Developers of Oxford-AstraZeneca Vaccine Tied to UK Eugenics Movement
By Jeremy Loffredo and Whitney Webb |
Unlimited Hangout| December 26, 2020
The developers of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine have previously undisclosed ties to the re-named British Eugenics Society as well as other Eugenics-linked institutions like the Wellcome Trust.
On April 30th, AstraZeneca and Oxford University announced a “landmark agreement” for the development of a COVID-19 vaccine. The agreement involves AstraZeneca overseeing aspects of the development as well as manufacturing and distribution while the Oxford side, via the Jenner Institute and Oxford Vaccine Group, researched and developed the vaccine. Less than a month after this agreement was reached, the Oxford-AstraZeneca partnership was awarded a contract from the US government as part of Operation Warp Speed, the public-private COVID-19 vaccination effort dominated by the US military and US intelligence.
Though the partnership was announced in April, Oxford’s Jenner Institute had already begun developing the COVID-19 vaccine months before, in mid-January. According to a recent BBC report, it was in January that the Jenner Institute first became aware of how serious the pandemic would soon become, when Professor Andrew Pollard, who works for both the Jenner Institute and heads the Oxford Vaccine Group, “shared a taxi with a modeler who worked for the UK’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies.” During the taxi ride, “the scientist told him data suggested there was going to be a pandemic not unlike the 1918 flu.” Due to this sole encounter, we are told, the Jenner Institute then began to pour millions into the early development of a vaccine for COVID-19 well before the scope of the crisis was clear.
For much of 2020, the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was treated as an early front-runner, though its lead would later be marred by scandals related to its clinical trials, including the death of participants, sudden trial pauses, the use of a problematic “placebo” with its own host of side effects and the “unintentional” mis-dosing of some participants that skewed its self-reported efficacy rate.
The significant issues that emerged during trials have provoked little concern from the vaccine’s two lead developers, despite critical attention from even mainstream media of its complications. The lead developer of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, Adrian Hill, told NBC on December 9th that the experimental vaccine should be approved and distributed to the public before the conclusion of the safety trials, saying,”to wait for the end of the trial would be the middle of next year. That’s too late, this vaccine is effective, available at large scale and easily deployed.”
Sarah Gilbert, the other lead researcher on the vaccine, seemed to believe that pre-mature safety approval was likely, telling the BBC on December 13 that the chances of rolling out the vaccine by the end of the year are “pretty high.” Now, the UK is expected to approve the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine shortly after Christmas, with India also set to approve the vaccine next week.
While the controversies surrounding the vaccine’s trials did ultimately undermine its previous frontrunner status, the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine remains heavily promoted as the vaccine of choice for the developing world, as it is cheaper and has much less complicated storage requirement than its main competitors, Pfizer and Moderna.
Earlier this month, Dr. Richard Horton, the editor-in-chief of the Lancet medical journal, told CNBC that “The Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine is the vaccine right now that is going to be able to immunize the planet more effectively, more rapidly than any other vaccine we have” in large part because it is a “vaccine that can get to lower middle-income countries.” CNBC also quoted Andrew Baum, global head of health care for Citi Group, as saying that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine “is really the only vaccine that is going to suppress or even eradicate SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in the many millions of individuals in the developing world.”
In addition to longstanding claims that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine will be the vaccine of choice for the developing world, this vaccine candidate has also been treated by several outlets in the mainstream and even independent media as “good for people, bad for profits” due to the partnership’s “explicit intention of supplying [the vaccine] around the world on a not-for-profit basis, meaning that the poorest nations on the planet will not have to worry about being shut out of a cure due to lack of funds.”
However, investigation into the vaccine’s developers and the realities of their “no-profit pledge” reveals a very different story than that which has been spun for most of the year by corporate press releases, experts and academics tied to the vaccine and the mainstream press.
For instance, mainstream media has had little, if anything, to say about the role of the vaccine developers’ private company – Vaccitech – in the Oxford-AstraZeneca partnership, a company whose main investors include former top Deutsche Bank executives, Silicon Valley behemoth Google and the UK government. All of them stand to profit from the vaccine alongside the vaccine’s two developers, Adrian Hill and Sarah Gilbert, who retain an estimated 10% stake in the company. Another overlooked point is the plan to dramatically alter the current sales model for the vaccine following the initial wave of its administration, which would see profits soar, especially if the now obvious push to make COVID-19 vaccination an annual affair for the foreseeable future is made reality.
Yet, arguably most troubling of all is the direct link of the vaccine’s lead developers to the Wellcome Trust and, in the case of Adrian Hill, the Galton Institute, two groups with longstanding ties to the UK Eugenics movement. The latter organization, named for the “father of eugenics” Francis Galton, is the re-named UK Eugenics Society, a group notorious for its promotion of racist pseudoscience and efforts to “improve racial stock” by reducing the population of those deemed inferior for over a century.
The ties of Adrian Hill to the Galton Institute should raise obvious concerns given the push to make the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine he developed with Gilbert the vaccine of choice for the developing world, particularly countries in Latin America, South and Southeast Asia and Africa, the very areas where the Galton Institute’s past members have called for reducing population growth.
In the final installment of this series on Operation Warp Speed, the US government’s vaccination effort, and race, the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine’s ties to Eugenics-linked institutions, the secretive role of Vaccitech, and the myth of the vaccine’s sale being “non-profit” and altruistically motivated are explored in detail.
GlaxoSmithKline and the Jenner Institute
The Edward Jenner Institute for Vaccine Research was initially established in 1995 in Compton in Berkshire as a public-private partnership between the UK government, via the Medical Research Council and the Department of Health, and the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline. Following a “review by the [institute’s] sponsors,” it was relaunched in 2005 in Oxford under the leadership of Adrian Hill, who—prior to that appointment—held a senior position at the Wellcome Trust’s Centre for Human Genetics. Hill, the lead developer of the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, still leads a research group at Wellcome aimed at “understand[ing] the genetic basis of susceptibility to different infectious diseases, especially. . . severe respiratory infections,” which conducts most of its studies in Africa. The UK’s Medical Research Council has also become a collaborator with the Wellcome Trust, specifically on vaccine-related initiatives. The Wellcome Trust, discussed at greater length later in this article, was originally created with funding from Henry Wellcome, who founded the company that later became GlaxoSmithKline.
Hill’s partner at the Jenner Institute and the other co-developer of the Oxford COVID-19 vaccine is Sarah Gilbert. Gilbert also hails from the Wellcome Trust, where she was a “program director,” and is a student of Hill’s. Together, Gilbert and Hill have worked to position the institute to be the center of all future vaccination efforts undertaken in response to global pandemics.
Professor Sarah Gilbert at Oxford, Photo by John Cairns
The Jenner Institute’s relocation to Oxford was largely facilitated by the Medical Research Council, which donated £1.25 million between 2005 and 2006, after the decision was made to replace the institute’s original sponsors (GlaxoSmithKline, the Medical Research Council, the Department of Health) with the University of Oxford and the Institute for Animal Health, now called the Pirbright Institute. The involvement of Pirbright meant that the relaunched Jenner Institute became unique in developing vaccines for both humans and livestock.
The relaunched Jenner Institute has come to dominate publicly funded vaccine development in the UK as well as the testing of vaccines produced by the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies via clinical trials and has overseen prominent safety trials for vaccines of high media interest in recent years. Some of the Jenner Institute–conducted trials later drew controversy, such as those using South African infants in 2009 in which seven infants died.
An investigation conducted by the British Medical Journal found that the Hill-led Jenner Institute had, in the South African instance, knowingly misled parents about the negative results of and questionable methods used in animal studies as well the vaccine being known to be ineffective. The vaccine in question, an experimental tuberculosis vaccine developed jointly by Emergent Biosolutions and the Jenner Institute, was scrapped after the controversial study in infants confirmed what was already known, that the vaccine was ineffective. The trial, largely funded by Oxford and the Wellcome Trust, was subsequently praised as “historic” by the BBC. Hill, at the time the study was conducted, had a personal financial stake in the vaccine.
Similar instances of dodgy practices in efficacy trials and the effects of increased dosages have led vaccine experts to criticize the COVID-19 vaccine developed by Hill and Gilbert. Hill and Gilbert hold a considerable financial stake in the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine. While the vaccine reportedly has an efficacy of over 90 percent, those figures—often cited in mainstream reports—are self-reported by the vaccine’s developers and manufacturers (i.e., the Oxford team and AstraZeneca), which is significant given that Hill and other Jenner Institute scientists have previously been caught manipulating trial results to benefit a vaccine product in which they were personally invested.
The prominence of the Jenner Institute in vaccine development and testing has largely come through Hill’s additional leadership role at the UK’s Vaccines Network, which chooses what vaccines to develop, how to develop them, and which firms should receive “targeted investments” from the UK government. The Vaccines Network also plays a key role in identifying “what vaccine technologies could play an important role in future outbreaks.” Two of the main backers of the UK’s Vaccines Network are the Wellcome Trust and GlaxoSmithKline.
Unsurprisingly, the Vaccines Network has steered many millions of pounds toward the Hill-run Jenner Institute, with completed projects including a “plug and display” virus-like particle platform for rapid-response vaccination. Also funded by the Vaccines Network were the Jenner Institute’s initial studies of novel chimpanzee adenovirus vaccines for coronavirus (in this case, MERS), the same viral vector used for the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. In addition to the Vaccines Network, the Jenner Institute also coordinates the efforts of the EU’s Vaccines Network equivalent, MultiMalVax.
Professor Adrian Hill at the Jenner Institute, Photo by John Cairns
The Jenner Institute also has a close relationship with GlaxoSmithKline and the Italian biotech Okairos, which was acquired by GlaxoSmithKline in 2014. Soon after it was acquired, Okairos, and its new owner GlaxoSmithKline, became key players in the 2014 experimental Ebola vaccine push, an effort that mirrors the current COVID-19 vaccine development rush in many key ways. The rushed safety trials for that vaccine were overseen by Adrian Hill and the Jenner Institute and funded by the UK government and the Wellcome Trust. GlaxoSmithKline and Okairos are the only firms represented on the Jenner Institute’s Scientific Advisory Board.
The Jenner Institute, along with GlaxoSmithKline-Okairos and a small French biotech called Imaxio, have been developing an experimental malaria vaccine since 2015, with human trials of that vaccine announced on December 12, 2020. Those trials will be conducted on 4,800 children in Africa over the course of 2021, in many of the same countries where Hill’s research group at the Wellcome Center for Human Genetics has been studying genetic susceptibility to several diseases. “A lot more people will die in Africa this year from malaria than will die from Covid,” Hill recently said in regard to the soon-to-begin trials.
Currently, the Jenner Institute is funded by the Jenner Vaccine Foundation, but the foundation’s documents note on several occasions a considerable influx of money from Wellcome Trust Strategic Awards. A “special review panel” from the Wellcome Trust actually lobbied the Jenner Institute to apply for further “strategic core funding” from the trust after visiting the institute and appraising its work. The Jenner Institute frames its funding from Wellcome as the key guidance behind its development decisions, which are made “based on the successful model of Wellcome Trust Strategic Award support.”
The Jenner Institute’s foundation, however, is not the only source of income for its lead researchers. Hill and Gilbert have been working to commercialize many of the institute’s vaccines through their own private company, Vaccitech. Though media reports often describe the vaccine as being a joint effort between AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford, Vaccitech is a key stakeholder in that partnership, given that the vaccine candidate relies on technology developed by Hill and Gilbert and owned by Vaccitech. A deeper look into Vaccitech offers a clue as to why the company’s name has been absent from nearly all media reports on the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, as it demolishes the much-touted claim that the vaccine is “nonprofit” and offered at low cost for charitable reasons.
Vaccitech: doing well by going “good”?
The official reason Sarah Gilbert and Adrian Hill created Vaccitech in 2016 per The Times is because “Oxford’s researchers [are] encouraged to form companies to commercialize their work.” Vaccitech, like other “commercialized” Oxford research enterprises, was spun out of the Jenner Institute via the university’s commercialization arm, Oxford Science Innovations, which is currently Vaccitech’s largest stakeholder at 46 percent. Hill and Gilbert are reported to maintain a 10 percent stake in the company.
The largest investor in Oxford Science Innovations, and by extension one of the largest shareholders in Vaccitech, is Braavos Capital, the venture-capital firm started in 2019 by Andrew Crawford-Brunt, Deutsche Bank’s long-time global head of equity trading at its London branch. Through its stake in Oxford Science Innovations, Braavos owns about 9 percent of Vaccitech.
Prior to COVID-19, Vaccitech’s main focus, especially last year, was the development of a universal vaccine for the flu. Vaccitech’s efforts in this regard were praised by Google, which is also invested in Vaccitech. At the same time, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was funding research to develop a universal flu vaccine, reportedly because the field of influenza vaccinology was not yet able “to design a flu vaccine that would protect broadly against the strains of flu that infect people every winter and those in nature that could emerge to trigger a disruptive and deadly pandemic,” according to a STAT News report from last year. The Gates Foundation effort originally partnered with Google’s cofounder Larry Page and his wife Lucy.
To fully finance Hill and Gilbert’s Vaccitech, and specifically its quest to develop a universal flu vaccine, Oxford Science Innovations sought £600 million from “outside investors,” chief among them the Wellcome Trust and the venture-capital arm of Google, Google Ventures. This means that Google is poised to make a profit from the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine at a time when its video platform YouTube has moved to ban COVID-19 vaccine–related content that shines a negative light on COVID-19 vaccines, including the Oxford-AstraZeneca candidate. Other investors in Vaccitech include Sequoia Capital’s Chinese branch and the Chinese pharmaceutical company Fosun Pharma. In addition, the UK government has put an estimated £5 million into the company and is also expected to make a return on the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine.
Vaccitech’s homepage showing company co-founders Adrian Hill and Sarah Gilbert. From vaccitech.co.uk
Information on the profit motive behind the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine has been muddied due to the extensive media promotion of the claim that Hill and Gilbert will not be collecting royalties on the vaccine and that AstraZeneca is not making a profit off the vaccine. However, this is only true until the pandemic is “officially” declared over, and the virus is labeled a persistent or seasonal condition that will require the mass administration of COVID-19 vaccines at regular intervals and possibly annually. Sky News reported that the determination of when the pandemic is over “will be based on the views of a range of [unspecified] independent bodies.” At that point, both Vaccitech and Oxford will obtain royalties from AstraZeneca’s sales of the vaccine.
Those tied to the vaccine have been at the center of promoting the idea that the COVID-19 vaccine will soon become an annual affair. For instance, in early May, John Bell—an Oxford medical professor and an “architect” of the Oxford-AstraZeneca partnership—told NBC News, “I suspect we may need to have relatively regular vaccinations against coronaviruses going into the future,” adding that the vaccine would likely be needed every year like the flu vaccine. NBC News failed to note that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine in which Bell is involved stands to significantly benefit financially if that does come to pass.
More recently, Bell told The Week that, “should there prove to be a market for regular vaccinations against coronavirus in the future, ‘there is some money to be made.’” Such sentiments have been echoed by Pascal Soriot, the CEO of AstraZeneca, who told Bloomberg last month that the company stood to make a “reasonable profit” once the pandemic was declared over and COVID-19 deemed a seasonal illness requiring regular vaccinations. On this matter, Vaccitech’s CEO, Bill Enright, stated that Vaccitech investors would receive a “big chunk of the royalties from a successful vaccine as well as ‘milestone’ payments” if and when the pandemic is declared over and COVID-19 vaccines become a seasonal event.
Vaccitech, in particular, appears quite certain that this possibility is slated to become reality. For all subsequent iterations of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, Vaccitech will reacquire a much larger percentage of rights to the vaccine, rights it is currently splitting with Oxford for the first iteration. Sky News has noted that the technology that Vaccitech owns “could drive the second generation of COVID-19 vaccines” and that it “has [already] received £2.3 million of public funding to develop it.”
US government officials such as Anthony Fauci have also signaled that the COVID-19 vaccine will require annual shots. Notably, the government, through Health and Human Service’s BARDA, has poured over $1 billion into the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine development. In addition to government officials, several recently published mainstream media reports have claimed that the “expert” consensus “seem[s] to be leaning toward an annual shot like the flu vaccine” with regards to the COVID-19 vaccine. For instance, Dr. Charles Chiu, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of California–San Francisco, recently told Salon, “This may end up being a vaccine that’s not a one-time thing or even a two-time thing. . . it may end up being what we call either a seasonal vaccine, or vaccine that needs to be administered every couple of years.”
Such hints about an annual COVID-19 vaccine from 2021 onward have recently become commonplace from the leading COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers themselves. For instance, on December 13th, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla was quoted by the Telegraph as saying, “How long this [vaccine] protection lasts is something we don’t know … I think it is a likely scenario that you will need periodical vaccinations.” Pfizer also recently issued a statement that noted that “we don’t know how the virus will change, and we also don’t know how durable the protective effect of any vaccination will be,” adding that its vaccine would be suitable “for repeated administration as booster shots” in the event that the vaccine only induces an immune response for a few months.
Then, this past Tuesday, Moderna released information that suggested immunity from its COVID-19 vaccine would only last several months, with Forbes writing that “the duration of neutralizing antibodies from the Moderna vaccine will be relatively short, potentially less than a year,” an outcome that would favor the push for an annual COVID-19 shot. The developer of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, Ugur Sahin of BioNTech, also stated on Tuesday that “The virus will stay with us for the next 10 years… We need to get used to the fact there’ll be more outbreaks.” He later added that “if the virus becomes more efficient… we might need a higher uptake of the vaccine for life to return to normal,” implying that these regular outbreaks he foresees occurring over the next ten years would be correlated with increased vaccine administration.
Quotes from the developers of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine themselves also point to a pandemic-dominated future and a desire for the crisis to be prolonged so that the vaccine can be widely distributed. Gilbert told the UK Independent in August that she believes COVID-19 is just the beginning and that COVID-like pandemics will become more frequent in the near future. The Jenner Institute vaccine team seems so determined to create the COVID vaccine that, in June, Hill was quoted by the Washington Post in June as stating that he wanted the pandemic to stick around, saying, “We’re in the bizarre position of wanting COVID to stay, at least for a little while. But cases are declining.” He also stated that his team was in “a race against the virus disappearing.”
With the vaccine developers, “medical experts,” government officials, and the CEOs of major vaccine manufacturers all agreeing that a seasonal COVID-19 vaccine is an increasingly likely outcome, it is worth considering a possible ulterior motive regarding the initial “nonprofit” model being used by the Jenner Institute/Vaccitech and AstraZeneca for their joint COVID-19 vaccine.
Given that vaccine guidance in several countries states that each dose of the multidose COVID-19 vaccine must be produced by the same manufacturer as previous doses, the implication is that in the event of a need for periodic COVID-19 vaccine variants, those who initially received the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine would likely be required to receive that same “brand” of vaccine seasonally. In other words, those who initially received the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine would likely be required, not just to receive a second dose of the same “brand,” but continue receiving that same “brand” of vaccine every year. Notably, no interaction studies have yet been conducted on the interactions between the COVID-19 vaccines and other medications as well as other vaccines.
If this turns out to be the case, it would certainly behoove the Oxford-Vaccitech-AstraZeneca team to want their vaccine to be the most widely used one in the first year in order to guarantee the largest market for subsequent annual COVID-19 vaccines. This could be a possible motive behind the efforts of the Oxford-AstraZeneca partnership “to supply the entire world with the Oxford jab” and to supply the vaccine “to the most vulnerable groups to COVID-19.” This vaccine has already been purchased, even before regulatory approval, by governments around the world, including in Europe, North America, Australia and most Latin American countries.
The Wellcome Trust
Adrian Hill currently holds a senior position at the Wellcome Trust’s Centre for Human Genomics. The Wellcome Trust is a scientific charity based in London, established in 1936 with funds from pharmaceutical magnate Henry Wellcome. As previously mentioned, Wellcome founded the pharmaceutical company that eventually became the industry giant GlaxoSmithKline. Today, the Wellcome Trust has a $25.9 billion endowment and engages in philanthropic endeavors, including funding clinical trials and research.
Hill has been closely tied to Wellcome for decades. In 1994, he participated in the founding of the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics and was awarded a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellowship the following year. He became a Wellcome professor of human genetics in 1996.
The Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics website boasts of the large-scale genetic mapping they’ve conducted in Africa. The center also publishes papers that explore genetic dispositions in relation to male fertility and “reproductive success.” The crossroads between race and genes is important in the center’s work, as an entire working group at the center, the Myers Group, is dedicated to mapping the “genetic impacts of migration events.” The center also funded a paper that argued that so long as eugenics is not coercive it’s an acceptable policy initiative. The paper asks, “Is the fact that an action or policy is a case of eugenics necessarily a reason not to do it?” According to Hill’s page on the Wellcome Trust site, race and genetics have long played a central role in his scientific approach, and his group currently focuses on the role genetics plays in African populations with regard to susceptibility to specific infectious diseases.
The Wellcome Genome Campus, which houses the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics, is located on the grounds of Hixton Hall, in Cambridgeshire, England.
Of even greater concern, last year Science Mag reported that Wellcome was accused by both a whistleblower and the University of Cape Town South Africa of illegally exploiting hundreds of Africans by “commercializing a gene chip without proper legal agreements and without the consent of the hundreds of African people whose donated DNA was used to develop the chip.” Jantina de Vries, a bioethicist at the University of Cape Town South Africa told the journal that it was “clearly unethical.” Since the controversy, other African institutions and peoples such as the indigenous Nama peoples of Namibia have demanded that Wellcome return the DNA it collected.
The Wellcome Centre regularly co-funds the research and development of vaccines and birth control methods with the Gates Foundation, a foundation that actively and admittedly engages in population and reproductive control in Africa and South Asia by, among other things, prioritizing the wide-spread distribution of injectable long-acting, reversible contraceptives (LARCs). The Wellcome Trust has also directly funded studies that sought to develop methods to “improve uptake” of LARCs in places such as rural Rwanda.
As researcher Jacob Levich wrote in the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism, LARCs afford women in the Global South “the least choice possible short of actual sterilization.” Some LARCs can render women infertile for as long as five years, and, as Levich argues, they “leave far more control in the hands of providers, and less in the hands of women, than condoms, oral contraceptives, or traditional methods.”
One example is Norplant, a contraceptive implant manufactured by Schering (now Bayer) that can prevent pregnancy for up to five years. It was taken off the US market in 2002 after more than fifty thousand women filed lawsuits against the company and the doctors who prescribed it. Seventy of those class action suits were related to side effects such as depression, extreme nausea, scalp-hair loss, ovarian cysts, migraines, and excessive bleeding.
Slightly modified and rebranded as Jadelle, the dangerous drug was promoted in Africa by the Gates Foundation in conjunction with USAID and EngenderHealth. Formerly named the Sterilization League for Human Betterment, EngenderHealth’s original mission, inspired by racial eugenics, was to “improve the biological stock of the human race.” Jadelle is not approved by the FDA for use in the United States.
Another scandal-ridden LARC is Pfizer’s Depo-Provera, an injectable contraceptive used in several African and Asian countries. The Gates Foundation and USAID have collaborated to fund this drug’s distribution and introduce it into the health-care systems of countries including Uganda, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Niger, Senegal, Bangladesh, and India.
Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, where Hill’s Jenner Institute resides, is enmeshed with the Gates Foundation. His employer, the University of Oxford, has received $11 million for vaccine development research from the foundation over the past three years and $208 million in grants over the past decade. In 2016, the Gates Foundation gave $36 million to a team of researchers that was headed by Pollard for vaccine development. In addition, Pollard’s private laboratory is funded by the Gates Foundation. Given this, it should come as no surprise that the Global Alliance for Vaccine Initiative (GAVI), a public-private partnership founded and currently funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, plans to distribute the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine to low-income, predominantly African and Asian, countries once it’s approved.
The Galton Institute: Eugenics for the Twenty-First Century
Both the Wellcome Trust and Adrian Hill share a close relationship with the most infamous eugenics society in Europe, the British Eugenics Society. The Eugenics Society was renamed the Galton Institute in 1989, a name that pays homage to Sir Francis Galton, the so-called father of eugenics, a field that he often described as the “science of improving racial stock.”
In the case of the Wellcome Trust, the Trust’s library is the guardian of the Eugenics Society historical archives. When the Wellcome Trust first set up its Contemporary Medical Archive Center, the first organizational archive it sought to acquire was tellingly that of the Eugenics Society-Galton Institute. Wellcome’s website describes the Eugenics Society’s original purpose as “to increase public understanding of heredity and to influence parenthood in Britain, with the aim of biological improvement of the nation and mitigation of the burdens deemed to be imposed on society by the genetically ‘unfit’.” It also states the interests of the society’s members “ranged from the biology of heredity, a subject that developed rapidly during the first half of the 20th century, to the provision of birth control methods, artificial insemination, statistics, sex education and family allowances.” Lesley Hall, Wellcome’s senior archivist, has referred to Francis Galton, a racist eugenicist, as an “eminent late nineteenth century polymath” in her discussion of the Eugenics Society archive held at Wellcome.
A poster published by the Eugenics Society-Galton Institute in the 1930S, from the Wellcome Library
Several top governance positions at the former British Eugenics Society, now the Galton Institute, include individuals who originally worked at The Wellcome Trust, including the Galton Institute’s president Turi King. Dr. Elena Bochukova, a current Galton Council Member and Galton lecturer, previously worked under the direction of Adrian Hill at the Wellcome Trust Center for Human Genetics. The Galton Institute’s Senior Genetics Researcher, Dr. Jess Buxton, was previously a ‘genetics researcher’ at the Wellcome Trust and then went on to carry out independent research financed by Wellcome. Her research, which is particularly race oriented, includes creating the first genetic sequence map of a native Nigerian. Moreover, Adrian Hill himself spoke at the Eugenics Society-Galton Institute at the celebration of their 100th anniversary in 2008.
The Galton Institute publishes what they now call the Galton Review, previously titled the Eugenics Review, where various members of the self-proclaimed “learned society” publish papers focused on population issues, genetics, evolutionary biology, and fertility.
A look at early issues of the Eugenics Review shines a light on Galton’s original ambitions. In the 1955 issue titled “The Immigration of Colored People,” an author asks, “What will become of our national character, good workmanship etc. in the course of a few decades if this immigration of negroes and negroids continues unchecked?” The article ends with an appeal to readers to write their parliamentary representatives and urge them that in view of “racial betterment or deterioration” something must be done urgently to “check the present influx of africans and other negroids.”
Today, it appears that the Galton Institute continues to see the immigration of racial minorities into European cities as an unchecked threat. Mike Coleman, an Oxford professor of demographics and a fellow at the institute runs an anti-immigration organization and advocacy group called MigrationWatch—whose mission is to preserve the European culture of the UK by lobbying the government to stem legal immigration and publishing data that supposedly demonstrates the biological and cultural threat of increasing immigration.
A 1961 issue of the Eugenics Review titled “The Impending Crisis” claims the function of the institute’s upcoming conference is “to honor Margaret Sanger” and describes the population crisis as “quantity threatening quality.”
Sanger, known as the “pioneer of the American birth control movement,” was a staunch advocate for promoting “racial betterment” and the key architect of the Negro Project, which she claimed “was established for the benefit of the colored people.” But as medical ethics fellow at Harvard Medical School, Harriet Washington, argues in her book Medical Apartheid, “The Negro Project sought to find the best way to reduce the black population by promoting eugenic principals.” Sanger was an American member of the British Eugenics Society.
Another early member of the Galton Institute was John Harvey Kellogg, prominent business man and eugenicist. Kellogg founded the Race Betterment Foundation and argued that immigrants and nonwhites would damage the American gene pool. Yet another example is Charles Davenport, a scientist known for his collaborative research efforts with eugenicists in Nazi Germany and his contributions to Nazi Germany’s brutal racial policies, who was vice president of the Galton Institute in 1931.
Another more recent member of the Galton Institute was David Weatherall, for whom the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine at Oxford is named. Weatherall was a member of the Galton Institute when it was still named the Eugenics Society and he remained a member until his death in 2018. Weatherall, who was knighted by the British monarch in 1987 for his contributions to science, addressed the Galton Institute on numerous occasions and gave a senior lecture on genetics at the institute in 2014, of which no transcript or video is available. As an Oxford professor, Weatherall was Adrian Hill’s doctoral adviser and eventually his boss when Hill began working at the Weatherall Institute conducting immunogenic research in Africa. A key fixture of the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine since its founding is Walter Bodmer, a former president of the Galton Institute.
While the Galton Institute has attempted to distance itself from its past of promoting racial eugenics with surface-level public relations efforts, it has not stopped family members of the infamous racist from achieving leadership positions at the institute. Emeritus professor of molecular genetics at the Galton Institute and one of its officers is none other than David. J Galton, whose work includes Eugenics: The Future of Human Life in the 21st Century. David Galton has written that the Human Genome Mapping Project, originally dreamt up by Galton’s former president Walter Bodmer, had “enormously increased . . . the scope for eugenics . . . because of the development of a very powerful technology for the manipulation of DNA.”
This new “wider definition of eugenics,” Galton has said, “would cover methods of regulating population numbers as well as improving genome quality by selective artificial insemination by donor, gene therapy or gene manipulation of germ-line cells.” In expanding on this new definition, Galton is neutral as to “whether some methods should be made compulsory by the state, or left entirely to the personal choice of the individual.”
Who gets the safest vaccines?
Considering the degree to which the players and institutions behind the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine (including the lead developer) are tied and connected to institutions that have been instrumental in the rise and perpetuation of racial eugenics, it’s concerning that this particular vaccine is being portrayed by scientists and media alike as the COVID-19 vaccine for the poor and the Global South.
The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine sells at a fraction of the cost of its COVID-19 vaccine competitors—running between 3 and 5 dollars per dose. Moderna and Pfizer cost 25 to 37 dollars and 20 dollars per dose, respectively. As CNN recently reported, the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine will “be far easier to transport and distribute in developing countries than its rivals,” several of which require complicated and costly cold supply chains. When the Thomson Reuters Foundation asked several experts which COVID-19 vaccine could “reach the poorest soonest,” all declared a preference for the Oxford-AstraZeneca candidate.
There is also the added fact that a host of safety issues have come to surround the vaccine. Recently, on November 21, a forty-year-old participant in AstraZeneca’s clinical trial who lives in India sent a legal notice to the Serum Institute of India alleging that the vaccine caused him to develop acute neuroencephalopathy, or brain damage. In the notice, the participant said he “must be compensated, in the least, for all the sufferings that he and his family have undergone and are likely to undergo in the future.”
In response, the Serum Institute claimed the participant’s medical complications are unrelated to the vaccine trial and said it would take “legal action” against the brain-damaged participant for maligning the company’s reputation, seeking damages in excess of $13 million. “This is the first time I have ever heard of a sponsor threatening a trial participant,” Amar Jesani, editor of the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics, said of the incident. The Serum Institute has received at least $18.6 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and has a deal with AstraZeneca to manufacture a billion doses of the vaccine.
Other manufacturers chosen by Oxford-AstraZeneca to produce their vaccine are also no strangers to controversy. For instance, their manufacturing partner in China, Shenzhen Kangtai Biological Products, has been at the center of controversy for years, especially after 17 infants died from its Hepatitis B vaccine in 2013. The New York Times cited Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, as saying: “Imagine if a similar scandal is reported again in China… It’s not just going to undermine the confidence of the company manufacturing the vaccine, it’s also going to hurt the reputation of AstraZeneca itself and their vaccine, too.”
In another example, the manufacturing partner chosen to produce the vaccine in the US is the scandal-ridden company with ties to the 2001 anthrax attacks, Emergent Biosolutions. Emergent Biosolutions, previously known as BioPort, has a long track record of knowingly selling and marketing products that were never tested for safety and efficacy, including its anthrax vaccine BioThrax and its biodefense product Trobigard. The current head of quality control for Emergent Biosolutions’ lead manufacturing facility in the US has no expertise in pharmaceutical manufacturing and is instead a former high-ranking military intelligence official who operated in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond.
The issues raised by their decision to partner with manufacturers with dark histories of product safety issues are compounded by the adverse reactions reported in the Oxford-AstraZeneca trials as well as the ways in which those trials have been conducted. In September, AstraZeneca was forced to pause its experimental COVID-19 vaccine trial after a woman in the UK developed a “suspected serious reaction” that the New York Times reported was consistent with transverse myelitis. TM is a neurological disorder characterized by inflammation of the spinal cord, a major element of the central nervous system. It often results in weakness of the limbs, problems emptying the bladder, and paralysis. Patients can become severely disabled, and there is currently no effective cure.
Concern over an association between TM and vaccines is well established. A review of published case studies in 2009 documented thirty-seven cases of TM associated with various vaccines, including hepatitis B, measles-mumps-rubella, diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, among others in infants, children, and adults. The researchers in Israel noted, “The associations of different vaccines with a single autoimmune phenomenon allude to the idea that a common denominator of these vaccines, such as an adjuvant, might trigger this syndrome.” Even the New York Times article on the AstraZeneca trial pause notes past “speculation” that vaccines might be able to trigger TM.
In July, an Oxford-AstraZeneca trial participant developed symptoms of TM, and the vaccine trial was paused at that time. An “independent panel” ultimately concluded the illness was unrelated to the vaccine, and the trial continued. Yet, as Nikolai Petrovsky from Flinders University told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, these panels are typically made up of “biostatisticians and also medical representatives from the sponsor drug company running the trial.” Then, in October, a trial participant in Brazil died, though in that case, AstraZeneca suggested that the person was part of the control group and thus hadn’t received the COVID-19 vaccine.
According to Forbes, the AstraZeneca vaccine was ineffective at stopping the spread of coronavirus in their animal trials. All six monkeys injected with AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine became infected with the disease after being inoculated. All the monkeys were put to death, which means that it will remain unknown whether those monkeys would have suffered other adverse effects.
Another concern is that trial administrators gave the trial control group (for both human and animal trials) Pfizer’s Nimenrix, a meningitis vaccine, as opposed to a saline solution, which is regarded as the gold standard for controls because researchers can be sure the saline solution won’t cause any adverse reactions. Using Pfizer’s meningitis vaccine as the control placebo allows AstraZeneca to downplay any adverse reactions in its COVID-19 vaccine group by showing that the control group suffered adverse reactions as well. “The meningitis vaccine in the AstraZeneca trial is what I would call a ‘fauxcebo,’ a fake control whose real purpose is to disguise or hide injury in the vaccine group,” said Mary Holland, general counsel at Children’s Health Defense.
Eugenics under another name
Despite these safety concerns and clinical trial scandals, close to 160 countries have purchased the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, and now reports are suggesting that India, the country with the second largest population on Earth, is likely to approve this vaccine by next week.
As documented here, while the vaccine may be heralded as “vital for lower-income countries,” the Oxford-AstraZeneca project is no mere philanthropic pursuit. Not only is there a significant profit motive behind the vaccine, but its lead researcher’s connection to the British Eugenics Society adds another level of warranted scrutiny.
For those encountering stories of eugenicists, it’s common to dismiss such activity as that of “conspiracy theories.” However, it’s undeniable that several prominent individuals and institutions that remain active today have clear ties to eugenicist thinking, which was not so taboo just a few decades ago. Unfortunately, this holds true for the individuals and institutions associated with the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID vaccine, who, as demonstrated in this article, immerse themselves in studies of race science and population control – primarily in Africa while working closely with institutions that have direct and longstanding links to the worst of the Eugenics movement.
As this series has shown, there are many concerns regarding the points where race and the COVID-19 vaccination campaign in the US and abroad intersect, both publicly and privately. Part I of this series raised questions about the policy-shaping role of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, which suggested that the US government make COVID-19 vaccines available to ethnic minorities and the mentally challenged first. Part II explained how in order to allocate COVID-19 vaccines in the US, health agencies are using a program created by Palantir, a company with a record of helping the US agencies target ethnic minorities through immigration policy and racist policing.
Furthermore, there are plans in place to exercise what could reasonably be described as economic coercion to pressure people to “voluntarily” get vaccinated. Such coercion will be obviously be more effective on poor and working communities, meaning communities of color will be disproportionately affected as well.
Considering these facts, and the case for scrutinizing the safety of Oxford-AstraZeneca’s “affordable” vaccine option made above, any harm caused by vaccine allocation policy in the US and beyond is likely to disproportionately affect poor communities, especially communities of color.
As such, the public should take all vaccine rollout policy with a grain of salt, even when they come cloaked in language of inclusion, racial justice, and public health preservation. As the co-founder of the American Eugenics Society (later renamed “Society for the Study of Social Biology”) Frederick Osborn put it in 1968, “Eugenic goals are most likely to be attained under a name other than eugenics.”
Data giant Palantir’s murky track record raises alarming questions about secret, potentially illegal £23 million NHS deal
By Kit Klarenberg | RT | December 23, 2020
Palantir has won a huge contract to continue its work on the NHS Covid-19 Data Store. But the British public will have no way of knowing how the private information the company has been granted access to will be used.
The potentially illegal two-year deal, which began on December 12, was awarded under the Crown Commercial Services G-Cloud 11 Framework, a ‘streamlined’ – i.e. much-accelerated – system typically used for minor contracts, which doesn’t require a tender to be published. Under the terms of the agreement, the store will rely on Palantir’s Foundry data until at least December 2022.
The store was established in March to manage Covid-19 data and inform the government’s response to the virus. Palantir was one of several tech firms hired for the project, for the princely sum of £1, and ever since has been granted access to sensitive data such as patients’ ages, addresses, health conditions, treatments and whether they smoke or drink, among other private information.
Such information is clearly a highly valuable commodity, exclusive oversight of which is fraught with opportunity for abuse, but Whitehall insists any personally-identifying details are aggregated or anonymized prior to being shared with Palantir et al.
Despite these reassurances, the deal did not go unchallenged – not least because the contracts underpinning the deal weren’t published until June, mere hours before a legal action brought by political campaigning website openDemocracy and law firm Foxglove to secure their release was due to commence.
A very secret weapon
An even cursory review of Palantir’s operations starkly underlines why so many should be concerned about its involvement with the NHS, and its access to such intimate patient particulars.
Co-founder Peter Thiel’s inspiration for the company was a desire to repurpose the fraud recognition systems of PayPal – which he also co-founded – for defense and security applications. Most established investors weren’t interested in his pitch, but it caught the attention of In-Q-Tel, the little-known venture capital wing of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which gifted the start-up US$2 million in 2004.
A decade later, Palantir was valued in the billions and pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars annually, primarily from US government agencies, including the CIA, Departments of Defense and Homeland Security, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Special Operations Command.
The company’s ‘Gotham’ platform pools these entities’ disparate and sprawling databases and allows for the effective sorting, management and cross-referencing of information contained therein.
These capabilities can be put to predictive purposes – for example, soldiers in Afghanistan used the tool to combine maps, intelligence reports, and reports of roadside bombings to plan missions. As a result, Bloomberg dubbed Palantir the War on Terror’s “secret weapon,” and Gotham also became of intense interest to law enforcement agencies the world over.
Due to the veil of secrecy surrounding Palantir’s commercial activities, the total number of forces employing the technology globally is unknown – although the company isn’t only opaque about what services it provides to which clients, but has been outright dishonest at the nature of its government partnerships in the past.
Usage metrics
In 2018, it was revealed police in New Orleans utilized Palantir software to trace targets’ ties to gang members, link suspects’ criminal histories, analyze social media, and forecast the likelihood individuals would commit crimes or become a victim thereof.
Several high-profile convictions of violent, murderous drug gangs were secured in the process, although it was operated in total secrecy for five years until exposure by tech website the Verge, with even the city council totally unaware.
The tendency toward concealment may at least in part be attributable to public outcry over predictive policing programs, which exhibit seemingly invariable racial bias. Even algorithms that do not specifically use race as a metric have been found prone to this prejudice, due to the inclusion of ancillary variables such as socio-economic background, education, and location.
Still, significant light was shed on how authorities use Gotham, and what information it collates, in September 2020, when two Los Angeles Police Department training documents – ‘Intermediate Course’ and ‘Advance Course’ – used to instruct officers on the workings of the system were leaked.
The data collected on citizens – both law-abiding and those with criminal records, or suspected of having committed a crime, or even being connected in any way to individuals who have – includes sex, race, names, contact details, addresses, prior warrants, mugshots, surveillance photos, personal relationships, past and current employers, and even tattoos, scars, piercings and other identifying features.
According to an ‘LAPD Palantir Usage Metrics’ document, in excess of 5,000 officers – accounting for half the Department’s members – had access to Gotham in 2016, and in that year, they collectively ran around 60,000 searches through the system in support of over 10,000 cases.
Such a cutting-edge service doesn’t come cheap, with subscriptions running to millions of dollars annually. This sizable investment comes despite questions hanging over Palantir’s predictive policing effectiveness, which may suggest the software’s value to authorities doesn’t necessarily lie in its crime-fighting prowess.
Official figures indicate violent crime rates remained virtually unchanged in Los Angeles from 2009 to 2019, while aggravated assaults increased. However, non-violent crime did fall over the same period, in particular burglary and vehicle theft.
‘Without any safeguards
Troublingly, crucial portions of Palantir’s NHS contract are entirely redacted, including sections titled “limit of parties’ liability,”“authorised user groups,” and “data integration and analytics capability for self-service” – which covers how many “authorised users” are permitted to create and modify tools designed using the data, and the data sets involved.
In other words, the public presently has no way of knowing precisely what private information Palantir has been granted access to, how it will be used, and with who and what it can be shared with.
Shocking stuff indeed, yet the mainstream UK media and lawmakers alike have been almost entirely silent on what should at the very least be the subject of intense national debate. Amazingly, the company’s name has been mentioned a grand total of twice in parliamentary debates over the course of 2020, and only once in a critical context.
This wall of establishment silence stands in stark contrast to the US, where legislators – including Senator Elizabeth Warren – have prominently raised privacy concerns over Palantir’s participation in ‘HHS Protect’, a program launched by the Department of Health and Human Services to track the spread of coronavirus. Under its auspices, the company harvests data from a variety of federal, state and local government sources, healthcare facilities, colleges, and more.
“The inclusion of Protected Health Information in this database raises serious privacy concerns,” a coalition of Democratic senators wrote in July. “Neither HHS nor Palantir has publicly detailed what it plans to do with this, or what privacy safeguards have been put in place, if any. We are concerned that, without any safeguards, data in HHS Protect could be used by other federal agencies in unexpected, unregulated, and potentially harmful ways.”
While ministers claim life in the UK will begin returning to “normal” around Easter 2021, the length of the deal places Palantir in a position of immense and entirely unaccountable privilege at the heart of an institution which theoretically provides vital services to every British citizen, for the next two years and potentially beyond.
Readers may wish to ask themselves who or what their elected representatives are truly working for, and which interests they ultimately serve – or better yet, pose these queries to parliamentarians directly.
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions.
WHO Deletes Naturally Acquired Immunity from Its Website
By Jeffrey A. Tucker | American Institute for Economic Research | December 23, 2020
Maybe you have some sense that something fishy is going on? Same. If it’s not one thing, it’s another.
Coronavirus lived on surfaces until it didn’t. Masks didn’t work until they did, then they did not. There is asymptomatic transmission, except there isn’t. Lockdowns work to control the virus except they do not. All these people are sick without symptoms until, whoops, PCR tests are wildly inaccurate because they were never intended to be diagnostic tools. Everyone is in danger of the virus except they aren’t. It spreads in schools except it doesn’t.
On it goes. Daily. It’s no wonder that so many people have stopped believing anything that “public health authorities” say. In combination with governors and other autocrats doing their bidding, they set out to take away freedom and human rights and expected us to thank them for saving our lives. At some point this year (for me it was March 12) life began feeling like a dystopian novel of your choice.
Well, now I have another piece of evidence to add to the mile-high pile of fishy mess. The World Health Organization, for reasons unknown, has suddenly changed its definition of a core conception of immunology: herd immunity. Its discovery was one of the major achievements of 20th century science, gradually emerging in the 1920s and then becoming ever more refined throughout the 20th century.
Herd immunity is a fascinating observation that you can trace to biological reality or statistical probability theory, whichever you prefer. (It is certainly not a “strategy” so ignore any media source that describes it that way.) Herd immunity speaks directly, and with explanatory power, to the empirical observation that respiratory viruses are either widespread and mostly mild (common cold) or very severe and short-lived (Ebola).
Why is this? The reason is that when a virus kills its host, it cannot migrate. The more aggressively it does this, the less it spreads. If the virus doesn’t kill its host, it can hop to others through all the usual means. When you get a virus and fight it off, your immune system encodes that information in a way that builds immunity to it. When it happens to enough people (and each case is different so we can’t put a clear number on it) the virus loses its pandemic quality and becomes endemic, which is to say predictable and manageable. Each new generation incorporates that information through more exposure.
This is what one would call Virology/Immunology 101. It’s what you read in every textbook. It’s been taught in 9th grade cell biology for probably 80 years. Observing the operations of this evolutionary phenomenon is pretty wonderful because it increases one’s respect for the way in which human biology has adapted to the presence of pathogens without absolutely freaking out.
And the discovery of this fascinating dynamic in cell biology is a major reason why public health became so smart in the 20th century. We kept calm. We managed viruses with medical professionals: doctor/patient relationships. We avoided the Medieval tendency to run around with hair on fire but rather used rationality and intelligence. Even the New York Times recognizes that natural immunity is powerful with Covid-19, which is not in the least bit surprising.
Until one day, this strange institution called the World Health Organization – once glorious because it was mainly responsible for the eradication of smallpox – has suddenly decided to delete everything I just wrote from cell biology basics. It has literally changed the science in a Soviet-like way. It has removed with the delete key any mention of natural immunities from its website. It has taken the additional step of actually mischaracterizing the structure and functioning of vaccines.
So that you will believe me, I will try to be as precise as possible. Here is the website from June 9, 2020. You can see it here on Archive.org. You have to move down the page and click on the question about herd immunity. You see the following.
That’s pretty darn accurate overall. Even the statement that the threshold is “not yet clear” is correct. There are cross immunities to Covid from other coronaviruses and there is T cell memory that contributes to natural immunity.
Some estimates are as low as 10%, which is a far cry from the modelled 70% estimate of virus immunity that is standard within the pharmaceutical realm. Real life is vastly more complicated than models, in economics or epidemiology. The WHO’s past statement is a solid, if “pop,” description.
However, in a screenshot dated November 13, 2020, we read the following note that somehow pretends as if human beings do not have immune systems at all but rather rely entirely on big pharma to inject things into our blood.
What this note at the World Health Organization has done is deleted what amounts to the entire million-year history of humankind in its delicate dance with pathogens. You could only gather from this that all of us are nothing but blank and unimprovable slates on which the pharmaceutical industry writes its signature.
In effect, this change at WHO ignores and even wipes out 100 years of medical advances in virology, immunology, and epidemiology. It is thoroughly unscientific – shilling for the vaccine industry in exactly the way the conspiracy theorists say that WHO has been doing since the beginning of this pandemic.
What’s even more strange is the claim that a vaccine protects people from a virus rather than exposing them to it. What’s amazing about this claim is that a vaccine works precisely by firing up the immune system through exposure. Why I had to type those words is truly beyond me. This has been known for centuries. There is simply no way for medical science completely to replace the human immune system. It can only game it via what used to be called inoculation.
Take from this what you will. It is a sign of the times. For nearly a full year, the media has been telling us that “science” requires that we comply with their dictates that run contrary to every tenet of liberalism, every expectation we’ve developed in the modern world that we can live freely and with the certainty of rights. Then “science” took over and our human rights were slammed. And now the “science” is actually deleting its own history, airbrushing over what it used to know and replacing it with something misleading at best and patently false at worst.
I cannot say why, exactly, the WHO did this. Given the events of the past nine or ten months, however, it is reasonable to assume that politics are at play. Since the beginning of the pandemic, those who have been pushing lockdowns and hysteria over the coronavirus have resisted the idea of natural herd immunity, instead insisting that we must live in lockdown until a vaccine is developed.
That is why the Great Barrington Declaration, written by three of the world’s preeminent epidemiologists and which advocated embracing the phenomenon of herd immunity as a way of protecting the vulnerable and minimizing harms to society, was met with such venom. Now we see the WHO, too, succumbing to political pressure. This is the only rational explanation for changing the definition of herd immunity that has existed for the past century.
The science has not changed; only the politics have. And that is precisely why it is so dangerous and deadly to subject virus management to the forces of politics. Eventually the science too bends to the duplicitous character of the political industry.
When the existing textbooks that students use in college contradict the latest official pronouncements from the authorities during a crisis in which the ruling class is clearly attempting to seize permanent power, we’ve got a problem.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research. He is the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and nine books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown.
WHO continues to go full Ministry of Truth
By Charles Rotter | What’s Up With That? | December 23, 2020
‘Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past’.
Orwell’s 1984
The climate wars which reached fever pitch a decade ago gave us a window into this sort of behavior by government bureaucrats.
The Internet and new media have given us additional visibility into the unrepentant behavior of those who would lie to us for our own good. I cannot overstate my disgust with those who have completely destroyed the credibility of the medical establishment.
God help us if something serious actually occurs.
Here is the WHO rewriting history and definitions to further their agenda.
Orwell did not envisage how simple it would be for the Ministry of Truth to rewrite history when it’s on the Internet.
Here is the current page where this content resides.
Notice in this video embedded below, this lying bureaucrat claims: “We have no therapeutics” and postulates a case fatality rate of 1%.
The five key events in the fake pandemic
By Jon Rappoport | No More Fake News | December 22, 2020
This article is a summary. I’ve written extensively on each of the five key events.
ONE: The false claim that a new virus was discovered and isolated.
No true isolation has been performed. The so-called genetic sequencing of the virus was actually a concoction, a cobbling together of pieces of data referencing segments of RNA. These segments were PRESUMED to be parts of the new virus—but researchers didn’t have the virus, so their presumptions amounted to fraud.
TWO: The erecting of a diagnostic test (PCR) for the virus they didn’t have. Obviously, no such test has meaning. It is built on the same sorts of absurd assumptions that led to the fictional discovery of the virus. However, strategically speaking, the test has produced millions of “positive results,” which are taken to mean “infected by the virus.” On this foundation of sand, the lockdowns were declared.
THREE: The Chinese lockdown of 50 million citizens, for no medical reason. This unprecedented event provided the model for other governments, and for the CDC and the World Health Organization. Now it was “acceptable” to imprison the global population and wreak economic devastation across the planet.
FOUR: The absurd computer prediction of 500,000 deaths in the UK and two million in the US, made by historically failed modeler, Neil Ferguson. His institute at the Imperial College of London is bankrolled by Bill Gates. Ferguson’s predictions were used to convince Trump and Boris Johnson that states of emergency and lockdowns were necessary.
FIVE: The forced premature deaths of millions of elderly people across the world—which were falsely called “COVID-19 deaths.”
These people were and are suffering from multiple long-term health conditions, made far worse by decades of medical treatment with toxic drugs. Terrified by a COVID diagnosis, then isolated from family and friends, they give up and die.
There are other important events, to be sure, but these are the key five.
The underlying fact that needs to be understood: what is called COVID-19 is not one condition. It is a variety of illnesses and effects stemming from different traditional causes RE-PACKAGED under the label, “COVID.”
Where authentic new conditions and causes may be involved, independent investigators need to look closely at such clusters of people, where they live. For example, the investigators should find out whether toxic vaccine campaigns were initiated in a community or region prior to declaration of the “COVID outbreak.”
TOPIC ARCHIVES:
https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/tag/virus/
https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/tag/testing/
https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/tag/pcr/
https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/tag/lockdown/
https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/tag/cases/
https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/tag/neil-ferguson/
https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/tag/old-people/
https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/tag/nursing-homes/
(To join our email list, click here.)
What’s actually IN the US “Covid Stimulus Bill”?
The answer to that is nothing like as simple as you’d expect, given the name.
OffGuardian | December 22, 2020
The US congress just passed their Covid stimulus bill, or the “Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021” to give its official title. So what’s actually inside it? What has just been passed into law?
The answers to that is “nobody really knows”, least of all the members of congress, who passed the law without reading it, as they so often do. It’s the longest bill in US history, at over 5500 pages and it sailed through the voting mostly sight unseen.
We’ve downloaded a copy of the full document and will embed it for those of you patient or masochistic enough to tackle the whole thing. We’ve read some already, and will point out the highlights:
- “Foreign aid” is a big winner. Egypt is getting $1.3 billion, Sudan, Israel and Ukraine get over 500 million each, and many other countries around the world sizeable contributions, much of which will be spent on “defense”. Which is to say sent straight back to America via massive arms purchases.
- Not all the money being sent overseas is for buying weapons, some is for backing coups. Venezuela and Belarus get special mention here, each getting their own section of the bill detailing how terrible their “illegal regimes” are. There’s also a large section on “combating Chinese influence”.
- For some reason there’s another section on copyright law, which makes illegal streaming copyrighted content a federal crime, punishable by up to three years in prison.
- Nearly 300 million is put aside to develop influenza vaccines and prevent a future influenza pandemic.
- 4 BILLION dollars for the Gates-funded GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance.
- Vaccine “misinformation” is also a concern, and the bill provides for a pro-vaccine propaganda campaign – or rather a “PUBLIC AWARENESS CAMPAIGN ON THE IMPORTANCE OF VACCINATIONS”
So – huge amounts of foreign aid, support for various coups, totally irrelevant copyright laws, provisions for pro-vaccine propaganda campaigns… it’s not your typical “stimulus bill” so far, is it?
Trust the Science: There is Undeniable Scientific Evidence of Widespread Voter Fraud
The Red Elephants – November 27, 2020
Believe the Science
As the American media continues to claim that no evidence for widespread voter fraud exists, many independent forensic data analysts, who have analyzed data scrapes from Edison Research found quite the opposite.
Since November 4th, there have been dozens of statistical analyses completed by data scientists, showing statistical impossibilities in hundreds of counties across the country.
One thorough scientific analysis published calls into question the legitimacy of Biden victories in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia.
This analysis was a through review of 8,954 vote updates and highlighted four decisive updates, which were the most anomalous updates in the entire data set. The experts found that each of the vote updates do not follow the generally observed pattern, and the anomalous behavior of those updates is particularly extreme.
Another scientific analysis by data scientists revealed How Pennsylvania Democrats Used Fake Voter Registration “Birthdays” to Commit Voter Fraud.
The analysts constructed a new metric of potential voter fraud using suspicious distributions of birthdays in Pennsylvania voter registration data. Under this metric, a number of counties in Pennsylvania have extremely unlikely distributions of voter birthdays. Seven counties representing almost 1.4 million votes total (Northumberland, Delaware, Montgomery, Lawrence, Dauphin, LeHigh, and Luzerne) have suspicious birthdays above the 99.5th percentile of plausible distributions, even when using conservative assumptions about what these distributions should look like.
Another statistical analyst recently revealed a scenario of how Democrats pulled off massive fraud in Montgomery county, Pennsylvania with ballot harvesting on a massive scale.
Another scientific analysis looked at the shift in voting patterns that occurred between the 2016 and 2020 elections to identify suspicious counties. The two with the largest shifts were Oakland and Wayne in Michigan.
Experts analyzed the election data from the two Michigan counties, and concluded that there are major statistical aberrations that are extremely unlikely to occur naturally. Using more conventional statistical analyses, they identified nine total different counties in Michigan alone with abnormal results.
Their expert recommendation was that those Michigan counties should have an audited recount for every ballot and signature.
According to another analysis by William M Briggs, PhD, approximately 154,000 votes have gone missing across several states. In Pennsylvania alone, there were around 30,000 Republican ballots not accounted for.
According to yet another expert analysis by Dr. Kershavarz-Nia who has a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D in various areas of computer engineering, Dominion memory cards with cryptographic key access to the systems were stolen in 2019.
Kershavarz-Nia has also trained with the CIA, NSA, and DHS office of Intelligence & Analysis. He is arguably the best and most experienced cyber security expert in the world. His technical expertise was touted by the New York Times and he has been described as a hero in the Washington Monthly. The findings in his nine-page affidavit is summed up as follows:
“I conclude with high confidence that the election 2020 data were altered in all battleground states resulting in hundreds of thousands of votes that were cast for President Trump to be transferred to Vice President Biden. These alterations were the result of systemic and widespread exploitable vulnerabilities in DVS, Scytl/SOE Software and Smartmatic systems that enabled operators to achieve the desired results. In my view, the evidence is overwhelming and incontrovertible.”
With many of the swing states ending in razor thin margins, many republicans have called for an audit to determine exactly how many non-citizens voted in the election. In an election where the difference in results is within 1% in key states, this is a legitimate concern considering their turnout has been confirmed to swing elections in the past.
One scientific study from 2014 concluded that participation in US election by non-citizens has been large enough to change meaningful election outcomes including Electoral College votes, and Congressional elections.
Despite the media consistently claiming that there is no evidence, endless scientific analyses, countless anomalies, and hundreds of affidavits exist that say otherwise.
Scientifically Analyzing Vote Spikes
In the early hours of November 4th, 2020, Democratic candidate Joe Biden received several major vote spikes that substantially and decisively improved his electoral position in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia.
Much skepticism and uncertainty in the scientific community surrounds these vote spikes. Suspicious vote counting practices, extreme differences between the two major candidates’ vote counts, and the timing of the vote updates, among other factors, casts doubt on the legitimacy the spikes.
Pennsylvania
In Pennsylvania, there were multiple very questionable vote spikes. In the early morning hours of November 4th, one particular vote spike of 337,000 votes, almost all for Joe Biden appears in the data. Approximately only 3,000 of those votes were for President Trump.
There was also a major vote spike in Georgia of approximately 107,000 votes for Joe Biden, while only a few thousand votes in the batch went for for President Trump. There were numerous other similar vote spikes in Michigan and Wisconsin, at similar times and dates, with similar results.
No forensic data scientist can provide an explanation for this phenomenon, other than potential illegal ballot harvesting and other forms of fraud at a massive scale. The likelihood of these early morning vote spikes in mail-in ballots legitimately breaking for Joe Biden at the margin they did, is statistically 0% in these states.
Georgia
Michigan:
Wisconsin:
The Red Mirage?
Many point to the ‘red mirage’ hypothesis to explain why these vote spikes favored Joe Joe Biden in key swing states. The red mirage scenario predicted that at the end of election day, it would erroneously appear that President Trump won the election because most states would count the ballots cast in-person on election day first. The hypothesis concluded that after tallying the mail-in ballots, Joe Biden would pull ahead because mail-in ballots tend to favor the democrats more than the republicans.
Outside of the impossibility that these vote spikes favored Joe Biden at margins they did – some as high as 99% – this explanation is particularly impossible considering republicans led in mail-in ballots requested and mail-in and early in-person ballots returned.
According to NBC News on election day, in Michigan Republicans led 41% to 39% in mail-in ballots requested. Republicans also led 42% to 39% with mail-in and early in-person ballots returned.
In Wisconsin on election day , Republicans led in mail-in ballots requested 43% to 35%, and mail-in and early in-person ballots returned 43% to 35%.
Historic Low Mail-in Ballot Rejection Rate
In a normal election year in any given state, hundreds or even thousands of mail-in ballots get tossed out for everything from late postmarks to open envelopes.
North Carolina rejected 546 ballots for just missing witness signatures in the 2012 presidential race. Virginia tossed 216 ballots in the 2018 midterms because they arrived in an unofficial envelope. Arizona discarded 1,516 ballots for non-matching signatures the same year.
In October, USA Today predicted that absentee ballot rejection totals would reach historic levels.
“At least 1.03 million absentee ballots could be tossed if half of the nation votes by mail. Discarded votes jump to 1.55 million if 75% of the country votes absentee. In the latter scenario, more than 185,000 votes could be lost in Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – states considered key to capturing the White House.”
In Georgia alone, it was predicted that over 100,000 absentee ballots would be rejected based on the normal percentage that are rejected in an average year.
That’s not what happened.
Mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania specifically have been accepted at almost 30 times the rate compared to historical norms. This raises serious questions in a swing state in which Democratic challenger Joe Biden is the projected to be the winner.
Reports about the rejection rate for mail-in ballots in the general election suggest that it was a fraction of a percent, which is up to 30 times lower than absentee ballots in an election without mass vote-by-mail.
The below graph shows the estimated rejectable votes vs the Biden margin of victory in key swing states.
Pennsylvania Impossibilities
In Pennsylvania since 2016, Democrats have lost over 50,000 registered voters. During the same time period, Republicans have gained over 150,000 registered voters statewide.
Not only did President Trump lose this state after leading by almost 800,000 votes on election day, but Joe Biden also annihilated Barack Obama’s 2012 numbers, as well as Hillary Clinton’s 2016 totals by 500,000 each.
While President Trump dominated in Ohio, Indiana, and Florida – flipping blue counties that haven’t been red for decades – he also lost in several demographically identical counties in Pennsylvania and Georgia, and is projected to lose those states.
The below graph depicts these highly questionable results.
According to data scientists, there were also over 200,000 ballots either returned a day before they were mailed out, returned on the same day, or one day
More than 20,000 absentee ballots in Pennsylvania have impossible return dates and more than 80,000 have marked return dates that raise questions, according to a researcher’s analysis of the state’s voter database.
“Over 51,000 ballots were marked as returned just one day after they were sent out, while nearly 35,000 were marked returned on the same day that they were mailed out.”
Another more than 23,000 have a return date earlier than the sent date. More than 9,000 have no sent date.
A screenshot of publicly available mail ballot data in Pennsylvania showing the date when ballots were sent out (3rd column from right) and received (2nd column from right) only one day apart. (Data source: Pennsylvania Secretary of State)
According to Politico, it was the ballots found in postal facilities that put Biden over the top in Pennsylvania. Postal workers found thousands of ballots in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh facilities Thursday after election day.
There also happens to be a record number of 90-year-olds registered to vote – in one year – than at any point in Pennsylvania history.
Another analysis of voting data in Pennsylvania shows that even if Joe Biden won 95% of returned Democrat mail-in votes, 21% of returned Republican votes, and 80% of returned independent votes, he would still have come up short of his margin of victory reported in the unofficial tally.
Exit polls showed Biden getting just 8% of the GOP vote overall. While the 95% number for Democrat mail-ins is closer (exits showed him getting 92%), the notion that 80% of mail-in ballots from independents went to Joe Biden is impossible. Exit polls showed Joe Biden winning around 52% of the independents vote overall.
Arizona Impossibilities
In Arizona, Joe Biden completely blew Barack Obama’s 2008 totals out of the water by approximately 700,000 votes. This is despite the fact that republicans gained 30,000 more registered voters than democrats this year in the state. Republicans also led in registered voters by over 100,000 voters in Arizona.
Even after adjusting for the voter registration increase – which republicans led in by a wide margin – a massive gap of hundreds of thousands of votes remains.
Nevada Impossibilities
A recent analysis of Nevada vote tallies uncovered an unprecedented jump in ‘problem voter’ registrations, which will likely prove the Trump legal team with another avenue to challenge Joe Biden’s victory in another state.
In an affidavit filed in the state, a data scientist found a questionable surge of incomplete voter registrations, and those giving casinos and temporary RV parks as “their home or mailing addresses.”
The expert, Dorothy Morgan, said that her initial study of the records showed a ‘historically strange’ jump in voter registrations missing the sex and age of the voter, making any confirmation by poll workers impossible.
She found that in the presidential election of 2016, there were 68 voter registrations missing this particular critical data. In the 2020 election, it was 13,372.
Additionally, over 70% of the incomplete registrations took place between July and September of this year.
In her two-page affidavit, Morgan wrote, “This investigation found over 13K voters whose voter registration information revealed no sex or date of birth. Not only does this mean we cannot verify whether these voters are old enough to vote, it is also historically strange: While one does not expect voter registration information to be perfect, it is very strange that there were very, very few of these kinds of imperfect records with missing or invalid information until this year – when there are 13,372 of them.”
Several addresses were odd too, she wrote.
Sworn Affidavits and Testimonies of Fraud
According to an affidavit in one Michigan lawsuit, one one particular township in the state had a voter turnout of 781.91%
According to the lawsuit, the townships of Zeeland Charter and Grout had 215% and 460% respectively, while ten others had 100% turnout.
In 3,000 precincts in Michigan voter turnout was reported at anywhere between 90% and over 700%.
Another election lawsuit filed in Michigan alleges there was massive voter fraud in vote-counting procedures in Wayne County, a Democratic stronghold and home to the city of Detroit.
Witnesses filing sworn affidavits under oath allege that Wayne County elections officials encouraged fraud, including changing legal names and dates on ballots, ballot-harvesting, voter intimidation, and preventing poll watchers from challenging irregularities in the vote-counting process.
“This type of widespread fraud in the counting and processing of voter ballots cannot be allowed to stand. Michigan citizens are entitled to know that their elections are conducted in a fair and legal manner and that every legal vote is properly counted,” said David A. Kallman, an attorney with the Great Lakes Justice Center.
Another sworn statement from Detroit indicates that several boxes of ballots were brought in through the back door of the TCF center at 9pm on Wednesday. Election rules state that all ballots needed to be inputted into the system by 9pm on Tuesday, November 3rd.
Election workers inputted the entire batch into the QVF system and manually added each voter to the list after 9pm.
Another part of the statement claims election workers assigned ballots to random names already in the Qualified Voter File to people who haven’t voted in the 2020 election. The sworn statement alleges that election workers systematically used false information in order to be able to process the absentee ballots, such as false birthdays.
“Election workers assigned ballots to random names already in the QVF to a person who had not voted. Defendants systematically used false information to process absentee ballots, such as using incorrect of false birthdays. Many times the election workers inserted new names into the QVF after the election and recorded these new voters as having a birthdate of 1/1/1900”
Outperforming Election Norms
Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 totals in every urban county in the United States, yet he outperformed her in only the metropolitan counties of Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
Biden is set to become the first president in six decades to lose Ohio and Florida, yet win the presidential election. For over 100 years, these states have consistently predicted the national outcome of the election.
Joe Biden lost almost every historic bellwether county across the country, yet is on his way to becoming the 46th president of the United States. The Wall Street Journal recently analyzed the results of 19 counties around the United States that have almost perfect presidential voting prediction records over the last four decades. President Trump won every single county, except Clallam County in Washington state.
Additionally, Joe Biden received more votes than any other candidate in history, despite Democrats’ massive and widespread losses in the House of Representatives.
Donald Trump was the only incumbent president in U.S. history to lose his re-election while his own party gained seats in the House of Representatives.
Confirmed Errors
On and after election day, there were several confirmed reporting errors that were fixed upon being revealed by journalists as they watched the numbers roll in.
• Arizona
In Arizona according to Politico, an error found in Edison Research data that was identified by a journalist showed that 98% of the vote had been counted on November 4th in Arizona when in fact only 84% of the vote had been counted. Officials corrected this mistake when it was pointed out.
• Georgia
In Georgia, Voters were unable to cast machine ballots for a couple of hours in Morgan and Spalding counties after the electronic devices crashed, state officials said.
The companies “uploaded something last night, which is not normal, and it caused a glitch,” said Marcia Ridley, elections supervisor at Spalding County Board of Election. That glitch prevented poll workers from using the pollbooks to program smart cards that the voters insert into the voting machines.
“That is something that they don’t ever do. I’ve never seen them update anything the day before the election,” Ridley said. Ridley said she did not know what the upload contained.
Additionally in four Georgia counties, there were misplaced memory cards with votes that officials forgot to upload and tally. When the memory cards were discovered, the uncounted voted decreased the margin in the state by a few thousand votes.
• Michigan
There was also something suspicious about the vote reporting in Antrim County, Michigan, where Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 30 points in 2016. Initial vote totals there showed Biden ahead of Trump by 29 points, a result that can’t possibly be accurate, as plenty of journalists noted.
When NY Times journalist Ben Rothenberg pointed this out on Twitter, they corrected the totals and called this an ‘error.’
According to the Detroit Free Press, a USA Today affiliate, officials further investigated the wonky election results in Antrim County.
Antrim County Clerk Sheryl Guy said results on electronic tapes and a computer were somehow scrambled after the cards were transported in sealed bags from township precincts to county offices and uploaded onto a computer.
In 2016, Trump won Antrim County with about 62% of the vote, compared with about 33% for Democrat Hillary Clinton. Trump beat Clinton by about 4,000 votes.
The day after election day, Antrim results showed Democrat Joe Biden leading Trump by slightly more than 3,000 votes, with 98% of precincts reporting.
These results were of course reversed.
In Oakland County’s 15th county commission district, a fixed computer glitch turned a losing Republican into a winner. A computer error led election officials in Oakland County to hand an upset victory Wednesday to a Democrat, only to switch the win back to an incumbent Republican a day later. The incumbent, Adam Kochenderfer appeared to lose by a few hundred votes, an outcome that seemed odd to many in his campaign. After the apparent computer error was found and fixed, Kochenderfer ended up winning by over 1,000 votes.
There were many other confirmed errors, including in Virginia where 100,000 extra votes were tallied for Joe Biden, and more may be revealed as the weeks go on.
Georgia Chaos
In just three counties, Joe Biden’s campaign was able to surpass Barack Obama’s historic 2008 performance by a combined 302,576 votes.
This is nearly 24 times more than the current margin of 12,670 votes, in a state Trump won in 2016. The results defy reason.
There were also many processing delays, specifically in Fulton county Georgia where a pipe suddenly ‘burst’ in the processing center.
On November 4th, at approximately 6:07 a.m., the staff at State Farm Arena notified Fulton County Registration and Elections of a burst pipe affecting the room where absentee ballots were being tabulated.
As of 7 p.m. on Wednesday Fulton County Elections officials said 30,000 absentee ballots were not processed due to a pipe burst. Officials reassured voters that none of the ballots were damaged and the water was quickly cleaned up.
But the emergency delayed officials from processing ballots between 5:30 a.m. and 9:30 a.m.
Officials in Georgia have not been able to produce any invoices or work orders related to a “burst pipe” at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena that was blamed for an abrupt pause in vote counting on election night.
According to Georgia GOP Chairman David Shafer, a third county in Georgia discovered a memory card with uncounted votes, a majority of which were cast for President Donald Trump.
“Our monitors tell us that Walton County election officials have found a memory card that was apparently not uploaded. The number of uncounted votes is not as large as in Floyd or Fayette but the President will pick up votes,” Shafer said on Twitter.
Previously, in Georgia’s Floyd and Fayette Counties, memory cards were also discovered with uncounted votes, mostly for President Trump. Of the roughly over 5,000 total votes discovered, approximately two thirds of those votes were for President Donald Trump.
The memory cards unearthed in the three counties add up to over 1,400 net votes for Trump, closing his gap with Biden from 14,156 minus 12,753.
Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger blamed the problem on Floyd County election officials failing to upload votes from a memory card in a ballot-scanning machine.
Former Data Chief and Strategist for Trump for President, Matt Braynard also recently discovered an alarming trend happening in Georgia.
Postal facilities like UPS and FedEx were apparently used to cast votes, with their addresses disguised as apartments.
According to Braynard, in Georgia nearly 100% of the voters who disguised a postal facility as their residential address voted absentee, with nearly zero voting on Election Day.
Under federal law, it is illegal to use a post office mailing address to cast your ballot. According to section 2 of this federal document, you cannot use a post office box mailing address.
Even if it was legally allowed under federal law to use a PO box as a residential address for your ballot, most of the postal facilities found in the data do not even have post office boxes at their facilities.
Thus far, Braynard and his team have discovered nearly 1400 early and absentee voters who have registered their residential addresses to postal facilities.
Massive Enthusiasm Gap:
Joe Biden with almost record low enthusiasm, underperformed across many major cities compared to Hillary Clinton in 2016.
In New York City, Chicago, and Miami, he was down 201,408, 260,835, and 6,945 respectively.
However, in the states Biden needed to overtake Trump in 2020, he gained massively. According to the Associated Press vote total data, in Atlanta, Milwaukee, and Pittsburg, he was up 76,518, 67,630, and 29,150 respectively.
According to polling, The difference in enthusiasm for the candidates is significant. Trump leads 52.9 percent to 45 percent among the 51.2 percent of registered Rust Belt voters who say they are “Extremely Enthusiastic” about voting for their preferred candidate. Among likely voters who are extremely enthusiastic, the president enjoys a double-digit advantage—60.5 percent to 44.9 percent.
Less than half of the supporters of former vice president Joe Biden, (46.9 percent) said they were voting for Joe Biden because they like the candidate. Approximately 8 in 10 voted for President Trump because they wanted his as President.
British organizations hit by “complex cyber attack”
Press TV | December 19, 2020
A major cyber attack that has hit US government agencies is also believed to have affected a small number of British organizations.
According to Sky News, British officials are “investigating” as to whether government departments have been affected by the big breach.
Hitherto, it is believed only private British companies have been affected.
Paul Chichester, the director of operations at the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), which is an extension of the GCHQ signals intelligence organization, has urged British companies to take “immediate steps” to protect their networks.
“This is a complex, global cyber incident, and we are working with international partners to fully understand its scale and any UK impact”, Chichester told Sky News.
“The NCSC is working to mitigate any potential risk, and actionable guidance has been published on our website”, he added.
Meanwhile, one of the directors of a leading British cyber security company has claimed the attacks could be the most “impactful national security [cyber] breach” that has ever been seen.
John Hultquist, who is senior director of analysis at Mandiant Solutions (which is part of the cyber security company FireEye), told Sky News that: “They [the hackers] managed clearly to gain access to a lot of secure areas. They are going to be very hard to get out”.
FireEye reportedly was the first cyber security company to discover the trans-Atlantic breach.
Yet another major figure in the British cyber security world echoed Hultquist’s assessment by describing the latest breach is “one of the most significant cyber attacks, really that’s ever been seen”.
Ciaran Martin, who is the founder and former head of the NCSC, told Sky News the attack was motivated by “traditional espionage”.
However, Martin, who is currently an academic at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University, cautioned that “it remains to be seen, what the final picture [about the hacking] tells us”.
US media, in addition to British security sources, have reflexively blamed the hacking on Russia’s foreign intelligence service (SVR) without furnishing any evidence.
Featured Video
Iran War Confusion & Mixed Messaging /Lt Col Daniel Davis
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
Anti-science
The infinite list
The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | October 12, 2022
Almost three years ago science entered a new dark age.
Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, seems to agree. He has been compiling a list of the examples of anti-science we have unfortunately become used to.
I have listed his thoughts so far but the list is continually expanding... continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Iran War Confusion & Mixed Messaging /Lt Col Daniel Davis
- Israel threatens Gaza flotilla activists with death after abduction
- Met refuses to probe British nationals accused of war crimes in Gaza
- Hezbollah denies activity in Syria amid persistent and false claims
- Melkite bishops concerned over Israeli demolitions in South Lebanon
- Israel’s Obliteration Ecocide from Gaza to Lebanon and Beyond
- UAE deports tens of thousands of Pakistanis, seizes their savings amid war on Iran: Report
- Wheels Down in Tbilisi: Was a Routine U.S. Military Stopover a Deliberate Signal to Iran?
- Trump’s second strike on Iran would be suicidal. But that’s not the reason why he won’t go ahead with it
- Palantir touts record expansion and ‘battlefield’ AI value
- If Americans Knew
- An All-American Retort to Israel’s Invasion of Lebanon
- How Dr. Adam Hamawy’s experience as a surgeon in Gaza inspired him to run for Congress
- Under Trump, Green Card Seekers Face New Scrutiny for Views on Israel
- With World Distracted by War, Extremist Settlers Intensify Attacks in West Bank
- Israel’s brutality toward Gaza flotilla activists – 3 articles
- “Spitting and humiliation are daily. People are afraid to walk in Jerusalem with Christian symbols.”
- How the US-Israel Relationship Weakens America and Harms the World
- 1 in 5 amputees in Gaza is a child, UN warns amid prosthetic care crisis
- 6,000 Gazans lack prosthetic and/or rehabilitation care – Daily Update
- As in Gaza, Israel is targeting rescue workers in South Lebanon, killing more than 100 since March
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: Declining Trends In 1980-2023 Tropical Cyclone Frequency, Accumulated Energy
- 46 IPCC Scientists Break Rank, Publicly Challenge Long-Standing Dogmatic Climate Claims
- Another Study Links Warming To Cloud Forcing, Shortwave Radiation, Natural Atmospheric Circulation
- Wind Energy Is Toxic, Hazardous To Human Health, Scientific Review Shows
- Oversupply Of Volatile Solar Energy Leads To Record NEGATIVE Prices!
- New Study: Extreme Heat Records, Heatwaves, Extreme Cold Records Declining Across US Since 1899
- It’s The Cold, Stupid! Cold 20 Times More Lethal Than Heat, Multiple Studies Show
- European Institute For Climate And Energy: “Climate Debate is Seldom About Science”
- New Study: The Climate May Be 5 Times More Sensitive To Solar Forcing Than Commonly Assumed
- EV Industry Reached $70 Billion In Losses In 2024 Due To Delusional Green Ideologies
Aletho News 