An extraordinary, concerted establishment campaign to rehabilitate the reputation of White Helmets founder James Le Mesurier has unfolded over recent months.
First, in late October, came a 6,000-word hagiography in The Guardian — less than a fortnight later, the BBC transmitted a 15-part radio documentary on his firm, Mayday Rescue.
Emma Winberg, Le Mesurier’s spouse and Mayday’s Chief Impact Officer, played a starring role in both efforts, in the process breaking the public silence she’d rigidly maintained since her husband’s mysterious death in November 2019.
Strangely though, discussion of her professional history was almost entirely absent. The Guardian was slightly more informative on this point than the BBC, sparingly describing Winberg as “a former British diplomat” working for a “communications firm in northern Iraq” when she became romantically involved with Le Mesurier in March 2016, before joining Mayday in January 2017.
‘Some of the funds will go missing’
The communications firm in question was Innovative Communications and Strategy (Incostrat), cofounded by Winberg in November 2014 with military intelligence veteran Paul Tilley, former director of Strategic Communications for the UK Ministry of Defence in the Middle East and North Africa. Like Le Mesurier, he attended Sandhurst Royal Military Academy.
Media references to Incostrat are sparse, although in December 2016 Rania Khalek revealed the company had approached a Middle East journalist and offered them US$17,000 per month to produce pro-opposition propaganda.
Private correspondence between the reporter and Incostrat indicates the company positioned itself as one of “three partners” of the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) “working on media surrounding the Syrian conflict.”
Incostrat’s work was funded by the FCO’s Conflict, Stability and Security Fund (CSSF). In February 2017, a parliamentary report stated CSSF had “substantial allocations” in Syria, amounting to £60 million.
The same report noted there was significant risk the CSSF was “being used as a ‘slush fund’ for projects that…do not collectively meet the needs of UK national security,” and some of the financing it afforded “will go missing or be linked to groups that may carry out human rights abuses.”
‘Using media to create events’
Significant light was shed on Incostrat’s cloak-and-dagger activities in September, when ‘hacktivist’ collective Anonymous dumped a vast number of FCO files on the web, exposing a variety of covert information warfare actions undertaken by the UK government against the Syrian state over many years.
The overriding objective behind all the initiatives was to destabilise the government of Bashar Assad, convince Syrians, Western citizens, foreign governments, and international bodies the Free Syrian Army (FSA) was a legitimate alternative, and flood media the world over with pro-opposition propaganda.
In one document, Incostrat boasts of surreptitiously “initiating events to create media effect” and of “using media to create events.” One example of this dual-strategy saw the company create mock Syrian currency in three denominations, imploring citizens to “be on the right side of history.”
The campaign was intended to ensure international opinion remained arrayed against Assad, at a time “media attention has shifted almost exclusively towards ISIS and some influential voices are calling for co-operation with the Syrian regime to combat ISIS.”
“The notes are due to be smuggled into regime-held parts of Syria once formal clearance has been authorized by [UK government] officials,” the file states. “We will engage the international media to create a story around the event… The message to the regime [is] covert but active resistance continues.”
Another saw Incostrat produce “postcards, posters and reports” to “draw behavioural parallels” between the Assad government and ISIS, and dishonestly further the conspiracy theory that “a latent relationship exists between the two.”
Incostrat also provided “a credible, Arabic-English speaking Syrian spokesperson” to the media to further the campaign’s messaging, securing interviews in “major news outlets” such as Al-Jazeera, Buzzfeed, CNN, The Guardian, New York Times, Times, and Washington Post.
‘Human interest stories’
Another document indicates the company was staffed by veterans of covert Whitehall-funded psyops, noting Incostrat partners previously established a local media platform in Iraq “immediately following the fall of Saddam Hussein,” training “a cadre of journalists” who were “instrumental in reporting on events in Basra.”
The same file also makes clear Incostrat personnel had been providing support to Syrian media platforms and civil society organisations since 2012, before the firm was founded.
In the process, Incostrat operatives played a role in creating eight FM radio stations and six community magazines across the country, developing and managing the Syrian National Coalition’s media office, and helped establish Basma – “a media platform providing human interest stories and campaigns that support [UK government] policy objectives.”
Other files leaked by Anonymous indicate Basma was the primary creation of ARK, a shadowy “conflict transformation and stabilization consultancy” headed by veteran FCO operative Alistair Harris, implying significant overlap between the pair.
Le Mesurier himself worked at ARK 2011 – 2014, and Mayday Rescue was spun out of the company – yet The Guardian’s lengthy elegy alleges Winberg had only been “briefly introduced” to him twice at “garden parties” prior to their formal March 2016 meeting.
Moderate torturers and murderers
As with other FCO contractors operating in Syria, including ARK, Incostrat produced propaganda promoting extremist groups as credible alternatives to the Assad government, and whitewashing their barbarous nature.
One document refers to the firm “providing strategic communications support to the moderate armed opposition.” An FCO tender for the project indicates some of the “moderate” groups to which Incostrat may have provided “strategic communications support” — “the Free Syrian Army, the Supreme Military Council, Revolutionary Forces Syria and… mid-level units such as Syrian Revolutionaries Front, Jaysh al-Islam [and] Harakat al-Hazm.”
The inclusion of Jaysh al-Islam (JAI) on this list is striking, for more reasons than one. While none of the collectives mentioned would adhere even vaguely to any definition of the term ‘moderate’, except perhaps broadly relative to the most murderous ‘rebel’ elements in Syria — with which each group regularly collaborated in any event — JAI was an especially and notoriously brutal fraternity.
For years, it ran the assorted areas it occupied under extremely vicious interpretations of Sharia law, kidnapping, imprisoning, torturing and executing innocent men, women and children for even the mildest infringements of strict Islamist code. Along the way, JAI carried out many atrocities, including parading caged Alawite families in the streets, using hostages as human shields, and attacking Kurdish civilians with chemical weapons.
While the UK government denies providing any backing to JAI, the files released by Anonymous confirm the other groups mentioned by the FCO all did receive Whitehall support of various kinds. Moreover, independent journalists who visited areas the group occupied found JAI worked closely with the White Helmets, which received tens of millions in funding from London.
Other files released by Anonymous indicate ARK reaped vast sums promoting the Helmets at the FCO’s behest, developing “an internationally focused communications campaign to raise global awareness” of the group in order to “keep Syria in the news.”
Along the way, ARK produced a documentary on the Helmets and ran their various social media accounts, including the Facebook page for Idlib City Council, at one time mooted as a potential interim government to replace Bashar Assad. When Al-Nusra overwhelmed the city, numerous Helmets were filmed celebrating the ‘victory’ in its main square.
The linkage between JAI and the Helmets gains an acutely sinister dimension given the former’s primary base of operations was the city of Douma, the site of a highly controversial alleged chemical weapons attack 7th April 2018.
The Helmets were central to Western news reporting in the initial hours and days following the contested strike, its operatives claiming two Syrian Air Force helicopters dropped barrel bombs containing the nerve agent sarin on the city.
Images they provided of cylinders embedded in buildings circulated widely on social networks and media platforms the world over, along with footage of local residents being hosed down in hospitals, children foaming at the mouth, and piles of dead bodies in a housing complex.
Paris, London and Washington claimed to possess secret proof Assad’s forces had attacked the city with chemical weapons, and in response launched a series of military strikes against multiple government sites in Syria 14th April 2018.
In March 2019, the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) issued a final report on the incident, which concluded there were “reasonable grounds” to believe a chemical weapons attack had occurred in Douma, and “the toxic chemical was likely molecular chlorine.”
However, a number of the organization’s previously suppressed files are now in the public domain — they make clear the report’s findings were directly contrary to the overwhelming majority of evidence collected by investigators who actually visited Douma, which pointed strongly to a staged ‘false flag’ incident.
An illicit affair
The documents imply witness and forensic evidence contradicting the notion a chemical weapons attack occurred in Douma, excluded from the OPCW’s final report on the incident, was collected in Turkey. The BBC’s radio series on Mayday confirmed this evidence was provided to investigators by Le Mesurier and the White Helmets.
While the OPCW website makes no reference to this assistance, not merely in respect of the Douma investigation but its probes of at least three other alleged government chemical weapon attacks in Syria, in June 2018 Mayday’s deep and cohering ties with the organization were exposed by none other than Emma Winberg.
Speaking at an Atlantic Council event alongside Bellingcat founder and chief Eliot Higgins, she described how the Helmets had in 2015 specifically been provided with OPCW-standard training and equipment to collect samples from the scenes of airstrikes for the organization. The ease with which this privileged position could be abused was apparently not considered, or indeed of no concern.
This followed two years in which the group’s status as ‘first responders’ in the Syrian crisis had become ever-more firmly established in the mainstream, thanks in no small part to the endless deluge of footage posted on the group’s social media channels, which was frequently broadcast by Western news platforms subsequently.
In 2014, Winberg said, human rights organisations began “taking an interest” in the footage and reaching out to Mayday directly, seeking witness testimony from Helmets among other things.
She also suggested the attention generated by the group’s video clips was serendipitous, as the helmet-mounted cameras they wore were originally intended to be a “training aid” — it wasn’t until later, allegedly, they thought to publicise the content captured.
Fittingly, Winberg’s brief talk fed into a speech by Higgins, in which he demonstrated how Bellingcat and other media organisations made use of the White Helmets’ footage.
‘How communications influence’
It’s highly implausible the FCO-funded information warfare specialists that trained and promoted the Helmets weren’t well-aware in advance of the propaganda value of imagery from the conflict.
Yet, Winberg’s narrative is even more incredible given ARK, the firm so intimately intertwined with Incostrat and Mayday, extensively tutored and equipped hundreds of Syrians in “camera handling, lighting, sound, interviewing, filming a story,” post-production techniques including “video and sound editing and software, voice-over, scriptwriting,” and “graphics and 2D and 3D animation design and software.”
ARK’s students were also instructed in practical propaganda theory, such as “target audience identification, media and media narrative analysis and monitoring, behavioral identification/understanding, campaign planning, behavioral change, and how communications can influence it,” and more. Such disciplines would no doubt be extremely effective in the staging of a ‘false flag’ attack.
The FCO continued funding Incostrat to the tune of millions after Winberg’s departure, and does so to this day. Cofounder Paul Tilley also left the company at around the same time, and founded IN-2 Comms, which“provides a more tailored product to the public and private sector focussing on specialised communication campaigns.” The firm has likewise reaped vast sums from Whitehall ever since.
One wonders whether the FCO’s extensive network of psyops cutouts played any role in the recent propaganda blitz surrounding Le Mesurier, Winberg, and the Helmets.
The BBC’s Mayday series credits Abdul Kader Habak as having provided “Arabic translation and additional research” to the project. According to his Facebook page, he worked for ARK 2013 – 2019.
Chloe Hadjimatheou, the documentary’s producer and presenter, has previously reported on events in Syria. In 2016, she produced a five-part documentary, Islamic State’s Most Wanted, on citizen activist collective Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently.
The group was founded by journalist Naji al-Jerf, who subsequently served as its primary spokesperson — he was also an ARK employee, playing a pivotal role in training and coordinating the firm’s vast network of stringers in Syria, and managing its distribution networks. He was murdered by ISIS operatives for these activities in December 2015.
On 18th November, Winberg announced her retreat from the public eye via Twitter, saying she would be “offline for the foreseeable” in order to “get to work”. It’s not certain what this “work” will entail, but mainstream efforts to deify her husband and obscure the reality of his professional history, the group he founded, and how and why he died, are evidently ongoing.
Kit Klarenberg, an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. Follow Kit on Twitter @Kit Klarenberg
December 8, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Syria, UK |
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Who was running whom in the Epstein espionage ring?
The story of the deceased pedophile and presumed Israeli spy Jeffrey Epstein continues to enthrall because so little of the truth regarding it has been revealed in spite of claims by the government that a thorough follow-up investigation has been initiated. The case is reportedly still open and it is to be presumed that Justice Department investigators have been able to examine certain aspects of what occurred more intensively. A major part of the investigation has been a review of actions taken by the four government prosecutors who were most directly involved with the negotiations with Epstein and his lawyers in 2007-8. The 22 month-long review, carried out by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), finally produced a 350 page report which was released on November 12th.
The DOJ has now picked out a scapegoat for what many now think was gross prosecutorial negligence, possibly including corruption of senior government officials. He is not surprisingly Alexander Acosta, who was the U.S. Attorney for Miami when the Epstein case came up. Relying substantially on internal government emails as well as communications between the prosecutors and Epstein’s team of high-profile lawyers to reach its conclusion, the OPR review concluded that Acosta exhibited “poor judgment” in his handling of the Epstein deal. He did not inform the victims or their attorneys of developments in the case, as required by law, and overruled the lead prosecutor and FBI agents who argued that Epstein should face serious jail time. He even cut a deal with Epstein before the investigation into his crimes was completed. The OPR investigators also determined that many emails that would have materially aided the plaintiffs were not made available to their attorneys, a shortcoming that the report attributed to a “technological error.”
The email gap covers the time span from May 2007, when the prosecutor’s office prepared a 53-page draft indictment of Epstein, to April 2008, shortly before Epstein’s guilty plea and slap-on-the-wrist sentence in state court ended the federal investigation. Epstein’s defense attorneys had during that time period been engaged in an aggressive lobbying campaign to persuade the federal prosecutors to rescind the indictment and shut down the federal case. Epstein’s “sweetheart deal” with the federal government negated a possible conviction of serious crimes against 19 alleged victims, most of whom were minors. Instead of a possible sentence of between 14 and 17 years in federal prison, Epstein was encouraged by federal prosecutors to plead guilty to two prostitution-related crimes in state court to resolve the case. He served 13 months of an 18-month sentence in a county jail on a liberal work release program, often sleeping in his own home, and the federal case was duly closed.
It is, of course, noticeable that neither Acosta, who has possibly now retired from public life, nor anyone else will be punished for what was clearly a gross miscarriage of justice. That is the way the government works these days. But there is also a much bigger problem with the report, which is that it essentially failed to follow up on an argument that Acosta made when the bungling of the Epstein case began to surface in the media last year.
There has, in fact, been a cover-up of a major element in the Epstein saga, namely his possible connection with Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad. Investigative reporter Whitney Webb has recently completed an exhaustive review of what we know about Epstein’s partner in crime, lover and accomplice Ghislaine Maxell, to include some consideration of the possible involvement of her sisters Isabel and Christine in activity initially directed by their father, known Mossad agent Robert Maxwell.
The evidence that Epstein was directly involved in intelligence work to include bribing or blackmailing prominent individuals to act on behalf of Israel, derives both from the statement made by Acosta in 2017 that “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone,” a comment that the Justice Department and FBI have apparently never sought to investigate further. It also derives from other external evidence. Epstein was found to be making videos of his guests having sex with his young girls, which is a version of a classic intelligence entrapment technique employed by every major spy agency worldwide and in his Manhattan mansion he had a large supply of diamonds, cash and an Austrian passport on hand if he should have to make a quick escape.
That Epstein would be linked to Israel rather than to some other intelligence service is inevitably due to his relationship with Robert Maxwell, which eventually included his daughter Ghislaine. Robert, a Czech Jew who became a naturalized British citizen, was believed by C.I.A. and other intelligence services to be a long-time agent of Mossad. After he died under mysterious circumstances, he was given a state funeral in Israel that was attended by every current and former head of the Jewish state’s intelligence service as well as by the country’s prime minister Yitzhak Shamir who eulogized: “He has done more for Israel than can today be said.” Ghislaine reportedly became the principal procurer of Epstein’s young girl victims.
Also corroborating the tale of espionage even if it appears to be of no interest to the FBI and Justice Department, is a book Epstein: Dead Men Tell No Tales written by a former Israeli intelligence officer who actually ran the “Robert Maxwell” operation, describing inter alia how Epstein and Maxwell were blackmailing prominent politicians on behalf of Mossad. According to Ari Ben-Menashe, the two had been working directly for the Israeli government since the 1980’s and their operation, which was funded by Mossad and also by prominent American Jews, was a classic “honey-trap” which used underage girls as bait to attract well-known politicians from around the world, a list that included Prince Andrew and Bill Clinton. The politicians would be photographed and video recorded when they were in bed with the girls.
But in spite of the evidence, the role of Ghislaine, currently in custody in a maximum-security Brooklyn prison, is less well known and is possibly being deliberately concealed by the Trump Administration, which is prone to do favors for Israel. Even less known are the possible roles of her two sisters. Webb details how Maxwell and his Israeli Mossad handlers compromised the top-secret information system then in use by the U.S. government. She observes that “While Ghislaine’s own ties to intelligence have… come to light in relation to her critical role in facilitating the Jeffrey Epstein sexual blackmail operation,… little, if any attention, has been paid to her siblings, particularly Christine and her twin sister Isabel, despite them having held senior roles at the Israeli intelligence front company that facilitated their father’s greatest act of espionage on Israel’s behalf, the sale of the bugged PROMIS software to the U.S. national laboratories at the heart of the country’s nuclear weapons system… Ghislaine herself also became involved in these [blackmail] affairs, as did Jeffrey Epstein following his first arrest, as they began courting the biggest names in the U.S. tech scene, from Silicon Valley’s most powerful venture capital firms to its most well-known titans. This also dovetailed with Epstein’s investments in Israeli intelligence-linked tech firms and his claims of having troves of blackmail on prominent tech company CEOs during this same period.”
Upon Robert Maxwell’s mysterious death in 1991, his sons Kevin and Ian took control of many of the interlocking companies that their father had used both to conceal assets and to obtain access and information while Ghislaine remained in the New York area and two other daughters Isabel and Christine opted to exploit the internet as an intelligence resource to build upon their father’s “legacy.”
Isabel, in particular, moved aggressively and eventually became recognized as the self-styled liaison between Israel’s government and Silicon Valley. Whitney Webb recounts in considerable detail how she “mov[ed] in ‘the same circles as her father’ and vow[ed] to ‘work only on things involving Israel’ … [to become] a pivotal liaison for the entry of Israeli intelligence-linked tech firms into Silicon Valley with the help of Microsoft’s two co-founders, Paul Allen and Bill Gates.”
One has to suspect that a tale of Mossad running a major spy ring in the U.S. using a pedophile and young girls might just be too much for some folks in power to tolerate and they have made sure that the true story will never see the light of day. But the tale of how the prominent ostensibly British Maxwell family, acting for Mossad, may have systematically spied on the United States over a number of years, often pretty much out in the open, and the FBI and Justice Department saw fit to look the other way, is bigger still. That is the real story. Israel yet again spies and Washington denies.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org
December 8, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Timeless or most popular | Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, United States, Zionism |
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Under the guise of combatting “structural racism,” the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security has laid out a strategy for ethnic minorities and the mentally challenged to be vaccinated first, all “as a matter of justice.” However, other claims made by the Center contradict these social justice talking points and point to other motives entirely.
With the first COVID-19 vaccine candidate set to receive an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) from the US government in a matter of days, its distribution and allocation is set to begin “within 24 hours” of that vaccine’s imminent approval.
The allocation strategy of COVID-19 vaccines within the US is set to dramatically differ from previous national vaccination programs. One key difference is that the vaccine effort itself, known as Operation Warp Speed, is being almost completely managed by the US military, along with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the National Security Agency (NSA), as opposed to civilian health agencies, which are significantly less involved than previous national vaccination efforts and have even been barred from attending some Warp Speed meetings. In addition, for the first time since 2001, law enforcement officers and DHS officials are set to not be prioritized for early vaccination.
Another key difference is the plan to utilize a phased approach that targets “populations of focus” identified in advance by different government organizations, including the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). Characteristics of those “populations of focus,” also referred to as “critical populations” in official documentation, will then be identified by the secretive, Palantir-developed software tool known as “Tiberius” to guide Operation Warp Speed’s vaccine distribution efforts. Tiberius will provide Palantir access to sensitive health and demographic data of Americans, which the company will use to “help identify high-priority populations at highest risk of infection.”
This report is the first of a three-part series unmasking the racist components of the Pentagon-run project to both develop and distribute a COVID-19 vaccine. It explores the COVID-19 vaccine allocation strategy first outlined by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and subsequent government allocation strategies that were informed by Johns Hopkins.
The main focus of this allocation strategy is to deliver vaccines first to racial minorities but in such a way as to make those minorities feel “at ease” and not like “guinea pigs” when receiving an experimental vaccine that those documents admit is likely to cause “certain adverse effects… more frequently in certain population subgroups.” Research has shown that those “subgroups” most at risk for adverse effects are these same minorities.
The documents also acknowledge that information warfare and economic coercion will likely be necessary to combat “vaccine hesitancy” among these minority groups. It even frames this clearly disproportionate focus on racial minorities as related to national concerns over “police brutality,” claiming that giving minorities the experimental vaccine first is necessary to combat “structural racism” and ensure “fairness and justice” in the healthcare system and society at large.
Part 2 of this series will discuss how Palantir, a company currently helping DHS and law enforcement violently target African Americans and Latinos, will be in charge of allocating “tailored” COVID-19 vaccines to those same minorities as well as Palantir’s origins and its executives’ views on race. Part 3 will explore the direct ties between a COVID-19 vaccine front-runner and the Eugenics Society, which was re-named the Galton Institute in 1989.
The Planners
The Trump administration has been criticized for its rush to develop and deploy a COVID-19 vaccine and particularly for installing Monclef Slaoui, a former pharmaceutical executive with ongoing conflicts of interest, as chief scientific adviser for Operation Warp Speed, the Pentagon-run program to produce and distribute the vaccine. Yet, if and when a Biden administration takes power, Operation Warp Speed is set to proceed with little, if any, modification.
The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (CHS) director Tom Inglesby, who will serve on the Biden Health and Human Services (HHS) transition team, has praised Slaoui, telling Stat News that the longer someone like him can remain in charge of the nation’s COVID-19 vaccine effort, “the better it is for the country.”
Inglesby, who led discussions at the CHS’s Event 201 exercise in October 2019 and who was one of the primary authors of the controversial Johns Hopkins Dark Winter exercise in 2001, is emblematic of the US government’s and the mainstream media’s general reliance on the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (of which CHS is part) for pandemic-related matters. Slaoui regularly appears on network TV as a COVID-19 oracle and has been called “one of the nation’s go-to experts on the spread of the coronavirus.” Readers may note that the Johns Hopkins “coronavirus tracker” has been used by virtually every mainstream news source since the beginning of COVID-19 reporting. This relationship is expected to continue, if not intensify, in a Biden administration.
Both Kathleen Hicks, the lead on Biden’s Department of Defense (DOD) transition team, and Alexander Bick, on Biden’s National Security Council transition team, are scholars at Johns Hopkins Kissinger Center for Global Affairs, reflecting the university’s broader influence on a future Biden administration. Yet, the most significant way the Biden transition intersects with Johns Hopkins is through the CHS.
Originally called the Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies, the CHS is a think tank within Johns Hopkins that regularly gives recommendations to both the US government and the World Health Organization and, like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has emerged as a voice of authority on all matters COVID-19 in the US. The center’s founding director was D. A. Henderson, best known for his role in the WHO-sponsored smallpox vaccination campaign. Henderson also held several government positions, including serving as associate director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy under George H. W. Bush. He was also the longtime dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.
Dr. Tom Inglesby
Another member of the Biden transition team is Luciana Borio, a current member of the CHS steering committee. As both a former FDA scientist and former National Security Council member, Borio signifies the relationship between the national security state and the biosecurity state. She’s currently a vice president of In-Q-Tel, the venture-capital arm of the CIA.
In-Q-Tel’s current executive vice president, Tara O’Toole, who at the onset of the COVID-19 outbreak declared that “the best way ever to protect those who are well is with vaccines,” is Inglesby’s mentor and predecessor as director of the CHS. She was also a key player and the lead author of the CHS’s Dark Winter and CladeX bioterror simulations. The Engineering Contagion series published by The Last American Vagabond earlier this year explored the Dark Winter simulation in depth, including how the simulation eerily predicted the 2001 anthrax attacks that followed soon after September 11, 2001, with several participants demonstrating apparent foreknowledge of those attacks.
Ending racism with vaccines?
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has consistently referenced materials developed by the CHS in its recent COVID-19 vaccine allocation literature. These CDC-issued materials form the backbone of the various vaccine allocation strategies issued by many state governments. Chief among these is the COVID-19 Vaccination Program Interim Playbook, published at the end of October. A key aspect of that program is the determination of “critical populations for COVID-19 vaccination, including those groups identified to receive the first available doses of COVID-19 vaccine when supply is expected to be limited.”
In August, the CHS published its Inglesby co-written Interim Framework for COVID-19 Vaccine Allocation and Distribution, which is cited by the CDC as a key reference for its nationwide COVID-19 vaccine-allocation strategy. This report will examine this document, in particular, as well as other related documents that reveal that ethnic and racial minorities, specifically those over sixty-five and those who make up part of the “essential” workforce, are set to be the first to receive experimental COVID-19 vaccines.
The Interim Framework argues there is a need to prioritize ethnic minorities, particularly African Americans and Latino Americans, in order to reflect “fairness and justice.” It states that “a critical difference” between COVID-19 vaccine allocation and the “context envisioned in the 2018 guidance for pandemic influenza vaccine allocation” is the fact that the US is “currently in the midst of a national reckoning on racial injustice, prompted by cases of police brutality and murder.” It goes on to state that “although structural racism was as present in the 2018 and previous influenza epidemics as it is today, the general public acknowledgment of racial injustice was not.”
It goes without saying that police brutality is decidedly unrelated to vaccine allocation as is increased national awareness of racial injustice as it relates to police brutality. This is further compounded by the police, in this document, being removed as a priority group for COVID-19 vaccine allocation, despite having been designated a priority group in all other government vaccine-allocation guidance since the 2001 anthrax attacks. Also odd is that it is only increased access of minorities to the COVID-19 vaccine that is cited as a way to address “structural racism in health systems,” not other policies that would be more likely to address the problem such as Medicare for All.
In addition, the Interim Framework admits that “communities of color, particularly Black populations, may be more wary of officials responsible for vaccine-related decisions due to past medical injustices committed by authorities on Black communities.” There is a long list of these “medical injustices” committed against minority communities by the US government, including the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiments, which are discussed in detail later.
Another odd passage on “justice” and “equity” as it relates to vaccinating ethnic minorities first states:
“In the context of vaccine allocation, treating individuals fairly has sometimes been defined as treating everyone the same or equally, for example, by distributing vaccines on a first-come, first-served basis or by giving everyone an equal chance at getting vaccine via a lottery. Because the impact of the vaccine is different for different people (i.e., some people are at greater risk of death), the straightforward ways of treating people equally are often rejected as unfair or as an inefficient use of vaccine. . . .
In the context of vaccine allocation, promoting equity and social justice requires addressing higher rates of COVID-19–related severe illness and mortality among systematically disadvantaged or marginalized groups. . .
As a matter of justice, these disparities in COVID-19 risk and adverse outcomes across racial and ethnic groups should be addressed in our overall COVID-19 response.”
This extreme emphasis on the “fairness and justice” of prioritizing minorities for the vaccine is contradicted by other claims made in the same document. For example, the document also states:
“The ultimate safety of an approved vaccine is not completely knowable until it has been administered to millions of people. During clinical trials, tens of thousands of individuals will receive the vaccine but that may fail to show safety concerns that occur with less frequency, such as 1 in a million. This can be a concern for particularly severe adverse effects.”
It also notes: “It is also possible that certain adverse effects may occur more frequently in certain population subgroups, which may not be apparent until millions are vaccinated.”
Notably, African Americans are understood to be at a higher risk for adverse reactions to vaccines. According to a study by the University of Pennsylvania, African Americans exhibit a disproportionately higher immune response to certain flu shots. And in 2014, the Mayo Clinic found that African Americans have almost double the immune response to the rubella vaccine as Caucasian Americans. Immune reactions that are too strong can result in more adverse events and inflammatory responses such as transverse myelitis, a debilitating inflammation and paralysis of the spinal cord. A 2010 study in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health showed that African American boys were at significantly greater risk of suffering severe neurological injury from the hepatitis B shot as compared to Caucasians.
This raises the question as to whether African Americans should be prioritized for a poorly tested vaccine when the available science shows that this demographic may be at a higher risk for adverse reactions to vaccines. Previous coronavirus vaccine projects triggered immune responses so strong that the test animals died, and the vaccine projects got scrapped. The Johns Hopkins CHS Interim Framework claiming that vaccinating African Americans and other ethnic minorities first represents “fairness and justice” and would address “structural racism” does not square with its admission that the safety of the COVID-19 vaccine is “not completely knowable” until millions have received it and that “certain adverse effects may occur more frequently in certain population subgroups.”
Who is really to blame for “vaccine hesitancy”?
For a successful rollout of a COVID-19 vaccine, the federal government will need to reckon with “vaccine hesitancy,” which the WHO named as one of the top ten threats to global health in 2019 and which is a major concern discussed at length in the August Interim Framework on COVID-19 vaccination strategies.
According to recent polls, such hesitancy is, understandably, most prevalent among African Americans, the group that has most commonly been used as human guinea pigs by the US government and associated scientific and medical institutions. For instance, there are the infamous Tuskegee University experiments, devised by the US Public Health Service (now a division of HHS) and the CDC. The unwitting participants in the study, all of whom who were African American, were told that they were receiving free health-care services from the federal government, while actually they were being intentionally untreated for syphilis so government scientists could study the devastating progression of the disease. Deception was critical to the experiment, as the participants did not know they were part of an experiment at all and were also kept unaware of their true diagnosis. While Tuskegee may be the most well-known example of racist medical experimentation in the US, it’s far from the only one.
For example, during Manhattan Project, the undertaking that produced the atom bomb, the US government contracted dozens of physicians to inject unknowing hospital patients with up to 4.7 micrograms of radioactive plutonium, forty-one times normal lifetime exposure. The goal of this experiment was to pinpoint the dosage at which radioactive elements such as plutonium would cause illnesses like leukemia, and to measure the amount of radioactivity that lingers in the blood, tissues, bones, and urine. Between 1944 and 1994 the Atomic Energy Commission supported thousands of experimental projects sanctioning such radiation on human subjects, most of whom were African Americans.
From 1954 to 1962, the Sloan-Kettering Institute, which receives hundreds of millions of dollars of NIH funds annually, injected over four hundred African American inmates at Ohio State Prison with live cancer cells to observe how the body might destroy them. The primary sponsor for this research was the National Institutes of Health, which also partially sponsored the Tuskegee experiments.
From 1987 through 1991, US researchers administered as much as five hundred times the approved dosage of the Edmonton-Zagreb (EZ) measles vaccine to African American and Latino babies in low-income Los Angeles neighborhoods as part of a vaccine experiment. Consent forms did not inform parents of the increased dosage or of the fact that the vaccine was experimental. Parents were also not informed that the vaccine had already been given to two thousand children in Haiti, Senegal, and Guinea-Bissau with disastrous results. For example, in Senegal, children who received the jab died at a rate 80 percent higher than children who did not receive it. The CDC would later characterize the US trials as “clearly a mistake.”
Between 1992 and 1997, Columbia University’s Lowenstein Center for the Study and Prevention of Childhood Disruptive Behavior Disorders conducted studies that sought to establish a link between genetics and violence, focusing on minority children in New York City. These experiments targeted 126 boys between the ages of six and ten, 100 percent of whom were either African American, Latino, or biracial. In exchange for $100 and a $25 Toys “R” Us gift card, the children, selected because their older brothers had come into contact with the juvenile probation system, were taken from their homes, denied food and water, and given a drug called fenfluramine. Prior to these experiments, fenfluramine had never been administered to people under the age of twelve, and it was already known that the drug was associated with heart-valve damage, brain damage, and death.
Such historical facts raise obvious questions about the reasons for “vaccine hesitancy” and how they are currently being approached by the US government and related institutions. While it would make the most sense to combat this problem by holding to account the people responsible for past abuses, such as those described above, the opposite has been the case. Instead, the CHS and other institutions, particularly regarding the coming COVID-19 vaccination campaign, have proposed several other means of combatting “vaccine hesitancy,” ranging from deception to information warfare to economic coercion.
A dark legacy poised to continue
Given the long-standing exploitive relationship between US medicine and ethnic minorities, the August Interim Framework addresses the situation that communities of color, and in particular black populations, “may be more wary of officials responsible for vaccine-related decisions due to past medical injustices.” It states: “Anticipate hesitancy among marginalized populations who may be fearful or wary of seeking vaccination at sites that have historically caused mistrust.”
Another CHS paper, published in July and titled “The Public’s Role in COVID-19 Vaccination,” which is cited heavily in the August framework, acknowledged the US “legacy of experimentation on Black men and women.”
However, the CHS document also notes that more than one COVID-19 vaccine candidate “may be available at the same time” and they “may have different safety and efficacy profiles across different population groups and may have different logistical requirements.” It adds that “it is also possible that certain adverse effects may occur more frequently in certain population subgroups, which may not be apparent until millions are vaccinated.”
It is notable that Palantir, the CIA-linked government technology contractor, has been put in charge of creating the software that will “decide” which “population subgroups” are given what vaccine. Palantir is perhaps best known for its controversial role in targeting undocumented immigrants through its contracts with ICE and its role in predictive-policing efforts that disproportionately targeted African Americans. It is certainly unsettling that those same ethnic groups that Palantir is most controversial for targeting on behalf of the national-security state and law enforcement are the same “critical populations” that the company will initially identify for the US military–led COVID-19 vaccination program, Operation Warp Speed.
In addition, in a move that can only aggravate minority community “vaccine hesitancy,” the August CHS Interim Framework recommends that the CDC transform the current “vaccines adverse-event reporting system” from a voluntary system that relies on individuals sending in reports to the government to “an active surveillance system” that “monitors all vaccine recipients,” possibly via unspecified “electronic mechanisms.”
The Last American Vagabond reported last month that Operation Warp Speed, seemingly having taken a cue from the Interim Framework, plans to utilize “incredibly precise . . . tracking systems” that will “ensure that patients each get two doses of the same vaccine and to monitor them for adverse health effects.” Those systems will be managed, in part, by the intelligence-linked tech giants Google and Oracle.
A woman passes by graffiti reading ‘No vaccine, No tracking, No COVID’, in Montreal, Sunday, August 16, 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues in Canada. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes
The main stated purpose of these “tracking systems,” referred to in other Warp Speed documents as “pharmacovigilance systems,” is to monitor the longer-term effects of new, unlicensed vaccine-production methods that are being used in the production of every Warp Speed COVID-19 vaccine candidate. These vaccines, per Warp Speed’s own documents, state that these methods “have limited previous data on safety in humans . . . the long-term safety of these vaccines will be carefully assessed using pharmacovigilance surveillance and Phase 4 (post-licensure) clinical trials,” following the administration of the COVID-19 vaccines to the prioritized “critical populations.”
A strategy takes shape
Given the above, the unprecedented facets of the Warp Speed COVID-19 vaccination plan—that is, its focus on ethnic minorities as the first to receive the experimental COVID-19 vaccine, its interest in giving different vaccine candidates to “different population groups,” and studying the largely unknown effects through “tracking systems” and unspecified “electronic mechanisms”— are all things that would obviously further fuel mistrust by those ethnic groups that have historically been targets of medical experimentation by the US government.
Furthermore, that COVID-19 vaccine development and distribution efforts are being spearheaded by the military and national-security apparatus, as well as having the intimate involvement of controversial contractors such as Palantir, will likely exacerbate minority distrust as Operation Warp Speed advances, given that these same groups are those most often found to be on the receiving end of militarized state violence. Also concerning is that law enforcement, military, and Department of Homeland Security officials will no longer be priority vaccine-allocation targets, for the first time since the 2001 anthrax attacks, while no convincing reason for their exclusion is offered.
Yet, instead of honestly addressing these unprecedented recommendations, the effort to get around the “vaccine hesitancy” issue as it relates to minorities plans to rely on tactics that avoid addressing any of these issues directly. In one example, although the August Interim Framework recommends “directly prioritizing” ethnic minorities, it recognizes that doing so “could further threaten the fragile trust that some have in the medical and public health system, particularly if there is the perception that there has been a lack of testing to assess vaccine safety and that they are the ‘guinea pigs.’” The document also states that “the implementation of directly prioritizing communities of color could also be challenging and divisive, as determining how to access specific populations and how to determine eligibility based on race or ethnicity includes many sensitive challenges.”
As a workaround for such concerns, the CHS suggests that “prioritizing other cohorts of the population, such as essential workers or those with underlying health conditions associated with poorer COVID-19 outcomes, could also indirectly help address the disproportionate burden of this pandemic on communities of color” due to the high representation of those minorities in the essential workforce.
The document continues: “While this approach might avoid some of the challenges outlined above, it would also need to be implemented in a way that ensures vaccines are equitably distributed across subcategories of these categories.” Thus, it suggests prioritizing “those individuals and groups who face both severe health and severe economic risks, specifically essential workers at higher risk of severe illness—or whose household members are at higher risk—who will suffer severe economic harm if they stop working.” Those groups at “higher risk of severe illness,” the document later notes, are incidentally ethnic minorities.
In other words, the strategy proposed by the CHS is to specifically prioritize cohorts of the US population that contain high proportions of ethnic minorities without directly prioritizing those minorities in order to, somewhat deceptively, avoid exacerbating “vaccine hesitancy” concerns among those groups by directly singling them out.
The Interim Framework acknowledges the high prevalence of ethnic minorities in the essential workforce and cites a paper published in April 2020 by the Center for Economic and Policy Research that notes that “people of color are overrepresented in many occupations with frontline industries.”
In addition to prioritizing essential workforce cohorts, which have a high percentage of ethnic minorities, the CHS document also suggests that prisoners, another group where ethnic minorities are heavily overrepresented, and “undocumented immigrant communities of color” should also be prioritized. Like the essential workforce strategy, this would ensure increased vaccine uptake by ethnic minorities without prioritizing them directly.
It is also worth noting that, in addition to the focus on ethnic minorities, the Interim Framework also recommends that “differently abled and mentally challenged populations, who can experience difficulties in accessing healthcare and could be in higher-risk living settings, such as assisted living facilities,” be included as a “target population” along with ethnic minorities.
This strategy as laid out by the CHS appears to have been embraced by the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which is the official government body that will designate the “target populations” of the COVID-19 vaccination strategy.
Also in August, Kathleen Dooling, a CDC epidemiologist writing on behalf of ACIP’s COVID-19 Vaccines Work Group, stated that “groups for early phase vaccination” should be those that “overlap” the most with, first, those with “high risk” medical conditions, second, essential workers, and, third, adults over sixty-five. As previously noted, the essential workforce is predominantly composed of ethnic minorities.
Notably, the “high risk” medical conditions listed in this same document are conditions that are all significantly more prevalent among ethnic minorities, such as type 2 diabetes, obesity, chronic kidney disease, serious heart conditions, and sickle cell disease. Cancer is also listed and, while prevalent across the US population at large, the incidence of cancer is highest among African Americans.
Particularly notable is the inclusion of sickle cell disease, as African Americans in the US have a much higher probability of having that condition than any other group. According to 2010 data analyzed by the CDC, the sickle cell gene, which is necessary in both parents for a child to inherit sickle cell disease, is present in 73 per 1,000 African American newborns, compared to 3 per 1,000 Caucasian newborns.
The “overlap” strategy fits with current CDC ACIP guidelines for vaccine recommendations, which hold that, if vaccination supply is limited, the CDC should “reduce the extra burden the disease is having on people already facing disparities.” The “overlap” strategy as laid out in the recent ACIP COVID-19 Vaccines Work Group document, however, has the inevitable end result of ensuring that the vast majority of those who will first receive the experimental COVID-19 vaccine will be ethnic minorities over the age of sixty-five and ethnic minorities in the essential workforce.
Also noteworthy in relation to the prioritization of ethnic minorities is that in March the government interpreted federal regulations to grant liability immunity to any entity producing, distributing, manufacturing, or administering COVID-19 countermeasures, including vaccines. According to HHS, this move may also “provide immunity from certain liability under civil rights laws,” meaning that those involved with the COVID-19 vaccination campaign may not be liable if found to violate the rights of groups protected under civil rights law, that is, ethnic minorities.
Controlling the narrative
Another tactic promoted by the CHS, as well as the CDC and Warp Speed, to combat “vaccine hesitancy” is aggressive communication strategies that include “saturating” the media landscape with pro-vaccine content while greatly reducing content deemed to promote “vaccine hesitancy.” The national-security state, which is managing Operation Warp Speed, has become increasingly involved in this media effort, particularly by censoring content that is considered to be anti-vaccine (including, in their view, news outlets critical of the pharmaceutical industry and vaccine manufacturers) by using counterterror tools that have previously been used to disrupt online terrorist propaganda.
After the October 2019 coronavirus pandemic simulation, Event 201, the CHS issued a statement that media companies have a responsibility to ensure that “authoritative messages are prioritized.” The CHS had co-sponsored Event 201 alongside the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
There is much more to this information war than just the rapidly accelerating online censorship effort. For instance, the official Operation Warp Speed document entitled “From the Factory to the Frontlines” notes that “strategic communications and public messaging are critical to ensure maximum acceptance of vaccines, requiring a saturation of messaging across the national media.” It also states that “working with established partners—especially those that are trusted sources for target audiences—is critical to advancing public understanding of, access to, and acceptance of eventual vaccines” and that “identifying the right messages to promote vaccine confidence, countering misinformation, and targeting outreach to vulnerable and at-risk populations will be necessary to achieve high coverage.”
The document also notes that Warp Speed will employ the CDC’s three-pronged strategic framework known as “Vaccinate with Confidence” for its communications thrust. The third pillar of that strategy is called “Stop Myths” and has as a main focus “establish[ing] partnerships to contain the spread of misinformation” as well as “work[ing] with local partners and trusted messengers to improve confidence in vaccines.”
Like the official Warp Speed guidance, the CDC Interim Framework also sees “community outreach” as an essential element for a successful vaccine campaign and suggests funding and training community health workers to promote vaccination specifically to “underserved, disproportionately affected groups.” It details how the US government might engage African Americans, Latino Americans, and lower-income populations to build trust in connection with vaccine recommendations and get around “concerns that they are ‘testing subjects’ for a novel vaccine.”
The CHS document notes, for example, the importance of cultural competence when promoting vaccines, advising that vaccinating at “churches, schools, culturally specific community centers or senior centers” might sit better with marginalized populations and make them feel more at ease. Such considerations were further elaborated on by Luciana Borio in September. That month, the vice president of In-Q-Tel and member of Biden’s transition team, wrote that while it may be appropriate to use US military resources for vaccination efforts, “any such federal engagement must be done in a collaborative manner sensitive to public perceptions that may be engendered by having a public health function fulfilled by individuals in uniform.”
A July CHS paper, “The Public’s Role in COVID-19 Vaccination,” a document Luciana Borio also helped write, argued, “Vaccination sites should not be heavily policed or send any signals that the site may be unsafe for Black or other minority communities.” This CHS paper further states that “trusted community spokespersons” should be utilized for a “communication campaign,” amplifying “vaccine-affirming, personally relevant messages.” Like similar WHO materials, it advocates tailoring the campaign to specific audiences and identifying a network of spokespeople to deliver a “salient and specific message repeatedly, delivered by multiple trusted messengers and via diverse media channels.”
Luciana Borio, former director of the U.S. FDA’s Office of Counterterrorism and Emerging Threats and current member of the Biden/Harris Transition COVID-19 Advisory Board.
The CDC also recommends vaccine administration at places such as university parking lots, soup kitchens, public libraries, and faith-based organizations. An October CDC report reads: “For people living in institutions, consider vaccination at intake; for people attending colleges/universities, vaccinate at enrollment.” It also proposes that US states and territories utilize nontraditional vaccination sites such as homeless shelters and food pantries.
The prospect of red-carpet celebrities, influencers, and “trusted messengers” endorsing public-health policy is not unthinkable. According to NBC New York, New York and New Jersey have already recruited celebrities to urge residents to follow CDC guidelines. Actors including Julia Roberts, Penelope Cruz, Sarah Jessica Parker, Robin Wright, and Hugh Jackman earlier this year joined a coordinated campaign to “pass the mic to COVID-19 experts.”
In addition, this summer the WHO paid PR firm Hill & Knowlton Strategies $135,000 to identify micro-influencers, macro-influencers, and what it calls “hidden heroes” who “shape and guide conversations” to promote WHO messaging on social media and promote the organization’s image as a COVID-19 authority. Hill & Knowlton are controversial for having previously manufactured the false “incubator baby” testimony delivered in front of Congress that propelled the US into the first Gulf War in the early 1990s.
“The Public’s Role in COVID-19 Vaccination” also urges using groups such as faith-based organizations, schools, homeowners’ associations, and unions trusted by “hard-to-reach audiences” to convey positive vaccine messages and to “modulate public perceptions of vaccination.” Accordingly, the July CHS paper notes “the importance of using outside groups who have relationships with the community, instead of direct government involvement.” It should be noted that during the Tuskegee experiments, the US Public Health Service hired Eunice Rivers, a black nurse with a close relationship to the local minority community, to maintain contact with those who were part of the experiment to ensure they continued to participate.
This outsourcing framework as laid out by the CHS is reproduced in the federal government’s own literature. An October CDC report entitled Interim Playbook for Jurisdiction Operations describes the importance of engaging what minority populations would consider “trusted sources” such as union representatives, college presidents, athletic coaches, state licensure boards, homeless shelter staff, soup kitchen managers, and faith leaders to “address hesitancy” in relation to the COVID-19 vaccine.
Operation Warp Speed’s document “From the Factory to the Frontlines,” released the same day as the CDC Interim Playbook, gives more specific examples of the government’s ongoing work with organizations “representing minority populations,” stating that faith-based organizations can be critical. “HHS’s Center for Faith and Opportunity Initiatives is working with minority-serving faith and community groups . . . and encouraging participation in the vaccination program,” the document reads. It also states that an “information campaign” led by HHS’s public affairs department is already working to “target key populations and communities to ensure maximum vaccine acceptance.”
Of note is that a member of Biden’s Office of Management and Budget transition team is Bridget Dooling. The OMB houses the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which reviews all regulations across the federal government. Dooling previously worked at OIRA, and from 2009 until 2011 worked under the direction of then-OIRA administrator Cass Sunstein. On Twitter, Dooling regularly interacts with Sunstein. She has frequently promoted Sunstein’s work on Twitter, especially this past month.
Notably, in 2008, Sunstein authored a paper encouraging the US government to employ covert agents to “cognitively infiltrate” online dissident groups that promote anti-government “conspiracy theories” and to maintain a vigorous “counter misinformation establishment.”
Elements of his strategy for tackling anti-government “conspiracy theories” are analogous to the aforementioned CHS theme of using “outside groups who have relationships with the community” instead of the government directly. “Governments can supply these independent bodies with information and perhaps prod them into action from behind the scenes,” he contended in his paper.
Sunstein was recently made chair of the World Health Organization’s Technical Advisory Group on Behavioral Insights and Sciences for Health to ensure “vaccine acceptance and uptake in the context of COVID-19.”
In September he also wrote an opinion piece for Bloomberg titled “How to Fight Back against Coronavirus Vaccine Phobia,” suggesting that “high-profile people who are respected and admired by those who lack confidence in vaccines” will help sell the public on the safety of vaccines. “Trusted politicians, athletes or actors—thought to be ‘one of us’ rather than ‘one of them’—might explicitly endorse vaccination,” he writes.
When all else fails, coerce
In addition to this information warfare approach to combatting “vaccine hesitancy,” the government also intends to stave off possible hesitancy through economic coercion, that is, by using economic incentives, even linking vaccination to entrance into the workforce, housing assistance, food, travel, and education.
Sunstein’s Bloomberg piece, for example, states that when a vaccine is available, “an economic incentive, such as a small gift certificate, can help” make it easy for “people who are at particular risk. Such gift cards will inevitably be more effective at swaying decisions of the poor.”
Former 2020 Presidential Candidate and United States Representative for Maryland’s 6th congressional district John Delaney recently penned an article in the Washington Post titled “Pay Americans to Take a Coronavirus Vaccine,” in which he argues a way to overcome the “historical level of distrust” in the vaccine development process is to take advantage of the current economic crisis and “pay people to take a COVID vaccine.” Delaney writes “Such an incentive might be the most effective way to persuade people to overcome suspicion or even fear. . .”
CHS’s “The Public’s Role in COVID-19 Vaccination” paper also details how bundling services like “food security, rent assistance, [and] free clinic services” with vaccination can increase vaccine intake. “Local and state public health agencies should explore opportunities to bundle COVID-19 vaccination with other safety net services,” it suggests. One way of doing this is to simply provide “food aid, employment aid, or other preventative health services” that “may be urgently needed” at vaccination sites. “[And] in some cases,” says the CHS, “it also may be acceptable and feasible to deliver vaccination via home visits by community health nurses when vaccination is bundled with delivery of other services.”
This strategy for increasing vaccine intake parallels what the CHS proposes in order to make digital contact tracing technology (DCTT) widespread in the population without mandating it outright. “Instead of making use fully voluntary and initiated by users, there are ways that DCTT could be put into use without users’ voluntary choice,” a recent CHS paper “Digital Contact Tracing for Pandemic Response” reads. It continues: “For example, use of an app could be mandated as a precondition for returning to work or school, or even further, to control entry into a facility or transportation (such as airplanes) through scanning of a QR code.”
Palantir and priority populations
Aside from the troubling aspects of the COVID-19 vaccination strategy as outlined above, there is the separate issue of the way in which these “populations of focus” will be chosen and identified. Palantir, the big data firm with deep and persisting ties to the CIA, has created a new software tool expressly for Warp Speed called Tiberius. Not only will Tiberius use Palantir’s Gotham software and its artificial intelligence components to “help identify high-priority populations,” it will produce delivery timetables and map out the locations for vaccine distribution based on the masses of data it has collected through various contracts with HHS and data-sharing alliances with In-Q-Tel, Amazon, Google and Microsoft, among others.
These data include extremely sensitive information about American citizens and the lack of privacy safeguards governing Palantir’s growing access to American healthcare data has even gotten the attention of Congress, with several Senators and Representatives warning in July that Palantir’s massive stores of data “could be used by other federal agencies in unexpected, unregulated, and potentially harmful ways, such as in the law and immigration enforcement context.”
Given that Palantir, at present, is best known for targeting the same minorities that are slated to be “priority populations” for early receipt of the experimental COVID-19 vaccine, Tiberius and the company behind it, including the obsessive “race war” fears of its top executive, will be explored in Part 2 of this series.
Jeremy Loffredo is a journalist and researcher based in Washington, DC. He is formerly a segment producer for RT AMERICA and is currently an investigative reporter for Children’s Health Defense.
Whitney Webb has been a professional writer, researcher and journalist since 2016. She has written for several websites and, from 2017 to 2020, was a staff writer and senior investigative reporter for Mint Press News. She currently writes for The Last American Vagabond.
December 7, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | CIA, Covid-19, Gates Foundation, United States, WHO |
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While praising the OPCW whistleblower’s integrity and professionalism, one director worried that seeking truth about the altered report on a ‘chemical attack’ in Syria might help Russia, which he denounced as the enemy.
“I fear there is little one can do since the report is final and out – unless one wants to feed in the Russian narrative and that I would never do as they really are not bona fide friends of this organization, that’s for sure,” was the message of one director to Dr. Brendan Whelan, one of the whistleblowers who challenged the ‘interim’ report by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) as doctored for political purposes.
This is according to emails published on Monday by Grayzone, an investigative outlet that has been following the OPCW whistleblower story since the beginning.
The director – whose name was redacted to protect his privacy – is the same one who in 2018 praised Whelan for his initial objections to the report, saying his email was “very carefully crafted, without emotions, not accusing anybody but laying out the facts and concerns very clearly.” Whelan’s June 22, 2018 email “took all the steps to maintain your moral and professional integrity,” he added, according to documents published by Grayzone.
Robert Fairweather, a British diplomat who was OPCW chief of cabinet at the time, requested that Whelan’s email be “recalled” – erased from the organization’s documents and archives – without explanation, having previously said the report was not “redacted” at the behest of the OPCW director-general, and that he only asked “that the report did not speculate.”
The “core” team appointed from new OPCW hires was then tasked with writing the final report, but apparently waited until Whelan’s term at the organization expired in September 2018 to publish its version of the report. Ironically, it did nothing but speculate – conveniently omitting any evidence actually gathered by the Douma inspectors to blame the government of President Bashar Assad in Damascus for what might have been a “chlorine” attack on the town held by Jaysh al-Islam militants. Fairweather was later made an officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for “services to international relations.”
Four whistleblowers have since come forth to challenge the OPCW’s alterations of the initial report. The organization’s response has been to defame them as disgruntled employees, while NATO-affiliated narrative management outfit Bellingcat actually doxxed Whelan.
The 16-year veteran of the organization, who was praised for his professionalism and integrity by multiple directors – as Grayzone documented – was thus hung out to dry because challenging the report would help “Russian narratives.”
He wasn’t the only one. In October, OPCW’s founding director general Jose Bustani was blocked from addressing the UN Security Council by the US, UK and France – the same countries that launched missile strikes against Syria without waiting for the Douma investigation, and have been accused of pressuring the OPCW into publishing the report retroactively validating that action.
The OPCW director mentioned above also told Whelan that talking about the report was “difficult to pursue out in the open, knowing that it is already being played by parties who are decidedly not bona fide supporters of the [Chemical Weapons Convention].” This is according to an April 17, 2019 email.
The “parties” referenced here are highly likely to be Russia, which the UK had accused of a chemical attack on a former spy in Salisbury, without any evidence but Bellingcat speculation. The US didn’t exactly object, choosing to take London’s word for it.
Western governments are trying to politicize the OPCW and “in fact, turn it into an obedient tool to realize their military and political agenda,” Russia’s envoy to the OPCW Alexander Shulgin told RT last month. These emails appear to support his assessment.
Meanwhile, mainstream media coverage of the OPCW whistleblower complaints has consisted of repeating the official defamatory claims about them or citing Bellingcat, leaving the job of digging for actual documents to outlets like the Grayzone and other independent journalists.
December 7, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | OPCW, Syria |
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Former Pfizer vice president and scientific director Dr. Michael Yeadon and German lung specialist and parliamentarian Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg have filed an urgent application with the European Medicine Agency calling for the immediate suspension of all SARS-CoV-2 vaccine studies – particularly the BioNtech/Pfizer study on BNT162b (EudraCT number 2020-002641-42).
Yeadon and Wodarg say the studies should be halted until a design study is available which addresses a host of serious safety concerns expressed by a growing body of renowned scientists who are skeptical of how quickly the vaccines are being developed, according to Germany’s 2020 News.
On the one hand, the petitioners demand that, due to the known lack of accuracy of the PCR test in a serious study, a so-called Sanger sequencing must be used. This is the only way to make reliable statements on the effectiveness of a vaccine against Covid-19. On the basis of the many different PCR tests of highly varying quality, neither the risk of disease nor a possible vaccine benefit can be determined with the necessary certainty, which is why testing the vaccine on humans is unethical per se. –2020 News
The pair also point to concerns raised in previous studies involving other coronaviruses – including (via 2020 News):
- The formation of so-called “non-neutralizing antibodies” can lead to an exaggerated immune reaction, especially when the test person is confronted with the real, “wild” virus after vaccination. This so-called antibody-dependent amplification, ADE, has long been known from experiments with corona vaccines in cats, for example. In the course of these studies all cats that initially tolerated the vaccination well died after catching the wild virus.
- The vaccinations are expected to produce antibodies against spike proteins of SARS-CoV-2. However, spike proteins also contain syncytin-homologous proteins, which are essential for the formation of the placenta in mammals such as humans. It must be absolutely ruled out that a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 could trigger an immune reaction against syncytin-1, as otherwise infertility of indefinite duration could result in vaccinated women.
- The mRNA vaccines from BioNTech/Pfizer contain polyethylene glycol (PEG). 70% of people develop antibodies against this substance – this means that many people can develop allergic, potentially fatal reactions to the vaccination.
- The much too short duration of the study does not allow a realistic estimation of the late effects. As in the narcolepsy cases after the swine flu vaccination, millions of healthy people would be exposed to an unacceptable risk if an emergency approval were to be granted and the possibility of observing the late effects of the vaccination were to follow. Nevertheless, BioNTech/Pfizer apparently submitted an application for emergency approval on December 1, 2020.
Wodarg Yeadon EMA Petition Pfizer Trial FINAL 01DEC2020 en Unsigned With Exhibits
Dr. Yeadon made headlines last month when he said “There is no science to suggest a second wave should happen,” and that false positive results from inherently flawed COVID-19 tests are being used to ‘manufacture’ a second wave.
As Ralph Lopez write at HubPages, Yeadon warns that half or even “almost all” of tests for COVID are false positives. Dr. Yeadon also argues that the threshold for herd immunity may be much lower than previously thought, and may have been reached in many countries already.
In an interview last month (see below) Dr. Yeadon was asked:
“we are basing a government policy, an economic policy, a civil liberties policy, in terms of limiting people to six people in a meeting… all based on, what may well be, completely fake data on this coronavirus?”
Dr. Yeadon answered with a simple “yes.”
He then lamented the lives lost as a result of lockdown policies, and of the “savable” countless lives which will be further lost, from important surgeries and other healthcare deferred, should lockdowns be reimposed.
Watch the full discussion below:
December 6, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Covid-19 |
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Internal Atlantic Council emails reveal the NATO-connected ‘think tank’ aggressively schmoozed the obscenely wealthy owners of Russia’s Alfa Bank, in order to secure a slice of their vast riches.
The communications have been released publicly as a result of the ongoing defamation case brought against Fusion GPS and its founder and chief Glenn Simpson in a Washington, DC court, by Mikhail Fridman, Petr Aven and German Khan, the owners of Alfa Bank. The three allege false allegations against them in the ‘Trump-Russia dossier’, produced for Fusion GPS by former MI6 operative Christopher Steele, damaged their reputation.
The now-notorious and utterly discredited dossier alleged they and the bank maintained a covert communications channel with Donald Trump, and moreover delivered “large amounts of illicit cash” to Vladimir Putin when he was deputy mayor of St. Petersburg in the 1990s.
In July, the trio were awarded damages in a separate action brought against Orbis Intelligence, Steele’s private espionage firm, in London after Judge Mark Warby ruled the dossier’s allegations were “inaccurate or misleading” and the former spy had failed to take reasonable steps to verify the claims.
‘We got nothing’
In May 2016, coincidentally around the same time the Democratic National Committee hired Fusion GPS to investigate Trump, the Atlantic Council caught wind of the fact Alfa Bank’s owners wished to give away the entirety of their fortunes to charitable causes while alive, and saw a prime opportunity for grift.
Writing to the think tank’s top executives, Council ‘senior fellow’ Anders Aslund lustily noted their intention, and respective net worth of Fridman ($15 billion) and Aven ($5 billion).
“This could open an opportunity. To date Fridman has been extremely stingy,” Aslund stated rapaciously. “Rich Burt represents both Fridman and Aven quite intensely. I shall tentatively have dinner with Aven in Moscow Sunday night so I might be able to ask him what he wants. As you remember, we hosted him here in November and got nothing.”
That the November 2015 event left the Council empty-handed was undoubtedly a crushing disappointment for Aslund, given he went to great lengths to be highly accommodating to Aven, letting him pick the time and format of his Council talk, the number of attendees, and more.
“Our preference would be a lunch talk, but please indicate what time that suits you. Do you want a private off the-record meeting with 20-24 people or a bigger public meeting? The choice is yours,” he wrote to Aven.
Aslund added chummily that whenever the billionaire had spare time in Washington, he and his wife Anna were “always happy” to see him. However, there were some organizational problems.
In an email to Council higher-ups, Aslund’s colleague Alison Perry suggests Aven wished to invite “former Russian propaganda minister” Mikhail Lesin to the meeting, to which Aslund initially agreed. However, the Council subsequently learned Lesin was under investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for money laundering, and was forced to “find a polite way” of letting Aven know Lesin was no longer welcome.
The volte face was presumably begrudging in extremis, given Lesin’s purportedly immense wealth – five properties in California alone allegedly owned by companies affiliated with his family were worth a combined US$28 million. In a bizarre twist, the day after the Council event, he was found dead in a Washington, DC hotel room. Authorities concluded he died of blunt-force trauma to the head, induced by falling due to acute alcohol intoxication.
‘Nothing must be reported’
Fast forward to October 15, 2017, and Aslund’s gold-digging scheme was in full swing – he wrote to Council staff stating invitations for a “small, private, off-the-record breakfast” on October 26 with Fridman and Aven needed to be sent to a number of powerful individuals.
Proposed attendees included representatives of the US State Department, National Security Council, Treasury, Congress, Senate, and other influential government-funded think tanks, including the Council on Foreign Relations, Brookings Institute, RAND Corporation, and others. The senior fellow was keen to stress no journalists should be invited.
Aslund’s long-running effort to curry favor with Alfa Bank’s owners is highly ironic given his vociferous promotion of the Steele dossier, which in June 2017 he dubbed “outstanding intelligence.”
In February the next year, he wrote an essay for the Council stating the “reasons to believe Steele are multiple and overwhelming,” and slamming the refusal of the mainstream media to publicize the dossier during the 2016 presidential campaign due to the unverifiable nature of most of its contents.
Claiming news outlets had “confused the profession of journalism with that of prosecution,” Aslund also expressed contempt for the philosophy that “if not everything is proven correct, nothing must be reported” – a rather troubling indictment, given the Council’s ‘anti-fake news’ partnership with Facebook, and claims to be “on the front lines of disinformation.”
“The US media missed the greatest scandal of the 2016 election campaign because they were so stuck in medieval liturgy it rendered them incapable of reporting the truth… The question is not whether the Kremlin helped Trump win the election but whether it can be proved in court and whether it is punishable according to all too arcane US law, which could not even sentence Al Capone for anything but tax evasion,” he fulminated.
Strikingly, the essay has since been “retracted and removed” from the organization’s website.
What claims in the dossier can be verified have since been proven to be total fiction, its contents drunken tittle-tattle provided to Steele by Brookings Institute staffer Igor Danchenko. In interviews with the FBI in February 2017, he expressed dismay this gossip had been used to secure surveillance warrants against individuals connected to the Trump campaign.
Nonetheless, Aslund still views the dossier as “largely credible,” and has even praised the “excellent” and “knowledgeable” Danchenko, who somewhat amazingly was a student of his at Georgetown University.
‘Corrupt politically exposed persons’
Aslund’s fundraising activities are doubly ironic given in 2019 he authored ‘Russia’s Crony Capitalism’, a book documenting the country’s alleged descent from a “market economy to kleptocracy.”
In March this year, he predicted this shift would contribute to Russia’s economic collapse in the very near future. It was at least the fourth occasion Aslund has foretold the country’s impending and unstoppable implosion, having previously – and incorrectly – done so in 1999, 2001, and 2014.
All along, his willingness to personally profit from the very financial activities he condemns has endured untrammeled. In June 2018, Aslund was appointed to the supervisory board of Ukrainian state railway Ukrzaliznytsia – he resigned in September this year.
In explaining his decision, he claimed he was exposed to “excessive” legal risks by not being provided directors’ and officers’ liability insurance, and said many of the board’s decisions hadn’t been implemented by Ukrzaliznytsia’s management.
Principled enough, but there was also the small issue of directors not having been paid since April. Or, at least, not paid enough – earlier this year, President Volodymyr Zelensky capped salaries of public employees as well as members of management and supervisory boards of state-owned companies at 10 times the official minimum salary, about $1,700 a month, from April 1 to the end of quarantine.
In a statement to Interfax, Aslund moaned that while presented as a temporary emergency measure, “it might persist” even longer, an obviously horrifying and unacceptable prospect for the closeted kleptocrat.
“Members of parliament attack foreign members of supervisory boards of state-owned Ukrainian companies for being foreigners and having been paid too much, but we have been paid nothing since April,” he raged bitterly.
The month after his supervisory board appointment, BuzzFeed revealed Aslund was paid to write a paper alleging financial institutions in Latvia, long-lambasted as lairs of criminality and corruption, had made tremendous strides in enforcing anti-money laundering statutes – by the very banks involved. It was commissioned by Sally Painter, a lobbyist for Baltic banks and member of the Council’s board of directors.
The organizations that lined Aslund’s pockets included a subsidiary of ABLV Bank, which at the time was attempting to secure permission to establish an office in the US. The effort was ultimately unsuccessful, as the US Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network concluded ABLV was a bank of “primary money laundering concern.”
“ABLV executives, shareholders, and employees have institutionalized money laundering… Management permits the bank and its employees to orchestrate and engage in money laundering schemes; solicits high risk shell company activity that enables the bank and its customers to launder funds; maintains inadequate controls over high-risk shell company accounts; and seeks to obstruct enforcement of Latvian anti-money laundering rules in order to protect these business practices,” the Treasury ruled.
Some of this illicit activity, the Treasury alleged, involved transactions for parties involved in North Korea’s procurement and export of ballistic missiles, and money laundering for “corrupt politically exposed persons.” ABLV was accused of funneling billions of dollars “in public corruption and asset-stripping proceeds through shell company accounts,” and failing to mitigate risks stemming from these accounts, “which involved large-scale illicit activity connected to Azerbaijan, Russia, and Ukraine.”
Shortly after the Treasury’s findings were made public, ABLV was forced to close – but Aslund told BuzzFeed he stood by his report, as it was “factually correct.”
The paper was presented at a private Council event in October 2017, the same month he was arranging that “small, private, off-the-record breakfast” with Alfa Bank’s owners.
It was convened despite Aslund’s research not being an official Council publication, and the think tank claiming it was written and published without its input. Perhaps unsurprisingly, no reference to the report or the event can be found on the Council’s website.
Snouts in trough
The email tranche indicates Aslund wasn’t the only Council apparatchik determined to get the think tank’s proverbial mitts in the Alfa Bank till.
In July 2015, Council chief executive Fred Kempe emailed Petr Aven about a fully-fledged partnership between the Council and Letter One, an Alfa Bank affiliate, and suggested there was “a larger role” for him to personally play at the Council.
All the Council’s approaches to Alfa Bank were allegedly unsuccessful, but there’s no shortage of dubious institutions and individuals all too willing to lavishly bankroll the think tank. Its donors currently include the US embassies of UAE and Bahrain, Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk, defense giant Raytheon, the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO), and the US State Department.
From 2006 – 2016, the Council’s annual revenue leaped tenfold, from $2 million to $21 million – a period in which, concurrently and not coincidentally, corporate and state budgets typically reserved for lobbying firms were increasingly directed to think tanks.
Its board of directors comprises well-connected US government veterans Henry Kissinger, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Michael Hayden, David Petraeus, and many others. The emails related to Alfa Bank also name Council officials Richard Burt, Daniel Fried, John Herbst and Richard Morningstar, all previously US ambassadors to European and/or Eurasian countries.
Such close ties to the US national security state unquestionably allow for very effective, well-targeted lobbying on behalf of its bankrollers indeed. Except Alfa Bank refused to bite.
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. Follow Kit on Twitter @Kit Klarenberg
December 6, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Russophobia | Atlantic Council, Orbis Intelligence, UK, United States |
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Google News is hyping a story published by Agrinews, which promotes a month-old World Bank report claiming water scarcity in the Middle East – caused by climate change – threatens crop production. The World Bank report, “Water in the Balance,” is old news, made up of model-driven speculation, instead of data. Real-world crop data, by contrast, tell a story of stunning crop success in the Middle East and throughout the world.
Climate Realism discredited the World Bank report in early November. Data show that despite considerable political turmoil and ongoing conflicts in the region, the naturally arid Middle East has seen its crop production grow as the earth has modestly warmed.
Since media outlets are still reporting the World Bank’s fiction as fact, Climate Realism’s refutation bears repeating.
The World Bank’s study says, “[w]hile information about water scarcity at present and in the future is available there is little knowledge of what this increasing scarcity means for Middle Eastern … food security. Agriculture will suffer because of climate change and water scarcity….”
In particular, in Summary for Policy Makers, the World Bank asserts water scarcity caused by climate change will reduce farm production in Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey. The available evidence strongly suggests that will not happen.
Real-world data concerning crop production across the Middle East shows crop yields and overall production have increased dramatically. More food is being produced even as thousands of acres of agricultural lands have been abandoned during regional conflicts.
Data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization show during the period of modest warming since 1989:
That Middle Eastern countries have increased crop production even as many of them have been embroiled in internal political strife, outright civil warfare, and external conflicts, is clearly good news—not a climate crisis.
Global warming lengthens growing seasons, reduces frost events, and makes more land suitable for crop production. Also, carbon dioxide is an aerial fertilizer for plant life. In addition, crops use water more efficiently under conditions of higher carbon dioxide, losing less water through transpiration. The latter fact should have allayed the World Bank’s concern about climate change-induced water shortages leading to crop failure.
The benefits of more atmospheric carbon dioxide and a modestly warming world have resulted in 17 percent more food being available per person today than was the case 30 years ago, even as the number of people has grown by billions. Indeed, United Nations data show the last 20 years have seen the largest decline in hunger, malnutrition, and starvation in human history.
Rather than regurgitating the World Bank’s flawed report as fact, Agrinews should have done some honest, independent research. Had the paper done so, it would have found crop production in the Middle East, as is true for most of the rest of the world, is booming during the period of purported catastrophic warming. Sorry, Google, Agrinews, and the World Bank, increased crop production and yields are the very opposite of a climate crisis.
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D. is managing editor of Environment & Climate News and a research fellow for environment and energy policy at The Heartland Institute. Burnett worked at the National Center for Policy Analysis for 18 years, most recently as a senior fellow in charge of NCPA’s environmental policy program. He has held various positions in professional and public policy organizations, including serving as a member of the Environment and Natural Resources Task Force in the Texas Comptroller’s e-Texas commission.
December 5, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | Middle East |
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2020 staggers on, each month becoming more bleak, tiresome and increasingly onerous.
In the early winter months we paid scant attention to the Coronavirus story developing in China. And why should we have? After SARS, almost twenty years ago, then minor scares such as Swine Flu, Ebola, Zika Virus, Flesh Eating disease, along with past potential terrors like Avian Flu and Foot and Mouth Disease, there was no reason to think this was anything but another sensationalized false alarm. Indeed, an honest investigation, not even one all that rigorous, could easily have demonstrated that this was the case.
However, the last nine months have been nothing but an absolutely dedicated, well organized and diligent global effort to re-brand the common flu as a devasting pandemic just barely under control.
We have been asked to turn to some of the most trusted people in our civil society, Doctors and Professors, the types of professionals whom we would least expect to lie to us or to deliberately mislead us. They have sworn an oath to heal, to do no harm; they are dedicated to the search for the truth, borne out of diligent research and a rigorous scrutiny of the data. If they gravely and repeatedly tell us that we are at great risk and that things can and will get much, much worse very quickly then who are we to question their wisdom and their warnings?
The suddenness and unrelenting persistence of this great Covid lie wears us all down.
We were caught off guard by this deception here in Ontario, Canada. Just before the annual, week-long March break holiday we were told by our Premier Doug Ford (just think of one of the Pigs from “Animal Farm”) to continue with our travel plans, all will be fine. Just days later the closures started and the sloganeering began: “Flatten the curve”, “We’re all in this together”, “The New Normal”. All empty, hollow utterances that allowed people to avoid really thinking about what was really happening.
In Ontario, those of us who still dare to question this narrative are becoming increasingly isolated and marginalized. It is amazing to see how quickly people have chosen their side on this matter and how unwavering their devotion to their cause can be. Whether it is a shut down for two weeks, 4 weeks, 3 months, masks all the time, everything closed or even an experimental vaccine, it does not matter. “We’re all in this together”. Anyone who disagrees is either reckless, selfish, stupid or all of the above.
This other ‘reckless’ point of view is much smaller and very marginalized. Prominent Scientists and Virologists are ignored in the media for voicing a dissenting opinion, even the most moderate voices of dissent are ridiculed. The Great Barrington Declaration, with an extremely reasonable and balanced plea for reason in dealing with CV-19, has been savaged in the press because some journalists were able to add some absurdly fake names to an online form that anyone could sign.
I was impressed enough by the open letter published in September from almost 2,000 Belgian Medical Doctors & Health Professionals that I sent it to my Belgian friends, very smart and well-educated people, who did not doubt the Covid narrative. The response, when I enquired of one of them, was that “it was too long, [he] did not read it”. His underlying message was clear, he was not going to consider anything beyond the boundaries established by the press. If the Economist or The Atlantic magazine supported the Covid narrative then it must be so. If you chose to consider anything outside these boundaries you were either misled or grossly misinformed.
Unfortunately for me, I was branded a conspiracy theorist a long time ago amongst family and friends because I passionately argue against the official narrative for 9/11. These obvious controlled demolitions, along with all of the other evidence of this carefully coordinated operation – the subterfuge, the impossible coincidences, the great effort to cover it up – was irrefutable proof in my mind, if you would just consider it.
The parallels of CV-19 to 9/11 are both terrifying and, I am ashamed to say it, reassuring.
The aftermath of the shocking, astonishing events of 9/11 became even more difficult to comprehend with the addition of the Anthrax attacks and the Belt-Way sniper that followed.
Covid-19 has been overshadowed in some of the same ways, with the Black Lives Matter riots and the extended, ridiculous spectacle that is the Presidential Illusion of Choice, held sacred by so many Americans. As a result, it is hard to remain focused on anything; the world seems to be coming apart at its seams, yet the deliberate rips, the shoddy stitching and the forces pulling things apart are obvious enough, if you bother to look.
Much like the Project for a New American Century, a policy document that detailed the need for an event like 9/11 and the sweeping, imperialist opportunities that would result, we now have ‘The Great Reset’. A chance to ‘Build Back Better’ an equitable and improved society for all, governed by a few.
Trying to connect these plans to CV-19 instantly makes one a conspiracy theorist, even though these strategic plans do exist. They are well-documented, easy to find and easy enough to read.
When you point out the obvious benefits that overreaching control and an obscene global theft of power and money will impart to a select few, it doesn’t matter. You are merely someone who sees a conspiracy in everything.
With 9/11 the world had changed for ever, they said, and in many ways it certainly has. For most of us – complacent, docile Europeans and North Americans – well, we just generally went back to life as it was before. Either knowingly or through sheer ignorance (usually a bit of both), we supported new wars of occupation in the middle east, the massive increases in military spending and huge new encumbrances on our personal freedoms.
The worst outcome of 9/11 was that several countries were illegally invaded and brutally occupied with millions upon millions dying and suffering as a result. For most of “us” this did not matter, as daily life was still the same. We still had our jobs, our holidays and leisure, our new gadgets, our homes and certainly our futures. After a few years, when I finally made sense of this great 9/11 lie, I still did not do much differently. I would argue with friends and family about what had really happened on that day, and I lost faith in much of the media and government I had formerly trusted. But, in the end, I still supported the system and benefited from it.
I feel ashamed of wishing for these same types of selfish outcomes with CV-19. Even though the world economies have haemorrhaged trillions of dollars to fight this re-branded flu, perhaps it will still be ok in the end? Money is just a modern faith-based system these days anyways. If we can believe in Bit-Coin, the vast labyrinth of Derivatives and Credit Default Swaps, then why can’t we just add a lot more cash to the mix if we need it? Most of us are too young to have ever experienced inflation. Isn’t that economic reality just for mismanaged countries like Zimbabwe and Argentina anyways? Perhaps the track and trace apps won’t be that intrusive and, after all, our phones violate our privacy every minute they are switched on as it is. Could this ‘new normal’ be any worse?
Perhaps the covid vaccine is just a cash grab for big Pharma, like the flu vaccine or the HPV vaccine? Products we never wanted nor needed, that required a campaign of coercion and fear mongering to produce any real demand. With the CV-19 disinformation campaign waging on a global stage, they seem to be positioned to distribute 3 billion servings of a double-dose vaccine at $39.00 USD per serf. That is close to 120 Billion dollars… Surely, that might be enough to tide over the pharmaceutical industry for a few years, until Covid-20? Perhaps they will achieve a balance: enough people willing or compliant enough to be vaccinated yearly, and a media/medical establishment willing to proclaim that the covid scourge is over for now?
I really don’t believe this will happen, yet I still selfishly hope that this covid era will end, that my kids can return to school without masks, that they will be able to take part in after-school activities and that their future still holds many exciting possibilities and paths.
I hate fearing that the world will suddenly be redefined as a global, technocratic state where diversity becomes equality, families become individuals and the truth, or even just a difference of opinion, becomes a violation of ‘community guidelines’.
It has now been nine months. The fear, uncertainty and self doubt I have about this situation and my future are constant and growing. I have grown extremely weary of sharing relevant articles and interviews that I am certain will alarm and enrage, only to find out they have fallen on deaf ears – unwatched, unread or simply dismissed.
It makes me wonder, who am I to think I am smarter than the majority, more aware and more of a critical thinker than my friends and peers? Perhaps I just suffer from a prolonged and acute confirmation bias and I am incapable of separating truth from conjecture, fear from reason and goodwill from ill intent? Is there some type of persistent pessimism or self-loathing that gives me this particular lens?
To assuage these doubts, which I encounter almost daily, I remind myself to revisit the tired cliché of cui bono. Who stands to benefit?
9/11 was an easy one, they actually published their goals beforehand in the Project for New American Century document and betrayed their nature in many instances of sheer greed, such as obscenely lucrative, barely-months-old insurance policies on the buildings they collapsed.
A casual examination shows us that CV-19 has already substantially enriched the Billionaire class, strengthened the stranglehold that the mainstream media and big tech have on creating facts and defining truth, allowed governments to spend without restriction and to restrict their citizens without restraint.
No matter how absurd the response becomes to what an honest virologist would call an inconsequential virus, most citizens are demanding a greater response. More unscrutinised spending, more closures, more doses of vaccines to be made available as soon as possible, and more public shaming (and worse) for those who do not comply with the ‘new normal’.
In the end, pharmaceutical giants will be the big winners, earning untold billions for their rushed vaccine, and will be spared any liability for all adverse consequences. Small businesses and personal autonomy will have disappeared and we will all be that much easier to track, control, monitor, punish and isolate.
Does it have to be this way? Last week I went to a local protest in Toronto. It felt really good to finally step forward and add my voice and my presence amongst those willing to call bullshit on this assault on science, reason and the fabric of our local and national communities. The protest itself was calm and measured but you could easily sense the frustration and fear of those in attendance.
To be sure, some protesters looked and behaved quite oddly and this made me wonder if I really did belong with this group. However, I feel much more at odds with “the new normal” types: the masked families in parks or the middle-aged women that now walk in the streets to avoid the dangers of human proximity on sidewalks, while glaring at the speeding cars that rush by.
I tend, therefore, to turn to a select few people and publications online instead. People like my younger sister, Eva, who has been a tireless advocate for truth in Syria, Palestine and Venezuela. I know her well enough to know she does what she does solely because she knows it is right, certainly not for money or prestige. As a thanks for her work and sacrifice, she has to live with constant attacks and the ignominy of a horrendous Wikipedia Page – nothing short of a smear, solely to discredit her in the eyes of anyone vetting her or new to her reporting.
It is people like this that I trust.
Throughout the last nine months, the conflicts of interest and the obvious biases of the media, lobbyists, most levels of government, big Tech, big “Charitable” foundations and benevolent trusts make it obvious that this scheme will only work if their propaganda is unwavering and unrelenting.
Why aren’t my friends and family as concerned as I am? Why does my wife, who has been able to see through much of the fear mongering and distortion, draw the line at protesting or voicing her opinion amongst friends? What do I do when I encounter her growing resentment towards me for behaving this way? I love her, I understand why she is afraid and what she wants to protect us from, but perhaps it is this sense of self-preservation which ‘the powers that be’ are counting on? Will this self-preservation lead to our undoing?
The temptation to try to wait this out is still strong, even though the few weeks they initially asked of us has gotten closer to a full year. The temptation to think we are too far gone to warrant launching resistance is also consistently there.
To combat this, I ignore mainstream media and I have stopped trying to reach others that I know cannot be reached.
There still remains, of course, many persistent and unresolved fears and issues.
How far can this possibly go? Will we be forced to vaccinate ourselves, our children and even our fragile elderly? How will our economy reconcile the gross expenditures of 2020? What businesses will remain once, IF, this finally grinds to an end? How likely is this crisis to be exploited as an opportunity by multi-national capitalism, in the ways leftist gate-keepers like Naomi Klein have written about in the past, yet seem unwilling to recognize in the present?
I hope for our sakes and for my own that more people grow weary of this non-existent pandemic and realize that they can demand a return to reason and individual liberties.
The most hopeful thing I have seen in months has been a compilation video of recent protests around Europe and North America.
When this all started, we were encouraged to stand on our porches and bang pots and pans at a set hour to celebrate our front-line heroes in manufactured displays of solidarity. It is so encouraging now to see people choosing, on their own, to protest together and banging pots and pans in front of their government buildings instead. Showing true solidarity against this covid nonsense.
This is the opposite of big-tech and their non-stop, ever-present propaganda. It is simple, non-violent and to-the-point. The message is clear: we are entitled to assemble together and to protect what is most dear to us. Families together, meals together, forging our livelihoods together, simply being together.
I won’t forget this message and I won’t miss another protest. The cost is too great. I am tired of seeing everything fall apart when we still have the ability to fight to live, work and simply be together as normal people.
December 5, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19 |
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Only full transparency and rigorous scrutiny of the data will allow for informed decision making
In the United States, all eyes are on Pfizer and Moderna. The topline efficacy results from their experimental covid-19 vaccine trials are astounding at first glance. Pfizer says it recorded 170 covid-19 cases (in 44,000 volunteers), with a remarkable split: 162 in the placebo group versus 8 in the vaccine group. Meanwhile Moderna says 95 of 30,000 volunteers in its ongoing trial got covid-19: 90 on placebo versus 5 receiving the vaccine, leading both companies to claim around 95% efficacy.
Let’s put this in perspective. First, a relative risk reduction is being reported, not absolute risk reduction, which appears to be less than 1%. Second, these results refer to the trials’ primary endpoint of covid-19 of essentially any severity, and importantly not the vaccine’s ability to save lives, nor the ability to prevent infection, nor the efficacy in important subgroups (e.g. frail elderly). Those still remain unknown. Third, these results reflect a time point relatively soon after vaccination, and we know nothing about vaccine performance at 3, 6, or 12 months, so cannot compare these efficacy numbers against other vaccines like influenza vaccines (which are judged over a season). Fourth, children, adolescents, and immunocompromised individuals were largely excluded from the trials, so we still lack any data on these important populations.
I previously argued that the trials are studying the wrong endpoint, and for an urgent need to correct course and study more important endpoints like prevention of severe disease and transmission in high risk people. Yet, despite the existence of regulatory mechanisms for ensuring vaccine access while keeping the authorization bar high (which would allow placebo-controlled trials to continue long enough to answer the important question), it’s hard to avoid the impression that sponsors are claiming victory and wrapping up their trials (Pfizer has already sent trial participants a letter discussing “crossing over” from placebo to vaccine), and the FDA will now be under enormous pressure to rapidly authorize the vaccines.
But as conversation shifts to vaccine distribution, let’s not lose sight of the evidence. Independent scrutiny of the underlying trial data will increase trust and credibility of the results. There also might be important limitations to the trial findings we need to be aware of.
Most crucially, we need data-driven assurances that the studies were not inadvertently unblinded, by which I mean investigators or volunteers could make reasonable guesses as to which group they were in. Blinding is most important when measuring subjective endpoints like symptomatic covid-19, and differences in post-injection side-effects between vaccine and placebo might have allowed for educated guessing. Past placebo-controlled trials of influenza vaccine were not able to fully maintain blinding of vaccine status, and the recent “half dose” mishap in the Oxford covid-19 vaccine trial was apparently only noticed because of milder-than-expected side-effects. (And that is just one of many concerns with the Oxford trial.)
In contrast to a normal saline placebo, early phase trials suggested that systemic and local adverse events are common in those receiving vaccine. In one Pfizer trial, for example, more than half of the vaccinated participants experienced headache, muscle pain and chills—but the early phase trials were small, with large margins of error around the data. Few details from the large phase 3 studies have been released thus far. Moderna’s press release states that 9% experienced grade 3 myalgia and 10% grade 3 fatigue; Pfizer’s statement reported 3.8% experienced grade 3 fatigue and 2% grade 3 headache. Grade 3 adverse events are considered severe, defined as preventing daily activity. Mild and moderate severity reactions are bound to be far more common.
One way the trial’s raw data could facilitate an informed judgment as to whether any potential unblinding might have affected the results is by analyzing how often people with symptoms of covid-19 were referred for confirmatory SARS-CoV-2 testing. Without a referral for testing, a suspected covid-19 case could not become a confirmed covid-19 case, and thus is a crucial step in order to be counted as a primary event: lab-confirmed, symptomatic covid-19. Because some of the adverse reactions to the vaccine are themselves also symptoms of covid-19 (e.g. fever, muscle pain), one might expect a far larger proportion of people receiving vaccine to have been swabbed and tested for SARS-CoV-2 than those receiving placebo.
This assumes all people with symptoms would be tested, as one might expect would be the case. However the trial protocols for Moderna and Pfizer’s studies contain explicit language instructing investigators to use their clinical judgment to decide whether to refer people for testing. Moderna puts it this way:
“It is important to note that some of the symptoms of COVID-19 overlap with solicited systemic ARs that are expected after vaccination with mRNA-1273 (eg, myalgia, headache, fever, and chills). During the first 7 days after vaccination, when these solicited ARs are common, Investigators should use their clinical judgement to decide if an NP swab should be collected.”
This amounts to asking investigators to make guesses as to which intervention group patients were in. But when the disease and the vaccine side-effects overlap, how is a clinician to judge the cause without a test? And why were they asked, anyway?
Importantly, the instructions only refer to the first seven days following vaccination, leaving unclear what role clinician judgment could play in the key days afterward, when cases of covid-19 could begin counting towards the primary endpoint. (For Pfizer, 7 days after the 2nd dose. For Moderna, 14 days.)
In a proper trial, all cases of covid-19 should have been recorded, no matter which arm of the trial the case occurred in. (In epidemiology terms, there should be no ascertainment bias, or differential measurement error). It’s even become common sense in the Covid era: “test, test, test.” But if referrals for testing were not provided to all individuals with symptoms of covid-19—for example because an assumption was made that the symptoms were due to side-effects of the vaccine—cases could go uncounted.
Data on pain and fever reducing medicines also deserve scrutiny. Symptoms resulting from a SARS-CoV-2 infection (e.g. fever or body aches) can be suppressed by pain and fever reducing medicines. If people in the vaccine arm took such medicines prophylactically, more often, or for a longer duration of time than those in the placebo arm, this could have led to greater suppression of covid-19 symptoms following SARS-CoV-2 infection in the vaccine arm, translating into a reduced likelihood of being suspected for covid-19, reduced likelihood of testing, and therefore reduced likelihood of meeting the primary endpoint. But in such a scenario, the effect was driven by the medicines, not the vaccine.
Neither Moderna nor Pfizer have released any samples of written materials provided to patients, so it is unclear what, if any, instructions patients were given regarding the use of medicines to treat side effects following vaccination, but the informed consent form for Johnson and Johnson’s vaccine trial provides such a recommendation:
“Following administration of Ad26.COV2.S, fever, muscle aches and headache appear to be more common in younger adults and can be severe. For this reason, we recommend you take a fever reducer or pain reliever if symptoms appear after receiving the vaccination, or upon your study doctor’s recommendation.”
There may be much more complexity to the “95% effective” announcement than meets the eye—or perhaps not. Only full transparency and rigorous scrutiny of the data will allow for informed decision making. The data must be made public.
Peter Doshi is associate editor, The BMJ.
December 5, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19 |
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“There is absolutely no need for vaccines to extinguish the pandemic… You do not vaccinate people who aren’t at risk from a disease. You also don’t set about planning to vaccinate millions of fit and healthy people with a vaccine that hasn’t been extensively tested on human subjects.” Dr. Mike Yeadon PhD, Pfizer’s former Vice President and Chief Scientist for Allergy & Respiratory Disease
“What we know about coronavirus from 30 years of experience is that a coronavirus vaccine has a unique peculiarity, which is any attempt at making the vaccine has resulted in the creation of a class of antibodies that actually make vaccinated people sicker when they ultimately suffer exposure to the wild virus.” Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Here’s what I think is currently going on in our country and across much of the western world. A public health crisis– that was manufactured and gamed-out before the initial outbreak in Wuhan, China –has been used to short-circuit long-held civil liberties, strengthen the authority of political leaders, collapse the economy, dramatically remake basic social relations, and impose absolute control over work, school, gatherings and recreational activities. Public policy is now set by unelected technocrats who operate behind the cover of lofty-sounding organizations that are entirely controlled by the world’s biggest corporations and richest oligarchs. President Dwight Eisenhower anticipated this troubling scenario 70 years ago when he said:
“Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
Bingo. This is the state of affairs in America today. All real power has been conceded to a globalist oligarchy that operates behind the curtain of corrupt government officials and public health experts. This begs the question of whether the hoopla surrounding the Coronavirus emerged as a spontaneous and appropriate reaction to a lethal and fast-spreading pandemic or whether the hysteria has been greatly exaggerated (Infection Fatality Rate is 0.26% or 1 in 400) to implement a transformational political-social agenda that will not only eradicate democracy and basic human rights, but also pave the way for dangerous vaccines that will dramatically curtail population growth, which is an objective that is widely shared among wealthy elites.
Would it surprise you to know that vaccines have been used in Africa, the Philippines, Nicaragua and Mexico to terminate fertility? Would it shock you to know that “do-goodie” mandarins –who want to save the world from overpopulation and global warming– have used toxic vaccines on unsuspecting young women who didn’t realize that they were being used as lab rats in a malignant eugenics experiment? This is from an article at Global Research :
“According to LifeSiteNews, a Catholic publication, the Kenya Catholic Doctors Association is charging UNICEF and WHO with sterilizing millions of girls and women under cover of an anti-tetanus vaccination program sponsored by the Kenyan government…
… all six samples tested positive for the HCG antigen. The HCG antigen is used in anti-fertility vaccines, but was found present in tetanus vaccines targeted to young girls and women of childbearing age. Dr. Ngare, spokesman for the Kenya Catholic Doctors Association, stated in a bulletin released November 4:
“This proved right our worst fears; that this WHO campaign is not about eradicating neonatal tetanus but a well-coordinated forceful population control mass sterilization exercise using a proven fertility regulating vaccine. This evidence was presented to the Ministry of Health before the third round of immunization but was ignored.”
(“Mass Sterilization”: Kenyan Doctors Find Anti-fertility Agent in UN Tetanus Vaccine?“, Global Research)
It all sounds rather suspicious, doesn’t it, especially since there was no tetanus crisis in Kenya to begin with. Kenya was merely the testing ground for vaccines aimed at achieving more diabolical goals. For example, why would a tetanus campaign only target women between the ages of 14 to 49 years old? Why did the campaign exclude young girls, boys and men who were equally susceptible to tetanus?
Why?
You know why. It’s because the real objective had nothing to do with tetanus. Tetanus was merely the pretext that was used to conceal the activities of globalist elites working the kinks out of their depopulation strategy. Take a look at this press statement By the Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops on the National Tetanus Vaccination Campaign:
“We are not convinced that the government has taken adequate responsibility to ensure that Tetanus Toxoid vaccine (TT) laced with Beta human chorionic gonadotropin (b-HCG) sub unit is not being used by the sponsoring development partners. This has previously been used by the same partners in Philippines, Nicaragua and Mexico to vaccinate women against future pregnancy. Beta HCG sub unit is a hormone necessary for pregnancy.
When injected as a vaccine to a non-pregnant woman, this Beta HCG sub unit combined with tetanus toxoid develops antibodies against tetanus and HCG so that if a woman’s egg becomes fertilized, her own natural HCG will be destroyed rendering her permanently infertile. In this situation tetanus vaccination has been used as a birth control method.” (“Mass Sterilization”: Kenyan Doctors Find Anti-fertility Agent in UN Tetanus Vaccine?)
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that they might have conducted these depopulation programs in Africa, but they’d never do anything like that in the United States where our ever-vigilant media would expose what they were up to. Right?
Unfortunately, the media is owned lock, stock and barrel by the same people who create crises to advance their own self-serving agenda. Covid-19 is probably no different in that regard. The fact that the infection is modestly lethal actually helps to achieve the broader goal of reshaping society, restructuring the economy, abandoning representative government, and reducing the population to more sustainable levels. These are the real objectives of this politically-driven farce. Check out this article in Bloomberg (2019) which helps to shed light on today’s Covid developments. The article is aptly titled “Earth Needs Fewer People, Scientists Say”:
“Forty years ago, scientists from 50 nations converged on Geneva to discuss what was then called the “CO2-climate problem.”…Now, four decades later, a larger group of scientists is sounding another, much more urgent alarm. More than 11,000 experts from around the world are calling for a critical addition to the main strategy of dumping fossil fuels for renewable energy: there needs to be far fewer humans on the planet…
“We declare, with more than 11,000 scientist signatories from around the world, clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency,” the scientists wrote in a stark warning published Tuesday…
When absorbed in sequence, the charts lay out a devastating trend for planetary health. From meat consumption, greenhouse gas emissions and ice loss to sea-level rise and extreme weather events, they lay out a grim portrait of 40 years of squandered opportunities. The scientists make specific calls for policymakers to quickly implement systemic change to energy, food, and economic policies. But they go one step further, into the politically fraught territory of population control. It “must be stabilized—and, ideally, gradually reduced—within a framework that ensures social integrity,” they write. (”Earth Needs Fewer People, Scientists Say”, Bloomberg)
Forbes published a similar article titled “Over 11,000 Scientists Declare Climate Emergency”. Here’s a short clip:
“Beyond simply sounding the alarm louder than in the past, the letter also offers immediate steps to be taken in six key areas to slow climate change and its impacts…. The steps represent a fairly drastic re-ordering of global society and its underpinning systems, starting with the phasing out of fossil fuels, replacing large-scale land clearing with reforestation efforts, stabilizing global population and greatly reducing the amount of meat and animal products we consume….” (“Over 11,000 Scientists Declare Climate Emergency“, Forbes)
Finally, there’s this statement published in the journal BioScience by dozens of scientists and endorsed by further 11,000 from 153 nations. The scientists say the urgent changes needed include ending population growth, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, halting forest destruction and slashing meat eating:
“Scientists have a moral obligation to clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat and to “tell it like it is.” On the basis of this obligation and the graphical indicators presented below, we declare, with more than 11,000 scientist signatories from around the world, clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency.
Still increasing by roughly 80 million people per year, or more than 200,000 per day (figure 1a–b), the world population must be stabilized—and, ideally, gradually reduced—within a framework that ensures social integrity. There are proven and effective policies that strengthen human rights while lowering fertility rates and lessening the impacts of population growth on GHG emissions and biodiversity loss. These policies make family-planning services available to all people, remove barriers to their access and achieve full gender equity….” (“World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency”, Oxford Academic)
(Notice how population control is a recurrent theme, a theme that coincides with the “zero emissions” agenda of elites and self-anointed “philanthropists.”)
The fact is, there is a growing consensus among corporate leaders and other elites that we are facing a “climate emergency” that will require immediate and draconian changes to our political, social and economic structures. Is it too far-fetched to think that Covid-19 was conjured up in order implement those changes without revealing the real reason? After all, the public is pretty evenly-split on climate change which means that the opposition would likely be organized, well-funded and ferocious. No doubt, that is something the oligarchs wanted to avoid altogether. A greatly-exaggerated global pandemic was the much better choice. With the media already in tow, and enough sell-out public health experts and Democrat governors to do the heavy-lifting, the prospects for success must have looked quite promising. 8 months into the current operation, the checkered flag is now within sight. State governors remain unopposed in their usurping of special “crisis powers”, Fauci and his ilk are still widely revered, masks are everywhere, rolling lockdowns and ever-tightening restrictions continue to be the order-of-the-day, and we are just weeks away from the icing on the cake, the thinning of the herd with a “nanoparticle-based vaccine containing a synthetic chemical called polyethylene glycol or PEG”. In other words, the stealth sterilization exercises that were conducted in Africa were merely a dress-rehearsal for the main event, the summary injection of billions of people worldwide in an effort to significantly reduce global population. Are we there yet?
Not yet, but soon.
The teams of psychologists who worked with governments (to sell the Covid terror) and who figured out that mundane reality must be turned on its head– through social distancing, masks, shelter-in-place orders, the closing of schools, businesses, public gatherings, and religious services– in order (to create a disorienting and terrifying environment) to usher in a new authoritarian system in which personal freedom extends no further than selecting one’s online purchases from either Costco or Amazon. These psychologists deserve much of the credit for the transformation of the western world into a lockdown police state ruled by scheming miscreants who will now decide our future for us.
THE VACCINE– The Culmination of 8 months of Relentless Disinformation and Hysteria
While it’s clear that the progress on the vaccines was deliberately delayed until after the presidential elections, (in order to hurt Trump’s prospects for reelection.) very few realize the reason vaccines are being so quickly deployed. Simply put, the epidemic is rapidly winding down forcing the vaccine manufacturers to seek hasty approval so distribution can begin. This is a matter of great urgency which means the FDA will undoubtedly cave in to political pressure and approve prospective vaccines way before trials prove them to be safe. On Wednesday:
“the United Kingdom became the first country Wednesday to formally approve the Pfizer and BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine… The first inoculations are set to be rolled out next week… The vaccine has been authorized far more quickly than any other in history, its lightning development outpacing the 15 to 20 years it usually takes to develop these types of medicines.” (“U.K. becomes first country to approve Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine”, NBC News)
Naturally, safety does not factor into the creation of a vaccine that normally requires 10 years to develop but is swiftly slapped together and brought to market in a mere 8 months. By definition, such a vaccine is not safe.
More from NBC: “In the U.S., both Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna have submitted applications to the FDA for an emergency use authorization..BioNTech CEO Uğur Şahin told NBC News’ Richard Engel that he was “confident that an authorization in the U.S. could also happen within the next two weeks.”..
Meanwhile, the World Health Organization told Reuters that it had received data from the companies and was reviewing it for “possible listing for emergency use” — meaning it could be rolled out quicker in developing countries.” (NBC News)
Why are these turkeys being rushed to market?
As we noted earlier, vaccine distribution is being rushed due to the fact that the pandemic is winding down, in fact, for all practical purposes, it’s already over. In the US, the hospitalization and fatality data are being deliberately inflated to perpetuate the hysteria, (we’ll explain this later) while in the UK, the fatalities attributable to Covid (in the fake “Second Wave”) have never exceeded the 5-year average of “excess deaths”, which is the barometer for deciding whether there is an unusual spike in mortality or not. There isn’t. The Second Wave does not exist. It is pure fabrication. Check out this blurb from Dr. Mike Yeadon, Pfizer’s former Vice President and Chief Scientist for Allergy & Respiratory. Yeadon dismisses the “Second Wave” theory as unscientific nonsense. Here’s what he says:
“Viruses don’t do waves… I have repeatedly asked to see the trove of scientific papers used to predict a ‘second wave’ and to build a model to compute its likely size and timing. They have never been forthcoming. It’s almost as if there is no such foundational literature… There have been no examples of multiple waves since and the most recent novel coronavirus with any real spread (SARS) performed one wave each in each geographical region affected. Why a model with a ‘second wave’ in it was even built, I cannot guess. …
Despite the absence of any evidence for a ‘second wave’ – and the evidence of absence of waves for this class of respiratory virus – there was an across-the-board, multi-media platform campaign designed to plant the idea of a ‘second wave’ in the minds of everyone. This ran continually for many weeks. It was successful: a poll of GPs showed almost 86% of them stated that they expected a ‘second wave’ this winter.
As research for this piece, I sought the earliest mention of a ‘second wave’. Profs Heneghan and Jefferson, on Apr 30th, noted that we were being warned to expect a ‘second wave’ and that the PM had, on Apr 27th, warned of a ‘second wave’. The Professors cautioned anyone making confident predictions of a ‘second’ and ‘third wave’ that the historical record doesn’t provide support so to do.
I looked for mentions by the BBC of a ‘second wave’.. On Mar 3rd and 6th, there is mention of a single SARS-CoV-2 wave with most (95%) of the impact early on. What looks to be the final document, Mar 29th, still just refers to one wave. This is what history and immunology teaches….
Despite this bothersome oddity about a ‘second wave’ and almost as if there was a plan for one, the PCR (polymerase chain reaction) testing infrastructure in the UK began to be reshaped… the Portuguese high court determined two weeks ago that this PCR test is not a reliable way to determine the health status or infectiousness of citizens…. With the scientific validity of this test under severe challenges, I believe it must immediately be withdrawn from use.” (“The PCR False Positive Pseudo-Epidemic“, Lockdown Skeptics)
No second wave??
Nope, it’s 100% bunkum. But “there was a plan for one”, which is to say, there was a plan for amplifying the panic to achieve the objectives of elites. That’s clear.
Yeadon then explains how the PCR tests were removed from NHS (National Health Service) labs and delivered to privately-owned “mass testing centers” that replaced “highly qualified and experienced Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) registered biomedical scientists” with ” mainly by volunteer unregistered staff in unaccredited laboratories that have been established within a few weeks.” Naturally, this threw into question the overall reliability of their test results which, in turn, produced massive numbers of false positives that in no way reflected the diminishing impact of the virus.
As Yeadon’s states: such mass testing brings with it, when using PCR as the method, a severe risk of what we call a “PCR false positive pseudo-epidemic”. This could never happen if we were not using PCR mass testing. When a more reliable test was used in Liverpool (Lateral-flow test or LFT) showing that a smaller percentage of people were infected, the test was discarded in favor of the PCR test.
“By September, the great bulk of PCR testing was being run by large, private labs, some of which are called Lighthouse Labs.” That is when the number of infections began to spike sharply which was completely inconsistent with the behavior of epidemics in the past.
Yeadon: “How we can square these claims of tens of thousands of daily “cases” and an unprecedented ‘second wave’ of deaths with the unfeasible quantity of testing using a technique considered by bench experts difficult to perform reliably even on a small scale?”
That’s easy. The whole charade was rigged to make PCR false positives look like a real epidemic. Keep in mind, this isn’t my unprofessional observation, but Pfizer’s former Vice President and Chief Scientist for Allergy & Respiratory.
And just look at the extent to which this farce was maintained. Here’s Yeadon explaining how definitions are stretched to the breaking point to exaggerate the number of Covid fatalities:
“A “case” is a positive PCR test. No symptoms are involved. A “COVID-19 admission” to a hospital is a person testing positive by PCR before, on entry or at any time during a hospital stay, no matter the reason for the admission or the symptoms the patient is presenting. A “COVID-19 death” is any death within 28 days of a positive PCR test.”
So, let’s say you have a massive heart attack and die, but a PCR test shows you have harmless RNA fragments in your bloodstream, then the death is labeled “Covid”. Got that? Yeadon summarizes this hanky-panky in one terse sentence:
“We have very strong evidence that the PCR mass testing as currently conducted is completely worthless.” (Yeadon and a panel of experts have since submitted a 10-point paper to the Eurosurveillance editorial board challenging the science upon which the PCR test is based “which has led to worldwide misdiagnosis of infections attributed to SARS-CoV-2 and associated with the disease COVID-19. We are confronted with stringent lockdowns which have destroyed many people’s lives and livelihoods, limited access to education and these imposed restrictions by governments around the world are a direct attack on people’s basic rights and their personal freedoms, resulting in collateral damage for entire economies on a global scale.”)
According to Yeadon and his team of independent researchers:
“The pandemic was over by June and herd immunity was the main force which turned the pandemic and pressed it into retreat. In the autumn, the claimed “cases” are an artefact of a deranged testing system…. While there is some COVID-19 along the lines of the “secondary ripple” …it has occurred primarily in regions, cities and districts that were less hard hit in the spring. Real COVID-19 is self-limiting and may already have peaked in some Northern towns. It will not return in force…
That’s it. All the rest is a PCR false positive pseudo-epidemic. The cure, of course, as it has been in the past when PCR has replaced the pandemic itself as the menace in the land, is to stop PCR mass testing.” (“The PCR False Positive Pseudo-Epidemic” Dr Mike Yeadon, Lockdown Skeptics)
Yeadon’s analysis is similar to that of Genevieve Briand, assistant program director of the Applied Economics master’s degree program at John Hopkins. Briand wanted to see the effect that Covid had on excess deaths using the CDC’s own data. What she found was extraordinary, but consistent with Yeadon’s analysis. Here’s a brief summary of what she discovered:
“From mid-March to mid-September, U.S. total deaths have reached 1.7 million, of which 200,000, or 12% of total deaths, are COVID-19-related….
After retrieving data on the CDC website, Briand compiled a graph representing percentages of total deaths per age category from early February to early September, which includes the period from before COVID-19 was detected in the U.S. to after infection rates soared.
Surprisingly, the deaths of older people stayed the same before and after COVID-19. Since COVID-19 mainly affects the elderly, experts expected an increase in the percentage of deaths in older age groups. However, this increase is not seen from the CDC data. In fact, the percentages of deaths among all age groups remain relatively the same.
“The reason we have a higher number of reported COVID-19 deaths among older individuals than younger individuals is simply because every day in the U.S. older individuals die in higher numbers than younger individuals,” Briand said.
Briand also noted that 50,000 to 70,000 deaths are seen both before and after COVID-19, indicating that this number of deaths was normal long before COVID-19 emerged. Therefore, according to Briand, not only has COVID-19 had no effect on the percentage of deaths of older people, but it has also not increased the total number of deaths.
These data analyses suggest that in contrast to most people’s assumptions, the number of deaths by COVID-19 is not alarming. In fact, it has relatively no effect on deaths in the United States.
…”All of this points to no evidence that COVID-19 created any excess deaths. Total death numbers are not above normal death numbers. We found no evidence to the contrary,” Briand concluded.” (“A closer look at U.S. deaths due to COVID-19”, JB Wells News)
The research of both Yeadon and Brand help to show how fake testing results, manipulated mortality data, relentless deception and disorienting state mandates (masks, lockdown etc) have fueled public hysteria creating the compliant population our rulers seek. After 8 months of this psychic-drubbing, the elites are now ready to deliver the coup de grâce, a vaccine containing potentially-toxic substance that will change the course of history.
Do I exaggerate?
Perhaps, but there are plenty of reasons to be concerned. Keep in mind, the most enthusiastic proponents of these experimental vaccines (media) are the same people:
- Who lied about Trump-Russia for 3 years nonstop.
- Who aggressively censored any information on Hunter Biden’s massive influence peddling operation.
- Who covered up any information related to last month’s stolen presidential election.
The media are the enemy of the people, and they have proved that many times over. But, how can we apply this rule to the roll-out of the new vaccines?
We can assume that the interests of the wealthy powerbrokers– who own the media and set their agenda– will take precedence over the people who are in line to be vaccinated. That’s all. Their interests will take priority over your safety. That’s the way it works.
So, one should be extremely wary of vaccines that are rushed to market in record time, just as they should be suspicious of the motives of people who see “skepticism” or “hesitancy” as a “national security threat”. These people are not to be trusted. It’s that simple.
Why, for example, would the British government enlist “military intelligence to seek out and stamp out what The Times calls “anti-vaccine militants” and related “propaganda content” in cyberspace”??
Why would the social media giants remove articles that are critical of the vaccines?
Why are all the media and public health experts pushing for mass vaccination?
Why?
The answer is obvious, isn’t it?
It’s because the wealthy powerbrokers that are orchestrating this operation, want to see We the People vaccinated en masse. That’s what this is all about.
So, the question is: Why? Why is it so important to them? Is it because they want to save lives?
No, that’s not it at all. There’s obviously something else going on that we don’t know about. Maybe it’s climate change, maybe it’s over-population, or maybe it’s a collective determination to transform society into a technocratic dystopia. (“The Great Reset”). We don’t really know, but one thing is certain, all this ballyhoo about Covid is a red herring. It simply diverts attention from the real agenda, which is why we should be cautious about the vaccines. Mass vaccination could, in fact, be the ultimate objective. Check out Yeadon’s take on vaccines in a recent edition of LifeSite News :
“There is absolutely no need for vaccines to extinguish the pandemic… You do not vaccinate people who aren’t at risk from a disease. You also don’t set about planning to vaccinate millions of fit and healthy people with a vaccine that hasn’t been extensively tested on human subjects…
Since it is demonstrable that “around 30% of the population had prior immunity,” and if one includes some young children who are “resistant,” 40%, and while considering that the infection rate is “somewhere [in] the mid-20s to low-30s per cent,” this means that around 65 to 72% of the population currently has immunity to COVID-19.
And considering the reality of herd immunity, when susceptibility to a virus falls this low, at around 28 to 35%, “that population can no longer support an expanding outbreak of disease,” and thus the virus “wanes and disappears… The pandemic is effectively over and can easily be handled by a properly functioning NHS (National Health Service). Accordingly, the country should immediately be permitted to get back to normal life.” (“Former Pfizer VP: ‘No need for vaccines,’ ‘the pandemic is effectively over”, LifeSite News)
Is he right? Are the vaccines an unnecessary risk that serve no earthly purpose? Here’s more from Yeadon on the potential downside effects of the new mRNA-based vaccines which are “all the rage”.
“The formation of so-called “non-neutralizing antibodies” can lead to an exaggerated immune reaction, especially when the test person is confronted with the real, “wild” virus after vaccination.”
– The vaccinations are expected to produce antibodies against spike proteins of SARS-CoV-2. However, spike proteins also contain syncytin-homologous proteins, which are essential for the formation of the placenta in mammals such as humans. It must be ruled out that a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 could trigger an immune reaction against syncytin-1, as it may otherwise result in infertility of indefinite duration in vaccinated women.
– The mRNA vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech contain polyethylene glycol (PEG). 70% of people develop antibodies against this substance. This means that many people can develop allergic, potentially fatal reactions to the vaccination.
– The much too short duration of the study does not allow a realistic estimation of the late effects. As in the narcolepsy cases after the swine flu vaccination, millions of healthy people would be exposed to an unacceptable risk if an emergency approval were to be granted and the possibility of observing the late effects of the vaccination were to follow.” (“That Was Quick”, Lockdown Skeptics)
Let’s summarize:
- The new messenger RNA vaccines could make recipients more susceptible to serious illness or death.
- Spike proteins can “trigger an immune reaction” that will “result in infertility.” (Once again, Population control)
- The new vaccines contain polyethylene glycol (PEG) which can be “potentially fatal.”
- The trials were not long enough to determine whether the vaccines are safe or not. FDA approval does not mean “safe”. Quite the contrary. The FDA is “captured” in the same way the FAA is captured. (Think: Boeing 737 Max)
The new regime of Covid-19 vaccines is both unnecessary and risky. Readers should ignore the hype and do their own research. Take responsibility for your own health and welfare. Do not expect the media or public health officials to tell the truth. They won’t. They want to use you as a guinea pig in their deranged lab experiment. Do not cooperate, do not comply, do not acquiesce, do not give in.
No surrender.
December 4, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, UK |
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