return to the status quo. In the end, the hedge funds and their billions will be protected while the little guy will be misinformed, steered down blind alleys, panicked, tricked into investing in bubbles, and, ultimately, fleeced for the benefit of the financial vultures and their bought-and-paid-for politicians and regulatory friends.
At last the David and Goliath story that has been woven around the GameStop insurrection is revealed for what it is: a story, a fable, a convenient narrative to trick the public back into the phoney, manipulated markets to once again take their place at the casino table. It is designed to trick people into thinking that this time they’ll be able to win against the house. But that is not how a casino works. In the central-bank inflated, derivatives-laden mystery markets of Wall Street, the games are rigged, the dice is loaded, and the house always wins in the end.
None of this is surprising to those who have known for decades that the markets are rigged. But every generation needs to see the deception play out in real time to understand just how deep and pervasive the systemic rot is. From this point on, those who have experienced the effects of this deception only have to answer one question: Are you going to continue to play Wall Street’s rigged game, or are you going to take your chips off the table and invest in local businesses and projects with the people on Main Street?
If you were online last year around this time, your social media timeline was likely flooded with an endless stream of stories and memes featuring bats.
The coronavirus was just gaining steam back in January of 2020 and rumors were swirling that the virus started because Chinese people ate “bat soup.”
While most of the bat-themed stories and memes were outlandish, the Worldwide Health Organization (WHO) did admit that Covid-19 and bats are most likely ancestrally linked. However, that’s where they say the connection ends. WHO still claims the origins of Covid-19 remain a mystery.
Until now…
A bombshell investigative report from Fox News host Steve Hilton has shed all-new light on the origins of Covid-19, and according to the report, it has nothing to do with bat soup and everything to do with Dr. Fauci and ferrets.
Yes, ferrets.
Ferrets are those adorable-looking furry little weasels that many Americans keep as pets… and Dr. Fauci is that annoying little weasel Americans can’t get rid of.
And when these two weasels finally came together inside a research lab in Wuhan, China, something unthinkable occurred — a deadly and destructive pandemic was created and unleashed upon the world.
That’s what Steve Hilton is claiming in his new investigation into the origin of the Coronavirus pandemic.
However, the story of Covid-19 doesn’t start in Wuhan, China. It actually began about ten years ago in a Netherlands research lab.
An innovative epidemiological study took place at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands. Researchers were looking to discover different ways respiratory viruses reacted in humans. Scientists used ferrets in their study because ferrets have similar pulmonary structures to humans, with well-developed respiratory bronchioles and submucosal glands.
Specifically, researchers wanted to know if a non-airborne virus could be mutated in order to become a contagious airborne disease.
So, in order to find this out, researchers injected the ferrets with a flu virus and after a series of tests, they discovered that yes, non-airborne viruses could be manipulated to become much stronger and spread via respiratory droplets.
The findings were groundbreaking and this study paved the way for an entirely new type of scientific genomics research called “gain-of-function.”
The point of gain-of-function research was to replicate in a lab what had been done with the ferrets in the Netherlands — to take a virus and manipulate and mutate it to make it “stronger” in order to see if it will “gain new function.”
On the surface, it sounds a bit ghoulish and almost “Frankenstein-like,” but imagine the advances medical research could make in the field of virus testing and vaccines simply by recreating these viruses in a lab.
Gain-of-function research was based on the philosophy, “keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.”
However, when you keep your enemies that close, you run the risk of getting burned.
Creating these ungodly strong and highly contagious viruses for research purposes could lead to an accidental or nefarious catastrophe of epic proportions.
But even so, and despite the danger, many in the scientific community believed the potential for progress outweighed the tremendous risks involved.
Dr. Anthony Fauci was one of those people.
The gain-of-function research quickly spread to labs all over the world and the money was flowing in from all corners of the globe, including the United States.
According to a Newsweek piece written in 2019, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Fauci-led National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), committed $3.7 million dollars to research bats and coronaviruses in China over a six-year period.
It’s worth noting that in the Newsweek piece US intelligence backtracked from their earlier claims that the coronavirus outbreak occurred “naturally,” and conceded that the pandemic “might” have started from a leak in the Wuhan lab.
But this new research wasn’t just about bats. It went deeper and darker than that. As a matter of fact, Dr. Fauci was among the first to fund the controversial gain-of-function ferret research in Wuhan, China. Fauci was so committed to the controversial work that back in 2011 he wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post, entitled, “A Flu Virus Risk Worth Taking,” where he vigorously defended gain-of-function research.
But something very interesting took place right before Obama’s moratorium on gain-of-function took effect.
Dr. Fauci had commissioned a study to assess the risk of new coronaviruses emerging from wild animals. Fauci wanted to see what viruses could infect animals and humans. The directive behind the research and written in the project summary was gain-of-function manipulation.
But the Obama admin was getting cold feet about the program.
While many in the scientific community (like Fauci) were very excited by gain-of-function research, the more popular it became, the more scrutiny it received, and significant security issues were being raised. Eventually, the controversy got to be too much and in 2014 the United States pulled the plug.
NPR reported that the Obama administration was concerned about any research that could make the viruses more dangerous, so they wanted to stop and review studies to see if they could make these germs capable of causing more disease or spreading easily through the air.
Gain-of-function studies, or research that improves the ability of a pathogen to cause disease, help define the fundamental nature of human-pathogen interactions, thereby enabling assessment of the pandemic potential of emerging infectious agents, informing public health and preparedness efforts, and furthering medical countermeasure development. Gain-of-function studies may entail biosafety and biosecurity risks; therefore, the risks and benefits of gain-of-function research must be evaluated, both in the context of recent U.S. biosafety incidents and to keep pace with new technological developments, in order to determine which types of studies should go forward and under what conditions.
In light of recent concerns regarding biosafety and biosecurity, effective immediately, the U.S. Government (USG) will pause new USG funding for gain-of-function research on influenza, MERS or SARS viruses, as defined below. This research funding pause will be effective until a robust and broad deliberative process is completed that results in the adoption of a new USG gain-of-function research policy 1 . Restrictions on new funding will apply as follows: New USG funding will not be released for gain-of-function research projects that may be reasonably anticipated to confer attributes to influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses such that the virus would have enhanced pathogenicity and/or transmissibility in mammals via the respiratory route. The research funding pause would not apply to characterization or testing of naturally occurring influenza, MERS, and SARS viruses, unless the tests are reasonably anticipated to increase transmissibility and/or pathogenicity. [PHE.gov]
But Dr. Fauci didn’t stop funding gain-of-function.
That little weasel kept digging…
Fauci kept the research alive by cleverly subcontracting the work out to a New York group called Eco-Health Alliance, led by Zoologist Peter Daszak. Daszak’s claim to fame is discovering the link between bats and SARS.
Fauci paid the three-plus-million dollars to Eco-Health Alliance and the research continued.
But here’s the wildest part…
According to Steve Hilton’s bombshell report, Eco-Health then turned around and subcontracted the gain-of-function portion of Fauci’s research back to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Hilton says the paperwork from Wuhan has a “reference number” attached that leads directly back to the funds Fauci paid to Eco-Health Alliance.
All roads lead back to Wuhan, and Fauci is driving the car.
It’s no secret that Fauci funded the Wuhan lab, there’s been a lot of reporting on his “general funding.” However, Steve Hilton’s bombshell report uncovered gory details about the specific work that was being done which nobody has reported on thus far.
According to the Wuhan paperwork that Mr. Hilton downloaded, the lab collected bat feces from a cave in China and discovered many cases of novel Coronavirus in the samples. Researchers analyzed and sequenced their genetic information, then built new viruses off of those samples and infected human cells with them. That research revealed that their man-made viruses could actually behave exactly like a natural virus.
But it’s what researchers unlocked that is the most terrifying of all.
According to the report, the lab’s creation and research of the virus unlocked a very specific “gateway” into the human body. And even more curious and creepy is that the Covid-19 virus that we’re dealing with today has those exact same gateway characteristics.
Do you believe in coincidences? I don’t…
The Covid-19 virus sticks to cells 10-20 times stronger than the SARS virus did, and this is what makes Covid-19 so incredibly contagious.
Take a look at what happens when Covid enters the body:
Coronavirus enters the body through the nose, mouth, or eyes. Once inside the body, it goes inside healthy cells and uses the machinery in those cells to make more virus particles. When the cell is full of viruses, it breaks open. This causes the cell to die and the virus particles can go on to infect more cells.
The viruses created during the Wuhan research are not exactly the same as the Covid-19 virus we’re dealing with today. However, as Mr. Hilton points out, the research that was done confirmed that Covid-19 could be manufactured in a lab using the same techniques that were developed in Dr. Fauci’s project.
In addition, Fauci’s project continued for another three years.
Today’s Covid virus is different than any other “natural” virus we’ve seen in the past. Natural viruses become more contagious over time as they naturally mutate, but today’s virus already had that feature “built-in” right out of the gate.
The paperwork from Dr. Fauci’s project explains how researchers swapped viruses from bats and other animals in order to make more infectious viruses to study.
And even more curious was what Chinese Virologisst Shi Zhengli said — she explained that the “backbone” of this Covid-19 virus matches other man-made viruses from the Wuhan lab library.
According to Steve Hilton, experts say that Covid-19 looks like two different strains from bats, and another unidentified animal… possibly the ferret again?
The question is this — can something like Covid-19 happen naturally? And if so, why does it look and act so similarly to man-made viruses from just a few years before, many of which are from Dr. Fauci’s personal disease vault?
More coincidences? They’re really piling up now.
I don’t believe in coincidences, but I also don’t know how Covid came to be or how it was unleashed on the world. But I do think that Steve Hilton’s investigation is the most in-depth and compelling that we’ve seen thus far. It definitely puts Fauci in the thick of things in a very precarious way, and it opens the door to a lot more questions.
Personally, I find it very hard to believe that all of this groundbreaking research was going on without Obama’s knowledge. He’s a man that loves to “weaponize” things. That’s what his entire legacy consists of — weaponized IRS, Intel, and media.
Was Dr. Fauci hiding the research from Obama, or were Obama and Dr. Fauci hiding the research from everyone else? And after all of this information we just digested, is it so far-fetched to ask if Dr. Fauci’s project and research were used later for something horribly nefarious in order to regain power?
Or was everything just one big coincidence?
All good questions and the American people deserve answers.
This is the video that outed Dr. Fauci’s gain-of-function research, and right now, everything he’s worked for hinges on whether or not Americans see this video and demand answers. If that happens, Fauci is likely done for.
ALL THE EVIDENCE.
FAUCI MONEY / ECOHEALTH ALLIANCE / GAIN OF FUNCTION VIRUS RESEARCH / WUHAN INSTITUTE.
All the cover ups, even the reason for the Mink cull. All here. Steve Hilton investigates origins of COVID-19, links to US commissioned research. https://t.co/xI7Gq7m6gG
It’s been an open secret, ever since Dr. Michael Mann used “Mike’s Nature Trick” to “hide the decline” by covering up some inconvenient tree ring data in the hockey stick climate graph, that climate alarmists will go to almost any length to only show the public the “crisis side” of climate data.
The National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) has been the keeper of U.S. wildfire data for decades, tracking both the number of wildfires and acreage burned all the way back to 1926. However, after making that entire dataset public for decades, now, in a blatant act of cherry picking, NIFC “disappeared” a portion of it, and only show data from 1983. You can see it here.
Fortunately, the Internet never forgets, and the entire dataset is preserved on the Internet Wayback machine and other places, despite NIFC’s ham-handed attempt to disappear the data.
Why would they do this you ask? The answer is simple; data prior to 1983 shows that U.S. wildfires were far worse both in frequency and total acreage burned. By disappearing all data prior to 1983, which just happens to be the lowest point in the dataset, now all of the sudden we get a positive slope of worsening wildfire aligning with increased global temperature, which is perfect for claiming “climate change is making wildfire worse.” See figure 1 below for a before and after comparison of what the data looks like when you plot it.
Figure 1: Comparison of the before and after erasure NIFC dataset showing acres burned. The blue trend line goes from a negative trend to a positive one when cherry picked data is used.
Clearly, wildfires were far worse in the past, and clearly, now the data tells an entirely different story when showing only data post-1983. The new story told by the sanitized data is in alignment with the irrational screeching of climate alarmists that “wildfires are driven by climate change”.
This wholesale erasure of important public data stinks, but in today’s narrative control culture that wants to rid us of anything that might be inconvenient or doesn’t fit the “woke” narrative, it isn’t surprising.
Interestingly, the history on the Internet Wayback Machine shows how NIFC rationalized this erasure of important public data.
Back in June 2011 when this data was first presented by NIFC publicly, it was simply presented “as-is”. They say only this:
Figures prior to 1983 may be revised as NICC verifies historical data.
In 2018, they added a new caveat, saying this:
The National Interagency Coordination Center at NIFC compiles annual wildland fire statistics for federal and state agencies. This information is provided through Situation Reports, which have been in use for several decades. Prior to 1983, sources of these figures are not known, or cannot be confirmed, and were not derived from the current situation reporting process. As a result the figures prior to 1983 should not be compared to later data.
According to the Internet Wayback Machine, that caveat first appeared on the NIFC data page somewhere between January 14 and March 7 of 2018.
It seems they received some blowback from the idea that their data, when plotted, clearly showed wildfires to be far worse in the past, completely blowing the global-warming-climate-change-wildfire connection out of the water.
Prior to 1983, the federal wildland fire agencies did not track official wildfire data using current reporting processes. As a result, there is no official data prior to 1983 posted on this site.
Not only is that a lie of omission, it is ridiculous. Their agenda seems very clear. When the data was first published, they only advised the public that some data prior to 1983 might be “… revised as NICC verifies historical data”.
There was no published concern that the data might be invalid, or that we shouldn’t use it. Besides, the data is very simple; a count of the number of fires and the number of acres burned. How hard is that to compile and verify as accurate?
What’s worse is that this data has been trusted for decades in almost every news story about any wildfire that ever occurred in the U.S. In virtually every news story about a wildfire, the number of acres burned it THE NUMBER the press uses in the story, without it, there is no scale of the severity of the fire. Similarly, for every story about “what a bad wildfire season we’ve had”, the press cites the number of fires as well as the acreage burned.
And now, after decades of that data being provided to the press and the public, and nearly a decade of NIFC making it publicly available on their website, they want us to believe that it is now unreliable data?
Seriously, just how hard is it to count the number of fires that have happened and the number of acres burned?
What NIFC is doing is essentially labeling every firefighter, every fire captain, every forester, and every smoke jumper who has fought wildfires for decades as being untrustworthy in their assessment and measurement of this critical, yet very simple fire data. I’ll take data from people on the fire scene over government bureaucratic doublespeak every day of the week and twice on Sundays.
This whole affair is outrageous. But what is even more outrageous is that NIFC isn’t at all transparent as to the reason for the change. They essentially say “The data prior to 1983 is no good, trust us”. There is no citation of a study, no methodology given, no rationale for the removal. That’s not science, that’s not statistics, that’s not even sensible, but that is what is happening.
Plotting the entire NIFC dataset (before it was partially disappeared) gives us some hints as to why this has been done, and how wildfire and weather patterns have been inextricably linked for decades. Note figure 2 below, combining the number of fires and number of acres burned. See the annotations that I have added.
Figure 2: Plot of the entire NIFC wildfire dataset, with acreage burned in amber, and total number of fires in a given year in blue. Annotations show major weather events in the U.S.
Clearly, what NIFC has done by saying data prior to 1983 is “unreliable” and disappearing it is not just hiding important fire history, but cherry picking a data starting point that is the lowest in the entire record to ensure that an upwards trend exists from that point.
Cherry picking, suppressing evidence, or the fallacy of incomplete evidence is the act of pointing to individual cases or data that seem to confirm a particular position while ignoring a significant portion of related and similar cases or data that may contradict that position.
And by choosing the lowest point in the record for total fires, 1983, and making all data prior to that unavailable, NIFC ensures that any comparison between fires and climate change over the last 38 years always shows an upward trend and correlation with rising temperature.
It seems to me that NIFC very likely caved to pressure from climate activists to disappear this inconvenient data. By erasing the past data, NIFC has become untrustworthy. This erasure is not just unscientific, it’s dishonest and possibly fraudulent.
For posterity, the entire dataset from NIFC (including pre-1983) is available here in an Excel (.xlsx) file:
In an interview on Tuesday with Fox News’ Bret Baier, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) denied that she spread the discredited CIA “Russian bounty” story. That CIA tale, claiming Russia was paying Taliban fighters to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan, was cooked up by the CIA and then published by The New York Times on June 27 of last year, right as former President Trump announced his plans to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. The Times story, citing anonymous intelligence officials, was then continually invoked by pro-war Republicans and Democrats — led by Cheney — to justify their blocking of that troop withdrawal. The story was discredited when the U.S. intelligence community admitted last month that it had only “low to moderate confidence” that any of this even happened.
When Baier asked Cheney about her role in spreading this debunked CIA story, Cheney blatantly lied to him, claiming “if you go back and look at what I said — every single thing I said: I saidif those stories are true, we need to know why the President and Vice President were not briefed on them.” After Baier pressed her on the fact that she vested this story with credibility, Cheney insisted a second time that she never endorsed the claim but merely spoke conditionally, always using the “if these reports are true” formulation. Watch Cheney deny her role in spreading that story.
Liz Cheney, as she so often does, blatantly lied. That she merely spoke of the Russian bounty story in the conditional — “every single thing I said: I saidif those stories are true” — is completely and demonstrably false. Indeed, other than Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), there are few if any members of Congress who did more to spread this Russian bounty story as proven truth, all in order to block troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. In so doing, she borrowed from a pro-war playbook pioneered by her dad, to whom she owes her career: the former Vice President would leak CIA claims to The New York Times to justify war, then go on Meet the Press with Tim Russert, as he did on September 8, 2002, and cite those New York Times reports as though they were independent confirmation of his views coming from that paper rather than from him:
MR. RUSSERT: What, specifically, has [Saddam] obtained that you believe would enhance his nuclear development program? …..
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Now, in the case of a nuclear weapon, that means either plutonium or highly enriched uranium. And what we’ve seen recently that has raised our level of concern to the current state of unrest, if you will, if I can put it in those terms, is that he now is trying, through his illicit procurement network, to acquire the equipment he needs to be able to enrich uranium to make the bombs.
MR. RUSSERT: Aluminum tubes.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Specifically aluminum tubes. There’s a story in The New York Times this morning this is — I don’t — and I want to attribute The Times. I don’t want to talk about, obviously, specific intelligence sources, but it’s now public that, in fact, [Saddam] has been seeking to acquire, and we have been able to intercept and prevent him from acquiring through this particular channel, the kinds of tubes that are necessary to build a centrifuge. And the centrifuge is required to take low-grade uranium and enhance it into highly enriched uranium, which is what you have to have in order to build a bomb.
So having CIA stories leak to the press that fuel the pro-war case, then having pro-war politicians cite those to justify their pro-war position, is a Cheney Family speciality.
On July 1, the House Armed Services Committee, of which Rep. Cheney is a member, debated amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act, the bill that authorized $740.5 billion in military spending. One of Cheney’s top priorities was to align with the Committee’s pro-war Democrats, funded by weapons manufacturers, to block Trump’s plan to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2020 and to withdraw roughly 1/3 of the 34,000 U.S. troops in Germany.
To justify her opposition, Cheney — contrary to what she repeatedly insisted to Baier — cited the CIA’s Russian bounty story without skepticism. In a joint statement with Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-TX), ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, that Cheney published on her website on June 27 — the same day that The New York Times published its first story about the CIA tale — Cheney pronounced herself “concerned about Russian activity in Afghanistan, including reports that they have targeted U.S. forces.” There was nothing conditional about the statement: they were preparing to block troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and cited this story as proof that “Russia does not wish us well in Afghanistan.”
After today’s briefing with senior White House officials, we remain concerned about Russian activity in Afghanistan, including reports that they have targeted U.S. forces. It has been clear for some time that Russia does not wish us well in Afghanistan. We believe it is important to vigorously pursue any information related to Russia or any other country targeting our forces. Congress has no more important obligation than providing for the security of our nation and ensuring our forces have the resources they need.
An even more definitive use of this Russia bounty story came when Cheney held a press conference to explain her opposition to Trump’s plans to withdraw troops. In this statement, she proclaimed that she “remains concerned about Russian activities in Afghanistan.” She then explicitly threatened Russia over the CIA’s “bounty” story, warning them that “any targeting of U.S. forces by Russians, by anyone else, will face a very swift and deadly response.” She then gloated about the U.S. bombing of Russia-linked troops in Syria in 2018 using what she called “overwhelming and lethal force,” and warned that this would happen again if they target U.S. forces in Afghanistan:
Does this sound even remotely like what Cheney claimed to Baier? She denied having played a key role in spreading the Russia bounty story because, as she put it, “every single thing I said, I said: if those stories are true.” She also told him that she never referred to that CIA claim except by saying: “if these reports are true.” That is false.
The issue is not merely that Cheney lied: that would hardly be news. It is that the entire media narrative about Cheney’s removal from her House leadership role is a fraud. Her attacks on Trump and her party leadership were not confined to criticisms of the role played by the former president in contesting the validity of the 2020 election outcome or inciting the January 6 Capitol riot — because Liz Cheney is such a stalwart defender of the need for truth and adherence to the rule of law in politics.
Cheney played the key role in forming an alliance with pro-war Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee to repeatedly defeat the bipartisan anti-war minority [led by Ro Khanna (D-CA), Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL)] to prevent any meaningful changes promised by Trump during the 2016 campaign to put an end to the U.S. posture of Endless War. As I reported about the House Armed Services Committee hearing last July, the CIA tale was repeatedly cited by Cheney and her allies to justify ongoing U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan.
Cheney is motivated by power, not ethics. In 2016, Trump ran — and won — by explicitly inveighing against the Bush/Cheney foreign policy of endless war, militarism and imperialism that Liz Cheney, above all else, still vehemently supports. What she is attempting to do is reclaim the Republican Party and deliver it back to the neocons and warmongers who dominated it under her father’s reign. She is waging an ideological battle, not an ethical one, for control of the Republican Party.
That will be a debate for Republican voters to resolve. In the meantime, Liz Cheney cannot be allowed to distance herself from the CIA’s fairy tale about Russians in Afghanistan. Along with pro-war Democrats, she used this conveniently leaked CIA story repeatedly to block troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. And just as her father taught her to do — by example if not expressly — she is now lying to distance herself from a pro-war CIA script that she, in fact, explicitly promoted.
Senator Rand Paul continued to slam White House medical advisor Thursday, saying that Anthony Fauci could be culpable for the entire coronavirus pandemic.
Paul was attacked by leftist media Wednesday for merely questioning Fauci’s extensive role in granting funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology at a Senate hearing.
CNN’s Anderson Cooper declared that Paul should “have more respect at least for medical science.”
Now in a further appearance on Fox And Friends, Paul has gone even deeper, accusing Fauci of being personally to blame for the global pandemic.
“The person they hired to investigate the lab for the WHO perspective is the guy who gave the money,” Paul urged.
“So NIH gave the money to EcoHealth. The head of EcoHealth – they got him to investigate whether Wuhan was doing anything inappropriate in their lab. But if they were then wouldn’t he be culpable?” The Senator questioned.
“Doesn’t he have a self interest in smoothing things over,” Paul continued, adding “I’m not saying he did cover things up but you wouldn’t appoint someone who is in the line of the supply chain of giving the money to them.”
“Ultimately here’s the rub. I don’t know whether it came from the lab. But who could be culpable? Dr. Fauci could be culpable for the entire pandemic!” Paul emphasised.
As Infowarsreported in April 2020, the NIH awarded a $3.7 million grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to conduct coronavirus gain of function research.
A cyberattack that crippled fuel supplies on the East Coast of the US and sent gas prices soaring could have been an inside job conducted by American spooks, rather than foreign hackers, a prominent Russian IT expert has claimed.
After a massive systems failure caused the Colonial Pipeline to shut down, Natalya Kaspersky, the founder and former CEO of security software firm Kaspersky Lab, as well as one of Russia’s wealthiest women, made the explosive suggestions in an interview with RIA Novosti on Friday. She alleges that the US’ top foreign intelligence agency, the CIA, has a crack team of digital warriors who are able to masquerade as overseas hacking groups.
According to her, the group, known as UMBRAGE, is adept at hiding its online footprints. The existence of the team first came to light in a series of documents published by WikiLeaks in 2017 and subsequently picked up by American media. At the time, USA Today said that the shadowy operatives “may have been cataloguing hacking methods from outside hackers, including in Russia, that would have allowed the agency to mask their identity by employing the method during espionage.”
On Thursday, President Joe Biden announced that the devastating blow to America’s infrastructure had been dealt from abroad. “We do not believe the Russian government was involved in this attack, but we do have strong reason to believe that the criminals who did the attack are living in Russia, that’s where it came from,” he said.
However, Kaspersky pointed to the list “of the countries under whose hacker groups this UMBRAGE is disguised – Russia, North Korea, China, Iran.” She claimed that “therefore, it cannot be said with certainty that the attack was carried out by a hacker group from Russia, and that it was not a provocation made themselves from there, or from some other country,” she said.
The day before, the operators of the Colonial Pipeline said that service had resumed, and that “we can now report that we have restarted our entire pipeline system and that product delivery has commenced to all markets we serve.” However, they added, it could take several days before gas supply issues were fully resolved.
Earlier reports from Israel said IDF forces invaded the Strip — for the fourth time since Israel’s 2008-09 Cast Lead aggression on Gaza.
According to the Times of Israel, the “IDF… mis(led) foreign media on (a) Gaza ground invasion,” adding:
An initial pre-dawn Friday statementsaid “IDF air and ground troops are currently attacking in the Gaza Strip.”
When asked for clarification, IDF spokesman Jonathan Conricus responded:
“Yes. As it’s written in the statement. Indeed, ground forces are attacking in Gaza… (T)hey are in the Strip.”
Some troops are “positioned in an enclave technically within Gaza territory,” the Times of Israel reported, adding:
“(F)or all intents and purposes… such a placement does not reasonably represent a ‘ground invasion.’ ”
The NYT falsely reported that “Israeli ground forces had attacked Gaza early Friday,” adding:
“The extent of the Israeli assault was not clear.”
The Times later corrected its report, saying ”that while ground forces were newly involved in the fighting, no Israeli troops were actually in Gaza, indicating that they were firing from within Israel.”
WaPo earlier tweeted: “Israeli troops have entered the Gaza Strip as conflict with Palestinians escalates, Israeli military says.”
A later tweet corrected the above incorrect one, saying: “Israeli military issues ‘clarification’ to earlier statement and now says its ground troops are not in Gaza.”
Deploying thousands of troops, tanks and artillery along Gaza’s border may or may not be in preparation to invade the Strip by the Netanyahu regime.
A previous and same day article noted that Israeli war minister Gantz and IDF chief Kochavi planned an intensive terror-bombing campaign — instead of a ground invasion.
Like earlier preemptive wars on the Strip, their diabolical plan is all-about inflicting maximum pain, suffering, slaughter and destruction against besieged Gazans — including defenseless civilian men, women, children, infants, the elderly and infirm in harm’s way.
Dominant Israeli hardliners consider them legitimate targets, in defiance of core international law — prohibiting attacks on civilians, considered protected persons in times of war.
Like US-dominated NATO, Israel operates exclusively by its own anything goes rules — Palestinians victimized time and again, including by ongoing preemptive Netanyahu regime aggression.
On May 14, Haaretz, the Jerusalem Post, and Ynet News editions included no reports of a Gaza ground invasion — so far.
According to Kan 11 News’ military correspondent Roy Sharon, earlier reports of a ground invasion are false, adding:
“Around the world, when they hear of ground forces entering, we remember Operation Protective Edge, and other large-scale operations, that the IDF enters with tanks and infantry forces for a massive operation in Gaza.”
“That is not what is happening at all right now.”
“There is no entry of ground forces into Gaza.”
“It’s true that ground forces are attacking in Gaza, but they are attacking from outside Gazan territory.”
According to an AFP News tweet:
“The Israeli army clarifies that its troops have not entered the Gaza Strip as it had earlier stated, blaming an ‘internal communication’ problem for the confusion.”
“Israel says it is carrying out an attack ‘in the Gaza Strip’ but that there are no boots on the ground.”
IDF ground forces are attacking Gaza from an enclave inside Israeli territory at this time.
Things are fluid, subject to change, including by escalating aggression on Gaza more than already — if Netanyahu thinks it benefits him politically.
As of early Friday morning, reports indicate that at least 119 Gazans were killed since Monday, including 31 children, well over 800 others wounded by relentless round-the-clock IDF terror-bombing and cross-border shelling.
According to Reuters, ICC chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said individuals involved in ongoing conflict may be investigated for war crimes, adding:
“These are events that we are looking at very seriously.”
“We are monitoring very closely and I remind that an investigation has opened and the evolution of these events could also be something we look at.”
For the past 73 years, the highest of Israeli crimes of war, against humanity, and other atrocities were never punished.
Accountability is off-the-table because of one-sided US/Western support.
Like the US, Israel uses banned weapons in all its preemptive wars, including:
White phosphorous bombs and shells that burn flesh to the bone and can’t be extinguished by water
Thermobaric bombs able to penetrate buildings, underground shelters and tunnels
Their blast pressure sucks oxygen from spaces and human lungs in the vicinity.
Norwegian trauma surgeon Dr. Mads Gilbert treated wounded Gazans earlier.
Many victims had horrific wounds he never saw before.
They included severe internal chemical, biological and radiological burns, effects of toxic gases, severed arms, legs, and other body parts, and abdomens sliced open, among others.
During Israel’s summer 2014 Protective Edge aggression, Gilbert said the following about Gaza’s killing fields:
“The ‘ground invasion’ of Gaza resulted in scores and carloads with (the) maimed, torn apart, bleeding, shivering, dying – all sorts of injured Palestinians, all ages, all civilians, all innocent.”
“The heroes in the ambulances and in all of Gaza’s hospitals are working 12-24hrs shifts, grey from fatigue and inhuman workloads (without payment (at) all in Shifa (hospital) for the last four months).”
“They care, triage, try to understand the incomprehensible chaos of bodies, sizes, limbs, walking, not walking, breathing, not breathing, bleeding, not bleeding humans.”
“HUMANS! Now, once more treated like animals by ‘the most moral army in the world (sic).’ ”
“My respect for the wounded is endless, in their contained determination in the midst of pain, agony and shock; my admiration for the staff and volunteers is endless.”
“My closeness to the Palestinian sumud (steadfastness) gives me strength, although in (some of the) glimpses I just want to scream, hold someone tight, cry, smell the skin and hair of the warm child, covered in blood, protect ourselves in an endless embrace – but we cannot afford that. Nor can they.”
“Ashy grey faces – oh NO! Not one more load of tens of maimed and bleeding: We still have lakes of blood on the floor in the ER, piles of dripping, blood-soaked bandages to clear out.”
“The cleaners (are) everywhere, swiftly shoveling the blood and discarded tissues, hair, clothes, cannulas – the leftovers from death – all taken away…(only) to be prepared again, to be repeated all over.”
“More than 100 cases came to Shifa (in the) last 24 hrs, enough for a large well trained hospital with everything, but here (there is) almost nothing.”
“Electricity, water, disposables, drugs, OR-tables, instruments, monitors – all rusted and as if taken from museums of yesterdays hospitals.”
“But they do not complain, these heroes. They get on with it, like warriors, head on, enormous(ly) resolute.”
“And as I write these words to you, alone, on a bed, my tears flow, the warm but useless tears of pain and grief, of anger and fear. This is not happening!”
“And then, just now, the orchestra of the Israeli war-machine starts its gruesome symphony again.”
“Salvos of artillery from the navy boats just down on the shores, the roaring F16, the sickening drones (Arabic ’Zennanis’, the hummers), and the cluttering Apaches.”
“So much made and paid in and by US. Mr. Obama – do you have a heart?”
“I invite you – spend one night – just one night – with us in Shifa. Disguised as a cleaner, maybe.”
“I am convinced, 100%, it would change history. Nobody with a heart AND power could ever walk away from a night in Shifa without being determined to end the slaughter of the Palestinian people.”
“But the heartless and merciless have done their calculations and planned another Dahiya onslaught on Gaza.”
“The rivers of blood will keep running the coming night. I can hear they have tuned their instruments of death.”
“Please. Do what you can… This cannot continue.”
It’s happening again in Gaza, likely for days longer, maybe weeks if Netanyahu thinks it benefits him politically.
On Thursday, Lebanon’s Al Mayadeen reported the following:
Israeli “occupation (forces are) us(ing) internationally banned weapons in Gaza,” including “toxic gasses.”
In the days ahead, more will be known about Israel’s latest dirty war on over two million Gazans in the densely populated besieged Territory.
Palestinian Policy Network member Yara Hawari accused the Netanyahu regime of using “skunk” in attacks on Palestinians throughout the Territories, describing it as follows:
It’s “a liquid compound with an overpowering odor that has been described by those who have experienced it as the smell of sewage mixed with rotting corpses.”
It’s “a concoction of chemicals that causes intense nausea, obstructing normal breathing, causing violent gagging and vomiting.”
It also causes skin irritation, eye and abdominal pain.
Used for collective punishment, exposure to concentrated high doses risks serious harm or death.
Israel exports terror weapons to other countries, including the US.
Their effectiveness is field-tested on Palestinians throughout the Territories, notably against Gazans.
Countless thousands were killed, seriously wounded or disabled from Israeli viciousness.
It’s happening in real time throughout the Territories, Gazans harmed most of all.
Instead of condemning and demanding accountability for Israeli crimes of war and against humanity, most world community nations largely look the other way.
The Office for National Statistics have released a summary of the past twelve months entitled ‘Coronavirus: a year like no other’, in which they have done their best to justify the United Kingdom turning into a dictatorial, nanny state. However when you read the small print within the data that the ONS presents, you start to realise that all is not as it seems.
The ONS summary of 2020 begins with a chart of which they have titled ‘COVID-19 caused more deaths in 2020 than other infectious diseases caused for over a century’.
The chart shows data ranging from 1901 through to 2020, and shows a general decline, with the odd spike here and there from 1901 through to around 1960. Coming down from over 130,000 deaths per year to around 8000 deaths per year.
At this point we see a plateau through to around the year 1980, where we start to see an extremely gentle incline up to the year 2007, where deaths reach around 9000 per year before it starts to decline at the same rate it had started to increase.
But then we come to 2020, the year of the “deadly Covid-19 pandemic”, allegedly. When we look at the graph it’s hard not to think someone has just drawn a darker blue line with the label COVID-19 to point at the actual data. But that almost vertical, darker blue line is in fact what the ONS have presented as an increase in infectious disease deaths during 2020, standing at a total of approximately 75,000. See for yourself in the chart below…
When presented with this chart, it certainly does a pretty good job at showing there has been a problem in the past year. It most certainly adds weight to the policies introduced to allegedly combat Covid-19, in which the economy has been decimated, small businesses have been destroyed, livelihoods have been ruined, mental health problems have boomed, and children’s education ruined.
Except when you read the small print associated with the data you start to realise this data has been “fudged”.
Within the notes section the ONS state this chart uses figures that include deaths of non-residents of the United Kingdom. We’re not sure what they have defined as non-residents but we doubt that would make much difference to the overall data.
They also state that the deaths are based on the date a death was registered rather than occurred, that’s also fine – they’re showing us the number of deaths that have occurred in the year due to infectious and parasitic diseases so that won’t make much difference either.
The ONS then tell us that the figures for 2020 are provisional – also fine, they might go up, might go down – but not really going to make an awful lot of difference, unless of course they decide to change the way Covid deaths are counted and revise the data for 2020. You know, stop adding people to the death toll who have tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 in the previous twenty-eight days to them being killed in a car accident, that kind of thing.
So points 1 – 3 are pretty boring so far and aren’t really going to change the data we’ve been presented in the chart courtesy of the Office for National Statistics. It’s point number 4 that should be making anyone viewing this chart ask questions.
The ONS state that the figures used in the chart were based on ‘The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) : ICD-10: Infectious and parasitic diseases (A00-B99).’ – see for yourself in the screenshot below…
What’s so odd about that? We hear you say – Well we’re glad you asked.
If we take a look at the International Classification of Diseases and what they represent over at the World Health Organisation’s website we can start to understand what diseases it is that the ONS have used for the figures within the chart.
A00-B99 which are the codes used for the figures in the data represent the following types of diseases –
Now that’s a pretty broad range of diseases, so maybe it’s easier to make our point by showing you what infectious diseases they didn’t include.
Before we do it’s important to point out what Covid-19 actually is, but rather than explain it ourselves we’ll use the World Health Organisation’s own definition –
‘Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is an infectious disease caused by a newly discovered coronavirus.
Most people infected with the COVID-19 virus will experience mild to moderate respiratory illness and recover without requiring special treatment. Older people, and those with underlying medical problems like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, chronic respiratory disease, and cancer are more likely to develop serious illness.‘
How about we show you the UK Governments description of what Covid-19 is as well –
COVID-19 is a respiratory illness. The most important symptoms of COVID-19 are recent onset of any of the following:
a new continuous cough
a high temperature
a loss of, or change in, your normal sense of taste or smell (anosmia)
Here’s what the Office of National Statistics chose not to include when they decided to present a chart to the British public ‘proving’ Covid-19 has caused more deaths than any other infectious disease for over a century –
They chose to leave out all diseases which use the ICD-10 code J00-J99 – Respiratory Diseases.
No we’re not kidding. The Office of National Statistics chose not to use infectious respiratory diseases, including influenza and pneumonia in a chart presented to the British public entitled ‘COVID-19 caused more deaths in 2020 than other infectious diseases caused for over a century’, when COVID-19 is allegedly an infectious respiratory disease.
Do you need any more evidence that the authorities have lied to the British public during the past year and attempted to scare them into compliance?
Perhaps the most important figures missing from this chart are that of the 1918 onward’s Spanish Flu pandemic?
Choosing to leave out the figures for all other infectious respiratory disease deaths when comparing Covid-19 deaths, an infectious respiratory disease, to other infectious disease deaths is comparable to presenting a business plan which uses a chart compiled of how much profit you expect to make in 2020 and comparing it to the decline in the use of paperclips in the last 100 years – in essence just ridiculous.
What we’re not sure of is what the chart would look like if the ONS had decided to include infectious respiratory diseases, including influenza and pneumonia when compiling their figures – but we are extremely interested to find out. So if anyone has this data please send it to contact@theexpose.uk .
COVID-19 caused more deaths in 2020 than other infectious diseases caused for over a century? – Prove it…
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
This site is provided as a research and reference tool. Although we make every reasonable effort to ensure that the information and data provided at this site are useful, accurate, and current, we cannot guarantee that the information and data provided here will be error-free. By using this site, you assume all responsibility for and risk arising from your use of and reliance upon the contents of this site.
This site and the information available through it do not, and are not intended to constitute legal advice. Should you require legal advice, you should consult your own attorney.
Nothing within this site or linked to by this site constitutes investment advice or medical advice.
Materials accessible from or added to this site by third parties, such as comments posted, are strictly the responsibility of the third party who added such materials or made them accessible and we neither endorse nor undertake to control, monitor, edit or assume responsibility for any such third-party material.
The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.
The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
Fair Use
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more info go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
DMCA Contact
This is information for anyone that wishes to challenge our “fair use” of copyrighted material.
If you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe that content residing on or accessible through our website infringes a copyright and falls outside the boundaries of “Fair Use”, please send a notice of infringement by contacting atheonews@gmail.com.
We will respond and take necessary action immediately.
If notice is given of an alleged copyright violation we will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material(s) in question.
All 3rd party material posted on this website is copyright the respective owners / authors. Aletho News makes no claim of copyright on such material.
Aletho News
Aletho News 